The Dark Fable, page 3
“Why are you here?”
“Well, it’s a petrol station, innit, and we needed petrol.” He leaned forward confidentially. His irises were a tawny hue, almost golden, and made him even lovelier. He had the lithe manner of a boxer who’d become a fashion model. It was very disconcerting. He continued, “And I was feeling snackie.”
She gritted her teeth and rang up his items. He smelled like spice and cedar smoke.
“I see you noticed the fancy cologne.” That smile again. “It’s Clive Christian. You can have nice things too.”
She shoved the magazine and the Twizzlers at him. “I think you should leave.”
He opened the Twizzlers, offered her the bag. She glowered. He shrugged and bit into one bright red rope. “A girl like you. A place like this. It doesn’t seem right, does it? I believe you’ve got something of ours.”
“Dev.” She tried his name as if it were a spell. “I’ll give it to you if you promise to go away.”
“You don’t have it on you . . . you’re smarter than that. When it’s time to retrieve it, well, you did get our invitation, didn’t you?” He smiled again and sauntered out. The store became dull when he’d gone.
Evie sank down onto a plastic crate and put her face in her hands.
The door chime buzzed. Someone approached. Without looking up, she said, “Can I help—”
“Open the fucking register.”
She looked up into the barrel of a gun. The guy behind it was masked only by a bandanna. She said, numb with shock, “I can’t.”
“I said, open—” The robber’s words cut off the moment she wished he couldn’t see her.
Everything froze as an ominous cold enveloped her. Darkness folded around her, causing everything she saw to become black and white, like a silent film. She heard those voices speaking a language older than the stars. She felt suspended, caught between the skin of reality and the night of the impossible.
And she was terrified.
She glanced at the shop’s reflection in the window—she didn’t see herself behind the counter.
The robber lowered the gun, his gaze dumbfounded. “Where . . . ?” He looked around, raised the gun again. “Hey! Where’d you go?”
Evie stared at him. He really couldn’t see her. Was she . . . ?
The door chime rang again. Evie and the robber turned.
The gorgeous guy from the Plaza La Mer gala strolled in, whistling. He browsed the chip aisle, not even looking at the robber, who aimed the gun with a shaking hand. The robber barked, “Hey, asshole.”
The gorgeous guy turned. “It’s Ciaran, mate.” His smile made Evie’s skin prickle. “Evie . . . I could use a little distraction.”
Evie flung a pack of cigarettes to the robber’s left. As the cigarettes struck the window, she ducked behind the counter. A gunshot cracked out, followed by the acrid bite of propellant in the air, and her heart slammed as the bullet shattered the plate glass. She heard grunts, things crashing. Then, silence.
The menace who called himself Ciaran leaned over the counter. “He’s down.”
She rose, shivering. He watched her. He had a split lip. The robber was splayed on the floor behind him. Gently, he asked, “You all right?”
She decided to be honest. “I don’t know.”
“Saw you blink out. Don’t forget that.” He pointed upward. “Video surveillance. You can’t let anyone see what you can do, got me? Dev’ll be taking care of it.”
Evie clutched the counter. So it was true. “Why . . . ?”
“Ease up.” His voice was soft. “Take a nice, deep true-’til-death.” He inhaled and exhaled as an example.
Breathe. She breathed in, out. Calm poured through her.
“I’m here to get Twizzlers and something to drink and . . . whatever this is, ’cause it’s damn cute.” He plucked a Kewpie doll from the display of Kewpies dressed as old-timey film stars like Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe.
“I can’t believe this.” Hysteria rose in her again. “Is this happening?”
He eyed her. Then he jerked his head at the robber. “Call 911 after I leave.” He strode out. He left the Kewpie doll on the counter.
Garth stumbled in at that moment, removing his earbuds. The look on his face was comical as he took in the strewn bags of chips, overturned racks of candy, the shattered window, and the robber on the floor. “What the hell?”
Evie glared at him. “Seriously? How did you not hear or see all that?”
A text pinged on her phone. It read, Seven PM sharp tonight. Follow the clue.
