Fable of Happiness (Fable #2) - Pepper Winters Page 0,4
tonight.
A guest and himself.
I almost bit my tongue into pieces, doing my best not to launch myself at him for touching her. For daring to make her tremble. For making her owlish eyes gleam with knowing tears.
If I could, I’d take her place. I’d volunteer, just like I volunteered as much as I was physically able, accepting the beatings and sodomy so my family didn’t have to.
I was the oldest, after all.
It was my job to protect them.
The only problem was, Storymaker preferred girls. He’d yet to touch any of us boys, and it fucking killed me that I couldn’t step in and save her.
Dismissing Elise, Storymaker narrowed his gray eyes at us as she joined our lineup. Watching us over his glasses, he sipped his drink and made us all squirm in tense silence.
I happened to know he was almost blind without his thick glasses, their silver frame painting him as some bookish father figure with salt and pepper hair, long, lean body, and obscenely feminine hands.
He’d been the feature of many of my nightmares.
His feeble, nerdy body was unable to create too much pain by fists and feet alone, but his affection for torture, sex, and age-old sadism had well and truly made him the scariest motherfucker in this house.
“Neo, didn’t I tell you to stand up?” Storymaker drawled, his stare locking onto the boy beside me. The boy who’d named himself after his favorite character of all time. He wanted to be Neo from The Matrix. A man who’d been normal until he suddenly wasn’t.
Neo bowed his head, his black hair swinging to obscure his face. His almond eyes, courtesy of a Vietnamese mother who’d been raped by an Englishman, gleamed with hate. He braced his shoulders, sticking his scrawny chest out.
Storymaker huffed. “Are you forgetting your manners, my children? What are you supposed to say when I summon you to a family meeting?”
I swallowed bile that washed up my throat, reciting along with my fellow prisoners. “Thank you so much, Master, for giving us a night of fun. We can’t wait to play with our friends.” Our voices all droned together, sounding like a hive of dying honeybees. “We promise to be good. We promise to go to bed when they tell us and to play whatever game they want. We promise to make you proud.”
Quell, standing next to Neo, wretched, her blond hair jerking as she pursed her lips and swallowed down whatever her stomach had tried to evict. Nyx with her fire-colored hair and milky skin grabbed her hand. Nyx seemed even whiter tonight. A ghost with flames upon her head, her light green eyes locked on the window as if she could escape.
“Ah, ah, ah, what have I told you? No touching unless a guest commands it.” Storymaker leaned forward, his temper cutting through the suave refinement he did his best to maintain.
Nyx and Quell let go of each other, denied every small comfort we had.
“And if I catch you all holding hands at night in that dormitory of yours again, I might just have to take those hands away, okay?” Storymaker grinned, looking at each one of us.
Jareth hissed under his breath. His bi-colored eyes (one blue, one brown) were so fierce and full of loathing, I honestly wondered if tonight was the night he snapped.
He’d tried to attack Storymaker before.
He’d gotten as far as grabbing the bone-handled letter opener on Storymaker’s desk, ready to stab the bastard, before the two guards who were always close by disarmed him and dragged him out of the room.
We didn’t see him for two weeks.
And when we did, he wasn’t the boy we used to know.
He was...soulless.
Storymaker kept his eyes locked on Jareth, waiting, same as us, to see if he’d try to kill him again. A few seconds passed before Jareth unfurled his fists and forced himself to take a breath.
With that breath, Storymaker relaxed back into his chair and smiled like any doting father would. “Right, now that you’re all bathed and fed, it’s time to play. You’re in for a treat tonight, my children. Every single member of our wonderful society is here. It’s our birthday, after all. That means you all get to stay up well past your bedtime. If you get sleepy, feel free to ask for some wakey medicine. We can’t have you falling asleep when you’re meant to be playing games now, can we?”
No one replied, our collective hate thick around us.