Rogue Myths Read online

  Rogue Myths

  Gatekeeper #1

  Layla Lawlor

  Rogue Myths

  Published by Icefall Press, July 2020

  Copyright © 2020 Layla Lawlor

  All Rights Reserved

  Originally published as Wayward Myths, July 2018

  Visit me online at http://www.laylalawlor.com.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Author's Note

  If you enjoyed this book …

  Echo City Preview

  Chapter 1

  When I looked up from my easel, the world blazed with colored fire. I blinked, squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them again.

  Nothing had changed. Or rather, it all had. Crimson limned every wrinkle of my bedspread, the underside of the sloping eaves, the windows at each end of the attic. The row of action figures on the windowsill were a spiky explosion of shocking blue and gold with traceries of green at the edges. Colors shifted when I moved my head, leaped from one object to another, red chasing orange chasing ultraviolet. In the shadowy space under the eaves, where our landlady's junk cluttered both sides of the Garret, shapes seemed to twist and writhe.

  I took a slow breath and put my brush in the paint-stained jar of water beside my easel, flicked off the bright clamp light that was probably making things worse with its harsh, flickering shadows.

  "Right," I said to myself. "Time for a break."

  I ducked automatically as I stood up to avoid bashing my head on the Garret's low, sloping eaves, but my dip of the head turned into a sideways slide as the nauseating color display threw my balance off. It was hard to figure out, for a minute, where the floor was. I had to throw a hand against the underside of the roof to steady myself.

  It was an ocular migraine, that was all. I'd had them ever since I was a kid, though they rarely blew up into full-bore headaches. But they'd been getting worse lately, and this was one of the worst I'd had. I was worried about navigating the ladder leading down to the rest of the house, especially with a cup of paint water in one hand. Fresca kept saying I was going to fall through the trapdoor and break my neck one of these days. This might be the day.

  But by the time I groped my way to the trapdoor, the visual upheaval was already calming down, and when I stepped off in the second-floor hallway it had faded from disorienting to bearable, with a certain sense of objects shifting around at the corners of my eyes. Unnerving, but relatively normal for me. I still felt unsettled. The whole world felt different tonight and I didn't know why.

  So it didn't help at all when a violently green blur shot out of the half-open door of one of my roommates' bedrooms and zipped past my leg.

  "Jesus!" I yelped, slopping paint water on myself.

  The green blur stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at me with reflective eyes. It was just my roommate's freaking cat, outlined in green fire and trailing tendrils off into the faintly red-tinged world. I squinted through the halo. Her fur was on end, tail puffed up.

  "What's the matter, Twinkie, did I scare you too?"

  Twinkie vanished down the stairs. There was music coming up from below, bouncy pop, which meant Fresca: if the boys were down there, it would've been something more experimental or acoustic. I wasn't in the mood for people right now, but this wasn't people; it was Fresca. I followed the cat downstairs.

  My best friend, Francesca Serrano, was at the epicenter of a studynado at the kitchen table, surrounded by books, papers, an open laptop, and a sparkly purple phone blasting Katy Perry. Studying, for Fresca, meant a constant flitter of multitasking, with six windows open to different Wikipedia pages and her Twitter and probably some fanfiction she was reading on the side. I didn't know how it worked, but somehow it did work, because her grades were as good as mine.

  Her hair was blue this week, an electric splash barely visible through a brilliant sheen of green and purple. Twinkie was a hot green splot under Fresca's chair.

  "Hey, Kay!" Fresca thumbed down the music and bent over to reach into a large box under the table, pushing the cat aside. "The buttons came in! Read this."

  I didn't really have a choice, as the button was pressed into my free hand. "Ask Me About LitFest," I read.

  "No, no. Read it again."

  "Ask me about—oh."

  "LitFist. Yes. We have three thousand of them. The LitFest student committee have been losing their minds on the group chat all day. We don't have time to order more."

  "Change the name of the event." I fumbled, one-handed, to pin the button onto my sweater. Fresca rolled her eyes and reached up to help.

  "Thank you for your useful input, Kay." Her phone dinged. She leaned over and huffed out a breath. "Oh, come on. Shut the fuck up."

  "Who?"

  "Tina," Fresca said, scrolling through emails. "The actual worst. She's blaming me for the button fiasco. Stupid cow also shot down my Ramayana recital because we already have four readings scheduled. All of which are Greek and Roman plays."

  I took my paint water to the sink. "For God's sake, Fres, if you hate it that much, just resign."

  "I can't!" Fresca moaned. She clutched two fistfuls of blue-dyed hair. "I've helped organize LitFest every year since I was a freshman. I just hate this ancient Greek theme park they're doing this year. It was supposed to be 'Literature of the Ancient World.' I have nothing against Greece or Rome, but premodern literature doesn't begin and end with Homer. It's like being back in fucking Nebraska, only with less corn."

  Fresca had once told me that she was much too busy being oppressed by three older sisters to waste time being oppressed by Fisher, Nebraska, pop. 818. Other hints, dropped throughout our friendship, indicated that it hadn't been easy to be the only Filipino girl in her graduating class. As one of two Black kids in my own senior year out of 594 graduating students, I could relate.

