The Lie Spinners (The Deception Dance) (27 page)

Ahead,
lines of fire streak in all directions. I stop talking to watch; I
watch because every time I speak with anyone, my situation gets
worse.

The
fire dancers ahead are the fastest, most spectacular dancers I’ve
see yet. Patterns and shapes form and morph constantly and within the
fiery cage, the dancers spin and duck and kick, in a dance
coordinated with each other. They even bend and spin in ways that I
would think impossible, but must be a trick of the moving firelight.
All three Thai women wear matching barely-there shorts, tank-tops and
have tattooed white web lines that branch out from their bare feet,
to their necks, to their wrists covering the remainder of their
exposed skin.

I
stare, lips parting. In the fire’s glow, little black tattooed
spiders crawl all across those webs… climbing up the women’s
legs, scurrying across the threads down their arms… Then they
vanish.

“
Chelsea,
did you see that?” I ask, grabbing my sister’s arm.

“
See…what?”
Linnie responds.

“
The
spiders, they were moving on the tattoos?”

“
Nope,
no spiders, just webs,” Linnie says.

“
I’ve
seen them,” A voice whispers from the other side of me.

I
turn to find a disheveled looking my-age girl standing way too close
on my other side. She’s smaller than me, and looks like her
light brown hair and clothing might have once been beach-party-cute
but she has long since moved past bedraggled. I immediately check and
find no tattoos on her bared wrists. Her eyes are also a dull muddy
brown, devoid of that characteristic demonic glow.

But,
the look she’s giving me makes me want to do anything but
relax. The girl’s look says: I’m hungry and you look
tasty.

I
hold onto Linnie’s arm and shift my sister behind me, slowly as
to not draw attention.

“
You
want to see spiders? Look,” the girl says as she lifts up her
chin. On her neck, below her ear, a small white web dangles with a
single little black spider weaving, its little inked arms twitching
back and forth. She says, “I named him Bob.”

While
I’m distracted by Bob, and the way he’s actually moving
on the girl’s neck, the disheveled girl grabs my arm. “Give
it to me.” I can smell her rank breath as she brings her face
inches from mine, big, muddy eyes are intent on mine, her nails
digging into my skin.

With
a twist of my wrist I break her hold and I put my hands up in a
back-off gesture, but the girl just steps even closer. I really don’t
want to hurt a crazy girl, but I will.

She
grabs for my shirt; her voice shaking, desperate-sounding. “I
can smell it on you, it’s…it’s on you…somewhere…in
your pocket. Give it to me.”

I
cover my pocket holding the Venom pill realizing what’s going
on. She can smell it? I step away, backing into Linnie.

“
Hey!
You be off now,” I look up to see one of the fire dancers has
stopped dancing, her fire balls extinguished in the sand. And to my
surprise I know her… it’s May. Stephen’s friend.
No wonder she wore clothes earlier that so covered her, she’s
neck to toes tattooed with webs.

May
steps halfway between where crazy and I face off, hand out-stretched.
“Be off now. We want no violence here.”

Eyes
darting between us, crazy jumps at May, punching her in the face,
knocking her to the ground. As May falls, Crazy steps over her and
launches at me, tearing at my shorts like a shark in a blood frenzy.

I
scream, and awkwardly fall onto May. As I try to right myself Crazy
gets a hand in my pocket and pulls so hard she tears it open.

The
pill drops onto the sand and crazy grabs it up. The moment crazy has
it, however, there’s another disheveled man who jumps onto her
back. I stand and grab May right before the rather large attacker-man
rolls with crazy onto the spot she’s just been lying in.
Grabbing May’s wrist I do my best to yank her out of the storm
of flailing limbs. Just in time, she takes my hand and standing, we
rush out of the fight. With a wince, May uses her thumb to wipe blood
away from a split lip.

A
few people scream, most flee, someone yells, “bum fight!”
right as a third person dives for the pair. And there are more
disheveled people coming, weaving through the crowd, and a couple
clean-looking people watching the fight with that same starving look
in their dull eyes.

“
What
the…?” Linnie says.

“
The
pill,” I whisper, “They’re after that pill.”

Suddenly
they stop fighting. Calmly, the crazy girl who attacked me stands,
brushes the sand off her face and arms, and she turns to stare
straight at me. Her eyes which had been that muddy brown are electric
sienna, the pupils slit, like a cat. Crazy turns and stalks away, no
one follows; the rest of that strange, hungry, disheveled crowd just
sort-of skulks off.

“
That
was seriously creepy,” Linnie says, voicing my thoughts,
perfectly.

“
Next
time, Amanda, take your pill before you leave your hostel room,”
May whispers, still standing beside me. “Or be even smarter,
and don’t buy it at all.”

“
I’ll
go for that second one,” I say, turning. Seeing that her cheek
bone and lip are already swelling, I say, “I am so sorry. You
didn’t have to step in for me like that…”

“
Oh,
do not worry, this is nothing. Believe me; I get worse every single
day.” May grimaces. She leads Linnie and me by our elbows so
that we all sort of huddle together.

