Watercolour Smile

  “Silas is a… I thought he hated the Klovoda?”

  A short, astonished laugh burst from Cabe, while Noah took the last step forward that was required to trip me into an ungraceful sprawl against the backseat of the car. He slammed the door and got behind the wheel as I scrambled into an upright position. Cabe ambled over to the front passenger seat, and I stared out of the back window as the house crawled away from us. I watched until the mountains seemed to swallow it up, and then I turned back to the front.

  “Silas doesn’t hate the Klovoda?” I tried again.

  “Silas hates the Voda.” Cabe twisted in his seat to face me. “There’s a difference.”

  “Doesn’t the Voda control the Klovoda?”

  “Yes and no,” Cabe said. He took in my exasperated expression before rolling his eyes and elaborating. “The Voda is the patriarch of our people; he has the power to control any and all sworn Zevghéri, but the Klovoda are something else altogether. They are the undercover elite of our people: the trench-diggers, the night-time whisperers, and the bone-breakers—and if you’ve ever paid attention in your history classes, you’d know that those people have a certain sovereignty of their own. The Voda might own us all, but he doesn’t have the time to command us all, so that job falls into the capable hands of the Klovoda, and the Klovoda have a kingpin of their own.”

  “Dominic Kingsling,” I recited, remembering all the times that Kingsling had been mentioned to me since coming to Maple Falls.

  “That’s right.” Cabe’s smile stretched for an instant. “And Silas is Dominic’s man—through and through.”

  “I see.” I frowned. “I didn’t know that.” Cabe was much more informative when he wasn’t trying to protect me.

  “Anyway…” Cabe sounded confused, which drew my attention back to him. He was still twisted in his seat, his eyes searching out something in my expression that might prove meaningful to him. “Why did you come busting into our rooms last night babbling about a strain?”

  “I…”

  “You’re supposed to be bonded.”

  “I—”

  “He can be a handful, I know. Did he do something to make you angry?”

  “Who?”

  Cabe blinked at me.

  “Who?” I repeated, a little more insistently this time.

  “The guy,” he said, unclipping his seatbelt.

  “Hey—” Noah shot him a look, but Cabe ignored his brother, manoeuvring himself between the two front seats to plop himself beside me.

  “You know,” he said to me, notching his feet against the centre console and nudging me with his elbow.

  “I don’t,” I replied. “I need you to elaborate. And put your seatbelt on.”

  He buckled himself in. “So you are angry at him then. You won’t even speak his name.”

  “Neither will you.”

  He blinked again.

  “Ugh,” I muttered, turning away from him to look out the window again. Silas was right, the messenger—or the hypnotist—had altered their brains somehow. It looked like they weren’t going to say his name… whoever he was.

  “Well,” Cabe leaned back and turned his eyes to the front, as Noah glanced in the rear-view mirror at him, “there you have it. Weston didn’t bribe her to sneak into our rooms and seduce us after all, she just had a fight with the guy and thought it would be a fantastic idea to have revenge-sex with one of her bodyguards. Pity you chickened out, eh?” He nudged me again.

  “Sure,” I said, on autopilot. “Sounds about right.”

  “Of course she wasn’t hired to seduce us,” Noah grumbled. “We’ve been through this, Cabe. She ran away from us both and even slapped you. She’s probably just nuts, like her guy. Right?” he aimed that last part at me, his eyes flicking to mine in the mirror for an instant, before returning to the road.

  “Sure,” I repeated. “I’m nuts. Just like my guy. And his name is what, exactly?”

  They both stared ahead as though I hadn’t spoken at all.

  “We’re here,” Noah finally said. “I told you there was no point in having this conversation.”

  I reached over to grab my bag, before realising that I hadn’t brought it with me. It was still beside my chair at the table where I had eaten breakfast—or not, I thought, as Cabe leaned over the back of the front seat and retrieved it from where he had been sitting. He got out of the car without looking at me and tossed my bag over his right shoulder. Noah strode ahead of us, carrying both his bag and Cabe’s, and they led the way to my Calculus room, where Cabe swapped my bag for his.

