Dance in Shadow and Whisper (Marionettes of Myth #1)

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

 

My chest tightened with a deep breath of preparation. I stared at the front door handle, simple brass and weathered from its once gossamer brilliance, the tread of my boots planted against the new carpet, the back of my neck tingling with sweat.

This whole mission was a joke.

I was the joke.

There must have been so many others much more capable than me, others who could handle the foreign outside world. Damn it, I was lucky if I could handle silencing an incoming call on my brother’s cellular telephone gadget.

The doorbell chimed. A disarming melody lulled throughout the house but echoed shrilly in my brain.

It was too late now.

My arm lifted, but my moist palm stopped just short of the sweeping grin of the handle when I saw how my fingers quivered. I hadn’t noticed until then.

There was no reason to be afraid—concerned, perhaps, for my personal wellbeing, but afraid? No. Certainly not. If I had to, I could hole-punch this guy through the chest with my fist if he gave me the right justification.

My fingers clamped the cool handle and twisted. The door popped open. The fresh, crisp light of early morning flooded the hallway.

There he stood, the embodiment of my fear and apprehension and sweaty palms. He stood nearly half a foot over me, tall for something that had once been human, but his skin was so white that he could pass more for a glow stick than any human I’d ever seen. His eyebrows raised above the rims of his aviator sunglasses as he regarded me with eyes so sinister and evil and diabolical that I couldn’t see them behind the mirror lenses.

He must have been sensitive to sunlight.

Odd.

“Kali?” he asked.

My lungs bloated with another deep breath. “Depends. Do you have a face behind those sunglasses?”

“I don’t, actually. I could draw one on, if you’d like. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done drag, after all.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to further elucidate. He didn’t. I pressed my lips together and said, “What….Drag…?”

“Yes, as in drag queen makeup.”

“What is that?”

Silence passed between us. I had a sense that this was something I needed to know if I were to pass for a human teenager at our target humans-only high school. If the armed guards with their silver bullets discovered I was part of the superhuman population, it wasn’t all that unheard of for guns to fire first and questions to be asked after.