Watercolour Smile

  He pushed me back and I fell onto the canvas-like material of the cot without a fight. He watched me as I pulled my knees to my chest, and then he sat beside me, put a hand on my shoulder and reached into his back pocket. I started struggling when I saw the syringe, but he was fast, and the needle was already retracting from my neck by the time I managed to force his arm away.

  “Dominic left,” he said, catching the back of my head as I fell. “I can get you out of here, but I can’t have you blowing me up or messing with my head the way you did just now…”

  His voice faded away as he lifted me from the mattress.

  I had gone from a basement dungeon to a closet, and I wasn’t entirely sure that the closet was much better.

  At least the basement dungeon had a toilet.

  One perk, I supposed, was the basket of food that Cabe replenished every day, but that didn’t mask the fact that for four days, I hid in Cabe’s closet while he tried to ignore me.

  I was almost certain that he was evading the issue—the issue being me. He had told me that the closet was only a temporary arrangement until he could convince Noah to let me stay in the house again, but he obviously wasn’t having any success, because I was still in the closet. On my first night I had gone looking for Silas or Quillan, but both were absent from the house. I couldn’t feel their presence, but I didn’t put much stock in my own sense of our connection. I was pretty sure that I was broken. My valcrick was broken. My heart was… no. My heart was hanging on. I was hanging on. Everything would be okay. I would figure out a way to win back Noah and Cabe without forming the bond.

  If Cabe ever let me move out of his closet.

  I refrained from approaching Tariq or Clarin, since Cabe had warned me that they thought I was on my first mission for the Klovoda. I had snuck into Tariq’s bedroom to watch him sleep for a few minutes, but Cabe didn’t need to know about that. It troubled me that they had believed the cover story so easily. Silas was constantly away on Klovoda business, but he never disappeared for so long as I had now been absent. Since Quillan and Silas still hadn’t returned to the house, I was pretty sure that they, at least, were suspicious.

  I had tried to snatch Cabe’s phone, hoping to call one of them, but he was always ready for me. He slept with it clutched in his fist, and the one time I had tried to pry it free, he had woken up immediately.

  “What are you doing?” I remembered the suspicious look in his eye. It had sharpened, hardening his features—features that shouldn’t have been so alert for a person who had just woken up.

  He had stared a hole through my head for several minutes, waiting for the excuse that I never gave him, before he ordered me back to my “room”.

  I pushed out of the closet, checking the time on Cabe’s watch. It flashed 12:54am. I spent a moment touching the device, mourning the loss of my own watch—or Quillan’s watch. I hadn’t seen it since the accident. I hadn’t seen the jewellery that Cabe and Noah had given me, either. My eyes trailed from the watch to my own hand, still stretched out in contemplative mourning. The scars were as prominent as ever; only, it was not in the visual sense. You could see them if you looked closely enough. They criss-crossed in a faded patchwork pattern over every inch of my skin, climbing beneath and ridding me of all purity. That was what really made them so conspicuous. The way they branded me; the way they cut through my hesitant memories to lay claim to my bruised heart. Even if they faded further, my heart would never stop bleeding.

  I had killed.

  Again.

  I shook myself into the present, casting a quick glance over Cabe’s prone form before slipping out of the room. I had been dying to use the bathroom for hours. I first checked to make sure the hallway was clear, and then I ran silently to the bathroom and shut myself inside.

  I took longer than I usually would have, washing my face over and over, hoping to erase the scars that now marred my skin. My features were oddly intact, just as all of my fingers and toes were still connected, but my skin… I turned my head in the light above the mirror, watching as the little silvery lines glimmered over my cheekbones. Scars. Everywhere. They were less prominent on my face, and I wondered if the skin there healed differently to the skin elsewhere. Either that, or I had thrown my arms up to protect my face at some point. I pulled my arms up now, tucking my fists beneath my chin to examine the skin. The scars along the backs of my forearms were much worse. They seemed to tell a different story to the rest of the scars, but I knew that it wasn’t the worst story to tell.

