All Our Pretty Songs

through the crowd, leads me to a rooftop balcony that’s easily four times the size of the apartment.

Out here the press of bodies is a little less, and I take deep gulps of fresh air. Far below us the city is still and dark. A darker shadow of mountains rings the black water of the sound. I want, more than anything, to be out there instead of here, rolling out my sleeping bag under a clear sky disordered with stars. Both of them with me, faraway and safe. There is still a chance for us, I want to say. We can go. We can walk away from this, from all of it. But Aurora’s eyes are big with delight and she’s pressing a glass into my hand, chattering away at me. In her element. So lovely that everyone around us turns toward her, moves closer, brushes up against her as if the magic she has is somehow transferable. I take a sip of what she’s given me and the liquor courses through me, fiery as acid.

“Holy shit!” I cough. “What is that?”

“Don’t know!” she says. “Crazy stuff, right?” She whoops, throwing her head back, white hair flying. “Come on, I want you to meet someone.” I finish the rest of what’s in my glass and she finds me another. In for a penny, in for a pound, I think, and gulp it down, too. Aurora’s hand in mine is cool and light. Whatever I’m drinking scrubs the fear right out of me, sends the edges of everything spinning. Aurora is at home here, Aurora will keep me safe. Aurora would never lead me into harm. I’m seeing things, foolish me, sent aflutter by a few rich people in a fancy room. I’ve been around rich people before. Rich people are very specific but not particularly harmful. Specifically dressed. Specific in a specific way, like they have weird parties in their clothes. This is profound. I’m going to explain to Aurora about rich people, but my whole body is blooming. Here we are, reckless and young and free as animals. If I jumped off the roof right now I bet anything I’d grow wings and fly. No wonder Aurora wants this. I want it, too, now, want to feel like this forever, want this the way I want sex or music or the feeling of my muscles moving as I run farther and farther into the hills. The warm air buoys me up in the limpid night. My glass is full again and I drink, keep drinking. The air tastes like candy.

Aurora narrows her eyes at me, her mouth moving, saying something, laughing, is it important, probably it’s not important, I don’t care. The mountains are talking to me, the water singing, all the salt in the ocean calling to the salt in my blood, Aurora, I can feel my heart beating, I mean really feel it. Did I say that out loud, or not, I can’t tell, is it important, probably it’s not important, I don’t care. Did I say that already? It’s pretty funny, I’m laughing. She’s laughing. The two of us laughing, together, arms around each other, laughing from someplace all the way in the soles of our feet, it’s really funny. The no-longer sinister faces around me are suffused with a soft glow, rictus grins smoothing out into smiles of real warmth and affection. How could I ever have been afraid of this? I want to find Jack and drag him off into a corner, I want to tell him that I love him, but more importantly I want him right now. I want to tell Aurora I was wrong, wrong about everything, how nothing that makes me feel this good could be a bad idea, but she’s talking to someone, telling him my name, pushing me forward. A white hand reaching toward me, long pale fingers on my skin. The touch of them burns like someone’s thrown me naked into a snowbank.

The man in front of me is impossibly tall and so white he glows with a phosphorescent light of his own against the velvet dark. Eyes the watered-down blue of ice chips, hair as pale as Aurora’s falling to his shoulders. Cold bores through me, cold mouth, cold still face. The twin vortices of his merciless eyes, filled with a hideous, intelligent cruelty. All the liquor in the world could not insulate me from the terror of this man, and the luscious haze runs out of me so fast it sets me reeling. His ice-colored gaze pins me where I stand. He takes his hand away, and I half expect to see blistered skin where his fingers touched me. “That’s Minos’s boss,” Aurora whispers in my ear. “He’s going to make Jack famous.”

“Delighted,” he says. The laughter in his eyes is infinitely more awful than Minos’s dead stare. My mouth opens, jaw working, but nothing comes out. I’m saved from having to say anything by Jack’s first perfect chord. Aurora tugs me away from the awful man and toward the source of the music. I can feel his stare on my skin even as the crowd closes in around us. I want nothing more than to lie down and let the balm of the drink wash over me again. “Come on,” Aurora says. “He needs us.” For once she’s the strong one. “Come on.” Her pupils are so huge they’ve nearly swallowed her irises whole.