With a shaking hand, she lifted the Kewpie doll Ciaran had selected. It was a Rudolph Valentino. In its heyday, Silver Cove had been a resort for movie stars and gangsters, when the boardwalk, with its sapphire blue roller coaster and gilded Ferris wheel, had been bright and new. There was a mural of one of Rudolph Valentino’s films painted on the old Metro station downtown.
She had an entire day to decide what she wanted, to pretend she had a choice.
Evie had researched, online, all the modern thefts laid at the feet of the elusive urban legend called La Fable Sombre. The stories ricocheted through her head as she strode down a neon-daubed street. She had a few more blocks to go before she reached the old Metro station. She passed a closed bookstore and some boutiques with spooky mannequins in the windows. It was late, but there were no buses, and she didn’t have the money for a cab.
In New York City, a famous painting lent to the Met had been ghosted away, without any locks picked or windows broken. At a Monte Carlo resort, three people had disguised themselves as a limo driver and two wealthy young heirs, then disappeared—after every guest had been robbed of their possessions while they slept. At a fundraiser in Crete, two roller-skating girls in Greek goddess masks had made off with priceless statuettes from ancient Sumer. Two people in raven masks had scaled a high-rise in Dubai, cut a hole in a window, and stolen an Isis necklace of blue diamonds, a signature piece by Bulgari.
The exotic and sinister name La Fable Sombre, “the Dark Fable,” had originated from a mythical society of thieves only hinted at in obscure books—a fact she had learned from an old article in the New York Times. And, although these modern crimes were speculated wistfully to have been committed by La Fable Sombre’s latest incarnation, it seemed none of the people who’d written about the thieves actually believed they existed.
A pink Aston Martin glided past and halted. Evie stopped walking, suspicion prickling. The car crept backward until it was parallel to her. The driver rolled down the window. “Evie. It’s dark and there are not-so-nice people around. Get in. It’s a dangerous neighborhood. Hear that?”
Evie squinted at the driver, recognized the wolf-eyed girl. Mad. She heard glass break, some excessive shouting down a nearby alley. She cursed. She strode to the pretty car and got in.
Mad, who now wore a short white raincoat and pink Converse, smiled at her. There were rosy streaks in her gold-white hair. “Nice to see you again.”
“You’re one of them.”
Mad began to drive, gloved hands careful on the wheel. “One of whom?”
“Okay. Be like that.” Evie sat stiffly as shadows and streetlights swept over her.
The old Metro station loomed with Cthulhuian elegance from the silent buildings clustered around it. The train station, built in the 1920s, had shut down in the eighties, replaced by a sleeker system elsewhere. The building, a soaring basilica of shiny stone hewn into vines and lilies, resembled an ebony kraken rising against the night. Evie got out of the car with Mad and gazed at the building, apprehensive. She couldn’t see anything beyond the archway and shivered in the cold California night. Mad moved toward the shadows, hands in her pockets. “Follow me, Evie. Don’t stray. Don’t speak. And don’t look afraid.”
Evie hesitated. Mad, continuing on into the dark, said, “If we were going to murder you, we’d’ve done that a while ago.” She turned, the shadows folding over her as her voice drifted back. “Come on.”
Evie followed her into the station, imagining the shadows she’d glimpsed beyond the arch might give chase if she changed her mind and fled. As she emerged from the gloom, old-fashioned lamps scattered light from a huge chandelier that had fallen in the center of the Metro’s lobby, the illumination shattering onto the figures waiting there. The place was a tableau of elegant decay: art deco murals depicting women with flowing hair were blotched with moss. Rust oozed from wrought-iron cherubs curled around the tops of pillars.
The leader, Ciaran, sat in a chair, watching Evie. “You know who we are?” He hunched forward.
“Yes.” Evie’s gaze skimmed the others. She wasn’t surprised to find the regal brunette she’d seen on the stair in her apartment building; Dev leaned against a broken pillar, his buzz cut a smoldering red. They all looked dangerous. Evie spoke clearly, “You’re La Fable Sombre.”
Ciaran rose and walked toward her. He smiled. That smile was bad news; she knew it as surely as if it had been a blade kissing her throat.
“Evie Wilder,” he said. “Who doesn’t like to be noticed. Who can be invisible.”