  After the bag switch, Noah turned without a word and ambled into the classroom, aiming for his usual chair. I made to follow him, but Cabe caught my elbow at the door, pulling me backwards. The throng of students trying to get into the classroom hindered his progress, and his grip on me tightened, drawing me to the side of the doorway, where he pushed me gently against the wall, falling beside me and turning his back on the other students.

  The passers-by started to peer over his shoulder, and my gut clenched. It was so similar to the day when I had first met Noah and Cabe back in Seattle.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy.” Cabe’s smile had disappeared again, but a soft expression hovered in the slight widening of his golden-brown gaze. “But you should be careful. I don’t know what Weston has hired you to do, but smarter and stronger people have already tried, and failed. I’ll promise you that. Though,” he paused to consider me for a moment, “it was kind of ingenious, sending us a girl that was already bonded. Not that it can make up for how terrible you are at sneaking around. Any good spy would know that we wouldn’t be keeping any valuable information in our bedrooms.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, “I dropped out of spy school.” What else could I possibly say? I could barely even think straight anymore. My mind was in a permanent state of reeling.

  Cabe’s lips twitched, trying to break into a smile, but he curbed the urge. “Feed Weston whatever false information you need to, if you want to get out of this situation alive. Silas might be taking you seriously for now, because of whatever Dominic has told him, but the second he suspects you… well, you don’t want to know what he did with the last girl Weston hired to get close to us.”

  “I’m sure he’s done worse.”

  “You’re right.” The smile finally broke free, and he grabbed my elbow again, steering me for the doorway.

  It wasn’t until I sat beside Noah in Calculus that the previous day really started to catch up with me. I considered crawling beneath my desk and crying, or even better—flipping my desk and screaming obscenities until someone decided to lock me up in a mental hospital. I was sure that Weston wouldn’t bother with me if I was in a mental hospital. Maybe the messenger would end up there too, and we could spend the rest of our days playing Scrabble and watching infomercials on the common-room television. Maybe the messenger would get bored with my unexciting existence and break out of the mental hospital to stalk someone else, and then I’d finally be free.

  Silas could join me, because everyone already knew that he was certifiably insane.

  That sounded nice.

  The door opened and a boy handed a note to Mr. Silver, who turned to me.

  “Principle Webber wants to see you, Miss Adair.” Noah stood up before I had even had a chance to register the sentence, and Mr. Silver shook his head. “Just Miss Adair.”

  I gathered my stuff and stood, but I didn’t get very far. A hand caught my arm, just above my wrist, and Noah pulled me to his desk.

  “Make sure you keep your phone on,” he said lowly. “As ridiculous as this job is, I still take it seriously.”

  I paused, on the verge of agreeing just for the sake of peace, before I changed my mind. I bent over his desk, putting our faces on the same level and lowering my voice to a whisper. “Do you even know why you’re guarding me, Noah?”

  For a moment he didn’t react, but then his eyes narrowed the slightest bit and his fingers flexed, before
releasing me. I left the room, heading for the office. Principle Webber’s secretary waved me straight through and I knocked on his office door. It opened, revealing a man in his late forties with bespeckled brown-grey hair and Coke-bottle glasses. His facial structure was broad and strong and his body seemed very fit for a man his age, but then again, he was Zevghéri. He waved me in.

  “Hello, Stephanie.”

  I sat in the lone chair before his desk, placing my book bag by my feet and folding my hands into my lap.

  “Don’t get comfortable,” Principle Webber said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  He opened the door and I fumbled with the strap of my bag, my skin tingling with the sudden weight as I swung it over my shoulder. The tingling spread down to my fingertips and I crossed my arms tightly over my chest, trying to ignore the nervous sensations. Webber followed me out of his office and locked the door behind him before setting off down the corridor. I followed him, fixating on the end-pleats of his trousers until the soles of his shoes stepped through a doorway and landed in a patch of grass. I glanced up as I passed through the same doorway, finding myself behind the administration building, looking down onto the back-end of the school grounds.

