Starlight Manor

Once Mayuri departs from the guest room and Lise enters, Alois all but disappears out of her sight. His only words to Lise before he goes, before she can ask him any of the thousands of questions bouncing around in her jumbled brain, are to stay put and not follow him. A command—as always.

But with the promise of a nice bath just around the corner, Lise can’t bring herself to argue.

The bathroom is gorgeous, a large, square room decorated in pink and white and gold. The tub before her is large and oblong, the aroma of the lavender-scented bath drifting gracefully through the air. The moment that lovely scent, accompanied with the feeling of hot steam, enters her nostrils, a sense of whole body relief seeps through her bones, ridding her of any and all thoughts; the questions and concerns in her mind crumple to ash. She sheds her clothes immediately, tossing them into a crumpled pile on the floor, and doesn’t hesitate to sink in. It feels like bliss, the sweet-scented water soothing her sore body, enfolding her in a warm embrace.

She doesn’t even think about getting out of the bath until the water has gone cold. By the time Lise finally steps out of the tub and into the robe that had been laid out for her, the day that had peered out from the bathroom window is gone and has been replaced with the darkness of night. Lise flips her curly hair back, not bothering to brush it, to stand on her tip-toes and look out the window at the beautiful estate. The endless grassy hills, the trees, the gardens. There isn’t another house in sight. It’s so different from Wobenn, where huts are packed so close together. Where you really have no choice but to know your neighbors, your community. She recalls Gideon’s words about the manor never getting any guests, and she wonders suddenly, and somewhat sadly, if the Starlight family ever gets lonely cooped up in this big house all by themselves.

Finally, Lise leaves the bathroom. She flops herself onto the bed, sighing at the comfort of the soft mattress under her. She’s trying hard to keep her mind peaceful and clear, like it had been in the bath, but it’s becoming harder and harder by the second.

Alois told her to stay in her room until he came back. But it had to have been hours and hours now, and he still hasn’t returned. Lise’s a bit worried about him. What would his mother say to him that would take this long?

She slowly turns the knob of her door and pulls it open, careful not to make a sound. She cranes her head out into the hallway, hoping to spot a glimpse of the familiar white-haired head of her best friend.

Nothing. There’s no sign of Alois. There’s only rolls of red carpet trimmed with gold, of those black, endlessly high walls, all barely visible in the darkness. Lise tries to listen for his voice, for his mother’s voice, but it’s no use. Complete and utter silence is all that meets her ears.

But her eyes happen to fall on something else. There’s a crack of light at the end of that hall—a gleam of brightness, like a ray of sunlight. It shouldn’t seem so strange, one open door in such a massive house, but that light is the only illumination in the utter darkness of the hall. In the cold, unwavering stillness of it.

Like a flower, Lise feels herself drawn to it.

Her feet are moving before she knows it, and soon enough she finds herself out of her room and into the hallway. Soon, she’s standing before that very room with the bright cracked door, her heart pounding in her chest.

Curiosity getting the best of her, Lise takes a chance and peers in.

Inside, to her surprise, is Alois’s brother, seated at a vanity, brushing his long white hair. His friend with the funny purple hair is with him, sitting cross-legged on the bed. His scarred face is now makeup-free, and he’s in night clothes instead of the work outfit he’d been wearing previously. It’s interesting to see them so at ease, even though Lise has only just met them. They must be friends.

“—longest list of people I’ve ever seen,” Mayuri is saying to Cami, who’s dark eyes haven’t left his own face, “to take care of over the weekend, on top of cleaning the entire front garden. All two acres of it.” Mayuri heaves a mournful, dramatic sigh and flops back onto the bed of white silk. “You’d think I was part of the family, really, with the work your mother gives me. It’s awful.”

“Terrible,” Cami says, running his fingers through his tresses.

His friend scowls over at him. “Is that really all you can say?”

Cami gives him a steely side-eye in the mirror, but doesn’t grant him a response.

