“Women aren’t things that you deal with, zalupa! No matter…” Her voice drew further away in a flurry of angry Russian-sounding words. I heard a car door slam, and then Silas was closing and locking the door again.
He switched on the bathroom light and then came back out, drawing his hands through his hair in frustration. I still hadn’t moved from where he had set me, and I had a hand pressed to my mouth. The room was a blur, but his face was clear.
I was drunk and he had lost control.
“Welcome to Wonderland,” I said, slumping back onto the bed.
He half-scoffed, half-laughed, and then the light was cut off as he closed the bathroom door. A moment later the shower started up and I climbed up to the pillows. I pulled off my shoes and socks and slid between the bedding, falling into a deep, dizzy sleep.
When I awoke the next morning I felt like there was a weight on my head, holding me down. I struggled to sit up, and saw Silas on the couch, his long legs propped up on the coffee table, his head tilted back. He was surrounded by fallen cards and broken shards of glass. I clutched at my head as I tiptoed to the bathroom and closed the door, shucking my clothes and huddling in the shower. The pressure on my brain turned to a dull thudding and then finally morphed into a full-blown headache. I groaned, resting my head against the tiles.
With a father like Gerald, it surprised me that I had allowed myself to drink so much. Perhaps I simply associated Silas with alcohol, since he always seemed to be sitting in a bar, though I had never seem him drunk.
Had he been drunk last night?
I wrapped a towel around myself and stumbled back to bed, hunting down my phone and checking it to make sure that Tariq hadn’t called to find out where we were. He hadn’t, and I was too relieved that I could go back to sleep to think twice about what else the lack of communication could mean. I tied my towel tighter, covered it with a blanket, and descended back into unconsciousness.
A knocking at the door woke me up the second time, and I grumbled something, pulling the blanket over my head. I heard the sound of broken glass being ground under booted feet, Silas swearing, and then the door opening.
“…Few more hours.” I heard his voice, and I piled another pillow over my head to block it out.
The door closed and then the bed dipped, and I went back to sleep again, glad that Silas had abandoned the couch. We slept for most of the day, and the sun had begun to set by the time he shook me awake. I sat up suddenly, my head tender but clear of pain. I reached for my phone again, something niggling at the back of my mind.
“Tariq hasn’t called,” I said, dialling his number.
“Seph?” he answered after a few rings. “How’s the king of the underworld?”
“The what?” I flopped back down, relieved to hear that he sounded fine.
“Silas. Cabe called me to say that he had a freak-out and you followed him to Portland.”
“King of the Underworld?” I laughed.
“Don’t you dare tell him that I called him that.”
“He’s really not that bad.”
“Hmm, so what are you doing in Portland then?”
I glanced over at Silas, who was propped up on one arm, unabashedly listening to my conversation. There was a hint of a smile at the edges of his mouth and his hair was sleep-tousled, his dark eyes fixed on me as I struggled with what to say. I needed to tell Tariq about Gerald, but now wasn’t the time. I didn’t even know what to say, because I hadn’t heard anything back from Quillan about the Zev he had sent to check out the house.
“I’ll tell you everything when we get back,” I finally said. “See you tonight.”
I hung up and Silas got up from the bed. “Get ready.” He moved toward the bathroom and then came back out to drop my clothes onto the end of the bed before going back in and calling out through the closed door, “We’re leaving in ten minutes. I need another shower, and then I’ll feel human again.”
I waited until the shower started up before crawling out from beneath the blankets and abandoning the towel that I wore in favour of my clothes from the day before. They smelled like tequila, and it made my head spin unpleasantly, but I pushed past it. The hotel room was an absolute mess, and I gathered up the cards, carefully avoiding all of the broken glass. I microwaved the food from the night before that we hadn’t eaten and curled up onto the couch to stuff as much of it down as I could manage in the ten minutes allotted to me.
