“Thanks. What are you supposed to be?” the kid asks, curiosity tugging his gaze toward Dante.
“I’m Tom Cruise. From Cocktail,” he explains softly.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” the kid insists, igniting a small, irrational spark of irritation in me. “You’re an angel of death, and he’s just a character.”
This is why I could never have a child. Explaining every microscopic thing in the universe? Exhausting. My tongue would snap in half before I finished the first explanation, and they’d already be firing off five new questions born from the first one.
A living nightmare.
“Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You’re a kid,” I say flatly. “What’s hard to understand? He’s the lure of the realworld—charm, temptation, sin, the invitation to life. And I’m the beyond-human archetype. It’s that simple.”
We are not the cliché version of a couple’s costume—no angel in white paired with a demon in black.
We’re more than that.
“Can I have a chicken nugget?” he asks, already too overwhelmed to follow a single thing I just said. Exactly as expected—too complex for his little brain.
“No,” I answer dryly. Then I lunge toward him with a sharp, ghostly hiss, the sound low and theatrical like something lifted straight from a horror film.
Predictably, he bolts, tiny legs pumping as he disappears into the shifting crowd. I exhale, relieved that the interrogation is over. Talking to him drained me, and I need every drop of energy for the kill ahead.
Dragging a nugget through ketchup, I push it into my mouth and finally take a moment to look around, feeling the warmth of food fueling me. Only then do I fully appreciate the scene surrounding us.
The whole place feels like New York shed its sensible skin and transformed into a fever dream built purely for spectacle.
The fair swallows an entire stretch of parkland—normally a quiet ribbon of joggers, dog walkers, and people pretending to enjoy nature, but tonight it has transformed into something feral and unreal.
Orange lanterns hang overhead like artificial constellations, shifting in the breeze, while fog machines exhale slow, undulating clouds of neon smoke across the grass. Cobalt blue, ultraviolet pink, venomous lime—colors drift past like ghosts unsure of their own anatomy, shapeless spirits smeared and remixed by every passing gust until the whole place resembles a sky that has melted onto the ground.
Heat radiates from the crowd, from humming generators, from food-truck fryers sizzling out things that look edible but suspicious. Black popcorn that stains fingers. Blood-red caramel apples that shine like lacquered hearts. Churros rolled in charcoal sugar and marketed as cinnamonwitch’s brew. Every stall pulses with LED strips flickering to the beat of a synthetic heartbeat, the whole fair thumping like it’s alive.
Three major attractions dominate the skyline, towering like temporary temples erected for some one-week cult.
The haunted house—an invented Victorian corpse of a building, crafted just for this event—leans with intentionally uneven porch beams, its windows stuttering with pale-blue lightning from inside. People in plague-doctor masks stand at the entrance, collecting tickets with slow, ceremonial movements, as if blessing every soul who steps inside.
Next is the mirror palace, a labyrinth where reflections twist into grotesque silhouettes. Outside its shimmering structure, laughter and startled shrieks ricochet like metallic echoes trapped in a tin can.
And then there’s the smoke park—the largest of them all. An open-air expanse where special-effects nozzles hide beneath fake grass, releasing blankets of fog in electrified, impossible colors. Speakers buried underground send bass trembling up through the soles of your feet. Shapes drift through the fog—dancers on stilts, creatures with horns and exaggerated limbs—appearing and disappearing like hallucinations meant to disorient rather than scare.
Above us, drones carve ribbons of color into the sky, delicate trails that look like cursive handwriting left behind by some enormous invisible hand.
And beyond the trees, Manhattan glitters like the real world is politely waiting just blocks away.
But inside this fenced-in fever dream, the night feels undone. Lawless. Cinematic. As if New York has agreed, just for tonight, to pretend it’s a dream someone got paid to engineer.
“I’ve never been to a fair like this,” Dante says beside me, his deep voice slicing cleanly through my thoughts. “Never seen anything like it. Only pictures.”
I turn, eyebrows arching. “Okay, but what the fuck did you even do in your life?” I ask, sarcasm dripping from my tongue. I jab him lightly with my shoulder. “Good thing you’ve got me now, huh?”
His lips curve into a smirk, subtle and devastating, sending a tug low in my core. I swallow, my gaze drawn to the precise movement of his slender fingers as he selects another nugget for himself.
The memory of him earlier—of the exquisite cruelty he put me through before tending to me with the care of someone handling a relic carved from glass—still lingers in the back of my mind, bright and searing.
He stands so close that the warmth of his body bleeds into mine, a phantom touch vibrating across my skin until goosebumps rise in a slow, delicious wave. My body aches in recognition, craving more.
Any ordinary poison would’ve burned out of my system by now. But what Dante put in me wasn’t poison at all. It was something far more permanent. A drug that never fully fades, that rewires every nerve into longing.
I turn my head, my eyes landing on our target. Dante pulled every credit-card record the bastard made at the fair, mapping out his path with surgical precision. We know precisely where he’s been and exactly where he’ll go next.
