Watercolour Smile
“Do you want to dance or something?” Danny asked, turning to look at what held my attention. Not wanting him to see Cabe so early in the night, I quickly grabbed his arm and his eyes snapped straight back to me… or more specifically, my hand.
“Ah. Yeah, sure,” I said. “Who doesn’t like dancing?”
“Me.” He was smiling that easy, wide smile that I had come to expect from him.
I released him, trying to be covert about moving a few inches away. I covered up the movement by leaning over the table for the little stand that held the cocktail menu. I played with it, spinning it around in circles.
“Aren’t you a musician?” I asked, recalling Danny playing the drums in music class.
“Hmm,” Danny answered. “That’s right. Musician—not dancer.”
“You should come and see us play some time,” Mike chimed in, looking from me to Poison. “We play down at the Door on Friday nights. It’s a pretty cool crowd.”
“You’re in a band together?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Danny replied. “You’ll meet the others tonight probably, they said they were going to be here.”
“Cool.” I tried to covertly look back to the dance floor, but Cabe had disappeared. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom.”
“I’ll come with,” Poison said, as the boys got up to let us out of the booth seats.
She led the way, since I had never been to Reds before, but I grabbed the back of her skirt to pull her up once we were out of sight.
“Have you seen Noah yet?”
“Nope.” She came back to me and we pressed ourselves to the wall, peeking back to the dance floor. “I saw Cabe earlier.”
“Me too—oh, I found him.” I pointed out Noah, who stood with Cabe by the bar. “I can’t see Amber.”
“I can.” Poison dragged me out a little further and pointed to the booth we’d left Danny and Mike in. “Seems like she’s moved onto your date.”
I stared at the back of Amber’s head. Her silky black hair swept into the crook of her neck as she dipped over the table and planted her elbows against the surface. She was facing Danny, but I couldn’t tell if she was talking or not. I realised, watching Danny, that he barely ever showed any real emotion. He was easy, he smiled, he flirted a little, but he never seemed… affected. He was grinning casually at Amber right now, and when she reached over to brush his hair back from his forehead, he caught her wrist. I waited to see if he would push her away or pull her closer, but he simply held her wrist as she continued to flirt with him. After a few minutes of watching them, I dismissed the scene and sought out Noah and Cabe again. They were walking toward the booth and there was a blond girl on Cabe’s arm. She looked vaguely familiar to me, but the dots didn’t connect until she slid into the booth seat beside Danny, leaning over to kiss his cheek in greeting.
“Oh no,” I said. “It’s happening.”
I almost ran back to the table as Amber straightened and turned to Noah. She saw me coming over his shoulder and smirked, stepping into his personal space. My mind went blank and my tongue felt like it weighed a ton, otherwise I might have shouted out something. Noah’s hand lit upon her waist and he pulled her into him. I turned away, then, a heaviness forcing all the moisture from my dry mouth to gather in my damp eyes.
Now that I was faced with the actual act of interfering, I found that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What right did I have? I had gotten angry at Silas for insinuating that I owned them in some way, yet here I was, proving him right.
It wasn’t fair on them. I didn’t want to trade places with Amber. I was pandering to the will of my bond, something that I didn’t even consider a part of me. Yet, somewhere along the way… I had stopped fighting it.
Maybe I never started fighting it.
I kept my head down and swept past them, my eyes on the table.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
A hand snagged my arm before I could sit down, and then I was gliding over the sticky club floor. I blinked at the retreating vision of Amber’s furious face until the hand pulled me around the corner.
“Let me go!”
“No,” Noah growled. We fell into a dark hallway and he slapped a hand against the wall beside my head, finally releasing me. He lowered his face to mine, whispering, “What the hell are you doing here?”