She laughed, a sharp spark. “I’m sorry. What?”
Mad lifted a pink cell phone so that Evie could see the screen. A video played, showing the Plaza La Mer’s ritzy gala descending into mayhem and Evie standing amidst the chaos. Then she saw herself . . . vanish.
Of course, it was true. Had she needed that video to confirm it?
Mad raised her other hand and flicked a finger. “Dev.”
Dev peeled himself from the pillar to hit the button on a film projector set up nearby.
Images in lush black and white jittered across a marble wall. Evie saw herself, a girl with smoky eyes, standing in line for a movie, ignored as people moved around her, a few even bumping into her. She lost sight of her image in the crowd. Then, a second clip, as she sat in a café. Two strangers took seats at her table, starting a conversation over their lattes as she stared at them indignantly—she saw herself fade from sight. In the next scene, she stood in her catering uniform in the center of a party as guests swanned past her. And then she wasn’t there.
She remembered those times, all too often, when she’d felt ignored and isolated.
After she’d regained some control, she turned with a wrathful gaze. “You’ve been stalking me.” And identifying an impossible, mind-reeling ability Evie had been using all her life without realizing it.
Dev swept up his hands. “I wasn’t stalking you personally, luv. It was a team effort.”
“Evie.” Ciaran spoke gently. “You can make yourself invisible. When you fade out, do you feel anything?”
She recalled her lack of a reflection in the Plaza La Mer. Of Dev not seeing her and Tyrone in the cabinet. Had she also made Ty unseen? “Darkness. Cold. Tunnel vision. Everything goes black and white, and noises are muffled . . .” Terror and wonder were ripping the veil from the world she knew. “When it started, it was just the graying out and the cold. I thought they were just panic attacks.”
Ciaran explained, “You instinctively make yourself invisible. You step out of this world, beneath its skin, so to speak.”
“No. That’s not possible.”
Mad clasped Evie’s hand as if pulling her back from a precipice. Her wolf gaze was direct. “We’ve all got something, Evie.”
Voice hoarse, Evie asked, “What do you mean? All of you . . . ?”
“Dev, there, is our trickster. He can charm anything, anywhere.”
Dev smiled and ran a hand over his sunset fade. “Anything. Anywhere. Anyone.”
The brunette snorted.
“Queenie.” Mad indicated the brunette in her shimmering silver dress—the girl who’d blown smoke at the Brute on the stair of the Pink Blight. “She’s our alchemist, a purveyor of potions.”
“She created the confetti.” Evie realized. “That made everyone turn against each other.”
“That’s why I took you aside, so you wouldn’t be affected.” Mad grinned. She gestured to the leader. “And that’s Ciaran Argent. Criminal mastermind and god of Doors. Doors with a capital D.”
Ciaran walked to a door. He turned to Evie. “Name a place you’ve always wanted to visit. A real one. Not a fictional one.”
“Please, no fictional ones,” Dev muttered. “That was a bloody fiasco.”
Evie had to play this game.
“Just say a place,” Mad urged. “Just try it.”
Evie flung out a desperate answer. “Paris then.”
Dev groaned. “Why is it always fucking Paris, yeah?”
Evie had always wanted to go to Paris. Long ago, when she’d been happy, she remembered posters of illustrated Parisian ladies on the rose-pink walls of her parents’ bungalow and a little Eiffel Tower that had held books. She still had a brooch that had belonged to her mom, an imitation Boucheron, with rhinestones instead of diamonds, a crown atop a circle. Paris had always seemed like a fictional place to her.
“Paris is a goddess.” Mad turned on Dev defensively.
Dev shrugged. “It’s overrated.”
“London then.” Evie didn’t know why she was encouraging whatever this was.
“My hometown.” Ciaran sounded approving. He knocked on the door three times. He looked at Evie, blue shadows edging his jawline. “Go on. Open it.”
Evie found herself drawn to that door, a work of art in bronze, engraved with a woman in a swirling gown, her hair scattered with stars. She laid one hand on the doorknob and pulled.
