“I could just kill her,” the man offered, his arm shifting until he cupped one of my breasts. “It wouldn’t be ideal, but I’d still do it. We’re under pretty strict orders, you see.” He laughed, his fingers kneading me. “Our boss is real interested in Gerald’s kid. We didn’t know about this one,” squeeze, “two of them would be better,” another squeeze, “but if I have to kill her…”
Dark fury flashed through Silas’s mask; severe and acrid, and I felt the sweep of emotion from where he stood, it thrummed heavily through me, pounding in my head and threatening to make me sick. The valcrick tried to rise in response, but I pushed it down. The last thing I needed to do was jolt the man holding a knife to my neck. The fury faded as quickly as it had appeared, and astoundingly, a smile spread over his face.
I had seen Silas smile, but nothing like this. It was arctic and it made his whole persona transform from dark and deadly to otherworldly malevolent. I knew that it had an effect on the man behind me, because I could feel him tensing, and the blade trembled painfully against my neck. His hand fell away from my chest.
“Choose.” Silas waved an uncaring hand, the terrible smile still in place. “The car or the girl, you can’t have both. How much would she be worth to your boss?”
“I’ll take her.”
“Get out of my sight before I change my mind.”
“Walk in front of us,” my captor warned. “With your hands where I can see them.”
Silas spun on his heel and retreated out of the room. The guy pushed me to the side, grabbing onto my arm and holding the knife at my collarbone as he dragged me along beside him. We followed Silas down into the living room.
“I don’t think Shrek is going to wake up,” Silas said casually. “Not today, at least.”
My captor didn’t even look over at his unconscious partner. He moved past Silas and walked backwards to the front door, keeping his eyes on Silas the entire time.
“Go upstairs and lock the door,” he warned. “You won’t be following us.”
“Enjoy her,” Silas said in return, heading for the stairs obediently. “She has a unique… spark.”
The guy only grunted in reply and then he was hauling me out the front door. As soon as we stepped out of the cover of the house the knife disappeared into the folds of his jacket. I let out a sigh of relief and stopped walking.
“Finally,” I grumbled, lifting my arms.
“Wha—” the word never got a chance to form.
The valcrick spiked from my fingers and hit him directly in the chest, sending him flying right back through the doorway into the house. I might have been a little too harsh, but I could still feel his hands on me, and so I couldn’t muster any guilt at the curl of smoke that I caught floating away from his chest. I had taken barely two steps before Silas was grabbing him and hauling him back to the bald man. The fury was back, edging his usually fluid movements and turning them jerky and sharp. He sat the two men together back-to-back and then fished out their phones, storing them in his pocket. He started rummaging around the house and I didn’t dare speak as he came back with a once-green rope. It was old, a little frayed, and stained brown in places. He tested it, twisting it around each of his hands and yanking in several places. When the rope didn’t snap, he used it to tie the men together at the neck, tightening it until it began to bite into their skin.
“Silas… they’ll choke.” I stepped forward and he whipped around, silencing me with a look. It was the same malevolence as before, but there was something… detached about it. He had stepped out of himself, and his monster had taken over.
I swallowed down the rise of fear, because he would feel it, and stepped back lightly instead of recoiling. He continued watching me, tracking my movements, and I stopped.
“Silas…”
There was no change. He flicked his eyes over me and they got caught on my neck. I saw the fury again and this time I did recoil. He spun back around and wrapped the rope around their necks again and again, giving them a coiled, joined collar, before knotting it and pulling it even tighter, his boot against the bald giant’s shoulder providing the leverage he needed. He moved to me once he was finished, and I took a step back for each of his steps forward, until I was once again in the threshold of the front door. He stopped then, and turned, heading into the kitchen. He hunted around the kitchen drawers for a lighter, and then he slammed the kitchen window closed. He moved around the bottom level of the house closing doors, latching windows, and then he disappeared upstairs and I heard the same slamming throughout the rest of the house.
Keeping a firm hold on my terror, I ran to the laundry and re-opened the door and window, and then did the same in the dining room, which faced into the backyard. I only dared to open two of the windows in the sitting room where the bald giant and my captor were tied, and I covered them with a curtain before sprinting back to the front door as Silas stalked back down the stairs. He walked to my captor and wrenched open his mouth, placing a box of matches onto his tongue. He did the same with the other guy, and then he dropped a lighter onto the floor a few feet away from them.
On his way out, he turned on the gas stove.
