The Dark Within Us (ebook) by Jess Popplewell

Author:Jess Popplewell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic

It wasn’t actually a restaurant, as it happened, but by the time they reached it Jenny didn’t much care, because Luc was right. She needed to rest.

She heaved a breath into her lungs and stared at the incongruous building in front of her.

It was incongruous because of its surroundings, which were bleak, brown and largely featureless. Barely inhabited, hardly civilized. And yet right now, in front of her on the edge of the Second Circle . . . was a hotel.

Or, not a hotel. Maybe one of those motel/diner combinations she’d seen on American TV shows. There was a neon heart-shaped sign above the door, with an artful crack splitting it in two and the words HOPELESS HEART MOTEL underneath. Naturally, only about two thirds of the letters lit up. There was a handwritten note in the window that said, ‘diner open, no vacancies’.

‘The Hopeless Heart?’ she asked flatly as they crossed the tarmac of the car park. Yes, tarmac. Yes, car park. Although, it was entirely empty of vehicles.

‘Best food in the Second Circle,’ Luc offered cheerfully. Somehow, that didn’t fill Jenny with much confidence.

The diner was shabby from close up. Paint peeled around the wooden windowsills, and even to Jenny’s eye the door appeared warped in its frame. None of this seemed to deter Luc in the slightest. When the door wouldn’t open immediately, he put his shoulder to it and shoved until it gave.

A bell tinkled as they entered. The floor was tiled in a sort of dirty sage green, and it didn’t escape Jenny’s notice that most of those tiles were chipped. Some of the grouting between them had been lost too, giving the impression that the gaps between tiles led down. Somewhere else.

Booths on the edges of the diner were upholstered in fake leather, sticky in the non-air-conditioned heat of a too-small room, in close proximity to the kitchen, which was visible through a hatch in one wall. Inside, a muscular man wearing a stained white T-shirt and a tea towel over one shoulder busied himself with multiple metal spatulas. The sound of frying meat filled the air, although the over-riding smell was of onions and eggs.

No one seemed to have noticed their entrance, even as they hovered by a wooden cut-out of a cartoonified waitress with a huge smile, holding a tray with a silver cloche. The words ‘wait here to be seated’ had been painted over the cloche by hand, and underneath someone had scratched something in Latin that Jenny guessed would be very clever if she had any idea what it meant.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.

There were two waitresses, and both had their hands full. One of them was clipping a wodge of order papers up on a piece of string above the cook’s hatch, and the other wore a plastered-on smile as she carried a porcelain bowl over to a booth towards the back of the diner.

Jenny’s gaze travelled into the booth, to the occupants, and surprise filled her when she caught sight of a cascade of glossy black hair, a pair of heavy-lidded, amethyst eyes .

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