  "Okay, how about this. Pretend it's on purpose. You could have a 'spot the spelling error' raffle and give away a prize."

  "Oh. Huh." She had been chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen; now she clamped it between her teeth and began typing furiously. "Good idea," she said indistinctly around it. "You're the best."

  "I know, I'm awesome. Where are the boys, anyway?" I asked, pouring dish soap into my palm to scrub acrylic paint out of my brushes.

  "They had a thing on campus. Gordon said they'd be out late."

  "They go to parties? I thought all they ever did was hide out in their cave and play video games."

  Fresca said something through her teeth that sounded like "Larp."

  "Did you just choke?"

  She took the pen out of her mouth and flashed her dimples at me. "They're LARPing, you know, live-action roleplaying. They invited us along, by the way."

  "I see you stayed home. I appreciate the solidarity."

  "It's mostly that I don't know the group." She shrugged. "You need the right vibe for something like that. We ought to get a Nerdhäus gaming group together. I can do it; I used to GM in high school. It's like riding a bike. You never forget how."

  "So you claim," I mutt
ered, scrubbing at the jar. I'd borrowed it from the kitchen and I didn't want to put it back with dried-on paint. "I saw you fall off the Village Bike just last week."

  "It was adjusted for your legs! It was like fifty feet tall!"

  "Just because some of us are—"

  "Freakishly tall giraffes?"

  "—I was going to say normal-sized, and some are Munchkins, not that I'm judging ..."

  She flipped me off. "If you're done insulting me—"

  "I could never get tired of insulting you, Fres." I put the clean jar in the cluttered dish drain and filled the coffeepot at the sink. Caffeine was supposed to help with migraines, though I had never noticed it making much of a difference with mine. But hey. Caffeine.

  "Email sorted." Fresca pushed back the laptop and scooped up the cat. "So how is life in the Garret? Can I see your paintings yet?"

  "When they're done," I offered vaguely. Food might help too. I opened the fridge, a giant '70s monstrosity in a stylish shade of institutional olive. "Do we still have pizza from last night?"

  "The boys ate it. You let the cat look at your art," Fresca complained. She scratched Twinkie's back with her bright blue nails, painted to match her hair.

  "Not anymore. The cat is on notice. She scared the shit out of me in the hallway earlier."

  "Doing what?"

  "Just being twitchy. Maybe your aunt's house is haunted."

  "Didn't you tell me you saw a ghost one time?" Fresca asked, smoothing down Twinkie's scruffed-up fur.

  "Okay, first of all, it was at your friend Streak's party when I said that—"

  "Stripe, his name's Stripe."

  "And I'd had three of those drinks with the bright blue stuff in it, I don't even know what that was, and this is why I hate parties, by the way." I dragged a carton of Chinese food out of the back. There was no date on it, and I always wrote dates on my leftovers, because I'm not a barbarian. "Is this yours?"

  "But you did see a ghost."

  "I had an imaginary friend when I was a kid. Everybody does." Memory shivered over me: a little boy on the swing set at school, and Mom taking me to the school counselor ...

  It's not nice to make up stories, Kay.

  "You said yours talked back."

  "Drop it, Fres."

  "Wow, someone's touchy tonight—ow!"

  Twinkie clawed her way out of Fresca's arms and zipped off for parts unknown. The thump of the cat hitting the floor nearly covered a crashing sound outside.

  "Everyone's touchy tonight," Fresca complained. "Ow, I think I'm going to need Neosporin. Thanks a lot, cat."

  "Hush." I raised a hand and put the questionable cashew chicken aside. "I thought I heard something."

  "Oh fuck, now what?" Fresca demanded, jumping out of her chair.

  "Now who's jumpy?"

  "You're the one who started talking about ghosts." She peered out the kitchen window. "Like what sort of something?"

  "Like something crashing around in the bushes. Maybe a deer?" I'd seen deer a few times in our backyard, tawny creatures with impossibly slender legs, gliding over the grass.

  We both looked out.

  The house was in a hollow beside the creek, screened from the water by a thicket of blackberry canes and small trees. We were too close to campus to be truly rural, but there was only a neighbor on one side of us. Our rental property backed onto a strip of university land, mostly scrubby woods and agricultural plots, and we had the creek on the other side, making the Nerdhäus feel more remote than it was.

  Tonight, a thick ground-mist had risen from the creek to cloak the yard, turning the woods opaque. There seemed to be colors in it: tendrils of red and yellow and green, shifting in a firefly dance. Beautiful but creepy. The trees that were still dimly visible in the glow of the house lights seemed to move on their own, like they were underwater.

  The porch light had been on the fritz for months, but I jiggled the switch anyway. No miracle occurred. There was a light on a pole at the top of the driveway, but it was too far away to do more than cast an eerie glow through the fog.

  "See anything?" Fresca whispered.

  I shook my head.