  The worst was my stomach.

  On some parts of my body, the faded white lines could almost be invisible; on others, the lines were vicious—painted by a malicious artist with chaos on his mind. On my stomach, however, I could almost believe that the skin was not real skin, but some kind of silky, silver fabric, conjured by the healing valcrick to hold my organs inside. The scars were not visible on my stomach. My stomach was a scar.

  I dropped my shirt, realising that I had zoned out staring at my injuries again when the door flew open behind me.

  I prepared myself for the worst. For Kingsling, or the messenger, or Tabby, or…

  “Silas?”

  He was frozen, blinking as though he could barley believe his eyes. I blinked back at him, frowning, because I hadn’t felt him enter the house. Even now, I had to concentrate to really feel that he was standing before me. His eyes had that wild look that I associated with one of his freak-outs, and I assumed that was why he wasn’t moving. I took a step toward him, but someone was already pushing past him. Quillan landed a breath away from me, bending until his face was on my level.

  “Where have you been?” he was whispering, his voice tinged with urgency, fear, and relief.

  I gaped, because I hadn’t felt him enter the room either. He pulled me into his arms, but the hug almost immediately turned assessing. He grunted, setting me down. His arms landed around my waist. Measuring.

  “Why have you lost so much weight?”

  I became stiff, suddenly terrified of how they would react to my scars. They hadn’t noticed yet. I pulled away, but it was too late. Silas was already beside me, his hand on mine. He pulled until my knuckle brushed against his chest. They both stared.

  I should have started speaking, but instead the silence reigned, brewing up conclusions in their minds.

  Silas took a step back, letting my arm fall.

  “Seph?” Quillan sounded afraid.

  I kept my eyes on Silas, because he was still stepping backwards, and he was almost at the door.

  “I was in an accident.” I found my voice and spoke rapidly, hoping that the information would halt Silas’s progress. His eyes had turned black as tar, the tightness in his mouth stretching out over his jaw. I tried to hold his dead stare without flinching away, but fear was pricking at the back of my neck, forcing a wobble into my voice. “At least I think it was an accident. Noah thinks I did it on purpose. Maybe I did. He says I tortured them. Maybe I did. I don’t know. Jayden came—I stole his car. Noah and Cabe tricked me… or, actually, I suppose I tricked myself. I thought I could trust them, but the messenger owns them now. The messenger or the hypnotist—I mean Jayden. Jayden is the hypnotist. But you probably already knew that, right?” My voice had risen in a panic, and I worked to lower it, forcing the disjointed sentences out of my mouth as fast as I could.

  Silas wasn’t reacting to any of it. The sociopath that lived inside of him had risen to the forefront, pushing the volatile man that I knew into the background and seizing control of his body, drawing him away from me, step by measured step. Any second now, he would slip through our fingers, and I couldn’t even fathom what he would do, and who he would do it to. His fingers were twitching. He looked capable of tearing a full-grown man limb-from-limb, except that the dark look in his eyes was too methodical for that.

  I continued speaking. “They took me to Kingsling. You know, Dominic Kingsling? The messenger was there. He called me Lela. Kingsling said that the messenger wa
s my twin. But Lela is my middle name, not my real name, and I don’t have a twin, so I don’t know what to make of that. Kingsling locked me in the basement. I think he wanted to experiment on me, but he doesn’t know that I have two pairs. The messenger knows. He knows everything. He lied to them. He told them that I don’t have any marks at all.” I pulled at the ends of my hair, beginning to choke on my own panic now. “Cabe broke me out, he—”

  Silas was gone. Like trailing smoke on a breeze, his menacing presence simply filtered out of the room, carried by the sheer urgency of his need to purge his mind of violence. I ran after him, Quillan close behind me. We spotted him halfway down the hallway, his prowling stalk seeming to emanate from the tension coiled around his shoulders. It was a tangible, living thing; brushing down his legs and snapping angrily with each silent footfall. Quillan took off, but they were both too fast for me. By the time I reached the front door, they were already out of sight.

