THE GIRL WITH CHOCOLATE EYES

CHAPTER 1

Brownie de Chocolat absolutely hated her nickname.

Yes, she really was a dark-haired brunette with deep brown eyes so dark they were almost black. But what gave her obnoxious classmate Tim the right to call her “the girl with chocolate eyes”?

She was sick and tired of snapping at everyone who called her that.

“If my eyes are made of chocolate, what exactly are you planning to do? Rip them out and eat them?”

Usually, that shut people up.

Unfortunately, there were exceptions.

“Yeah,” some would answer without the slightest hesitation, grinning as they stared straight into her eyes, apparently imagining how they might scoop out those delightful little dessert eyeballs and serve them on cocktail sticks.

Others became genuinely offended and started jabbing at their phones, insisting that chocolate eyes were incredibly fashionable these days. Then they would produce photographic evidence, usually involving the beautiful Hermione from Harry Potter or Elena from The Vampire Diaries.

Brownie also found looking in the mirror mildly depressing.

She had always dreamed of being an ethereal blue-eyed blonde—the sort of girl who could bring men to their knees with nothing more than a blissful, slightly drugged-looking smile and a little carefree flirting.

After all, a blonde could be as dumb as a brick and still somehow be considered beautiful in every corner of the civilized world.

Brownie, on the other hand, desperately wanted people to see her as a genuine feminist menace: angry, dangerous, perhaps even mildly terrifying.

Not some adorable little sweetheart with a pretty smile.

If fate had given her gothic beauty instead of angelic beauty, then she had a reputation to maintain.

If I were blonde, I’d smile at strangers and help people, she often thought. But apparently that wasn’t my destiny.

And so Brownie learned to shoot with the skill of an action-movie cowboy and mastered the art of wearing skin-tight leather pants with heavy platform boots.

She had also desperately wanted to learn how to use a lasso.

Mostly so she could catch attractive men and drag them toward her while mildly strangling them in the process.

Unfortunately, the lasso refused to cooperate.

No matter how hard she practiced, she just couldn’t get the hang of it.

Eventually, Brownie consoled herself with the thought that she could always shoot a man in the leg.

Either leg would do.

Then catching him would be easy.

Brownie had been born and raised under a cloud of mystery.

For example, her mother insisted that their family was extremely aristocratic.

Brownie had never found a shred of evidence to support this claim—not in the local archives, not on the Internet, nowhere.

She couldn’t even find anyone else with their surname.

But Brownie had learned very early in life that arguing with Mother was generally a poor survival strategy.

The woman had a vicious temper and treated anyone who disagreed with her as though disagreement were a personal declaration of war.

In Brownie’s opinion, her mother behaved nothing like a duchess.

Or a countess.

Or even, if standards had really fallen, a baroness.

She behaved more like an underpaid public-restroom cleaner who had spent twenty years scrubbing filthy toilets and had finally decided to take revenge on humanity.

Consequently, Brownie usually kept her face carefully blank and swallowed all her mother’s claims about the magnificent castle their family had supposedly once owned in France.

Except sometimes Mother forgot herself and relocated the castle to the Czech Republic.

Then Hungary.

The mythical castle had remarkably flexible geography.

It seemed to bounce around the world like the TARDIS—the Doctor’s demented blue box—appearing almost everywhere except the former Soviet republics and Africa.

Tropical islands were apparently perfectly acceptable.

Presumably, even in the depths of her madness, Mother understood that castles in certain places had either crumbled centuries ago or had never existed in the first place.

Almost every day, usually while crying over dessert, Mother would continue the family saga.

According to her, the magnificent castle—naturally concealed from ordinary human eyes by powerful magic—had somehow been drunk away by Brownie’s father.

Who was, of course, a disgusting vampire.

On evenings when Mother got particularly drunk, Brownie was treated to even more colorful historical details.

Apparently, the whole thing had actually involved an epic war between a dinosaur and a donkey—

No, wait.

A beaver.

No.

Werewolves and vampires.

Yes. That was it.

Werewolves and vampires had fought an apocalyptic battle and reduced the castle to rubble, stone by stone.

Brownie’s father had then somehow managed to drink away the remaining land and ruins.

Or lose them in a card game.

Or lose a bet to the Lord of Hell himself.

The precise historical record remained somewhat fluid.

By the end of these passionate speeches, generously fueled by moonshine or whatever other alcoholic horror Mother had acquired that week, she would usually be sobbing uncontrollably and declaring that it was all because of that monster.

That swindler.

That bastard.

That walking catastrophe Brownie had the misfortune to call her father.

Because of him, they had been left with nothing.

And that was why they were now forced to live in a tiny American town and clean toilets.

