Dust and Roses: Book Two of the Dust Trilogy (16 page)

Cadence and I kept our eyes glued to each
other’s. She held one finger to her beak. Once Mr. Mason and the other person
had gone she led me to my room and unlocked the door.

Before stepping inside, I turned to her.
“Cadence, you heard what he said, right? He’s talking about opening the sixth
tunnel.”

Cadence shook her head. “No. We heard
wrong or misunderstood. There is no way he would do that. Get in.”

She and all the others there had a blind
allegiance to Mr. Mason, so of course she didn’t want to believe it, but I knew
she’d heard the exact same thing I had. She gave me a final look before sliding
the door shut. She knew exactly what he was planning to do.

The sixth tunnel held the worst of the
worst creatures. They had no conscience or self-control. Those things would
destroy anything in their path. With them let loose, they would kill everyone,
including my family and everyone I knew.

What was Mr. Mason thinking? He would risk
everyone’s lives—Giver, Taker, and Human, just to get back at the Angels. I got
that he was angry about the curse, but certainly there had to be another way.
There was only one solution. I had to find a way to stop the curse and I had
less than a week to do it.

The day after Mr. Mason released me from
the lair, I told Fletcher and Imani everything. Fletcher’s parents were out and
the three of us sat on Fletcher’s bed. I watched the two of them work on a
half-gallon of rocky road ice cream.

Imani had a lot to say. “I was scared as
hell. You said you were going to the lair and then you disappeared for two
days. I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like I could call the police without
telling your secret.” She stabbed her spoon into the ice cream. “So anyway, let
me get this straight. There’s some secret tunnel
under
the lair,
under
the school that holds terrible monsters—monsters worse than the ones I saw down
there the other day?”

I nodded.

“And if they get out, we’re all done for,”
Fletcher added.

I nodded. “They’ll destroy anything in
their path and just keep going. Who knows how many people this could effect?
We’re talking Ogres, Trolls, Wendigos, Chupacabras, Hellhounds . . .”

Imani’s eyes had glazed over so I stopped
talking.

“It’ll be bad—like end of the world bad,”
Fletcher added. “That Aswang is a complete idiot. What is he thinking?”

Although I didn’t care for Mr. Mason, I
felt the need to defend him. He was a Taker and in his mind, he was doing what
he had to do to protect his own. “Hey, he wouldn’t even be thinking about this
if the Archs hadn’t enacted this curse. They’re going to cause all kinds of
trouble if they don’t call it off.” Really, it was all their fault.

“It seems the first step would be getting
the Givers to revoke the curse. That seems to be the root of this problem. How
do we do that?” Imani asked.

Fletcher scowled at her. “What do you know
about it? This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Imani snatched the ice cream away from
him. “But it does. If that tunnel gets unsealed, we’re all in danger.”

“Don’t blame this on Givers,” Fletcher
said defensively. “The only reason the Gemini Curse was put back into place was
because of the poor behavior of the Takers. For a while, everyone had been
getting along and coexisting just fine then Bailey had to go killing off Givers
and innocent people.”

Yes, Bailey had been a Taker, so in their
eyes it made us all guilty even though it wasn’t right. Bailey had acted alone
and none of us approved of her actions.

“Okay,” I said. “I get that, but Bailey’s
gone and those murders have stopped—”

“Right,” Fletcher agreed, “and they might
have called off the curse until what happened at the carnival. Every time we
turn around, Takers are going against the truce so what do you guys expect us
to do?” Fletcher snuggled underneath his covers. “I’m sorry, Arden, but with
all you guys have done, the Givers will not call off the curse.”

Imani sighed and looked from me to
Fletcher. “In the meanwhile you have to stop that thing—guy—whatever, from opening
that tunnel or we’re all screwed.”

“Me? What am I supposed to do?”

Imani stood and stretched her long body.
“What I saw you do the other day down there, I’m pretty sure you can find a way
to reason with him. If not, do what you have to do.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “I can’t
kill him.”

“Arden,” Fletcher said, “nobody wants that
to happen, but Imani’s right. Mr. Mason is going to get us all killed. He has
to be stopped somehow.”

That was easy for him to say, Fletcher
wasn’t a Taker so what did he care about Mr. Mason? Still, he was probably
right but Mason was Hollis’ father and I had made Hollis a promise. If I went
back on mine, he just might go back on his.

I ran Imani and Fletcher’s words through my
mind. I had to strike the problem at its root and the root was Mr. Mason. I had
no intentions of killing him, I only needed to make him think that I was.

Making a wrap dress proved to be more
complicated than I thought it would be. It was the hardest thing I had ever
made, but once it was done, I was proud of it and named it Lady. I folded Lady
carefully and placed it in a plain white box to give to Cadence.

Thankfully, I found her alone in the
control room. She sat cross-legged on the bed, reading.

“Hey, Cadence.”

“Hey,” she muttered, not looking up from
her book.

I held the box up. “I bought you a gift.”

Her head snapped in my direction. “A gift?
For what?”

I shrugged. “Just because. I wanted to
make you something nice.”

She eyed me suspiciously as I handed her
the box, laughing nervously. “It’s okay. It’s not a bomb.”

Slowly she lifted the lid and pulled Lady
from the box.

The look in her eye as she held Lady in
front of her told me she liked it and I swelled with pride. Knowing Cadence,
this gift could have gone either way.

“You made me a dress?”

“Yeah. Try it on.”

She hesitated for a moment but then headed
for the bathroom to change. I sat on the bed and waited for her, hoping that it
fit. When she emerged, I was relieved to see that the dress fit her perfectly.

