By the way, the prologue/preface/back-of-the-book blurb is currently in Romantic Fiction, waiting to be moved here. I had a change of heart in view of certain things. Don't ask silly questions if you want to be taken at all seriously, please, because likelier than not, they'll be answered later. Nitpicks not really needed, advice more so. ; ) Enjoy!
The problem with walking home is that sometimes, people see you.
“Sorry,” he said, catching hold of my arm automatically. I glanced down at the stiletto heel he had all but kicked out from under me, and seeing no damage, begged him not to worry about it.
“No,” he said, and his smooth accent I found impossible to place. “No, I wasn’t apologizing about that.”
I shot Tara a glance, as if to say, Go on, I’ll be there in a second. She shook her head, and I made a note to kick her for it later.
He looked down at me, and the perfection of his face was fake, uncanny. The grey of his eyes, the deep brown of his curls, everything about him was too… too flawless.
I should’ve guessed, then. A dead leaf skittered past me in the street, and the scraping noise it made across the asphalt sounded like a warning.
Needless to say, I was too stupid to listen.
He muttered under his breath, something like, …The best they can do? Pathetic. And then said something in a different language, much too quickly for me to catch even a word of it.
The ugly little trees across the street rustled ominously; they were trying to say something, I was sure.
“I was apologizing,” he said, and the slow deliberation of his voice was apparent even to me, “for what I’m going to do.” A little smile tickled the corners of those disgustingly perfect lips.
His grip on my arm, forgotten ‘til now, suddenly got very much tighter.
What…the…hell?
“Well if you could do whatever it is and then send me off, I’d appreciate it, Your Highness. I’ve got a turtle to feed, so, yeah,” I said, but the tone of my voice betrayed the depths of my fear.
His smile only grew. “You don’t mean that, Mary.”
“I don’t mean—wait.” It was the bad sign of every movie, when some weirdo on the street knew your name. A car flew past like all the nightmares of Hell were behind it, and as I looked back at the guy who had taken possession of my arm, his grey eyes seemed to turn fiery a moment. “I’d ask how you know my name but I think that would just be dumb, wouldn’t it?”
He laughed, and even now I won’t try to describe the sound. Perfect, my instincts continued to whisper to me, way too perfect.
“That,” he said, “is what I love about you. Besides your name, of course.”
“My name,” I repeated, in a voice that indicated I thought he had probably escaped from the nearest mental institute.
“Your name. Mary, Mary, Mary.” Every time the word left his mouth, I shuddered. The seamless mixture of hatred and love in his voice as my name passed those soft lips seemed to make the very air thrum around us.
“Er, now that we’ve got that over with, I should probably go,” I said, sliding my hand from his grip and skirting around him towards Tara, her puzzled face like a light through the impenetrable darkness.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, and as I looked back, he flicked a smooth brown curl from one eye. Not without guilt, my heart gave a little flutter. I wished then more than ever that I could slap myself, or – or something. “I came all the way up here, and now that I’ve done that, I think it’d be kind of a waste to let you skip off, don’t you know.”
“No, I don’t,” I said warily, tactfully kicking Tara’s shins to get her moving.
Just at that moment, as Tara and I turned to make a very hasty exit, he spoke again. I could never quite remember what he said, or in what language it sounded like it must have been; I imagine he was saying the names of his friends, for the moment the words dissolved into the air, two shadows appeared from… somewhere. If I hadn’t already been afraid for my sanity, I would’ve admitted it looked like they’d leapt from the ground.
“Escort Tara home, gentlemen. I will know,” he added quietly, “if you have harmed her.”
One, thin and long-faced yet almost as freakily flawless as he who held me captive, stepped forward from the darkness to set an almost protective hand on Tara’s shoulder.
“As you wish, My Lord.” What did he say?
Maybe I dozed off for a sec’, or maybe they were just super fast, but I swear, I blinked once and both men and Tara were gone.
“Mary,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“D’you have any shopping to do?”
His hand slid to my wrist, and I strove not to trip over my high-heeled feet as he pulled me across the street.
If I could have said anything at that point without fear of being shot or having some large amount of bones in my body broken, it would have been, Leggo, but of course, I was much too stupid.
The inside was somehow even uglier than the outside of the supermarket. I stared in disgusted awe at the faded, cyan-colored walls, at the scuffed grey linoleum and the elusive smell of spoilt milk.
“I hate you,” I said, and not to anyone in particular.
“Yes, well, we all have to hate someone, don’t we?” he remarked lightly, and released my wrist at last. I glanced up just as he looked down at me, and the expression on his face was a challenge; did I dare try to run?
Nah.
The noise my shoes made on the linoleum as I followed him through the aisles of cheap snacks was almost exactly the kind of sound I’d imagined a duck would make if you decided to beat it with a ‘no U-turn’ sign. I tried to picture such an occurrence in my head as he snatched a box of crackers from a dilapidated shelf, but all I came up with was blood that looked like watery ketchup.
“I don’t like ketchup,” I informed the hideous pink-tiled floor as my footsteps echoed along its badly painted walls.
“Not even on cheeseburgers?” my brown-haired companion asked innocently, flashing a winning smile over his shoulder.
“I haven’t eaten dead cow for seven years, and thank you very much, but I never really liked it in the first place.”
I looked up from staring at the chipped-tile floor just in time to realize he was less than a foot away and I was doomed to run right into him. With a futile and desperate attempt to deter the horrific occurrence, I flung myself backwards; he caught me before I got the chance to knock myself unconscious.
“Dammit,” I cursed.
“Who?” he asked, and helped me back to my feet. I snatched the cracker box from his hand, making a noise that I thought sounded like a sarcastic chuckle. “And why are you trying to impersonate a baby goat?
