Lost Girl

Chapter Two: The Prey

The boy walked through the city, and reveled in the darkness and the lights that tried – but always just failed – to push it away. Big cities were strange mixes of bright and black. The luminous glaze of a big city was so all-pervasive that it chased away every twinkling star, and yet at the same time so sparse that a dark corner could always be found.

The boy's name was Nibs. It was British slang for "his Highness," a nickname his mother had given to him a long time ago, long enough that he no longer thought of it as anything but his real name, his only name. He liked thinking of himself as royalty. It wasn't that far from the truth, after all.

Nibs smiled, thinking of the darkness he had just come from. The place had been called Club Crawl, a name that called to mind delicious depravity, a promise of the profane. And it had very nearly provided just that. The blonde. She had been so ripe. So ready. Desperate to prove her beauty and worth in the way that so many girls were these days, self-esteem crippled by health and beauty advertising whose main message boiled down to: at your core you're ugly, and no one will ever really want you.

A noise slithered through the darkness.

Nibs froze. He flicked his hair – long and scraggly in a way that spoke clearly of the cost of the cut – out of his green eyes and tried to pierce the inky black around him. He was in a part of L.A. that he probably didn't belong in, a part of the city where his white skin and expensive clothing would act like a siren call to certain elements. So the fact that he had just heard a noise wasn't entirely surprising. Still....

"Who's there?"

His voice bounced down the street. Most of the streetlights in this neighborhood were dark, their globes shot to craggy shards that resembled a witch's snaggled teeth. This was a neighborhood where darkness was preferred, where light was an intruder. The storefronts had withdrawn behind corrugated metal shutters that had once been a uniform shade of brown but now wore lines of graffiti and gang tags like cruel rainbows on a steel and concrete veldt. The sidewalks were curled and pitted, rotted from beneath and crumbling from within. Even the street's asphalt seemed to be a less vivid shade of black – as though the creator of this borough had made a deal with the devil to wash all purity out of the place, even the purity of the darkness itself.

Nibs waited a moment. He looked like he was seventeen – a very thin seventeen – and he knew that his age would draw people in and of itself. Which was fine. But he didn't want to make himself too easy a target.

Where was the fun in that?

He waited another moment, then turned and resumed walking. He began to whistle. The tune was an old one, another gift that his mother had left behind. She was a Welsh woman, someone he remembered mostly as having a good heart and a bosom big enough to suffocate in. The tune was jaunty, and after a moment he abandoned whistling and began to sing.

"I've no sheep on the mountain, nor boat on the lake," he sang. "Nor coin in my coffer to keep me awake. Or corn in my garner, or fruit on my tree. Yet the Maid of Llanwellyn smiles sweetly on me." Nibs knew he must look like a madman, a young white kid walking through South Central L.A. with hands in pockets that might hold rings, an expensive watch, or the latest electronic gizmos – it was a cornucopia of possibility for any mugger or gangbanger looking for an easy mark.

And that was the point. That was the game. The fun.

"Softly tapping at eve to her window I came," he continued singing, his voice a high, piping baritone that carried well in the still air of this warm spring night. "And loudly bayed the watch –"

The noise came again. Closer this time. Clearer. There was no mistaking it for anything but what it was: the distinctive scrape of shoe leather on pavement. Nibs resisted the impulse to spin around. Nothing to be gained by such a move. Except maybe to scare whoever it was away.