May
whispers, “I feel like…I feel like perhaps I owe you
both, in a way. Our
mutual
friend
confided in me, I know who he is, and a little of who you both are to
him, please don’t tell him I told you. And
don’t
worry
,
I promise I will not tell anyone. But, I feel like it is my fault
that he will not leave with you.
Our
friend
is a bit of a hero, I think. I’m afraid that he’s trying
to save me; but, I cannot be saved. I know this sounds very strange,
but, I’d like to talk to you, to help get our friend away from
this place.” She nods over to the bar that Stephen works at.
“People who stay there too long, never leave. I just…”
She looks around at the crowd moving around us, and then continues,
“I just cannot talk about it here.”

I
whisper back, “Okay, we should…”

“
Mæ̀m̀āy!”

“
I
must go,” May says, spinning around and running toward the
other web-tattooed women. The elder of the three spider-web-ladies
(though probably no older than her late twenties), pours a line of
gasoline in the sand, lights it with a torch and the three women
simultaneously light up balls at the ends of chains before beginning
their synchronized dance. Before Linnie and I turn away, reeling from
what May just said, not to mention the attack, a crowd has already
formed around the fire dancers.

That
Stephen has a hero-complex is no news to me, he saved me, he saved
Linnie, he even tried to save Chauncey, who everyone else wrote off
as a lost cause.

When
Linnie had been kidnapped by demons and held for twenty-six days last
summer, Stephen didn’t stop until he got her out, which, from
what I had heard, was an almost impossible task. Not that Linnie has
told me about it; that’s her one off-limits subject: her
kidnapping and torture at the hands of her demon-possessed best
friend last summer (to be fair, I just don’t know how to bring
it up).

And…Stephen
went beyond saving me last summer; he was the only one who told me
the truth. He was the only person willing to untangle the lies Andras
and Nicholas had told me. Stephen told me the truth: that it was
under Andras’ orders that I was drugged, kidnapped and
viciously attacked; even though if Stephen hadn’t, he could
have stopped Andras from opening the gates of Hell last summer by
simply delivering me to Andras (while I was blissfully ignorant of
how evil Andras is). But that’s just not how Stephen works.

And
I’m almost positive that if he’s staying to save an
innocent woman from a very bad situation, it’ll be near
impossible to convince him to abandon her.

Day
Twelve

As
the sweaty, alcohol fuming bodies press in on me from all directions
I decide that my idea of a good time is reading a good novel, alone.

“
I
have been fondled three times and I have no idea who to slap,”
I shout to my sister who presses up against my side.

Linnie
shouts back, and even though she literally plasters against me, I can
barely hear her over the crowd and the techno, “No one’s
fondled me! Do you think it’s because of my hair?”

I
restrain the urge to tell her that she might need to talk to a
professional about her issues—
seriously
?

The
tide washes over our feet, managing to scatter some of the gridlocked
crowd around us to drier sand. Thank you, Mother Ocean! I grab
Linnie’s hand and back us up so we’re knee deep in the
calm, deceptively serene looking sea.

I’m
tempted to jump in but I think of the folded piece of paper in my
pocket, and resist.

This
morning a teenage guy who looked like a Mormon Missionary gave me
that crumpled piece of paper, it was titled ‘Full Moon Party
Survival Guide’. The first thing on there was: The full moon
brings in strong tides; most of the deaths during the Full Moon
Parties come from drowning. After that was a short list of incredibly
good advice. I probably owe that kid my life; a ton of people
probably owe that kid their lives, and people were totally being rude
to him, openly making fun of him in his suit—sometimes I hate
people.

Like,
now, when I’m given the choice of walking knee deep in the
ocean or having my breasts fondled by randoms.

Ocean,
all the way.

Linnie
and I walk in the water that periodically rises to thigh deep, then
lowers to just below our knees, then repeats. We spot a stretch of
sand where we might be able to stand very still without being
touched, and head up the beach.

I’m
completely soaked, but at least the fact that my shorts are sopping
with ocean water might deter some of the perverts from grabbing my
butt.

Five
uneventful days have passed and even though we’ve gone out into
this madness every night I haven’t had a chance to talk with
Stephen or May, or get any closer to finding out what’s really
going on. Mostly we just maneuvered through the crowds until we find
May, fire dancing with her spider webbed crew, or Stephen tending bar
in that club. Neither acknowledged us. Neither could be found during
the day. Neither sought us out.

And
since I have no pressing urge to swim through the crowd, find that
guy Pom, and tell him that “I need to find The Spider, right
now,” I have a sinking feeling that I was right, and this is
not the Full Moon Party from my vision.

The
one thing I did learn, when Linnie and I went to a little store where
you can rent a computer, is that Midsummer is another name for the
Summer Solstice, and this year it will be on June Twenty-first. Since
the next Full Moon Party is on June Twenty-third, I will have exactly
one week after that day to return Stephen to Madeline. On July First,
I begin to rot.

No
pressure or anything.

I
take a deep breath, which is a mistake.

“
Can
we just go dance?” Linnie asks, loudly, “We’re
never going to get through this mess to find them. And, there’s
probably no point since they’re just going to keep ignoring
us.”

I
sigh. She’s right. We head into the crowd, staying to the areas
with small openings between people, until we cross into the dancing
zone. It’s like the beach sections off into three indistinct
zones, right next to the clubs is the sardine zone, then there’s
a thick space of dancing gyrating bodies, then nearest the ocean is
the standing and rolling in the sand, make-out zone. Neon lights
dance over us, black lit people painted with flowers and dragons and
smeared designs glow as they wield glow sticks. Linnie and I blend
into the crowd letting the techno, guide our movements.