Rose Colored Glasses: Prologue

Prologue

The candidate was here. The scent of rust and skin was there, floating between lemon polish and smoke rings .

Giles wrinkled his nose.

“Children come here, sir,” he said. “I think you should put that out.”

Peter hacked up a laugh. “I’ve been smoking for two hundred years and never been sick a day of it.”

“With all due respect, you’re a boulder. Children are more fragile.”

“And what sort of children are about a school at midnight? I thought you couldn’t drag them here in the daytime, let alone night.” Peter’s laugh rasped again.

Giles shrugged. “They’ll come quick enough if you set off the fire alarm.”

“Ah, well.” Peter spat. “Mortals. Too clever by half, gods bless 'em.” He let his bowl twist to the floor, spilling tobacco to burn through fresh wax and tile. Giles winced.

A scream fractured against the walls, splintering to ringing aftershocks in Giles’s ears.

Peter cleared his throat. He looked at Giles, the moonlight staining his eye tar-black through his rose-colored monocle.

“I think you’d best run,” he said.

And Giles was running, sprinting down the corridors, past doors locked shut and closets left opened as the compulsion to find the source of the scream overrode conscious thought beyond the command to gallop and surge and seek.

Another scream ripped through his head, louder than the first. He turned left, then right, and then he was there in the classroom two doors down on the left before the echo had flown away.

Every desk, every cubby, every shelf had been ransacked. Plastic bodies lay across the carpet, broken limbs mixed with block piles and streamers torn from the bulletin boards. The letter of the week had been B, as in “bear.”

A wardrobe whimpered. Giles picked his way over the mess. The door was cracked open, but inside he heard nails scrabbling for a chink to grip and keep it closed.

“Better open it.”

For someone who wore half again his weight in metal, Peter could be stealthy when he chose.

Giles sighed. “Yes, sir.” He reached for the handle.

The door flew back as a body launched itself from the mound of teddy bears where it had been buried. It gripped a white bear by the leg like a mace, flailing it towards the intruders.

Giles sighed again. There was no hope, then. The candidate’s white-blonde hair had darkened with sweat, and his tan had leached away from terror, but he was still beautiful. Blood oozed from somewhere on the back of his head to coat his neck. His eye-whites shone pink behind the rose-colored glasses, pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

“Stay away!” The candidate swung his bear towards the pair. “Stay still!”

“We haven’t moved, lad. Breathe, now, that’s it—” Peter kept up the patter as the swings slowed, then stopped. The candidate stood, trembling, head turning between Giles and the dwarf and the door and back to Giles.

He began to giggle, a manic, mad sound, the bear loosening in his grip. “Cin-der-ell-a, dressed in yell-ah, went upstairs to kiss a fella! And then he died,” he said. “Like you. Like them. Like me.”

The candidate smiled then—that brilliantly cocky smirk—and the steak knife he’d hidden behind the bear’s leg bit into his own neck. He kept giggling even while the air burbled out of his throat to mix with blood. The blade fell to the carpet, the body toppling backwards into the closet to rest on the pile of staring bears.

Those damn giggles echoed longer in Giles’s head than the screams.

“What a waste,” Giles whispered. He had not moved.

“Brave boy,” Peter agreed. “But not ours.”

The rose-colored glasses had fused to the candidate’s head during the trial. Bloody furrows behind his ears marked where he’d tried to dig them off. Peter used the dropped knife to saw the glasses away from the corpse; no need to waste a clean blade. “Here, Giles, clean these up.”

But Giles didn’t take the glasses from Peter’s hand. Instead, he knelt and placed the boy’s hands across his chest. He pulled two slightly linty pennies from his jeans pocket. “Goodbye,” he said, weighing the lids shut.

Peter had watched this silently, a silver flask clutched in one hand and a pair of filthy glasses in the other. He spoke now. “Get back, now. It’s time.”

Giles stood, allowing Peter to sprinkle a clear liquid across the closet and the body. A click, a flash, and half the room was in flames. The fire turned the corpse's flesh fever-red in a mockery of health.

“It’s time,” Peter repeated. Giles turned to find the glasses offered to him a second time, the lenses clean and nestled in a now-dirty handkerchief.

Giles just looked at the glasses. “How long do we look, Peter?” he asked, dropping the subservient show. “How many more people have to die until we find them?”

The pink glass glistened red in the flames, refracting shadows of dark blue and violet and gold in the palm of Peter’s hand. “We look as long as it takes, boy.” It was Peter’s turn to sigh. “There’s nothing for it. Nothing we can do.”

He held out the glasses once more, and this time, Giles accepted them. Without another word, they left the room as bells began to shriek in the empty building.