Chapter 6

Arccoo

“Everything’s in place,” Elena said, the light from her laptop turning her glasses into glowing mirrors. “There might be a flicker at first, but once this digital generator starts to purr, this place will put the haunted mansion to shame.”

“We’ve only got twenty minutes,” Carmen pointed out. “Are we going to be up and running by then?”

“We’re blending technologies here,” Elena countered. “Literally no one has ever done this before. Don’t rush me.”

Arccoo strode across the room. “The adapters are working and should be ready to make the connection.” He stood at Elena’s desk and watched her type so fast she might as well have had thirty fingers. A few engineers back home would envy her technological prowess.

A body brushed against his. He noticed how close he was to Carmen. She was looking up at him with a sweet smile. Something inside him demanded he put some distance between them. Not only for his duty but to avoid letting Carmen’s sisters know about their incredible connection. He still wasn’t sure how they’d react to their interspecies romance.

Seeing the sparkle in her eye kept him in place, however. He smiled back. To his shock, her hand found his and their fingers laced together like vines tangling themselves along the branch of a tree. It was natural and effortless.

“Here goes nothing,” Elena said. She punched the spacebars and all the lights went out, even the laptop. They were surrounded by pitch darkness, as if someone had flipped a switch on reality.

“Where’d the lights go?” Sofia called from another room down the hall. Her swift footsteps followed quickly.

“I said it might flicker,” Elena said into the void.

“This isn’t a flicker.” Sofia was in the room now. “This is a total blackout. You may have shut down the entire power grid.”

Arccoo started to move so he could help, but Carmen gripped his hand and pulled him close. Her other hand slid up his arm. He leaned in the direction of her breathing. Like their hands, their lips found each other without the aid of light. They wasted no time, kissing long and deep while the oblivious Elena and Sofia tried to fix the problem with their setup.

There was a groan in the darkness. For less than a second, Arccoo thought it might be Carmen reacting to the intensity of their kissing. He almost panicked and pulled away. Then there was another groan and he understood that the sound wasn’t coming from any of them.

“What the hell is that?” Sofia asked. “If that’s a ghost and we have nothing to record it with, I swear to God…”

There was another groan, closer this time.

“Give me a second,” Elena muttered.

The groan became a hideous howl bellowing from the tortured throat of an undead thing, confused, angry, and hungry. It might have sent shivers down Arccoo’s back if Carmen wasn’t already doing that by running her fingernails through his hair as they continued their embrace.

“Got it!” Elena cheered.

The lights came back on. Carmen and Arccoo separated. Sofia gasped.

Standing in the doorway was a reanimated corpse, its flesh hanging from bones like the tattered ribbons of a decaying shirt. Half of its face was bone, with hollow sockets glaring at them with mortal longing. One skeletal hand outstretched in their direction. Whether it was looking for help or trying to grab one of them was impossible to say.

“That… is… amazing!” Carmen squealed. “It worked!” She clapped her hands giddily.

Elena hit a key on the computer, and the zombie faded in a cloud of silver ones and zeroes. “I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to have the best decor on the block,” she said, folding her arms across her chest with pride.

“And that’s not all,” Arccoo said. He reached over and punched in a short code. Bats appeared, dangling from the ceiling.

“Whoa,” Sofia marveled. She reached up to one. “Can I touch it?” she asked, well on her way to doing just that.

Before her finger could make contact, the bat spread its wings and shrieked in her face. She yelped. Her reaction set off a chain reaction with all the other bats who cried and snarled with ear-splitting intensity.

Cowering, Sofia begged them to stop.

Elena did her thing and all the winged mammals vanished in a puff of code. “With my know-how and Thryal power, there’s nothing our holograms can’t create.”

“I need a drink,” Sofia said, charging out of the room.

Carmen looked at Arccoo with awe radiating from her face. “How is this even possible?” she asked. “It’s like magic.”

Elena scoffed. “No such thing!” she said.

As she turned around to speak to them, both Arccoo and Carmen took half a step apart. Again, this was instinctual. No words had to pass between them. This fact thrilled and worried the wayward prince. His elder mother loved to extol on how true love manifests silently.

You become of one mind , she would say. Your bodies operate in unison. Your spirits entwine. When your heart knows the truth of another without a single word, then you know the love is real.

“It’s all technology,” Elena said. “An out of this world AI system.”

Arccoo nodded. “I uploaded centuries of your myths surrounding this holiday. The AI interpreted it and created holographic code to represent the various creatures and entities associated with it.”

“By blending our two technologies together, we were able to make something no one has ever seen!” Elena went back to typing a billion words per second. “Arccoo, thank you for helping. You’re amazing!”

Carmen winked at the prince. “She’s right. You are amazing.”

He bowed his head and touched his heart, a sign of thanks that royal men only expressed to their closest companions. He didn’t realize he’d done it until after his hand was back at his side. Things were progressing faster than he thought possible. If the connection grew any stronger, he may have to consider—

He stopped that train of thought. This wasn’t the time to dwell on what could be. Carmen and her sisters were expecting a massive celebration that would echo through time. That was his priority now. He would worry about the dangers of love later.

The front of the mansion was bathed in ethereal red and orange light, as if fires from hell rose from the earth to light its facade. Stone gargoyles blended in seamlessly with the original structure of the house, only to occasionally change position or snarl at a passerby. In various windows, figures could be glimpsed from the corner of the eye, only to vanish when viewed straight on. Dark clouds, like bruises in the night, rolled and rumbled above everything, a mystical storm about to break.

Thanks to the hollow-emitter drones circling the perimeter, this one residence in Hollowbrook had been transformed into a haunted wonderland that dazzled trick-or-treaters and dared others to skip out on the wildest party inside.