Silas got out of the shower looking a little worse-for-wear, with dark shadows smudged beneath his eyes and a flicker of wariness in his expression. He shook his head when I held out the plastic container of noodles and then sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the couch.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For… all of it.”
“I don’t think there was any damage done. I opened most of the windows downstairs before we left.”
He quirked a brow as a brief moment of surprise passed over him, warming my chest with an even briefer feeling of accomplishment. “You did?”
“Yeah.” I grinned. “Turns out I’m not as silly as I look…” I paused, the fork falling from my mouth, my whole body going slack. “Oh my god. I painted… I painted the house burning down! The day I met Noah and Cabe…”
“But that was months ago.” He sounded perplexed, and I couldn’t blame him. The time frame that my paintings followed from conception to reality seemed to be wholly unreliable.
“Yeah.” I frowned, setting the container aside. “Empty… the house was supposed to be empty. I remember feeling that the whole painting was empty.” I shook my head, standing to clear up the food containers. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
We cleaned up the hotel room as best we could and Silas went to settle the damages with the front office as I got into the BMW. He told me to start driving, so I did, assuming that he’d catch up to me sooner or later. I dialled Quillan and put the phone in my lap once I was back on the road.
“I assumed everything was fine,” he answered by way of greeting, “since there were no emergencies called into the Kenton police department last night, and you didn’t call back.”
“Are you holding up a finger right now?”
“If you were here, I would be.”
“I’m sorry, Miro.”
“No you’re not.”
A laugh escaped me and I quickly covered the phone, but I was pretty sure that he heard it anyway. “Sorry,” I repeated.
“You didn’t mean it that time either.” His tone had softened.
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“You already owe me, remember?”
“So now I owe you double. But I’m keeping one of them because you conveniently left out how Hunter usually calms Silas down.”
“It’s not entirely what you think, Seph. Silas could have hurt someone, and Hunter knows what she she’s getting herself into whenever we call her to calm him down. You don’t, or didn’t—we couldn’t risk you being the one to confront him.”
“Well… I’ll admit. It was an experience.”
“How did you do it?”
“We drank tequila and played truth or dare.”
He barked out a laugh. “What? Are you serious? Where the hell did you find a high-school party in Kenton?”
“Very funny, but the joke is on you, Bossman, because it worked.”
“You were in way over your head, weren’t you, sweetheart?”
“Yeah,” I admitted with a sigh. “It was terrifying. Miro?”
“Hm?”
“I don’t think we can make the it back tonight. I need to be with Tariq for a little bit.” There was no way that I was leaving Tariq behind this time, but I decided to broach that subject later. “Will we… I mean… is there a body for a funeral?”
“Yes.” He hesitated, on the edge of saying more, but seemed to decide against it.
“What about the two guys?”
“They were dead.” He said it tonelessly, but I knew that he hadn’t been planning on telling me unless I a
sked. “They asphyxiated with the rope tied too tightly and gas leaking all over the house.”
My fingers on the steering wheel tingled with shock, and I quickly pulled over when I saw the wings of light. Whatever this valcrick was, it wasn’t harmless. I jerked on the handbrake and set my hands on my thighs, breathing deeply.
“He killed them.” My voice broke. “He…”
“We’ve had the surveillance cameras taken out and all of the evidence cleared,” Quillan said cautiously. “The police might start investigating, and I assume that it will lead them back to the two dead guys, but considering what they were involved in, it’s not entirely surprising that they’ve suddenly disappeared.”
“They’re dead,” I repeated numbly. Two more people that I had held the power to save. Two more lives that I had failed. “I should have done something. I could have cut them loose.”
“I don’t think Silas actually meant to kill them,” Quillan admitted. “He was probably expecting their backup to arrive and find them like that. We all watched the surveillance tapes from yesterday and he had it all set up for someone to find. He wanted to send them a message, scare the crap out of them…” he trailed off, and I realised that he was holding back.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Seph…”
“Just tell me.”