The patio is thick now with people, their conversation unintelligible and raucous, rising all around me like a murder of crows. Aurora holds my hand tight and we stare around us at the sea of strangers. Jack is standing at the very edge of the roof, his head down, his face hidden behind his hair. A fat man in a donkey mask runs laughing in and out of the crowd, followed by the girls I saw before, half-naked now and wreathed in grape leaves. I see a man whose torso ends in goat’s legs and another crowned in antlers. You are drunk, I tell myself. You are drunk, you are drunk, you are drunk.

Jack strikes another chord, and that terrible audience howls aloud with one voice, the unearthly shriek growing louder and louder until I clap my hands over my ears. The music is a huge and terrifying thing that sends flights of dark birds spinning into the night sky. The air is growing hotter, thicker, unbearably stifling. A storm front is rolling in, moving so quickly across the sky that it looks as though someone has spilled a bottle of ink across the stars.

Bodies dance past me, stinking of filth and sulfur. Hands grab at my hair, my arms, tearing at the thin fabric of my shirt. Women whirl by, clawing at each other until blood runs down their shoulders and their naked breasts. Men and things that are not men loom over me, some of them masked and some of them with faces that are worse than masks. A man with the head of a bull. A woman with a swan’s wings and a swan’s serpentine neck. A woman with a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, cool grey eyes. A swarm of beetles streams over my feet. Still Jack plays, and the mass of bodies twists and seethes. Over it all I hear the groaning rumble of thunder. The sky flashes white, and Jack falters. The dancers freeze in place, teeth bared, smeared in blood and sweat. The air around me is fuzzing like static on a television, cutting to images of the bone-white trees. The noise of the river, the howling dog. A great black palace rising out of the distance, its edges sharpening. Aurora is no longer at my side, and I look around, frantic, see her leaning into Minos, his fingers a bony cage around her shoulders. Her mouth is slack, her eyes empty. “Aurora!” I scream, but my voice is lost in a crack of thunder, the rising wind. The tall pale man is behind them, watching Jack play and smiling. Cass’s amulet feels like a stone around my neck and I fumble at it with my free hand, trying to undo its knots. My palm bumps against the leather bag, and I can hear Cass’s firm voice cutting through the chaos around me, clear as if she’s right next to me. “Go. Get out of there. Go.” But Aurora. Jack. “I mean it. Go.”

I stumble through the crowd, punching and kicking until the packed mass of bodies parts to let me through. Back to the apartment, the chandeliers dripping wax in searing droplets that land in my hair, on my shoulders. Hands grab at my body, my breasts, my clothes. Like you’re running a marathon. Go. Go. Go. Head down, battering ram, out, out, out. I reach the door, the knob burning my skin, the door sticking, pulling with all my strength, screaming in terror as the surge of people presses me up against the metal and wood and I think for a second I am going to die here in this awful room—and then with a crack the door springs free of its frame and I’m falling into the hallway, the door slamming shut behind me.

The hall is absolutely silent. I lie panting on the spotless white carpet. There is no hint of what I’ve left behind on the other side of the door. The walls are lurching around me, and I realize for the first time how drunk I am. I crawl to the elevator on all fours, slap at the down button, roll myself in when the doors open with an ordinary ping. The ride down takes forever. My stomach is roiling, and I wonder what happens if you puke in the elevator to hell. Bad things. I’m using the walls to get to my feet when the elevator stops with a jolt and I fall again out the open doors, landing in an undignified heap at the feet of the valet. “Sorry,” I manage. He offers me his hand, and I take it, trying not to flinch at the touch of his clammy palm as he helps me stand. He doesn’t say anything. Turns the sunglasses toward me, holds my shoulders until I’m steady. Smiles. There’s no way I am imagining it: His teeth are pointed, and I think I see the flicker of a tongue forked like a snake’s. Holy shit. I back away, trying not to panic. “That’s some costume,” I whisper. His lips close over the terrible teeth, making the smile somehow even more ghoulish. I stumble past him, out of that awful building, out into the safety of the night.

I walk for a long time before I find a phone. I am drunk and my clothes are torn and I can only imagine what I look like; I caught a glimpse of the smeared mess of my eyeliner in the valet’s mirrored sunglasses. Even Cass will never let me out of her sight again if she sees me like this. I dial Raoul’s number instead of my own. He answers on the tenth ring, his voice sleepy.

“Hello?”

“I’m in trouble,” I whisper.