  The area had been completely cleared to make way for a greyscale vehicular display: there were any number of vans, all without logos; a couple of hulking SUVs; and many more nondescript town cars, all in various shades of black or grey. The vehicles were arranged in such a way that they were unofficially cordoning-off a large section of the abandoned car park that bridged the distance between the back oval and the unused tennis courts marking the edge of the school grounds. The whole area had been forgotten, apparently, when the new Sports Centre had been built. I squinted, my footsteps faltering, but Webber marched right on, approaching the barricade. I followed him through a gap between two town cars with such heavily tinted windows that it was impossible to see if anyone sat behind the reflection.

  On the other side, chaos awaited.

  Dozens of men and woman buzzed around the cordoned-off area, speaking in low tones to each other. They wore a uniform of sorts, though it may not have seemed so obvious had they not all been standing together. The men wore either black cargo pants paired with boots and bomber jackets, or else they wore dress pants, dress shoes, and chesterfield overcoats… all black. The women were similarly either casual or formal, with black tights and knee-length rubber-soled boots with stretchy t-shirts, or else formal coats that hid what might have been worn beneath. As soon as we breached their colour-coded sanctuary, the low hum of chatter died out, and many heads turned to stare at us. One of the men in coats nodded to Webber, and Webber nodded back, settling onto his heels uneasily.

  “Do you see those barrels?” he asked me, nodding toward the centre of the silent commotion with his head.

  I nodded. There were at least eighteen of them, and a van on the other side of their barricade had opened its doors, revealing more of the barrels inside. They all had writing on them, but I couldn’t read what it said from where I was standing—apart from that, they seemed unremarkable.

  “Do you know what those are?” Webber asked.

  I flicked up eyes upwards and found that he had been watching me very intensely. I shook my head, suspicion and indecision bubbling up inside me until I could feel acid at the back of my throat. Webber nodded and turned without another word, leaving the area. I followed him all the way back to his office, where I sat in the lone chair again. He seated himself behind his desk and seemed to forcibly relax himself, his eyes still fixed on my face.

  “Those were bombs,” he said.

  I opened my mouth and a jumble of sounds came out, because I immediately began to choke on my words. I paused to gulp in air. “The barrels?”

  “They weren’t just barrels. They were filled with fertiliser and gasoline—not entirely dangerous on its own, but each barrel was connected by a detonating cord, which in turn was connected to a time-blasting fuse. The barrels were circling the main school building. If a charge had been initiated, it’s unlikely that anybody in the building would have gotten out alive.”

  My hands curled around the seat of my chair, and the office around me began to swim. The framed pictures on the wall lost their rigidity and melted into one-another, and for a moment, I feared that I would pass out.

  “This was on my desk.” Webber’s voice reached to me from far away, the muffled, distorted quality trying to convince me that I was underwater, and he was speaking to me from above.

  He had placed something onto the desk, and I glanced at the short length of pipe now, my eyebrows drawing together and the bile in my throat dying to an uncomfortable simmer as confusion took over.

  “W… what—”

  “It’s another bomb.” Webber seemed part-way exasperated now, as though he dealt with explosives on a daily basis, and my lack of composure was beginning to wear on him. He picked up the tray that the pipe was balancing on and turned it the other way, showing me that the pipe had been cut open, and was being cradled by a stand of some sort. “The pipe was pre-cut. There’s a glass film over this side,” he explained, motioning towards what I could already see for myself.

  I didn’t want to get too close, but Webber was touching it and moving it around, so the people from outside—whom I now suspected were Klovoda agents—must have already disabled it. I moved to the edge of my seat, just far enough to make out the different levels of matter on the inside of the pipe, framed by the glass viewing window. There were strange metal balls packed in tightly, taking up most of the room in the pipe, and then what looked like half an inch of soil, topped by some kind of blocky white substance. It seemed to have a chalky consistency.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the white stuff.