He sighed, and I knew that he was scrubbing at his face. I could hear the rustle of fabric against the mouthpiece of his phone. “Silas was right. More people did arrive. They didn’t set the two guys free, though. They left them there to die, and set fire to the house.”
A chill crept through me. “W-what do you mean? Y-you said that there was still a body to bury?”
“They set the fire in your father’s room. We have half a body. The Zev that we had on standby called the fire department and they got to it in time.”
That made it a little better, but only a little bit. Silas hadn’t meant to kill them.
A car pulled up behind me and I picked up the phone, turning it off speaker. “I have to go, Quillan.”
“Did you just call me Quillan?”
“Ah, yeah. Sorry. That’s what I call you in my head,” I muttered absently. I was watching Silas in my rear-view mirror as he got out of the car behind me and walked around to my window.
“At least you don’t call me Bossman in your head,” he said as Silas tapped on my window.
I rolled it down. Silas reached through and plucked the phone from my fingers. He glanced at the screen, saw Miro Quillan, and put the phone to his ear.
“She’s supposed to be driving, you know.”
I snatched the phone back in time to hear Quillan’s answer, “Why, Grandma, what big teeth you have!”
Despite everything that we had just discussed, despite everything that had happened the night before, despite the kiss, and Hunter, and Gerald… I found myself laughing. “It’s me again.”
“Ah, you survived another encounter with the wolf. I’ll say goodbye now, before he huffs and puffs and blows up the car.”
He hung up and I stared at the phone, chuckling. “Miro doesn’t usually joke.”
“He does when he’s under a lot of stress. He’s weird like that.”
I watched Silas walk back to his Jaguar and I pulled out ahead of him. We drove together like that all the way back to their apartment building, and rode the elevator up to the top floor in silence. He unlocked the door and I walked inside, my feet stalling when I saw Tariq. He had been facing the glass wall at the other end of the kitchen, but he turned as we walked in. The setting sun glared behind him, turning him into an almost-silhouette, but I could still make out his face.
It was exactly as I had painted it.
“Tariq!” I cried out, running over to him. “What happened?”
He slumped onto a stool at the breakfast bar, picking up an icepack that had been resting there.
“I went for a run after I spoke to you on the phone, and they ambushed me.”
“Who ambushed you? Are you… do you need to go to the hospital?”
He scoffed, the sound self-depreciating. “It looks a lot worse than it is,” he admitted. “Two guys with bandannas covering their faces. They got a few good punches in, then some random guy jumped in and told me to run. Said he’d already called the police, but I think he was lying. The bandanna-guys were scared of him though. This is all my own fault. Someone has been contacting me for months now, trying to… well, recruit me—at least that’s what they said. It all started around the same time that your stalker appeared, so I was scared that it was the same person, trying to use me to get to you.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I got a text one day, saying that I had caught their attention. They said that I had information that they were interested in, and asked if I would consider meeting them. I didn’t reply, and the next day there was ten thousand dollars in my bank account. I got another text message that night, saying that it was only a portion of what they would give me, if I met with them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Are you insane?”
“Maybe. I couldn’t decide what to do, at first. Ten thousand dollars? You would have been able to quit your job, we could have afforded an apartment of our own, we could have left Gerald for good. But what if it was the same person who was stalking you? And what if you found out? You would have hunted them down instead of running away, and then you probably would have died, or worse… whatever is worse than dying.”
“I left you, Tariq!” I balled my hands into fists, fighting with a fury that tried to drown out my usual sense of control. It wasn’t a normal fury, and so I fumbled; it was wrung with guilt, and all the stronger because of it. “I left you,” I cried. “I left you so that you wouldn’t be dragged into all of this! You should have told me… I never would have… I…”
Silas moved to my side and Tariq jumped, apparently only just noticing him. His eyes caught on Silas’s hand as it landed on my shoulder, and then flickered back to my face. His gaze narrowed, examining the dark smudges that I was sure marred the skin beneath my eyes, and the cut that was still healing on my neck.
“They were there, weren’t they?” he asked slowly.