I laughed, and his eyebrows shot up. I couldn’t help it. This was how I managed to stop him kissing Amber? All I had done was walk past them. It felt good to release the terrible premonition, even if it could happen again in five minutes time—I had still managed to thwart the very vision that had been plaguing me for so many days now. A finger caught my chin, lifting my head. My laughter died off immediately, because Noah’s mouth was an inch from mine. His face was too close to see his expression, so I dropped my eyes and pushed against his chest. He didn’t budge, and my own chest was suddenly aching terribly. Noah’s fingers tightened, lifting my face until I wasn’t sure whether the sudden pressure against my lips was the warmth of his breath, or the touch of his mouth. The anxious pricking spread over my skin, turning my lips numb and forcing a darkness into my head.
I slumped, and he caught me.
“And here I was thinking that you were going to make her cry.”
Noah stumbled away from me as Cabe walked over to us, his attention on his brother. I began to tremble, using the wall to support my unsteady weight. My negative reaction to them was significantly stronger all of a sudden, and I didn’t understand why. I glanced at Noah; his features were masked in the same confusion that danced around inside my chest, wreaking absolute havoc with everything that I had believed, until now. Was the itching feeling something supernatural? Like the bond? I had assumed that it reflected my feelings, but my feelings for Noah hadn’t changed, I didn’t think.
I ran back to the table and slumped down next to Poison, snatching up the drink that I had abandoned earlier and tossing it back. Danny cocked his head from the other side of the booth and I stood up, muttering something about getting another drink. He caught up with me halfway to the bar, his fingers brushing lightly over my shoulder.
“Hey there, rebel without a cause, I should probably get this for you. You don’t have an ID.”
“Oh. Right.” I stopped moving and he walked up to the bar and ordered my drink.
“Everything okay?” He returned, pushing the glass into my hand.
“Sure,” I mumbled. “I just feel funny.” I attempted to take a sip but the room tilted violently to the side and Danny’s arm shot out, catching me.
“What’s going on?” His brows pinched together, forming a severe line. “You only had one drink. Did you take something? Is that why you keep disappearing?”
“Take something?” I asked as he righted me and stole my glass, tipping back the rest of my drink and setting the empty glass onto a nearby table.
One of his hands was still on me, somewhere between my waist and my hip; his fingers were biting softly through my blouse. Something tickled in the back of my mind, telling me that Danny touching me was not something that I wanted, but then the room spun again and his other hand wound around my arm, almost fully supporting my weight.
“Stephan… um… Seraph?” he stumbled over my real name, as most people had been over the course of the last few days. “What the hell?”
I blinked at his face, trying to bring him into focus, and then I smiled widely. He blinked back at me, surprised.
“You’re scary,” I whispered, flicking the black metal bar that cut through his left eyebrow. I stuck out my tongue and his eyes dipped down, something heating in his expression, a slow boil of emotion that threatened to reveal itself to me. “Show me,” I demanded.
He grinned and the tongue piercing appeared briefly, pushed out between his teeth.
I peered at it and then gasped and reeled back. “It changed colours!”
He laughed and shook his head. “Nah, Duchess. You’re just high. What did you take?”
>
“I’m not high.” I frowned, turning toward the railing that bordered our raised platform. I ran at it, coming up hard against it, laughing. I leaned over, watching the dancers below. I felt Danny beside me a moment later, his eyes heavy with curiosity.
“I should probably take you home,” he mused.
“Nah.” I rolled my eyes, and then laughed again, leaning back over the railing to look up at the ceiling of the club. It was a mess; huge aluminium pipes connecting in plain sight, an air-conditioner duct poking out, paint peeling off. “And you finished my drink, so you can’t drive.”
I pitched forward when he pulled at my hip. He was probably trying to prevent me from falling over the railing, but he only succeeded in making me fall into him instead. I pushed off, but he wasn’t trying to hold me there. Danny wasn’t such a bad guy, I surmised, but I really couldn’t deal with him right now.
“Bathroom,” I said, jerking my finger over my shoulder.
“Again?” He folded his arms, the silver appearing in his mouth again as he considered me. “I think you’ve had enough, Stephan—er, Seraph. I know that you’re an Atmá, but hiding from your pair and trying to dull your strain with drugs like this… it’ll only lead to more problems.”