Brownie, at least, was still in school.

So the glorious prospect of spending the rest of her life scrubbing toilets remained, for the moment, merely the ghost of a possible future hovering ominously on the horizon.

Still, Brownie refused to despair.

She actually enjoyed the sheer artistry with which her mother could sob while inventing increasingly fascinating stories.

And if you looked at things from the right angle, imagining yourself as a countess—or, what the hell, even a princess—was rather pleasant.

At moments like these, every miserable detail of Brownie’s life acquired the faded glamour of an ancient aristocratic dynasty wiped from the face of the earth.

A dynasty of which she was now the sole surviving heir.

Well...

Apart from her half-crazy mother.

Princess Brownie with the chocolate eyes, last hope for the resurrection of a once-great bloodline!

Unfortunately, her hopes of becoming even the queen of her high school had died a humiliating death.

At the final school dance, the crown had gone to a surgically enhanced blonde with enormous bright-blue eyes and legs approximately three miles long.

Brownie, meanwhile, had spent prom dancing with some skinny, pimply loser whose name she had somehow failed to learn despite sharing a classroom with him for years.

He was a nobody.

A punching bag.

The school outcast.

To be fair, so was Brownie.

She had simply developed a more effective survival strategy.

After firing a couple of warning shots into the air and, on one memorable occasion, shooting one of her tormentors in the arm, Brownie earned the unofficial title of “The School’s Resident Psycho.”

After that, people mostly stopped bothering her.

They still whispered behind her back, naturally.

But Brownie considered that progress.

Mother had also stormed into the school after that incident and created such a spectacular combination of riot, scandal, and daytime talk show that an actual hurricane would have looked restrained by comparison.

The principal and his collection of useless minions were particularly eager to avoid unpleasant headlines.

Headlines involving words like racism, sadism, violence, and whatever other horrors journalists might enjoy attaching to their school.

There was also the awkward matter of shameless favoritism toward rich students.

Those privileged little angels were allowed to wear special white baseball caps, do practically anything they wanted, and receive top grades on tests so catastrophically bad they should have been preserved in a museum.

Then came the incident the day before graduation.

The same nerd Brownie would end up dancing with at prom walked into school and shot five students, apparently at random.

And then, adding insult to injury, he got arrested right in the middle of prom, leaving Brownie without her only dance partner.

Naturally, everyone immediately started suspecting her of crimes against humanity.

Fortunately, the omnipresent Mother intervened.

She arrived, introduced herself without the slightest embarrassment as a Countess from Paris, and created a scandal of such cosmic proportions that Brownie was eventually released from the police station where she had been spending the remainder of her graduation night.

Well...

“Spending” might have been too generous a word.

Mostly, Brownie had been trying to convince the police that she hadn’t even known the shooter’s name and certainly hadn’t taught him anything improper.

Such as shooting.

Unfortunately, she then became offended on a professional level and started yelling that she was a much better shot.

If she had done it, she declared, there wouldn’t have been much of the school left standing.

Or anyone inside it.

And she certainly wouldn’t have stopped there—she would have blown the damn building up for the grand finale.

This did not improve the interview.

At all.

The situation might have become considerably worse if Mother hadn’t practically dragged her daughter out of the station by the scruff of her neck while loudly announcing that she had confiscated Brownie’s gun specifically to prevent her from shooting the prom king and queen if Brownie failed to win the crown.

For some mysterious reason, this statement made the police even more suspicious.

Fortunately, there was no evidence.

More importantly, Brownie’s fingerprints weren’t on the .45-caliber revolver used by the shooter, who had initially managed to slip right past the brave guardians of law and order despite someone calling the police.

It turned out Stephen had simply pretended to be one of the victims after shooting himself in the shoulder.

The boy had also been deeply offended by his arrest at prom.

Apparently, he had secretly brought another weapon with him because he had been planning to shoot the prom king and queen.

Why?

No particular reason.

Just because.

During the arrest, Brownie informed her unfortunate dance partner that he was an idiot.

He should have pretended to be dead, she explained, then escaped from the morgue before anyone could arrest him.

That helpful piece of advice was the reason she ended up being hauled off to the police station alongside him.

So yes, occasionally Brownie suspected that Mother genuinely loved her.

Most of the time, however, she insisted that the woman had ruined her life by filling her head with ridiculous expectations and thereby turning her into an aggressive bitch.

Privately, though, Brownie knew the truth.

She could have been good.

Truly sweet.

Adorable, even.

All she needed was to have been born a blue-eyed blonde.

But fate had made her a dark-haired brunette with almost-black eyes.

Under circumstances like these, behaving like a demon from Hell was practically a social obligation.

The gothic aesthetic demanded it.