Mayuri just barely lifts his head off the mattress. Without his makeup, there are notable dark circles under his eyes.

“And you?” he drawls, derision dripping off his every word. “How’s your weekend looking, Cami?”

Alois’s older brother, ignorant of the sarcasm, seems to be deep in thought at the question. Lise is almost taken aback by his naiveté. “I take care of a rather large mafia group on Saturday night,” he recalls slowly. “It may take me a while. Disposal will be the hard part. Not necessarily difficult, just irritating. The ocean is quite far.”

Disposal? The ocean? Lise is beyond confused. What in the world does Cami do for a living? What do any of them do? Seeing the mansion they lived in, she had been assuming they didn’t have to work at all. In her head, the Starlights just relaxed at home and sipped fancy beverages on luxury seats, enjoying their riches all day. The thought of any of these wealthy, pristine-looking people at a job, working? Having a boss? It makes her head spin.

“Why in the world would you dump them in the ocean?” Lise watches raptly as Mayuri turns over so that his face is buried in the sheets, his voice muffled. He sounds exhausted. She wonders if every servant that works here is often as tired as him, or if he’s just one of the more important ones. “Just bring that red-haired maid along to incinerate the bodies for you.”

The bodies.

Lise’s smile drops faster than a rock into water.

Unperturbed, Cami runs the brush through his silky hair.

“I can’t,” he says.

“Sure you can,” Mayuri tells him simply. “You can bring a few valets with you. They’re all trained in clean-up. I’ve taught most of them myself.”

A wave of nausea crashes down on Lise. She can barely even believe what she’s hearing, let alone allow it to sink in. Clean up of what, exactly? Of bodies? The servants here are taught what to do with murdered corpses? Is that what he’s saying?

Still, she leans forward, trembling with shock and horror and fear, yet desperate to hear more.

“The clients want the bodies drowned,” Cami says, and there’s a hint of something like humor in his words. “And Mother has made it clear she wants no one else but me on the mission.” He places down his brush. “It’s an important task.”

A smile twists Mayuri’s mouth.

He gets to his feet and braces his hands on Cami’s chair just as he did at the kitchen table, looking down at him in amusement. “So Kwithra wants you to go back and forth in your car and dump them one by one?” He smooths back a strand of Cami’s hair behind his ear. “What a poor little heir you are.”

“What Mother wants, Mother gets,” Cami tells him simply. He lifts his bony shoulders in a nonchalant shrug. “Life is easier that way.”

Mayuri hums. “I’m sure.”

Suddenly, the purple-haired butler stiffens, his spine straightening up. He turns his head ever so slightly to the right, and his sharp eyes meet Lise’s in the doorway, pinning her to the spot.

Instantly, Lise wants to run away. She wants to turn around and bolt as fast as her legs can take her, to grab Alois and leave this house—this entire place—behind. But she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she just stands there staring back at him like a deer in headlights, frozen to the spot.

“Cami,” he lilts, not taking his eyes off of her for a single second. “We have company.”

“I know,” Cami says, his emotionless face untroubled. Even so, he doesn’t look over. “I felt him.”

“Him?”

Cami’s eyes immediately meet Mayuri’s in his vanity mirror.

“It’s his friend,” Mayuri says. His gaze feels predatory on Lise. “The little girl.”

A tiny crease appears in Cami’s forehead. He turns to face her only then, and Lise shrinks away from the cold hollowness of his dark eyes.

“Interesting,” he says slowly. “How?”

Mayuri runs his tongue over his pearly white teeth. “I don’t quite know.”

What the hell are they talking about? Lise can feel her teeth chattering. Murder talk, no doubt.

Cami seems slightly distressed. “I thought I sensed Alois,” he mutters, half to Mayuri, half to himself. Slowly, he turns to face Mayuri again, like he has all the time in the world to be contemplating whatever nonsense he’s talking about. Like Lise isn’t ready to shit a brick right there in front of them. “But I suppose my own brother doesn’t care enough about me to spy on me. Even after all this time.”

