19 | goddess (part two)

A CRASH OF APPLAUSE THUNDERS in the crowded room, the deafening rumble swallowing our footsteps as JJ and I weave our way back to the table where my brother and Archer are waiting, arm in arm.

Archer's pale cheeks are subverted, streaked with red, while once-stormy eyes are effulgent and dancing with shafts of sunlight breaking through the cloud, as he tips his head back for another shot. Across the duration of our performance, someone somewhere must have brandished a bottle or two of tequila, and the boys are taking turns slamming down glasses, wiping the backs of their mouths with gusto after each.

I slap Ebony's hand away from the bottle as he reaches to pour himself another with shaking hands, though his fingers are clutched around a glass that is still three-quarters full. I snatch it from his grasp and down it in one, relishing in how my throat burns as I collapse into my seat.

"How much have you two had to drink?" I grimace, the aftertaste still wildfire dancing across my tongue.

"Ebony's gone," Archer mutters, his finger trailing around the top of his glass―now-empty, though I don't trust the way he's eyeing my backpack, still half-filled with the stuff I've stockpiled: a few from my mother's cupboards, but most of the more expensive stuff pilfered from Rebel's mansion and countless parties when I know she's too drunk to notice. "I'm...goddamn. I dunno."

"Right, you're switching to water," I deadpan, tossing him my bottle and a packet of peanuts. Two staples in the bag slung across the back of my chair that accompanies me everywhere; emergency rations for the crawling heat of the night, when faces are indistinguishable and the period of inebriated excitement seems endless. "I'm clearing up the rest. Screw off."

Archer flips me the middle finger and I laugh, tipping back the bottle of tequila, pressing my lips to the neck. The taste is vile and makes me shudder, but I can't have been drinking for more than an hour and be anything less than drunk as all hell.

Its afterglow sears the back of my throat and I choke it down, the bottle ending up back somewhere on the table, thinking perhaps anything stronger than a few beers might be a bit too ambitious for this time, especially when someone needs to drive us back and Archer is in no way fit to do so without killing us all.

JJ seems to notice this too, feeling around for a water bottle and pressing it into my hand. "We should eat. These two might regain some sense," he says. "I think you're the only one with half a brain left."

"That's okay," I say, getting to my feet. They're unsteady, but after a few moments, my mind clears enough to hook my arm through JJ's. "Where's the food?"

"It's in the back," he answers.

Since performances are taking a lull, the crowds have cleared to let us through to an expansive buffet table in the back left corner of the room. I scoop up handfuls of sandwiches and other dry, salty foods, hugging them in my arms before JJ and I weave our way back to Ebony and Archer.

On an empty stomach, a cheese and tomato roll tastes delicious.

I devour it just as Archer is tearing his own apart ravenously and Ebony has already half-swallowed his, shoving it into his mouth with no regards to his ability to digest it.

Around us, the room is immersed in chatter and encapsulated in a single, all-consuming alcohol breath, the heavy aroma causing the place to tremble as it does with feedback, and the next string of performers take the stage.

A harpist and a flautist, though her hair cascades down her back in a straight russet curtain, hiding her face and her gaze, obscured by shadow. He holds the flute with a trembling white grip, like he's running on nothing but liquid courage and heated, ardent desperation.

A resounding silence swallows the endless din of the room, the choral symphony of clinking glasses and immersive chatter, laced with a spark of enlivenment exclusive to the Chain. Though I'm not the one onstage, I feel a thousand pairs of eyes pinning me to the wall―searing―and the darkest of them are a coalescent void, soulless and empty; the beautiful, destructive properties of dark matter in an ever-expanding universe.

The heart inside the night burns too.

She begins to pluck at the strings. Like Apollo on his golden lyre, she moves with avid dexterity, dipping and swaying with the charm of the music and the way it picks up like the swell of the breeze―the wind of the West; Iris' prismatic rainbow gaze―though far from transcendental and not yet immortalised in gold, it is the way she is all skin and bone and nothing else to speak of that has the crowd enraptured at her performance.

The flute is an accompaniment, silver filigree when the word is bright and filled with sunlight; a paperweight of fate. Eyes closed and lips pursed, a song that fills the skies.

I can't seem to tear my eyes away.

Fingers fist at the hem of my dress, and when I lick my lips, the cloying taste of beer still lingers. All additions―afterthoughts―to the hurricane trance of their song, and how it seems to seep beneath my skin.

Liquid gold infuses with my blood, and I'm mesmerised. Eyes follow every movement of her fingers, and each of his breaths: a flautist and a pianist, stealing the lungs of hundreds.

And when the song ends, I notice how the strings have severed her fingers into slivers of flesh; the way blood seems to stain her skin as though it belongs; the nails torn from her fingers, leaving an inky red residue. I notice how her hair melts into her dress, a silky maroon number that appears to be glued to her skin, and how her hands slow, falling away from the gilded instrument after the last strum.

But, most of all, her smile etches itself into my memory: escaping her shadow, deadly and cutthroat.

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