Glitter & Doom: A Masque of the Red Death Story Read Online Free Page A

the guard.”
    April held her breath until he was gone. She should have begged him to take her with him, but any effort to escape would have just alerted him that she wasn’t as stupid as she had pretended. And with her exhaustion and woozy head, she wasn’t going to be winning any prizes for alertness or intelligence. She leaned back, glad she was on the sofa.
    “So you’re Malcontent’s little peacock now.”
    She jumped. For a moment she had completely forgotten about the boy who was chained to the wall.
    “I suppose I am.” She’d been called much worse than a peacock. She stifled a yawn. “What did you do to draw his interest?”
    “I’m an inventor,” he said.
    She peered over the back of the couch.
    “Did he want you to invent something? Or does he just want an inventor to shackle to the wall?” she asked, thinking of her uncle’s dungeon full of scientists.
    “He wants me to destroy something,” the boy said darkly. “To build a bomb for him. But I won’t.” His voice had quivered before when he’d spoken of Malcontent’s bombings. What did he know of such horrors?
    “That’s good,” she said. “I admire a touch of rebelliousness.” She tossed her hair over her shoulders.
    “I know what you admire. I saw the boy who brought you here.”
    Was he jealous? Or just angry? At the club he’d blushed when she looked at him, and Elliott had suggested that she intimidated him. Apparently being chained to the wall had loosened his tongue.
    “He was pretty, wasn’t he?” April kept her voice steady, her eyes trained on the inventor. He was completely still, knees pulled up to his chest. With the manacle around his wrist he didn’t have much freedom to move.
    He raised his chin, as if giving her permission to scrutinize him. It was the sort of thing she might do. Except she would lower her chin a bit, close her eyes for a moment so her lashes would flutter delicately, turn so that he could see her excellent profile.
    Since he was giving permission, she didn’t hide her interest. High cheekbones. Thin lips. Nothing seemed terribly wrong with him, but she couldn’t tell anything about his eyes through the goggles.
    “Why don’t you wear regular spectacles?” she asked. Their eyes locked for a moment. But it held no magic because the goggles looked so ridiculous.
    “I was working when Malcontent’s men grabbed me. When I work I look down a lot, tinkering with parts. Eyeglasses in frames tend to fall off, and to break. The lenses that I require to see are quite heavy.” He pushed his hair back, but it just flopped into the same place, partially covering his magnified eyes.
    “They look it,” she said. They were also surprisingly good at making him appear homely. What if he was actually handsome underneath? It was much more exciting to be imprisoned with a secretly handsome boy.
    “The strap messes up your hair,” she observed. But it was nice hair. Slightly curly. He shook his head from side to side, his lips twisting in amusement. The movement made the distortion of his eyes even worse, and suddenly it was impossible for her to imagine him as devilishly handsome underneath a disguise. What if he was scarred, or if his eyes were terribly squinty? What if he was cross-eyed? At least his teeth looked normal. April had a horror of boys with bad teeth.
    She put one hand to her aching head. Why on earth would someone dedicate themselves to inventing things, anyway? If she hadn’t found lipstick and the Debauchery Club, would she have taken up invention as a hobby?
    “Are there any girl inventors?” she asked.
    “If you’re looking for a pastime,” he said, “then you should probably take up something a little simpler.”
    Did he think that was the sort of thing that would hurt her feelings?
    “I wasn’t looking for a hobby.” April turned her back to him, settling on the sofa. But the silence was unpleasant, so she added, “I just wondered if there were girls who invented things. A