Mayuri raises an eyebrow at him. “I hear he’ll be spending a lot of time with you soon enough, I believe,” he says. “With all of you.”

“What does that mean?” Lise blurts out. She can feel sweat pooling on her forehead.

Cami is looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, but only barely, like he couldn’t be bothered. Like she’s nothing but a bug on the wall, a slimy, disgusting thing. A lesser thing.

“You are in the home of the Starlight assassin family, little girl,” he says softly. His chin is pointed high and proud. “You will address me with respect.”

Assassin family.

“So you’re killers?” Lise blurts out. “For real?” She can feel her hands shaking. “Are you going to kill me? Am I going to die?”

Mayuri throws back his head and laughs, even though none of this is funny. Lise’s heart is racing now, beating rapidly in her chest like the relentless pounding of a drum.

“If Cami were to kill you,” he says, “you’d find yourself on a very, very long list of targets, my dear. But I suppose you wouldn’t know that. Waitlists are a rather adult concept.” He pulls out another chair and gestures to it with a tilt of his head. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

His fingernails, curled around the backrest, are sharp.

Lise gulps.

She has no choice.

She walks over slowly, cautiously, to the chair and sits down as gingerly as she can, making sure her feet don’t leave the floor for even a moment. She won’t make herself too comfortable in case things go wrong—as in somehow worse than they were already turning out to be—and she has to bolt.

“You are in no danger here, little girl,” the purple-haired servant assures her. She eyes him suspiciously as he cocks his head and smiles down at her. “What was your name again? Lise?” At her slow nod, he leans down at her side, way too close for comfort. Despite her terror, Lise forces herself not to look away. “Don’t get caught up on that word—assassin. It sounds scary, but it’s truly not. It’s simply a job, you see.”

“Simply a job,” Lise repeats, her voice faint.

“Adults who are very rich or very important, little Lise, have a lot of enemies, and many of these enemies are quite dangerous. Someone—something—needs to be strong enough to take out these enemies. To discard them, if you will.” He gestures to Cami, the intensity of him, and Lise can almost picture him in action, can almost see the stains of crimson red soaked into his perfect white hair. “That is the function of the Starlight family. They are quite renowned for killing with both sorcery and pure physical skill. They help protect others from certain death.”

“Sorcery?” Lise echoes him, eyes wide. “You guys use magic to kill people?”

Lise can count the number of people in her town she’s met that can use sorcery on one hand alone. Margote could pinch the petals of a flower and make them shrink. Neana was able to make sticks float a few inches above the grass. Philippe could even squint real hard at his mean old grandfather until he made a tiny little rip through his shirtsleeve with just his eyes, if you gave him a good twenty minutes. But powers strong enough to kill? They’d been gone for a long time. Or so Lise thought.

“I do not,” Cami finally speaks. “I was born without any abilities.” He smooths his bangs down in the mirror. “Alois certainly could, if he wasn’t so busy wasting his potential down in your little village doing… whatever he may do nowadays.”

Open-mouthed at this sudden revalation, Lise turns her focus to Mayuri. “Can you use sorcery, sir?”

Mayuri’s grin shoots a shot of warped excitement through Lise’s blood. “A true sorcerer never reveals his secrets,” he whispers, lifting a secretive finger to his mouth, and Lise gapes at him in awe.

Cami shoots him a mildly annoyed look. He rests his elbows on the arms of his chair. “Can you, girl?”

Forcing herself not to look away is a difficult task, but Lise manages it. “No, sir.”

Cami’s head tilts to the side, his black eyes narrowed into slits. “You lie.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know,” Mayuri murmurs to Cami. He turns back to Lise, casting her a sympathetic look. “Pardon my friend here, Lise. Communicating politely is not his specialty. What he means to imply is that you seem to have a magical aura. One that we both took note of.” His eyes grow distant, contemplative. “And one I’m sure Kwithra has taken note of as well.”

“A magical aura?” Lise parrots back at him once again, eyes going large. “Me?”