I paused, half turned to walk away from him. “How…?”
I felt him move behind me, not touching me, but close enough that he could lower his voice. “We spoke about it at Poison’s party, remember?”
“Right.” I nodded, even though he was behind me. “I’m not taking drugs,” I added, walking away from him.
The walls started to spin again once I was safely inside a bathroom stall, and I whipped out my phone, misjudging my grip as it slipped right out of my fingers, bounced off my knee and fell to the tiled floor. I pitched forward, trying to catch it, and ended up smacking my head against the stall and joining my phone on the floor. I lay there, groaning, as footsteps announced a group of girls entering the bathroom.
“Duchessss?” a girl cooed, the sing-song quality edged with malicious humour. “We know you’re in here!”
“There,” another girl said. “I see her phone.”
The footsteps drew nearer and a hand tangled in my hair, pulling tight. I yelped as someone tried to drag me out from beneath the stall door. I scratched at their arm, feeling rewarded by the screech on the other side of the stall. More hands joined in as I scrambled for my phone, and they extracted me from my hiding place, tossing me against the wall beneath the mounted hand dryers.
“What have we here?” Amber headed a contingent of glossy-haired, high-heeled club girls, planting her hand on her hip as they flared out behind her.
“What the hell,” I groaned, my voice sounding muffled. “What did you put in my drink?”
“Do you like it?” Amber was smiling as I clutched my phone behind my back. I ran my fingers over the screen. It was shattered, and I quickly pulled my finger back and let it fall to the ground. “It’s new,” Amber continued. “My father wanted me to test it on you. How do you feel?”
“Your father?”
“Poor Seraph Black. She’s doesn’t know anything, does she?” Amber turned to one of her club warriors, and the two girls shared a pretend pout of commiseration. “My father,” Amber stepped to my side, “is Dominic Kingsling, bitch.” She knelt down, taking a hold of my right shoulder. “But you won’t remember that by the time the drug is out of your system. You won’t remember anything. Now let’s go for a walk, what do you say, hmm?”
I didn’t say much at all, since talking was proving to be increasingly difficult. Some part of my brain acknowledged the fact that I was being carried out of the bathroom, but I felt as though I were floating down the corridor, lifted by silky wings. It was soft and spongy. Comfortable.
I could go to sleep…
I could have… until the cloud that carried me grew spikes, spearing me with the tiny pinpricks of a thousand needles.
The sensation disappeared as the cold air from outside blasted me in the face. I heard what sounded like the slamming of car doors, and saw what might have been a limousine, and then time seemed to skip forward. I was suddenly inside the cabin of a vehicle, my cheek sticky against the leather seat, my hands secured behind my back with something cold and plastic.
“Messenger?” the single word came out scrambled, sounding more like meshmener.
“What did she say?” someone asked.
“Who cares,” another answered. “She’ll be unconscious in no time. Seems like the S20 drug is working perfectly, Kingsling didn’t have anything to be worried about after all.”
“Yeah,” someone agreed. “She’s not flipping out at all. More like going to sleep.”
“So, what now? We just take her clothes off and snap a few dirty pictures, that’s the plan? Seems a bit boring. The least we could do is spice up the photo-shoot—get a little action on camera. He said to make it as filthy as possible.”
“He wanted it to look as filthy as possible. He wanted to make it look like something had happened. We aren’t being paid to stick it to her, dude.”
“Think of it like method acting.” The speaker chuckled. “The best way to make this photo-shoot look realistic is to make it real.”
A chorus of laughter rang off the end of that statement, indicating that there were more people in the limousine than I had originally thought.
“Drop-off point is half an hour away, lads.” An unfamiliar voice rang out from the direction of the front of the car.