He didn’t even look back as he approached the front door, and I quickly got out of his way. He slammed the door shut and I saw the envelope of money that I was supposed to give my father sticking out of his back pocket. He locked the door with my set of keys and then threw my keys into the garden, reaching for my arm. I wanted to jump away from him but I held firm, walking stiffly beside him, back to the Jaguar. He opened the passenger door and I obediently sat. I wasn’t sure what to do, because I had never actually seen this side of Silas—I had seen hints of it, but never the full transformation.
He was less than a human, more than a man, and halfway to an animal.
As we drove away, I looked up at the second story of the house, waiting for the tears that never came.
Silas drove back to the apartment and reached over to open my door, pressing a set of keys into my hand as he did so.
“Straight. Upstairs.” He spoke as if forcing the words out from between his teeth was painful.
I got out of the car and watched him speed away again, my legs shaking too badly to keep standing. I pulled out my phone and dialled Quillan.
“Seph? What’s happening?” He didn’t sound as horrified as I felt, which meant that he couldn’t feel my emotion from so far away.
“Silas freaked out.”
“It was only a matter of time.” He paused, drawing in a heavy breath. “Where is he? What set him off?”
“I can’t get into that right now. He… he tried to kill some people. I… I did what I could, they might still survive.”
“What do you mean you can’t go into it?” His tone turned sharp.
“I can’t handle all of you freaking out right now. Can you tell me where he is?”
“It’s not a good idea to go after him. You could get hurt.”
“I have to.” My tone wasn’t pleading, it was hard. It filled the resulting silence with a stubbornness that I rarely showed, fighting off whatever argument he might have been able to come up with.
Even though I knew that they had all the resources—and more will than was required—to control my every action, I also knew that they cared about me, and Quillan understood me better than the others. He understood my drive to protect the people closest to me.
Quillan paused, and I could tell that he was struggling. “One second,” he finally relented. “He has a program that tracks all our phones. I’ll check it.”
“Thank you,” I breathed, running for the apartment building. I rode to the top floor and used the keys to unlock his apartment. “Do you have anyone you can send to the apartment to watch over Tariq? I don’t want to leave him alone.”
“I’ll have Cabe call someone.”
Tariq was nowhere to be seen, but then again, he was living in the other apartment. I hunted down where Silas kept the keys and grabbed a set with the B
MW logo, taking the lift back down to the basement.
“Okay,” I said as I started the car up and drove out of the basement. “Which way?”
Quillan muttered directions and I drove, the unease in my stomach gurgling into downright panic as the distance stretched further and further. There could be many reasons that Silas was trying to get so far away, but I couldn’t shake the persistent suspicion that he was aiming to mute our bond with distance. Eventually, I heard Noah and Cabe’s voices in the background, and I put the phone on speaker, resting it in my lap. One hour turned into two, and two trickled into three. Quillan stayed on the phone the entire time.
“You’re going to have to tell me eventually.” He finally brought up the incident again. “He doesn’t look like he’s going to slow down anytime soon.”
“I think we read my painting wrong.”
“You went to see your father?”
“He was dead.”
“What the hell? Shit… Seph. I—” his voice broke off in a soft curse and he switched the phone off speaker. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. What happened?”
“There were these two guys there. They attacked us. One of them said something about his boss being interested in Tariq. It’s possible that those guys were the ones who would have hurt Tariq.”
“That wouldn’t make Silas snap. I’m guessing one of them touched you?”
“Yes.”
“What did Silas do?”
“He tied them together with a rope around their necks, closed all the doors and windows, turned on the gas and left matchboxes in their mouths.”
The other end was silent for a long time, the crackling of static a warning sound in my ear, and then finally Quillan spluttered, “Where did they touch you?”
“He cut my neck…” I flicked my eyes up to the rear-view mirror, seeing that half of my neck was smeared with blood—much more than I had anticipated. I hunted down a pack of wipes in the glove box and started cleaning it away. “And… um… grabbed me.”
“Grabbed you?”
“Do I really need to tell you this?”
He let out a few more curses.
“Have I told you that you swear too much?”
“Yes, you have. Wait… your father was still in the house?”
“Yes.” My voice didn’t even wobble. “I opened as many windows as I could while Silas was upstairs. He didn’t notice.”
“Good. I’ll see if I can send someone over to your house. We have some Zev’s we can rely on; they’ve helped with these situations in the past. We already have someone watching over the apartment building, if Tariq goes anywhere, they’ll tail him.”