The micro-speakers lining the walls pumped out classic Halloween jams, keeping all the witches, vampires, cowboys, and naughty nurses dancing from track to track. Almost every room in the house was stuffed with spooky revelers drinking gallons of alcohol. The only thing louder than the music were the spontaneous screams reacting to a serpent descending slithering down a banister, a masked madman swinging a chainsaw at someone’s head, and impish gnomes running up legs and jumping into drinks before disappearing in binary smoke.

As Arccoo moved through the throngs of partiers, he couldn’t help but notice the eyes following his movement. Even now, amid a horde of costumes, something about him signaled his otherness. He thought it might be the alien skin, but plenty of body paint concealed his true form. Then he considered that his size might be drawing their attention, but a long-legged creature on stilts passed by him, and he knew that couldn’t be the reason.

Perhaps it was his movements. He sensed he might be falling back on old training, gliding through the room as opposed to walking. Princes, especially those tasked with ambassadorial responsibilities, were taught to move through a room as if gliding on the air itself. He was hoping he could disappear, be just one of many faces in the crowd, but now that was proving impossible.

Leaning against a doorframe, he considered leaving altogether. He had done what he set out to do. Carmen looked delighted. She danced with her sisters unbound by self-consciousness. She was happy, and that was all that mattered right now. Even if he couldn’t fully enjoy it with her, he was thankful to be able to help her have a night of bliss.

A ghost howled above him. It wavered just below the ceiling, looking like smoke seen through water. An idea started to form. Based on what he’d read, the concept of ghosts were not all that dissimilar to the yaave from Thryal. Instead of being the lost spirits of any dead person, yaave were specifically dead soldiers who never received a true burial. Their method of haunting consisted of pranks and annoying the living until their bodies could be laid to rest. Since he and Elena already brought his home and hers together through technology, why not combine their mythology as well?

Ducking into a hallway, Arccoo slipped into a closet. From the strap around his ankle, he produced the cloaking device he’d utilized to conceal himself from Carmen upon their arrival. Activating it now, he felt the cool rush spread over him as his form disappeared from view. Cloak in place, he sought out to cause a little havoc.

The first opportunity that struck him was juvenile, but he did it anyway. A woman dressed as a French aristocrat was laughing at someone’s joke and holding up a thin glass of champagne to cheer. The others in her secluded clique did the same. Arccoo rushed up before their glasses could clink and stole them right from their hands.

The aristocrat gasped. The ninja beside her reached for a throwing star while the drag Sherlock Holmes gnawed on the end of her pipe. Arccoo drained each glass down his own throat all at once and then returned the empty containers to the stunned attendees.

Wasting no time, he moved on to a gorilla breakdancing in a circle of tipsy police officers and clowns. Using his extraterrestrial strength, Arccoo grabbed the primate off its feet and held him high above his invisible head.

At first, the guest struggled, frantically swinging their limbs to escape. Once the roar of the crowd drowned out the music, Arccoo felt the individual relax. They stuck their arms and legs out straight, pretending to fly over the party. As the prince carried him, the dancer mimed swimming through the air.

One guest hollered to their friend. “How is this possible?”

The mummy next to her proudly answered. “Wires and magnets! It’s always wires and magnets!” Humans could talk themselves into believing anything.

The gorilla drank up the adulation, seemingly failing to notice where Arccoo was taking him. All that changed a second later when the prince let go of his captive and allowed them to splash into the massive punch bowl, spraying every guest in a three-foot radius.

He could hear the person inside the gorilla costume calling out for some assistance, and another attendee called back. “Why don’t you fly some more?”

It was thrilling moving among them without being noticed, removing the occasional mask or lifting a chair and twirling it in the air. Every witness offered theories on how this was being done, allowing him to get as wild and crazy as he wanted.

On his way to the old piano, he hooked an arm around Carmen’s and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. He walked backward to watch her stunned and confused reaction before the realization of what just happened dawned on her. She was quick. He liked that.

Sitting at the musical instrument he knew nothing about, Arccoo began banging on the keys. The discordant sound that erupted startled half of the room. With the tiny remote he kept strapped around his wrist, Arccoo turned down the music and continued slamming his fist into the keys.

The effect was unsettling, even to him. As he slammed into the notes, however, his ear began to pick up a pattern. It clicked into place. He was essentially sitting down at a harpkii, the very instrument he and his siblings learned to play before reaching the age of six.

He remembered Lady Durtoo’s no-nonsense instructions and the way she flicked his ears if he played a single sour note. The memory straightened his spine, and he started playing a melody that flowed from him as naturally as breath. Closing his eyes, he allowed the song to play itself, using his fingers as a conduit.

Reaching the epic climax of the song, the walls themselves shook with the power of his playing. The crowd nearly broke the windows with the power of their whistling and applause. Arccoo grinned behind an invisible veil. He knew their approval was genuine because they had no idea a prince was behind the spectacle.

A familiar touch grazed him. Looking up from the bench, he saw Carmen leaving the room, looking back at him over her shoulder. Compelled, he followed her out.

The corridor beyond was fairly quiet. “Let me see you,” Carmen whispered.

Arccoo deactivated the cloak. He swore her eyes lit up when she looked at him, and he wondered if she felt what he did every time he was around her.

Her eyes danced with amusement. “You’re incredible. Do you know that?” she asked.

“I am only my lady’s servant,” he said, repeating the traditional bow.

“I don’t think anyone will forget this Halloween bash anytime soon,” Carmen said, her hands sliding up his chest. He didn’t stop her, despite the risk of getting caught.

“It is a night for the ages,” he agreed.

“Why don’t we dance?” she offered. “Screw anyone who sees us.”

Without argument, he allowed her to lead him back into the room and gave into his longing to disappear with her in the crowd. Elena and Sofia watched them, and to his extreme relief, the sisters seemed to approve.