Chill, damp air swept over her. Framed by writhing shadows was a city that glistened in the night. She saw a giant Ferris wheel and the obsidian gleam of a snaking river. Her heart jolted. It’s a trick. But she could smell wet asphalt, car exhaust, the fug of that old river.
She set one foot over the threshold. Shadows swept across her. Absolute darkness. For an instant, she breathed scorching cold. Then London air kissed her skin as if the Thames was winding itself around her.
A hand grabbed her by one wrist. She glanced over her shoulder to meet Mad’s gaze. Mad said, “Come back now.”
Mad drew her back over the threshold. As the door shut, Evie marveled. “Was that real? How?”
“Any door. Any place. As long as it exists in the real world. I’m a Traveler.” Ciaran walked Evie to a marble bench. She dropped onto it. Mad sat on one side and Ciaran on the other.
Still processing what she’d seen, Evie whispered, “I don’t know how I . . . do it. I don’t know how to control it. What I can do. I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s you,” Ciaran told her. “It’s like breathing. You don’t control it. No need to think about it. You’re a natural.”
“I’m not.”
“You lifted my wallet, Evie.” Ciaran laid one arm on the back of the sofa. “You got out of the gala with the Cobra. You were meant to be with us. Aren’t you tired? Of dead-end jobs? Of having to rely on strangers? Of just scraping by?”
Evie kept very still, surrounded by these dangerous creatures. “How did you find each other?”
“Ciaran found us,” Mad replied. She and Ciaran fist-bumped. “With the Doors. He wanted to locate others like us, so he asked the Doors. But you appeared when we came for a job. That was just kismet.”
“Maybe our energy is making more of us.” Dev sat on the arm of Queenie’s chair, his white suit immaculate in the romantic light.
“That’s not how energy works,” Queenie told him. “I’m not explaining it to you again.”
Dev gave her the V-shaped British version of the bird.
Evie forced the next question. “What is La Fable Sombre?”
Ciaran told her: “We’re the successors of the original Dark Fable. Every decade, La Fable Sombre is reborn with a new crew.”
“There were the Rogues in the 1970s. Vergil and Grace, from Michigan and Paris.” Mad sighed. “They robbed the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.”
Ciaran stretched his arms over his head. “The Misfits in the eighties, a Texas girl and a boy from Colombia who purloined all those Aztec and Mayan artifacts from Madrid.”
“The Sisters in Paris,” Queenie said. “During the French Revolution. Stole Marie Antoinette’s crown and her Book of Shadows.”
“The Songbirds.” Dev spoke. “A Navajo musician and a girl guitarist from Bangladesh. 1960s. Swiped a king’s ransom of Hollywood jewelry. Stole a cursed ring of Charlie Chaplin’s that came from the tomb of Tutankhamun.”
“Wasn’t Chaplin LFS?” Queenie was watching Evie.
“No.” Dev looked thoughtful. “Harry Houdini was. And Marie Laveau . . . what other famous alumni? Wild Bill Hickok. Blackbeard. Until he got kicked out for being an absolute nightmare.”
Evie was both awed by this secret history and skeptical. She wished she could read about these fabulous exploits. Ciaran seemed to sense what she was thinking. “Sorry, Evie. You won’t find our scintillating predecessors described in any history books. Only rumors.”
“What we can do . . . ,” Evie whispered.
“We, each of us, had nothing once. Then we found out we had something. An ability, like.” Ciaran watched her.
Dev hunched forward. “It’s like we were all so fucked over by life we made ourselves special.”
Queenie rested her head against the cushions. “Speak for yourself. I’ve always been special.”
Dev cast a sidelong look at her. “And lovely.”
“Obviously.”
Mad twirled her hand, indicating all of them. “We’re a family, Evie. We look out for each other. We won’t let you fall. We won’t let you fail.”
Evie realized she was every girl on every threshold to every magical world there ever was. “So . . . is it just all of you?”
“We’re part of an organization,” Ciaran told her with a smile. “You’ll meet them later.”
Evie had made her decision even before she’d realized she could trick reality. She curled her hands into fists so the others wouldn’t see them trembling. “Do I have to sign something in blood? Get a tattoo?”
Ciaran sat back, the shadows slanting across his face so that only his eyes were visible. “None of that.”
