On the one hand, Onny thought this was adorable.
On the other hand:
She was watching herscience teacherkiss someone.
She turned around to tell Byron that they should go, only to realize just how close his face was to hers. And not merely close… but startling in its nearness. In the night, his eyes burned. His long lashes cast shadows onto his cheekbones. Byron’s hairwas so dark that it looked like a rare ink coveted by the same poet who’d given him his name. And then there were his lips. Onny was so used to his mouth positioned in an austere slant or sneer that she was taken aback by how soft they appeared in that moment. It was the kind of terrible, tempting softness that made her want to know if Byron’s mouth felt like how it looked.
In the dark, she watched his throat move. Her eyes flew to his. The way he looked at her… No one had ever looked at her like that. Like she was something hypnotic, the magical made real.
And then, from behind them, she heard a loud crunching sound.
“Is someone there?” called out Mr. Brightside.
Onny glanced behind Byron, where the pathway wound back up the hill and directly to the lawns outside the basement and dance floor. She grabbed his hand: “RUN!”
Together, they fled up the path.
Behind them, Mayor Grimjoy hollered: “You won’t get away with this!”
Beside him, his husband yawned and said, “They already did.”
By the time they got up the hill and disappeared into the mingling crowd on the lawn, Onny’s heart was positively racing.
And she knew it wasn’t because of the run.
“Now what?” asked Byron, his voice low.
The partygoers milled around them underneath thestrung-up lights. Santa Claus and Wolverine were locked in an arm wrestle. Jessica Rabbit was glaring at the Joker, and a trio of girls dressed up as the Three Little Pigs were posing for pictures near the ice sculpture of a bear. Some fifty feet away, someone had left the basement doors open. Colorful smoke poured out from the doors, and the DJ was on his third replay of a “Monster Mash” remix. There was so much happening that Onny found it hard to focus. Part of her blamed the moon. Moonlight had a way of turning the world unfamiliar, and right now that’s exactly how Byron Frost looked, a completely alien version of the person she thought she’d known.
“Diamante?” asked Byron, waving a hand in front of her face. “Has my beauty stunned you into silence, or are you officially giving up on the ridiculousness of your love potion?”
That snapped Onny back to herself. What time was it? She glanced at her phone:
10:03P.M.
Shoot. That only gave her two hours to complete the potion by midnight.
“We still have one more ingredient left,” said Onny, glancing at the basement dance floor.
Onny reached down, pulling up some of the grass and holding it triumphantly. She reached into the little purse at her side and carefully packed it in. “Voilà! Now we just need people to dance on this and we’re done!”
“Done,” echoed Byron. “So, what, that would be the end of it?”
His voice sounded flat. He’d turned his head toward the dance floor, and the shadows blocked his expression. Onny feltoff. She was this much closer to finishing the love potion and claiming cosmic joy, but somehow it didn’t feel like the completion of a grand quest.
“Yup,” said Onny in a too-bright voice as she dusted her hands. “You’ll have to suffer throughat leastanother thirty minutes with me. But then you can exact your diabolical cost, so… yay? C’mon! To the basement we go!”
Without another glance at him, Onny marched off to the basement-turned-ballroom. The moment they got inside, Byron’s eyebrows skyrocketed up his forehead.
“Diamante, this isnota basement.”
“It’s at the base of the house, ergo, basement,” said Onny.
“A good basement has one slightly shitty couch and maybe a Ping-Pong table. Not… an ancient crypt… and holy crap, does that dance floor have lights in it?”
As Onny had fully expected, Corazon Diamante’s Halloween decorations were gloriously over the top. In the swiveling lights, it really did look like a haunted crypt. The wall of windows that would normally look out over the infinity pool and the rest of the property had been curtained off with drapes designed to look like cave walls, and the vaulted ceilings were strung with glowing ivy. The open floor plan had lent itself to a scene that would make Indiana Jones giddy with joy. A huge, toppled skull with its jaws cracked wide held a bar tended to by a werewolf. Statues of Aztec gods peered down from a row of pillars and looked out over a gleaming, golden dance floor that was subtly luminous with tiny LED lights. It was also completely… totally… empty.
At least a hundred people were milling about the edges, butno one was moving. Onny glared at the DJ booth directly behind them, which was currently blasting Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”
