“You know you suck at showing her that you love her, don’t you?”
“I know. I’ve always been terrible at showing how I feel, but I don’t care. I’m practically her parent. I have to be strict with her, and make sure she’s doing what she needs to do.”
Axel got out of the Cadillac and walked to a tombstone and sat on it. He pulled out another bag of food, dangling his feet from the tombstone. To Axel, this seemed like a little family picnic. Loki didn’t mind as long as Axel stayed calm enough to be his guide.
“Tragic Beans?” he offered Loki.
“No thanks. I’m not in the mood for crying and laughing at the same time,” Loki sat next to him.
“It doesn’t happen very fast,” Axel explained. “You need to eat half a bag before the effect takes place.”
A black cat with green eyes approached Loki after circling a couple of times around the tombstone. Loki worried it would talk to him like usual, but he remembered animals only talked to him when he was alone. The cat brushed its ears against Loki’s jeans and meowed. Loki patted it reluctantly.
“I wonder why animals don’t love me the way they do you and Fable.” Axel said, dropping Tragic Beans into his mouth, one by one. “You know that when I walk with Fable in the forest behind the house, butterflies rest on her arms?”
“She is Fabulous, remember?” Loki replied, winking at the cat. It winked back, and even bit its lip and nodded.
“I still don’t get what my name was supposed to mean. If she’s Fabulous, then who am I?” Axel wondered.
“Hungry,” Loki mumbled. The cat buried a laugh behind a sneeze, and crept away.
Somehow, Axel wasn’t offended. In fact, he laughed whole-heartedly, swinging his dangling legs, munching and crunching.
“You’re good company, Loki,” Axel said. “I like you, and I might make you my friend.”
“I like me, too,” Loki said.
Axel laughed even more. “Either we’re the most awesome dudes in Sorrow,” Axel said. “Or we’re the silliest, and most predictable.”
Loki reached over Axel’s bag of beans and pulled out a single Tragic Bean. Although chatty and a bit trying at times, Loki thought Axel was good company, too, but he wasn’t going to tell him. After all, Loki never had a buddy before. The Tragic Beans were salty, and Loki wondered why they didn’t make him cry or laugh.
Maybe Tragic Beans were a scam. If you laugh and cry at the same time, you end up acting normal, right?
Loki grabbed himself another bean; it was just food with a silly name, he thought. Munching turned out to be a good idea. It took his mind off the crawling branches overhead, and the strange noises in the dark.
9
The Swamp of Sorrow
With a full stomach, Axel lay sacked out on the tombstone while Loki read the Dreamhunter’s notebook under the moonlight. There were many things he had to learn about the process of entering a vampire’s dream, but he was beginning to understand the theories and ideas of doing it. He used his phone to write the information in the pages he was reading before they dissolved into sand. This way he had a copy of the notebook’s material, except the drawings, which he used his phone’s camera to capture.
Loki also noticed there were some missing pages, which he assumed someone had read before him—he wondered if Charmwill had read parts of the notebook.
“You know, I think it’s a good idea we’re waiting for other teenagers to arrive,” Axel said. “Not only will they show us the way to cross the swamp, but we can also use them as a shield since Snow White will waste them first.”
“That’s mean,” Loki raised his head from reading.
“Live mean or die trying,” Axel crouched suddenly behind the tombstone, and motioned at an approaching car. Loki saw a Jeep’s headlights shimmering in the distance, and heard loud rock music roaring from a radio. Girls and boys were laughing and yelling as the Jeep came chugging into the cemetery.
“Here we go,” Axel rubbed his hands with enthusiasm.
The headlights flashed against the lower base of the tombs, illuminating the peeling grey of the stones with carved names and dates and insects crawling over them. Some of the tombstones were overrun by grass and weeds and others were broken in half. One had the following phrase written on it: Happily buried since 1857. Don’t leave flowers, leave a dime.
The light penetrated through the cold mist as the Jeep stopped abruptly over the muddy earth before the swamp.
“Here we are at Buried Moon Cemetery!” a girl said, jumping out of the Jeep then landing in the mud while the others laughed along. There were two girls and two boys. The girl in the mud was a redhead, and wore long leather boots and strangely enough, a skirt, in the cold weather.
One of the boys threw a cooler filled with drinks on the ground. Axel swallowed so loud Loki thought he was saying something.