“Is it just me—” Noah’s voice sounded dazed—“or is this even worse?”
His head was tilted to the side and his eyes were alight with turbulence. Cabe glanced at him and then back at me, his eyes trailing up to the scarf and then leisurely moving back down my arms to my face, before flitting lower.
“Much worse.”
I tried to sit forward again, and Cabe finally took pity on me. He pulled the blanket out from under my legs and pulled it over me, lying to my right on the outside. It wasn’t the kind of closeness that I needed, but then Noah settled on my other side, and their warmth gradually seeped through the layers to settle the yearning beneath my skin. I sighed, huffed, and then sighed again, shifting around to get comfortable.
“Stop wriggling,” Noah said.
I didn’t reply, because I didn’t want anything to come out of my mouth that I wouldn’t usually say. Instead, I kept shifting around, the burning need to be close to my pair not allowing me to settle.
“We should get under the blankets,” Cabe pondered. “She’s tied up, what’s the worst she can do?”
“I’d rather not find out.” Noah’s profile was dark, but I gathered that he was staring at the ceiling. I huffed again, trying to kick at the blankets. He turned to the side, his eyes catching mine. “At least she isn’t crying.”
“I’m still here,” I grated out, surprised that my teeth were pressed so tightly together.
“She slept in Miro’s lap, that one time.” This was Cabe, and I turned my head the other way, finding him half-bent over me, his eyes focussed on my face. “Is that what you want?”
I nodded, and he seemed to consider me for a long time before he pulled back the cover and slid in beside me, turning me on my side and pressing the length of his body against my back. His arm looped over me to rest on the bed between me and Noah, his fingers curled into a loose fist.
“Better?” he asked brusquely.
I seemed to have floated off into a pleasant trance, and I didn’t even answer him. I closed my eyes and drifted almost immediately off to sleep. Maybe this was the trick, was my last conscious thought. Catch the strain before it gets too difficult, and you won’t shame yourself beyond repair.
I woke when the door banged opened and someone laughed. I groggily blinked open my eyes and glared at Clarin. He plopped onto the end of the bed and captured my feet in his hands, tickling my soles lightly through the blanket.
“What do we have here?” he teased. “Did saintly little Seph have a visitor last night?”
I made to move, but my hands were still tied up, my face flushed bright with mortification. Noah and Cabe seemed to have disappeared.
“Umm…” I tucked my face against my arm, trying desperately to think of a reasonable excuse.
He yanked the blankets away from me, eyeing my clothes. “You don’t look defiled.”
“I wasn’t defiled!”
He wiggled his brows at me and then crawled up to straddle me, leaning over to untie the scarf. Naturally, Silas chose that moment to walk into the room.
His steps faltered, his dark eyes blinking through astonishment, before settling into something cold.
“Three seconds,” he said to Clarin, his voice jagged.
Clarin finished untying the scarf before leaping off me. “Hey,” he held his hands up jokingly, but even I could see the wariness in his eyes, “wasn’t me! I found her like that. I was just untying her.” He tossed the scarf to the bed.
Silas glanced at me, and I tried not to notice the way his eyebrow twitched in question.
Clarin might have suspected that I was bonded to Quillan and Silas—since I had told Tabby as much, but he also saw the way I acted with Noah and Cabe. He hadn’t actually vocalised an opinion to me at all. He avoided the subject carefully.
I yawned, arching into a stretch now that my arms had been freed. “Morning, Silas.”
I couldn’t help the smile that spread over my face at the sight of him. His knuckles were smooth and unmarked, his face rested and neutral. He hadn’t gone out last night, and it made me unbearably happy, despite our turbulent relationship.
“Angel.”
I stumbled from the bed, giving Clarin a light shove. “What are you waking me up for?”
“The grim reaper over there asked me to.” Clarin nodded his head in Silas’s direction.
Silas kicked back against the wall, folding his arms and resting his dark eyes on us, saying nothing. I moved to the closet and pulled open the door, freezing. I turned back to the room.
“Clarin, could you give us a moment?”
“Sure.” He made for the door, but glanced back at Silas. “Please don’t eat her, or take her back to your demon’s lair to share her soul with the rest of the boogiemen.”
Silas’s lips twitched, elongating the scar on the left side into a menacing hint of lazy mirth. Clarin blinked, and then shook himself, as if bringing himself out of a daze—though perhaps, more likely, he was trying to fight off the usual terror that people felt when confronted with Silas’s modicum of emotion. I opened the closet door wide when Clarin left, and Cabe and Noah strolled out, as casual as if they’d been having a tea party, instead of hiding from Clarin.
“Um, what?” I managed.
“We heard him thundering up the stairs.” Noah grinned. “We’re trying to save our reputation, remember?”
“Why’d you tie her up?” Silas asked from the other side of the room.
I turned to him cautiously, but there was no anger in his expression. There was nothing in his expression at all.
“This,” Cabe swooped up the scarf and fluttered it out, “is a magical Seraph-deterrent.”