  I ran after them all the same, my movements becoming jerky with panic, my legs wooden and my back stiff. The panic was hindering me, making it too hard to function. I was suffocating on it. I opened my mouth, unable to help the cry that broke free. It was anguish and loss, anger and fear, all screamed out into the wind.

  “Silas! M-Miro!”

  Lights began to turn on in the house behind me, but I was beyond caring. I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the driveway, and even then, I only stopped because something was blocking my path.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Noah’s angry shout wasn’t enough to pull my attention away from what lay before me.

  I felt that I had been standing there staring at it for hours… but it could only have been minutes.

  The pounding of so many feet on the driveway behind me was drowned out by the incessant noise of my heart palpitating in my ears, and the sounds of Noah and Cabe amidst a scuffle went all but unnoticed, stored away in whatever part of my mind was currently storing facts that it was unable to process.

  “Stop fighting!” Tabby cried.

  “Seph?”

  It was Tariq’s voice that finally broke through my haze, and I turned my horrified eyes on him.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I warned him.

  I cursed the quiver in my voice. He must not have heard me, for he stepped closer.

  “Seph? What’s happening?”

  I grabbed his arm. “Please. Go back into the house. Lock the doors, please—” Please, oh god, don’t let him see it.

  He pulled away from me, breaking my hold. He had already seen it. How could he not? It was glaringly obvious, sitting beneath the dull glow of a street lamp. To anyone else, it might have looked like a joke. A cruel prank. Not to us—we knew that abandoned mattress lying at the base of the driveway like we knew the backs of our hands. We had cleaned our father’s vomit off it. We had hosed it down after he had urinated in the bed—which he did at least once a week. We knew those sweat-stains, those frayed edges.

  We were familiar with the brownish-red stain that blossomed out, covering the faded material in his lifeblood. One side of the mattress was charred black, eaten away by the same flames that had eaten away half of Gerald.

  What we weren’t familiar with was the burnt carcass that reclined in comic morbidity, one arm bent against the ruined mattress to lift the spine and cock the blackened skull in a curious way—as if to say, ‘Can I help you?’

  It was like something from a shop of horrors. Was it possible to buy fake dead bodies? I needed to find out.

  “Don’t,” I whimpered, as Tariq began to mouth the words on the mattress. They had been scrawled in the usual slanting, red handwriting, running alongside the thigh-bone of the… thing.

  I charge my daughters, every one,

  To keep good house while I am gone.

  You and you, and especially you,

  Or else I’ll beat you black and blue.

  I turned, ready to march back up the driveway, but I was strangely glad for the hand that held me back. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go, or who to ask for help. I didn’t know how to protect Tariq, or myself.

  “What does this mean?” Tariq asked, once he was certain that I wasn’t going to run away.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, as another hand found my shoulder, tearing me away from Tariq. It means I’m about to be punished.

  Noah stared down at me, Cabe two steps behind him, looking a little worse-for-wear.

  “What does that mean?” Noah echoed. I could feel the emotion in his fingertips. It was the same panic I had felt. It was the same panic I could now see in Cabe’s eyes.

  “It means you need to find the others,” I said. “Silas and Miro. They’re in danger.”

  “That’s my girl,” a voice pierced our secluded bubble of panic. “Always thinking of others.”

  I turned slowly. Shock seemed to have loosened Noah’s hold, though his touch lingered, his fingers curling into the collar of the shirt I wore. He didn’t seem to want to let me go. I could feel the suspicion and confusion that radiated from him.

  A form had materialised—only a shadow—some way down the road. I pulled away from Noah and brushed past the others, my feet walking of their own volition, stepping me right into a waking nightmare. The man took shape the closer I walked, and that scared me. I had expected him to shimmer away, like a mirage. My eyes touched upon his stringy hair, and his broad forehead, before drinking in his sharp green eyes. It was like drinking the worst kind of medicine. My stomach began to roll.