“Yes.” I slumped a little and Silas stepped behind me so that I could lean back into him. It seemed strange, for Silas to be recognising the need for comfort in another human being, let alone being willing to supply said comfort, but I didn’t have the energy to properly dwell on the irregularity. “They killed Gerald,” I told Tariq.
For a moment, it seemed that he hadn’t understood me. He blinked at me, slowly, and then turned to stare out of the window.
“I used to dream about him dying.” His voice was low, breaking off at the last word. “I…” He fell forward, raking his hands through his hair. “Shit. Seph.”
I took a week off school and stayed in Seattle with Tariq. Silas stayed behind with me, but he locked himself into his apartment most of the time. I saw him taking apart the phones that he had stolen from the two men that had attacked us at Gerald’s house, and I didn’t question him. I simply stored the information away to examine later. I couldn’t handle it right then.
Tariq and I cleared out the old house and sold most of our father’s possessions. We bought a new second-hand couch that didn’t smell like booze, and had someone pick up Gerald’s bloodstained, half-burned bed. We had no idea why someone would buy it, but we didn’t ask any questions. We were just glad to see it go. Tariq stayed with me in Noah and Cabe’s apartment, and I spent most of the day in Quillan’s art studio while he was at school. When Tariq came home I would follow him to football practise and sit on the sidelines, simply content to be near him and watch over him.
On Saturday, only four people gathered in a small graveyard to bury what was left of Gerald: Silas, Tariq, an unfamiliar woman, and myself. The woman wore a leopard-print, spandex skirt, paired with a sk
in-tight black tank and a netted black fascinator. When she saw us, she burst into tears. None of us seemed to listen as the priest drivelled on miserably. His tone seemed to match the meagre splattering of rain that dampened the mound of fresh dirt, barely even misting us, but casting enough gloom to darken everything. The woman was too busy crying, and the rest of us seemed to be retreating to somewhere else. Tariq had a far-away look in his sorrow-speckled green eyes, like he couldn’t decide why he was upset. A few minutes into the priest’s monologue, a car pulled up and three men got out. They were tall, with broad shoulders hugged by clean-cut, dark-toned suits. I couldn’t see their faces from this distance, as an umbrella shielded one of them, and the other two were facing the wrong way, but I quickly dismissed them. No man who dressed that well could possibly be there for our father.
It wasn’t until they drew close that I looked up again. Three simultaneous sensations slammed into me, causing me to stumble back. The controlled fire of Quillan’s black eyes licked over the cold, rain-dampened skin of my arms and face, and the aura of authority that always seemed to shift where he walked blanketed around me; I started to shudder as my eyes flicked to Noah, caught in the electric storm contained within his gaze, before moving to Cabe. Looking at each of them in turn was disorienting, overwhelming. Quillan grounded you, Noah picked you up and tossed you into the wind, and Cabe caught you, sparking a light in your heart that made everything suddenly meaningful.
Silas glided away from me to stand beside Tariq, probably understanding that the others would want to be close to me after our week apart. Noah and Cabe stepped up on either side of me, their hands reaching to mine. I hiccupped as our fingers twisted together, trying to fight of the unpleasant scratching sensation. Quillan’s hand landed on the back of my neck, and the woman who had been crying before suddenly stopped. Her eyes grew wide, her gaze dragging from person to person and finally landing on me, confused.
Right.
We weren’t normal. This wasn’t normal. These four… and me.
I returned my attention to the priest, who hadn’t paused in his long-winded recitation of where the dead go when they die. It was probably a comforting thing to speak about, at other funerals… but not Gerald’s. Gerald was a wounded animal, a broken artefact, a tainted memory. We were all relieved that the suffering had ended, because his very existence had festered like something malignant and damning. We were sad that we were relieved, but we weren’t sad enough to be comforted by the thought of a soul like Gerald’s living on in any kind of eternal existence. It was better to think of him as a person that once lived, and was now gone.