“I see,” Silas said. “Pack it with her stuff then. We need to leave in half an hour.”
Silas and I arrived in Seattle at midday. As soon as I spotted Tariq at the station, I dropped my bags and ran through the crowds to pull him into my arms. His face was blessedly, beautifully the same.
He laughed and patted my back awkwardly. “Hey there, bundle of joy. What did you do with my sister?”
I pulled back and shook my head. “Sorry, I’m just happy to see that you’re okay.”
“Never been better. Silas left me the keys for his Jaguar. They were in a drawer of business cards for pretty much every police officer in Washington, so I only took it out once…” he trailed off as Silas came up behind me. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“Hello, Tariq,” Silas said easily, though an easy tone for Silas was something resembling the way every evil witch preened… right before they locked you in a basement.
“H-hey,” Tariq stuttered, shooting me a look. “Did the trip go okay?”
I nodded and Silas moved past him, toward the car park. Tariq watched him go and I patted his arm. “Don’t worry about him. Tell me what’s been happening? How’s school? How’s football going?”
“I speak to you every few days.” Tariq’s worry eased with a small smile. “There’s nothing new to tell you. But you look different.” He paused as we reached the car—Quillan’s BMW. “You’re… I don’t know. Are those new clothes? You seem really happy.”
I got a person killed.
I got three people killed.
That makes four in total. My ledger was really adding up.
“Sure.” I forced away my niggling depression and jumped into the car.
Silas drove us back to the apartment building, grumbling about the BMW the whole way, like driving it was stooping too low for him. He parked in the basement, and I had the distinct feeling that he was dragging out Tariq’s discomfort by slowing down when he walked past the Jaguar, sweeping a cursory glance over it. We piled into the lift and I stared at the buttons for the other floors as we climbed.
“If you guys own this whole building,” I ventured, “what’s on the other floors?”
“More apartments, a gym, a pool,” he shrugged. “We don’t use the rest of it. We rent it out.”
Silas d
isappeared into his own apartment as soon as we reached the top floor, and I sat down with Tariq in the piano room of Cabe and Noah’s apartment, absently picking at the keys as I told him everything that I had been leaving out of our conversations together over the last few months. He almost imploded when I tried to talk about forming the bond with Silas and Quillan, so I skipped over most of the details and only told him what he needed to hear. By the time I got to Aiden’s story, my tears were beginning to make the piano keys slippery beneath my fingers, and as I told him about the last painting I had done, I stopped playing altogether.
“But how did you know that Gerald did it—or, would have done it? He wasn’t in the painting?”
“No, I just felt it. I heard him speak.”
Tariq’s eyes travelled to the window. “This is a lot to take in.”
“I know…” I softened my voice. “I’ll stay here with you this weekend but then I need to go back to Maple Falls. This guy, whoever he is, will be paying attention to everything that I do. I don’t want to bring you into the whole mess. He left another message for me just before we left.”
“What message?”
“Well… no actual message or anything this time. Just a few broken dolls. I must have done something to make him angry. I was starting to think he had moved on—either that, or Silas had secretly hunted him down and disposed of him.”
“What do you think you did?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it… I had just come back from a double-date with Poison. So… maybe it was that.”
“He’s angry that you went on a date?” Tariq seemed confused. “What makes you think that?”
“It’s the only thing that really makes sense. If he doesn’t want me to form the bond with Noah and Cabe, he probably doesn’t want me dating other guys either. But that’s not important right now. Will you stay away from Gerald, please?”
“I guess.”
“Thanks, Tariq. We’ll send him money in the mail. Enough to live by, but not enough to… you know.”
“Drink himself to death with?”
“Basically.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Want to play a game?” He seemed to be trying to change the subject. There was an uncomfortable look in his eye, and he kept glancing toward the door.
“Sure.”
His smile stretched easily, apparently relieved that we didn’t have to continue the conversation, and then he was standing and leading the way back to the media room. He clicked on one of the gaming systems and handed me a controller.
“We’ll play Nazi Zombies,” he said.
I stared at the screen: at the boarded-up room, and at my soldier character on screen. I saw a zombie trying to break through the planks on the window, and everything rushed back to me.
“Are you drinking straight vodka?”
I blinked, my hands beginning to tremble.
“Whoa, no need to get all feisty. It’s a little unnerving with those eyes of yours.”
I felt the bump of Aiden’s nose, saw the closeness of his different-coloured irises as he tried to show me that I wasn’t a freak, or if I was, then so was he.
I dropped the controller and turned away from the familiar game, burrowing my head into the couch-cushion.
“Seph?” Tariq shook my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Not this game,” I croaked.
“Oh, ah… okay, sure. We’ll play something else.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Tariq, and as it neared evening Silas came to fetch me. We drove in his Jaguar to my father’s house and stopped outside of it.
“You ready for this?” Silas asked.
I nodded, and he handed me an envelope.
“What are the chances of me convincing you to stay in the car for this?” I asked.
“Laughable,” he said, without a trace of humour in his tone.