  “Come say hello to Daddy,” Gerald goaded me, opening his arms for a hug.

  The ghost of my scumbag father didn’t seem happy that I wasn’t running into his arms for a reunion. He clucked his tongue and strode forward, taking my arm and escorting me further down the road.

  He wanted to go for a walk? At this point, I was beyond protesting. Could you even fight a ghost? I was tempted to find out, but I was currently too shocked to do anything more than stop myself from tripping as he dragged me along beside him. When we reached a limousine, I almost laughed. There was suddenly no doubt in my mind that I was dreaming. It was the only possible explanation.

  Can ghosts drive?

  Gerald opened the passenger door, waving me inside. I stared at the door. The worst that could happen would be a repeat of my last limousine experience. I wouldn’t mind torturing my father’s ghost. Maybe it would give me closure. Before I could properly decide, Gerald shoved me in the back and I flopped forwards, landing on a seat.

  Lord Weston was sitting beside me.

  The laugh that had seemed inappropriate before now burst forth, loud and obnoxious.

  “This is hilarious,” I said. “Someone drugged me again, didn’t they? And now look—I’ve gone totally insane.”

  Weston sighed, glaring at Gerald over my head. “I told you not to get out of the car, you’ve scared her senseless. She’s babbling like an insane person.”

  “Maybe she was always insane,” someone said from the other side of the limousine.

  I squinted at the gravelly voice. “You!” I yelled, my finger extended as though I might shove it straight down his throat.

  Dominic Kingsling rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Me.”

  I slumped back into my seat, my arm falling down.

  What was left to say?

  “I want to wake up now,” I said, moving for the door.

  Gerald slammed it in my face and moved around to the driver’s side of the limousine, which brought my unwilling eyes to the front passenger seat. Jayden was sitting there, his torso twisted just enough to bring me into focus. He raised his brows at me—communicating through that one-way radio of his, yet again.

  I tried tugging at the door handle, unsurprised that it refused to open. Kingsling clucked his tongue disapprovingly as the engine purred beneath my knees, and I renewed my efforts on the door.

  “Dammit,” I groaned, slamming my fist against the window. “This was a mistake.”

/>   The limousine was moving, and the mountain house began to draw away from me. I could barely make out the silhouettes of people chasing us down the road.

  Weston reached down, and I quickly slammed a mental barrier into place as he tried to help me back into my seat. “I know this is a shock.” He sounded like he was trying to pacify me. “You weren’t supposed to see Gerald like that, he jumped out of the car—”

  “Do you know who left the mattress there?” My voice came out sounding accusatory.

  “What mattress?” Weston frowned, the horrible force of his blue eyes pinning me for a moment before flicking to Gerald in question.

  “I didn’t see nothing,” Gerald said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “I was only gone long enough to drag her back here.”

  “How…” I was almost shuddering too violently to speak, but I forced the words out nonetheless, “how is Gerald here? How is this possible?”

  “I was hoping to do this in a more dignified manner.” Weston spoke on a sigh. “But I suppose this will do. Gerald is not your real father, Miss Black. He was assigned to you. His faked death was… well, let’s call it a bad managerial decision on my part.”

  For some reason, this elicited a throaty laugh from Kingsling.

  “Bad managerial decision,” I echoed, shock rendering me unable to do more than repeat what was being said to me.

  “Yes.” Weston folded his hands in his lap, taking up too much room on the bench seat that we shared. “I made the mistake of tasking my Director with the job of recruiting Tariq. We wanted him to keep an eye on you. He was supposed to be the one to initiate you into all of this,” he waved a hand around, indicating my current situation. “He was supposed to teach you about your ability, and about the Zevghéri. Since you were raised with humans, we thought it better that a human be the one to initiate you. Tariq refused. He wanted nothing to do with us, and he wanted us to stay far away from you. His mother’s influence, I suppose.”

  “So naturally Gerald had to fake his death,” I said, toneless.