Thick fingers slipped into the front of my blouse, getting a hold of the material and pulling my torso up until faces swam into focus, though the features remained blurred to me. The fingers curled into a fist, and the fist twisted until the loud tearing of rent material filled the suddenly silent space. The limousine hit a bump in the road, breaking the man’s hold on me and sending me into another ungainly sprawl. My face landed on something soft, my arms still twisted painfully behind my back.
Another bout of laughter rang out, one of the voices much closer than the others, reeking of bourbon. A hand tangled in my hair, shifting my face tighter against the softness beneath my cheek. It began to grow hard.
“Well then, since you’re already there...” The voice had become husky, gravelly with some kind of perverted undertone.
I could barely think, let alone fight, but I attempted to draw on my valcrick anyway. The man continued his assault, rubbing my cheek against himself as his free hand found its way into the crop top I had worn beneath the blouse. A camera flashed.
I screwed my eyes shut.
Don’t fail me now, I pleaded with the electricity, something that I had never had to do before. Please help me. I felt my fingers twitch, felt the brief flutter of light, and then the dark, unseen world around me descended into chaos. The smell of burnt rubber assaulted my nostrils as the tires skidded against the road, the car losing control in a sudden, frenzied dance for traction. Maybe the car was flipping over... it was hard to tell, because my head had smacked into something sharp. A body was thrown against me, pinning me to something even sharper. Heat roared to life and the grinding of shattered glass was sounding in tandem with the exploding pain in my stomach—a hot agony that spread, sticky and wet, to cover my skin.
I could hear screams, otherworldly in their wretchedness; dark and grating in their intensity; they teased me with a glance at something beyond, something frightening and horribly endless. The screams weren’t mine. They belonged to them. The blurred faces… and now their blurred screams would carry them into the endless darkness without me.
I was sure of this, because I was the one who was sending them there.
“I’m on scene. Only one of them. A girl. You won’t believe what I’m seeing right now. I can’t tell how many were in the car, but they’re all… yes… including the driver. Dimitri? She doesn’t have any injuries that I can see… yeah alright. EMT’s arriving now. See you in ten.”
I blinked my eyes open, bringing the night sky into focus
. I felt like my bloodstream was littered with glass, and every pump of my heart only scraped the shards against my veins, causing more harm than good. A broken groan echoed from my throat—broken, because it didn’t make any sound whatsoever. The muscles in my throat worked to produce the noise, but fire dragged in its place, and only air escaped my lips, forming a brief white cloud above my face. Legs appeared in my line of vision, a face swimming over me.
“You’re going to be fine,” the woman said, kneeling beside me. She had choppy blond hair and a no-nonsense look in her eye. I wanted to believe her, just because of that expression. She asked, “Are you hurting anywhere?” She was checking me all over, probably wondering where all the blood was coming from.
I was wondering myself.
Everywhere, I tried to say. It came out as a strangled, croaking noise—a sound I’d never even heard before.
She was frowning, pressing down on various parts of my body, appearing more baffled by the second. She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, leaving a smudge of red on her cheek from the plastic gloves that covered her hands. “Where is all the blood from?” she asked. When it seemed apparent that I wasn’t going to answer her, she directed the question over her shoulder.
With excruciating effort, I turned my head to the side. A man kneeled there, shining a little torch in my eye.
“I don’t know,” a male voice answered—the direction of his voice sounding from some place behind the blond woman. A police officer came into focus, his mouth moving in tandem with the continued speech. “The other bodies look like they’ve been put through an incinerator. There isn’t much bone left, let alone blood. Only a few… ah, pieces, here and there. They’ve been collected.” He sounded like he wanted to be sick.
I blinked as the flashing of lights cut across him, throwing his face into a medley of red and blue, turning his natural skin tone a sallow, yellowish tint. There was a police car angled across the road and an ambulance parked behind it. All around us were mangled pieces of charred metal, some of them still licked by orange flames. A fire engine must have been behind us, because I could see the flashing of its lights across the gravel, and the firemen were hosing down a wreck to the side of the road. I stared at the spray of water, my fingers tingling.