I walked to the door, Silas following close behind me. The door was unlocked, the house dark, but I didn’t let that silence my frazzled nerves. I walked quietly, stepping as lightly and quickly as I could, at a pace that I had taught myself long ago. I avoided the noisier parts of the floor and Silas was a hulking, silent shadow behind me. It was a little scary that someone so much larger than me could be just as quiet as I was being. I walked up the stairs and down the hallway to my father’s bedroom, pushing the door open. I hated to admit it, but I never would have been so bold if Silas hadn’t been standing behind me.
Gerald was sitting on the bed, a television remote in his hands, his head lolling to the side as he slept. Despite the warm and stagnant air, the blankets were pulled up around his chest.
“Stay here,” I whispered to Silas, slipping forward to place the envelope on the edge of his bed.
I paused, my hand still on the envelope, my breath snagging in my throat. My father’s chest wasn’t moving and he wasn’t snoring. Either he was in a very deep sleep, or else…
“Gerald?” I asked, raising my voice just as a thump sounded behind me.
I spun around as Silas collided with the side of the doorframe, a massive man standing behind him with a baseball bat, tattoos scratched all over his bald head. Silas pushed off with one arm and caught the second swing of the bat with the other, surprising the guy with how quickly he had recovered. I started forward, but an arm caught me from behind, forcing me back. My father’s closet door was hanging open, and a slender man had just stepped out of it. Silver flickered and I felt the cold prick of something against my throat.
“Don’t move,” a voice said in my ear. “Don’t say a word.”
I swallowed my scream and watched as Silas finally wrenched the bat away from the bald man. He tossed it over the stair railing and it landed on the floor below with a thud. The bald man swung at him but he ducked fluidly, raising his hands and falling back onto the balls of his feet. He danced away from the man’s meaty fists like his opponent was moving in slow motion, striking back with a merciless recoil that always seemed to catch the other man by surprise.
The scene faded before me, showing me a different, but somehow similar vision.
A hand whipped out, catching the boy across the face. Judging by the swelling in the right side of his face, it wasn’t the first blow that he had suffered. I felt sorry for him, but I also wished that he would stop laughing, and start fighting back. He looked strong. I wished I was that strong.
I wished I could fight. Why wasn’t he?
I forced the image out of my head, needing to expel actual effort to drag myself back into the present. Now wasn’t the time to be entertaining possibly schizophrenic flashbacks.
“Quit playing.” The bald man was angry, his face mottled and his breathing choppy with a wheeze of pain. He finally hooked Silas and moved to slam him back against the balcony railing.
Silas twisted as his spine brushed the balustrade. He slammed his elbow into the base of the other man’s throat, and then bent and grabbed his legs. I watched as Silas heaved, sending a man twice his size over the balcony railing, his back muscles straining like they were about to pop out. I heard the crash below, and watched with growing apprehension as Silas leapt over the balcony after him, apparently landing right on top of him… if the shout was anything to go by. The guy holding me let go of a breathy laugh.
“Well I never… you’ve got quite a fighter there.”
“What—” I started to speak, but the knife pressed closer, stinging me.
“I didn’t say you could speak yet,” the man chided softly. “Now I’m going to move the knife, and I want you to be a good girl and tell me who you are. If you call out to your friend, I’ll slit your throat. Understood?”
I couldn’t nod without digging the knife deeper, so I tapped on his arm instead. He moved the knife away, slightly.
“His daughter.” I pointed to the bed, where my father still sat. “W-what did you do to him?”
“Shot him in the dick. Covered it up with a blanket when I saw your car pull up outsi
de. Want to see?”
My stomach roiled and I tried to pitch forward, but he caught me and held me back, the knife creeping back to my throat.
“Oh my god,” I groaned, fighting the spinning nausea.
“They kept you nice and hidden,” the man said, his nose in my hair, his hand creeping around my stomach. “We might have worked out a different arrangement, if I had known he had a second kid.”
“I don’t understand.” I shoved his hand away from my body savagely, and he anchored my hands to my sides by looping his arm around me in an iron band and jolting me back into his chest.
“There ain’t much to understand, sweet-pea. We’re under orders to rough-up papa-bear and deliver a message to his kid.”
Silas appeared in the doorway then, having made quick work of the bald man. He froze, his hand flicking to his belt like he was reaching for a weapon, but there was nothing there. His fingers flexed, his dark eyes narrowed on the knife at my throat, and then he straightened and leaned against the frame again.
Casually. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“What do you want?” His voice was too quiet, and his eyes were pitch black, lit from within by a liquid inferno. It penetrated me in a mist, seeping through my pores with the power to disintegrate me from the inside, leaving nothing but ash as he walked away.
“That’s a real pretty car you got out there,” the man said against my hair. “Give me the keys, and I’m taking the girl.”
Silas paused, his fingers twitching, and the knife bit into my neck again. I felt a bead of blood trickle slowly down to my chest, and Silas’s eyes followed it for a moment, his expression unreadable.
“Take the car, no girl, and I won’t kill you and your partner on the way out of here,” Silas answered.