“Because baby goats are my very favorite animal,” I said. “What were you thinking? These crackers taste horrible.” I offered him one.
“No thanks,” he said, “I don’t drink.”
“Haha.”
With sudden earnestness, he said, “Somehow, Mary, I hoped you had more sense than you suddenly seem to. P’raps it’s because you’ve just been all but kidnapped by an stranger who hasn’t introduced himself, and yet just now compared your sarcastic giggle to the bleat of a – well, I guess they’d be called lambs, wouldn’t they?”
He asked it like he actually expected an answer. I glared at him, trying to wordlessly make it clear that I suspected he was an escaped nutcase. I don’t think he got it.
“Baby goat sounds funnier,” he said, and that seemed to satisfy him, because he stopped talking as he turned to browse the ugly green shelves.
“This stuff is all really disgusting,” I finally said, casting an eye up and down the aisle. “Why’d you take us here?”
“Because the only people who come down this aisle are people who have kids and don’t have the money to buy them healthier stuff, and as we all know, those people don’t habitually pay visits to cheap supermarkets at two in the morning.” He paused, frowning. “And that may or may not be true.”
“Great,” I sighed. “So why are we here – more importantly, why am I here?”
Stopping his shelf browsing for a moment, he looked over his shoulder and said, very seriously, “Because I said so.”
That made sense. Or at least, the muscles running down his arms and his six-foot-two height did. I didn’t complain anymore.
“Say, this cheese spray stuff looks good,” he remarked, and tossed a can over his shoulder. I was lucky enough to catch it – with my face. So maybe not that lucky.
“Owwww,” I muttered, bending to pick it up. My nose throbbed and I glared at his back.
“Sorry, did I miss?” he asked, and turning – arms full of boxes of who-knows-what – to look at me, smiled innocently.
“Only by a little bit.”
“Well, Mary, I—wait, what’m I thinking? Have we met?” I was officially convinced: this guy was clinically insane. It must have been my vacant stare, because he sighed with exasperation. “I mean, have we been introduced? I forgot because I already knew yours. Your name, I mean. And, I mean… how many times have I said ‘I mean’?”
“Three. Not counting the one at the end," I informed him, feeling clever. He ruined it by laughing.
“Oh, never mind. Lucifer,” he said, and thrust his hand forward, not seeming to notice the assorted boxes and cans as they rained from his arms to the floor.
“Mary… Winslow,” I said, shaking his hand tentatively. For no reason in particular, he was beaming. Hoping to wipe the smile form his face, I asked, “Lucifer what?” What I had, the first time, put down to an involuntary twitch, I realized now was a flinch; he flinched every time the name Lucifer was spoken.
“Lucifer Diavolos, that is. Oh, I always did leave out the last name. Force of habit, an’ all that.” Flinch.
“Funny name,” I said, surprised at my own lack of manners. It was just something about him, ticked me off without even doing anything. “Spanish?”
“No, actually,” he said, and failed to enlighten me further. “Just plain Satan’s good, too. It sounds more dynamic, more fear-instilling, don’t you think?”
“I – I…” I didn’t have any idea of what to say. “Sure.”
I frowned at the boxes scattered across the ugly pink linoleum. He said it so…seriously. Satan’s good.
“As it turns out, it wasn’t my mom who named me Lucifer, but my dad. Imbeciles, that’s what all fathers are. I could have had a cool name like Jake, or Allen, or – or Norman, but he just had to scribble Lucifer on the birth certificate. Well, so to speak,” he ranted, not seeming to notice my confusion.
“You don’t look like a Jake or an Allen or a Norman,” I said, and immediately hoped my words would get lost in his ridiculous tirade.
They didn’t.
“I don’t?” he mused, and turned abruptly to look at me.
“No.” I studied his face, with those high cheekbones, those piercing grey eyes, and those impossibly glossy brown curls. Too perfect, my mind continued to chant. It was getting annoying. “No, you don’t,” I repeated. It was suddenly very obvious, how nobody was in this part of the store. Almost as if…someone had planned it.
“What do I look like then, Mary?” And my name was a caress, and somehow, a slap across the face. He stepped forward and slipped a long finger under my chin, forcing me to look into those searching grey eyes.
“Like a…” I thought for a moment, and then a long-lost memory resurfaced from my high school years. A day, a day in my favorite class. “Like a demon. I haven’t forgotten what little Italian I learned – not yet. Diavolos? Diavolo. Posso essere stupido, ma lo livello ho difficoltà mancare i subtleties semplicistici,” I said, in clumsy and halting Italian.
The last thing I remember of that extraordinary night was the look on his face as the words flew from my mouth. His eyes burned like hot coals, and the teeth in his grin were sharp – black. His hair hissed and writhed like angry, dying fire, and the words he spoke I only later understood.
“Non mi aspettavo di meno, la mia Maria.”
[spoiler]Roughly translated from Italian to English: Diavolos? Diavolo. Posso essere stupido, ma lo livello ho difficoltà mancare i subtleties semplicistici = Diavolos? Devil. I may be stupid, but even I have trouble missing simplistic subtleties. And his reply: Non mi aspettavo di meno, la mia Maria = I expected no less, my Maria.[/spoiler]
Silly, I know. Nitpicks not wanted! Advice is nice. No asking stupid questions! Heh-heh.
. Amo l'italiano! Imparo dal mio babbo, ma ho usato l'aiuto di un dizionario per leggere la sua sezione.
That sounded kind of bad.
I thought this was wonderful. I know you don't want nitpicks; there isn't really much to nitpick on anyway. Your characters' voices are very natural and relaxed, your narrative smooth with its transitions, and Mary's sarcastic train of thought amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I hope you'll be sure to alert me when the next installments are posted.
Reactions (or, in other words, why in the name of baby goats isn't she freaking out?!)
