Semua Bab Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast: Bab 11 - Bab 17

CHAPTER ELEVENShe couldn’t stop crying. The tears trailed down her cheeks and onto her chin, the tissue soaked and useless from wiping her nose.“There will be other chances, yes?” Samuel said in his heavily accented English. He kneeled in front of her, his hand calmly stroking her thigh as she sat on the edge of the bed. “And if no, then, perhaps an adoption could be best, I think, no?”Lucky shook her head. No. No children. She would never risk it. The seven children the shadow had stolen over the past four years hadn’t been enough. She could feel it. The dark wanted something more. Something rich with experience.Simple death isn’t what fed this ravenous dark. It savored surprise and regret. The awareness of the end approaching. The panic growing as the limbs became weak and the vision clouded. The overwhelming stillness of the eternal silence as the world grew quiet. The darkness demanded tears, confusion, dread. The last moments of a life lived.A child who was still safely

APARTMENT 1BBULLETMonday, 3:24 PMFive blue. Seven red. Four yellow.He blinked the sleep from his eyes. Lifted his head from the mattress. Saw the shit hole on Eidolon Avenue he called home. The TV with the cracked screen sitting on the plastic crate. The yellowing walls with the rust colored streaks running from ceiling to floor. The scattered pizza boxes and cheeseburger wrappers. And his friends . . .five blue, seven red, four yellowsitting on the cheap ass coffee table.That’s right, he thought. They were all there.Five blue. Seven red. Four yellow.He stretched and turned to the window. Kicked the sheet away from his legs. It was raining. And late.Fuck.Hated that job anyway.And FUCK his foot hurt.He sat up and turned his leg.What the fuck?A new tat. A snake. A small snake. A fuckin’ cartoon-ass fuckin’ garden snake or something. Some punk ass shit a prom queen flyin’ on Molly would get before getting fingered in the back of some quarterback’s Chevy.And

APARTMENT 1DANNIVERSARYMonday, 3:24 PMWe are a walking history of our failures,” Marta said as she snapped the napkin open and laid it across her lap. “A stumbling catastrophe of unbelievable screw ups that, as you can plainly see, screwed us up.” She laughed, the tight smile on her gleaming lips held a moment longer than needed. “Really, it’s just been an endless array of aborted endings. Until now, I mean.” Her pudgy hand lifted her champagne glass—her sixth, but who was counting?—in yet another toast to the elegant man seated to her side. “And for that, we thank you, Mr. Peabody.”“I promise, this time we’ll get it right,” the stranger said with a small nod.Even here, surrounded by the decay that was Eidolon, he seemed to fit. Untouched by the yellowing walls and the splintered baseboard, the brown stains running from the ceiling or the thin windows that rattled when the wind blew and rain pelted the glass, as it did now, this Peabody was neither tall nor short, neither han