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I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
--Sylvia Plath--
PRELUDE
It’s a penitentiary full of rhymes and riddles. A place where dark and light are one and the same.
Carnal passions await within.
Your screams won’t save you; they’ll only excite them.
Safety is but an illusion.
Trust no one. Question everything.
He’s been watching. He’s been waiting.
It’ll be your turn soon.
Servatis Periculum.
Something wicked this way comes.
Take a journey to the Devil’s Playground.
CHAPTER ONE
They say that some of the best memories can come from a bad idea.
I can personally vouch for the truth in that. But you know what else is true? The consequences that will be waiting to remind you of all your dumbass decisions.
You’d have thought I’d learned this lesson eons ago, yet here I was, reaping everything I’d sown.
Painfully.
Too many shots of Tequila combined with too few hours of recovery made for a deadly combination.
I knew better than to drink the way I had the night before, even if I did have a laundry list of valid excuses to do so.
Unfortunately for me, this never worked out well. I had never been the kind of person who could drown their sorrows at the bottom of a bottle, though I envied those that did. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to remedy the mess that I was. Not to mention I had shit tolerance and wasn’t remotely attractive when I got drunk.
Some girls had the ability to be cute while intoxicated. I became the equivalent of a dying fish searching for water… with a hint of newborn calf. Ugh. The thought of consuming even a single drop more of treacherous ethanol made me disgustingly nauseated.
I’d brushed my teeth—twice—and could still taste it.
While getting drunk off my ass may not have been the healthiest way to go about dealing with my mental and emotional turmoil, it’d kept my sanity intact. That had to count for something.
Although, it would be comical if liquor were the spark of me completely losing the plot, all things considered. My odds of making it through life entirely sane had the same probability of a coin toss. Heads, I’d be like my father’s side of the family. Tails, I would take after my mother’s. I had yet to determine which was worse when it came to those crazy fuckers.
I weaved around a couple walking through the lobby of the resort, readjusting my shades and tightening my grip on my suitcase.
“I think I’m dying. Hangovers are so underrated,” Melantha grumbled from beside me, tugging her beanie down further.
“I haven’t felt this shitty since that party we attended the day we graduated high-school,” Gracelyn agreed.
Both of those statements resonated with me. Deeply. I hadn’t wanted to get out of bed unless it was to sit around butt naked and stuff my face with a fry up and chug gallons of Powerade. That sounded like pure heaven right about now, but we had a flight to catch.
Feeling a soft vibration against my thigh, I pulled my cell from my pocket and swiped down to see the text. I was expecting it to be one of my parents or my abuelo. Weirdly, there wasn’t any number displayed.
Even weirder was the text itself.
Unknown: Something wicked this way comes…
I stopped walking, brows furrowing as I read the message two more times before typing out a quick reply.
L: Who is this?
Almost immediately, a box popped up. Sender Unknown.
Message cannot be sent.
“You okay?” Mel called back to me.
“Yeah. Sorry.” I fixed my face into a smile and started walking again, slipping my cell back into my pocket.
“To hell we go,” Mel sighed, shouldering open one of the doors that led outside.
“Can we at least be on the plane before you start being all negative?”
“Is there a difference between doing it now or later? You know exactly how things are going to be when we get back.”
“We don’t know anything yet,” Gracelyn refuted.
“I know we’re well overdue for our ‘precious’ societal debuts. We’re going to be dragged into the corporate office so our parents can explain exactly how they’ve mapped out our futures. They probably married us off to some deranged arrogant assholes already. The ones who organize their drawers and ties by color.”
That sounded overdramatic, but sadly, she was right. It was the way things worked in our world. However, I couldn’t openly agree. That’d open the door to a conversation I wasn’t ready to have. We’d attempted that already, which was how we’d wound up in our current condition.
Talking about it led to thinking. Thoughts came with feelings, most of which were bitter, angry, and conflicted—for various reasons. My new plan was to immerse myself in denial until we were back home. “Let’s just wait and see what they have to say, and then we can go from there.”
She ignored me.
“Do you think they’ll offer us pamphlets or use a full-blown PowerPoint to really get their message across and explain all the ways they ruined our lives?”