I stood and helped her tie the belt around
her waist a little tighter. “I knew you were about the same size as my dress
form.”

Stepping back, I admired my work. I was
also surprised to see that Cadence had a killer set of legs. I had only ever
seen her wear jeans so I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Bird legs
maybe?

“This is really pretty,” Cadence said,
“but where am I supposed to wear this? You know I don’t go anywhere . . .
except snapperwhip hunting.”

“I don’t know. You can put it on just to
wear around here. Maybe Hollis would like it.”

She sighed and headed back toward the
bathroom. “Doubt it. That boy doesn’t notice anything.”

“Sometimes a girl has to make the first move,”
I told her, even though I had kissed Fletcher a couple of times and he’d looked
at me as if I were crazy. A strange thought came to me. How does kissing work
when you have a beak? I wanted to ask but I didn’t want to take the risk of
offending her when everything was going so well. “Do whatever you want,” I told
her. “Whatever feels right to you.”

She smoothed down the sides of her dress.
“Thanks. This is really nice.”

I felt warm inside, but not in the bad way
like when I was about to cause some damage—in the warm and fuzzy way.

She went to change back into her clothes
and I left the control room to handle something else.

I took the elevator down to the middle
level of the lair where Mr. Mason’s office was located. As I knocked on the
door, I had no idea what to expect. I had never just shown up to his office
without being summoned. Any time I had been called down to Mr. Mason, I had
been in trouble so his office gave me bad vibes.

 The door slid open. Mr. Mason was
perched behind his desk scolding a kid who looked like some kind of elf sitting
in a chair across from him.

Mason paused, focusing his attention on
me. “Ms. Moss, what can I do for you?”

I wiped my sweaty palms on the side of my
dress. “I was wondering if I could have a moment. It’s really important.”

He nodded and looked at the elf-boy. “I
don’t want to have to call you down here for anything else, you understand?”

The boy nodded, looking relieved, and
escaped the room.

“Have a seat,” Mr. Mason said as he
shuffled some papers.  His desk was always filled with papers. I wondered
what they were.

I sat down and folded my hands in my lap.
I was already doing everything wrong. I shouldn’t have been taking his orders.
I needed to make this man take me seriously.

“I know what you’re planning to do,” I
blurted out.

He raised one eyebrow at me. “Excuse me?”

“I heard you the other night when I was on
my way to solitary. You plan on opening the sixth tunnel and you can’t do
that.”

He sat back in his desk chair, smirking.
“Really? And just who do you think you are to tell me what I can and can’t do?”

“Think about what you’re doing. Do you
know how much damage that will cause? The beasts will kill everyone.”

He walked over to the wall behind him
where there was a safe. “Not that I have to explain anything to you, but my one
and only concern is our own. We will be safe. Humans and Givers are not our
problem.”

“You won’t open that tunnel,” I said as
forcefully as I could.

Mr. Mason opened the safe, pulled a small
black box from his pocket, and placed it inside. “You don’t seem to understand
anything. You happen to be on the right side of the Gemini curse. You’re
winning and your Gemini is losing. But most of the Takers won’t be as fortunate
as you are. Most of them will lose, dragging our numbers down significantly. I
know you don’t feel much loyalty to us, but you can’t expect us to just sit
back and take a beating like that. I will do everything I can to protect this
population.”

“Maybe you can stop this. You kind of
egged it on by letting that Minotaur out.”

He locked the safe again and took his
seat. “That was a warning.”

“That was a slap in the face and now
they’re going to take it out on all of us. What you did is just making
everything worse. Can’t you talk to them? Try to reason with them?”

He grimaced like he smelled something bad.
“I would rather die than grovel to those self-important anarchists. It won’t
happen.”

I leaned forward in my seat. “This is
about your ego? Everyone is going to die if you do this. How can you not care
at all? There’s no telling who will be affected—many   innocent
people. People who have nothing to do with this. People who don’t even know we
exist.”

Mr. Mason looked amused, like I was some
kind of joke to him. “You are under the incredibly wrong impression that I care
about people. I will make sure we are safe and that is where my concern ends.”

I wanted to knock some sense into him but
then I thought about Fletcher lying on that bed, dying because I was sucking
the life out of him. I had to stop this curse and reasoning with Mr. Mason was
the only way to do it.

I took a deep breath, summoning all the
patience I had. “Please, think about this. There will never be any peace. What
is the point of that? Turmoil where there doesn’t have to be.”

He studied me for a long time before
speaking. “You don’t know this world. You weren’t raised in it like the rest of
us so you don’t know any better. We will always take a backseat to them. They
get to roam free, live like Humans, have possession of that curse, determine
whether we live or die. They judge us as if we behave like filthy animals when
we simply do what we were born to do. It’s time for that to end. Besides, I
still believe they were responsible for the massacre that killed many of us
years back.”

His voice was thick with bitterness which
was understandable since his wife had been killed during the massacre. “You
don’t know that. No one knows who did it,” I told him.

“Are we done here? I do have work to do.”

I leaned forward in my chair and I narrowed
my eyes at him. He didn’t see me as a threat. He was treating me like some kind
of joke “I’ll kill you before I let you open that tunnel.”

He stood so abruptly his chair tipped
back. “I’m about tired of your threats, girl. If you’re going to do something,
do it. But I will give you fair warning; a young creature who has yet to gain
her full abilities, is no match for an adult Aswang.”

Scaring him wasn’t enough. Mr. Mason
needed to be stopped permanently, but I didn’t have it in me to do it and he
knew it.