Alive At Crepusculum ✓ [TPL Book One]

II

At last, the horse slowed to a gentle trot and came upon an affluent neighborhood, walking into a grand garden with a fountain and a lemon-yellow house with a cream-colored porch. A few blocks away sat Rushford Candy Shop—a quaint little shop with a light brown roof and beige walls. It wasn't the only candy shop in small Penwood State, but it was one of the few that sold sweets imported from other countries.

Richard helped Anastasia off the horse and called for his stable boy—rather rudely awakened as he would later complain—to take the horse to be fed and groomed.

The boy grumbled and said, "Yes, Master C."

"As you insist on being called," the boy added in sarcastic tone. Richard dropped his façade for a second and winked at the boy who grumbled some more.

Anyone who knew Charles would find the lemon-yellow house to be quite lovely and delightful. Charles never owned any slaves, and it was said he regarded his new stable boy as a friend and even invited the boy inside to dine with him. Slaves or servants were not always allowed in the abodes of their masters, so those who saw this of Charles found him to be extremely progressive and probably born in the wrong era.

"Maybe you should've been born fifty years later, Charlie," those who believed the slave system should be abolished would often say.

"Maybe he should've been born fifty years earlier!" those who loved the slave system would bark and continue, "And you lot should shut your fikkin' mouths!"

Charles would smile with his eyelids crinkling in the corners as if this divide was beyond his control, so all he would do was watch and let it unfold on its own. The only debate he would be were among friends. Richard watched Charles' every gesture and every facial expression to get him just right. The two-year relationship certainly helped. 

Not a soul knew the real reason Charles would never take a wife. Once Richard fully embodied the candy man, he killed him in his sleep and devoured his body. Every day since then, he was Charles around anyone and Richard only to himself.

But that was about to change.

He helped Anastasia to the couch.

"You will not ask questions about anything that happens within the house, or about me or anything that I do."

"Yes, Mr. Rushford. I understand." Anastasia nodded.

Richard nodded. "Very well." He slipped off the façade.

* * * * *

"I am very thankful of—" Anastasia stopped for she noticed a change in Charles. He seemed to be someone else. But it wasn't just his face or his body that changed. She sensed a presence in the shadows on the wall behind him. And how odd, she thought, for shadows to be there when none of the light sources of the house were shining on his face.

"You know, it's a relief I don't have to act in my home around you, too," he said, full Lwennen lilt and high-class mannerisms she recognized from her brief trip there decades ago. He sat beside her on the sofa. Anastasia shrunk back on instinct. The shadow behind him rippled.

A mustache snaked across his upper lip. He twisted the handlebars in his fingers.

"Who are you?" she whispered. She had seen the likes of the hocus-pocus in her time, but not like this. And what, she wondered, was wrong with his shadow? "What are you?" she fixed her question.

The man changed again to Charles and back again as if showing off. Was this façade witchcraft or the work of some other devil? Did she unknowingly follow a demon into its abode? But she reasoned that people were worse than demons. She would rather be with this man than back with her abusive Master Brews.