  “C4,” Webber answered.

  I snatched my arm back, cradling it against my chest. “Is… is that… active?”

  “The electrical lead has been pulled out and there’s no blaster cap. It’s essentially disabled. Essentially.”

  “What kind of bomb is that? It looks more like a display.”

  “I wasn’t told its official name, but from what I understand, once detonated, those would act as bullets.” He pointed to the metal balls, and then sat back in his seat, crossing his arms and lifting his gaze from the bomb to my face, almost expectantly now. “There was a picture taped to each of the barrels, Seraph.”

  Some part of my mind tried to register the fact that he had just used my real name, but I was distracted by a ringing in my ears. Panic rolled through my limbs, having been held back by a stringent hope that this had nothing to do with the messenger. No, I shook my head, drawing a frown from Webber. Not hope. Delusion. But there was a limit to how much I could delude myself, and now the evidence was dancing before me, twirling in a taunt of fluttered skirts and ringing laughter. I stared at the bomb on the desk.

  Nice try, it seemed to taunt me. You will never escape me.

  As though it were the most natural thing in the world to do, I stood and turned my eyes from the bomb—dismissing it—to search the desk before me. Upon finding what I had anticipated, I reached out and gathered the stack of photographs into my hands, falling back into my seat again.

  The first was a blurry picture of myself in the peach dress, waist-deep in an inky black pool of water with Cabe and Noah either side of me. The second was a picture of me sitting at the back of the gymnasium, the hood of a sweatshirt pulled up to hide my face. The messenger had captured the longing in my eyes as I watched the gymnastics team stretching together. The third was of me changing in the locker room, a shirt half-pulled over my head, the small white bow adorning the waistband of my grey underpants crooked with mocking naivety, showcasing just how stupid I really was.

  “I’m sure you get the picture,” Webber said, reaching over his desk and taking the stack of photos from me. “Whoever did this had intimate knowledge of the schedule of all people coming in and out of this building. The surveillance cameras d
ropped out for a total of seventeen minutes and the barrels were handled as our night security team were leaving their posts to make room for the day security team. The barrels were placed so strategically that they would have gone relatively unnoticed until students were released for lunch. Lucky for you, I had some paperwork I needed to finish this morning so I came in early and noticed the breach in our surveillance system.”

  I stared at the stack of photos, trying to process too many things at once. Seventeen minutes? Did that mean that the messenger was… more than one person?

  “Was there a message?” I asked.

  He regarded me coolly through his glasses. “So this has happened before?”

  I nodded, and he opened one of the drawers beneath his desk, pulling out a lone photograph. It was another photo from the night of Poison’s party. I was stuck between Noah and Cabe, and even though I knew better, it looked like Noah was kissing me. Another unfamiliar nursery rhyme was scrawled in red across the back of the photograph.

  I like little pussy, her coat is so warm,

  And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm;

  So I’ll not pull her tail, nor drive her away,

  But pussy and I very gently will play.

  “They’re not really my brothers,” I said, after contemplating the message for a moment more.

  “I figured as much.” Principle Webber’s tone was dry. “Do you know who is doing this?”

  “I don’t know who it is. I call him The Messenger.” I looked up then, meeting his gaze over the desk, letting him see that I wasn’t being dramatic or dishonest.

  “I had someone do a little investigating,” he said. “It didn’t take long to figure out your real name, Miss Black. What you’re doing with the Adairs is another matter altogether. The Klovoda has been informed, and as you can see,” he gestured over his shoulder absently, “their agents have converged on the school. I expected them to pass word onto the Voda, simply because the Adairs are involved. I didn’t expect them to send a representative to Maple Falls to meet with you.” He watched me, waiting for a response. I didn’t have one. “You’re not a sworn Zevghéri yet, are you Seraph?”