  "It could be coyotes," she said. "Supposedly there's a pack of them around Ithaca. That'd explain why Twinkie's acting so weird."

  "Are they dangerous?"

  "Nah, they're little. Like medium-sized dogs. I'd love to see one. C'mon, let's get a better look."

  We ventured cautiously onto the back porch. Wide and partly enclosed, the porch ran across the entire back end of the house, jammed with many years' accumulation of Fresca's aunt's moldering junk. This end of the house was angled toward the creek and the woods, with the gravel driveway wrapping around it. Cars passed on the road, but their engine noise was muffled by the house, their headlights swallowed in the mist. The rushing of the creek, swollen with spring melt, was the loudest sound back here.

  Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that we weren't alone. Maybe it was just the migraine making me tense, lacing the fog with Halloween shades of red and orange and electric yellow every time I moved my head.

  The porch lit up with the sudden blue-white glare of the flashlight app on Fresca's phone. She played the light across the backyard, but its range was too short to reach the trees through the fog. Still, no animal eyes flashed back at us, only the sparkling of wet grass.

  Trying to lean out further, I barked my knee on an overflowing plastic bin. Cans rattled across the porch.

  "Does anyone ever take this thing out?" I complained, hopping on one leg. The everyday annoyance broke the tense mood.

  "It was Drew's turn last week, I think. Or mine?"

  "So, no." I made a face. "Pickup's on Monday. Let's just put it out and then it's done and not underfoot anymore and we don't have to worry about it."

  "Are you volunteering?"

  I looked out into the darkness. "You're the small-town kid. You have coyote defense skills."

  "It was your idea. Throw down for it."

  Her paper wrapped my rock. I swear she cheats but I don't know how.

  "Will you at least go with me?" I begged, stacking the bins.

  "No," Fresca said. "I'm freezing. Got your phone?"

  "It's upstairs."

  "Here, then." She pressed hers into my hand. "Don't use the flashlight too much. I haven't charged it lately and I've been playing music all evening."

  "You're abandoning me to a pack of coyotes with a flashlight that's running out of juice. You're an awful friend."

  "Scream if you need me," Fresca said. "I'm gonna go doctor up these cat scratches before my arms fall off."

  She retreated into the warmth of the kitchen, leaving me alone in the dark. The phone's blue-white spotlight lit up the sagging boards at my feet. It was localized but very bright.

  "You will come if I scream, right Fresca?" I shouted back through the screen door.

  Her reply issued faintly from within. "What are friends for?"

  I carried the recycling bins down the steps to the gravel drive. A softly bitter wind bent the mist into eerie shapes, and I wished I'd brought my jacket. The sound of the creek was louder here, away from the porch.

  We had moved here last September, when we decided to live off campus, and I still wasn't entirely used to the ever-present noise of the creek. The water didn't make a constant white noise, like I would have expected. Instead it was an ever-changing symphony of unexpected splashes and low hollow notes like a deep and distant bell. Sometimes, when the creek was loud like tonight, I could almost hear voices in it, a lunatic babble whispering in my ear.

  And the light from Fresca's phone was dimming noticeably.

  "Deer and raccoons," I muttered. "Deer and raccoons."

  There was an odd smell in the air tonight, a wet smell, different from the sharp springtime reek of mud and dead grass. I recognized it, but took a moment to place the familiarity: a childhood beach vacation in Virginia, a rented cabin and the sound of breaking waves, sand warm and gritty between
my toes. And the salt-and-metal scent of the sea.

  Which was impossible, because we were in Ithaca, New York, and the ocean was two hundred miles away. All the hairs stood up on my arms. Even my scalp prickled.

  A black shape loomed suddenly out of the mist. I staggered and almost twisted my ankle before recognizing my own car. I had to set the boxes down and use another few seconds of Fresca's phone battery to check the inky pool of shadow under the car, because otherwise I'd be looking over my shoulder all the way up to the road. Nothing—

  —but through the narrow gap between the car's underside and the gravel, I thought I glimpsed movement on the far side. I straightened up so fast I got a head rush. The blue glow lit winter-dead grass and mist, nothing more.

  "Scram," I called into the shadows. "Deer or rabbits or whatever you are—whoa!"

  I glimpsed a flash of something pale in the thicket. Of course, that was the moment Fresca's phone picked to die completely. I was suddenly, temporarily blind, and in the darkness, something bumped into me.

  I yelled. So did whatever it was. We staggered away from each other, and I fell on my ass on the gravel, knocking over the boxes and scattering cans everywhere. There was a crunch from nearby as whatever it was fell down, too.

  As my eyes adjusted, the sight of a pale blur laced with rainbow splinters of color set my heart galloping again. Tilting my head to the side to make the migraine effects less, I finally realized it was a person, a woman dressed in white.

  Chapter 2

  I had trouble looking directly at her, because she seemed to be on fire. Usually Fresca and my roommates appeared to me in soothing shades of blue and green, but this woman was lit up in shocking red, with oily, shifting undercurrents that made me feel faintly ill whenever I moved my head. Red tendrils trailed away from her body, vanishing into the fog.