“It could simply be because you’ve been around Alois for a long while,” Mayuri says, stroking his chin lightly with a finger. “Or you may have powers of your own—possible, but unlikely.”

Is that what her strength was? Sorcery? Lise had never thought of it that way. Was it something she could train, could hone? Would she have to use it to protect Alois from his own family?

She feels calmer now, as much as she can be when faced with two mass murderers. “So you’re not going to kill me,” she says, relieved. She turns to Alois’s brother. “You said the Starlights are… an assassin family, Mr. Cami?”

“Yes,” Cami says. He doesn’t take his gaze off of her; his words are blunt and clipped.

“So you guys kill people,” Lise says hesitantly, her brow creasing. “But why?”

Mayuri shrugs. “For money.”

“It is our family’s legacy,” Cami corrects him.

Mayuri cocks his head at her, a sardonic smile curling his mouth. “For both, then,” he says.

“It sounds awfully mean,” Lise says, and she wants to clamp her hands over her mouth as soon as the words leave it.

Cami only lets out an audible sigh. He spins around in his chair without a word, as if done with the conversation, and starts messing with his hair again.

Lise rises to her feet, straightening herself up, her shoulders all the way back.

“Do you only kill bad people, Mr. Cami?” she asks quietly. “Or do you kill good people too?”

“Who is a good person,” the man says exasperatedly, pulling his hair back with a long red ribbon, “and who is a bad person, girl?”

“Alois is a good person,” Lise says, even as her voice trembles like a leaf in the wind. Her palms grow even sweatier as she sees Cami’s back tense at the mention of his brother’s name. “A bad person would be someone who… who kills without reason. Without question.”

Cami meets Lise’s eyes in the vanity mirror.

“You truly believe that my brother has not killed without question?” he asks softly.

Lise forces herself to think about it, really think about it. Alois, killing innocent civilians for money? Slaughtering them without a second thought? She just can’t picture it.

“No,” she says finally, a quiet boldness in her tone. “He… he wouldn’t like that at all.”

“Of course he did not like it,” Cami says impatiently. “That is why he left.” He turns in his chair abruptly, his dark eyes burning through her own. “Does he tell you nothing, little girl? Did he abandon his own family to do nothing but drag you along from place to place as his ignorant little sidekick?”

Lise feels like she was just slapped in the face.

As wrong as Cami is about her and Alois’s friendship, he isn’t wrong about everything. They had just arrived here, and already there was so much Alois had never told her about. Lise knew this would be the case, but she never expected the secrets of his life to be this dark, this heavy. Why hadn’t Alois told her about his family, about his sorcery? Why had he held so many secrets inside? Why had he even brought her here with him?

“I trust Alois,” Lise says firmly, clenching her fists at her sides. “And I know what kind of person he is. So I don’t ask him very many questions. I just go where he goes. And he trusts me enough to take me there with him.” She places a hand on her chest to gesture to herself. “Me, and no one else.”

Cami, for the first time since Lise has met him, appears to her more human than robot, and a very irritated human at that. The tight, angry lines of his face make him look almost normal, bringing color to his harsh, pallid face. She catches the terrifying sight of his thin eyebrows narrowing at her before Lise whirls around and heads for the door in long, fast strides, hoping the men can’t hear the frantic pounding of her heart. Before she leaves, she turns around once more.

“One more question,” she says bravely. “For you, Mr. Mayuri.”

Mayuri is Cami’s opposite, bright and endlessly amused. “Yes?”

“Why do you stay here?”

“Because I quite like it here,” Mayuri says simply. “And because I pledged allegiance to this family long ago. Morality does not and has never interfered with my loyalty.”

“But you’re just a butler,” Lise says to Mayuri helplessly. “You’re supposed to be normal.”

Mayuri’s sly smile is a sure thing.

“None of those who reside here in Starlight Manor,” he drawls, placing a hand on her curly blonde head to turn her back into the direction of her room, “are normal, dear Lise.”

—