“Silas does this a lot?”
“He used to… yes.”
Quillan muffled the phone with something as Noah and Cabe started speaking in the background. He had done this many times over the last few hours, and I figured it was to spare me the details of Silas’s previous transgressions. After a few minutes Quillan came back.
“Alright, Seph. He stopped.”
“Where?”
“At a hotel. Noah is arranging for someone to meet you there.”
“Who?”
“A friend. Her name is Hunter.”
Her. The word reverberated with dogged intent, colliding painfully into me with each repetition.
“Why?”
He took a deep breath. I braced myself, knowing instinctively that this wouldn’t be something that I wanted to hear.
“She’s the only one who can calm him down when he goes off the deep-end like this. We don’t want you going in alone. Do you understand?”
“Sure.” My voice broke off, and I focussed on following Quillan’s directions to the hotel.
I parked the car out the front of the right apartment and got out to stretch my legs. Quillan was muffling the phone again and I took it off speaker, pressing it to my ear to hear better.
“She said Silas already called her,” Noah was saying. “He told her to meet him at a bar, so he must have left his cell in the hotel room. I’ve rerouted her to the hotel to pick up Seph…”
I stopped trying to listen then. It hurt more than I was willing to admit, and I needed to hold the phone away while I calmed myself. I couldn’t have Silas feeling these emotions or he would know that I was near and would probably run again.
“Miro?” I brought the phone back to my ear as a red Chevy pulled up right next to me. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for helping.”
I hung up before he could say anything more and wrapped my arms around my torso as the woman got out of the car. She had fire engine red hair, sleek and straight, with porcelain skin and striking green eyes. A scattering of freckles fanned over her nose, but that was the extent of the innocence to be found in her appearance. She was wearing tiny shorts and a leather singlet that dipped low in the front and showed a short stretch of perfect, pale midriff. Her lips were ruby red, her makeup artfully applied. As she walked toward me, I found my stomach dropping through the ground. She was tall and willowy to the extreme, like a supermodel; and the way she walked was reminiscent of a jungle cat’s slow stalk.
“You must be Seraph.” She regarded me quickly, the hint of a Russian accent assaulting my ears, and then she seemed to dismiss me, obviously not floored by my appearance the way I had been by hers. “Let’s go.”
I got into her fancy car without hesitation. If she was my ticket to Silas, I’d swallow my insecurities and go along with it.
“So how do you know the guys?” I asked, fiddling with the hem of my shirt.
“I only really know Silas.” Her voice was smooth and rough all at once, with the kind of timbre that rolled over your hair in the wrong direction. “Miro calls me in when he gets crazy like this. But Si and I grew up together in Ukraine.”
“Cool.” Si. “Wait—Ukraine?” Not a Russian accent after all.
“Yes.” Her lips quirked down into a pouty frown. “Weston used to send him away for each school term. He spent more time with his mother, Yvonne, in Odessa.”
She didn’t ask me how I knew them, so I decided to keep quiet. I fiddled restlessly until we pulled to the side of the street opposite the bar.
“You should wait out here,” she advised me. “I’ll get him and bring him to the car.”
“Okay,” I said as she got up and began her cat-stalk to the bar.
As soon as she reached the door, I was up. I ran after her and opened the door, slipping inside behind her and inserting myself into a booth right beside the door, with a clear view of the rest of the room. There were a bunch of guys in the booth beside me, and one of them leaned over to say something to me.
“Shh.” I waved an urgent hand at him, my eyes trained on Hunter.
She spotted Silas almost immediately, and so did I. He was hunched over the bar with his back to us, his knuckles resting either side of a glass. Dried blood was crusted over his hands and everyone in the place seemed to be giving him a wide berth. How had he managed to get into a fight already? Or had he simply punched something? Hunter slid into the stool beside him and ran a hand over his back. I watched her red fingernails scratch lightly over the material, her pale hand contrasting with the dark material. His whole body seemed to tense, and I clamped a solid iron barricade over the rise of possessive anger that threatened to boil right up and consume me.
He turned slightly, giving me the back of his head as he glanced at Hunter. I wanted him to turn his attention back to the bar and ignore her, or better yet, tell her to leave. Instead, she dipped forward and fastened her mouth to his, and he allowed it. I was glad that my brain couldn’t seem to compute what was happening, because my solid iron barricade had just tumbled like it was made of cookie crumbs. Hunter leaned back, and I could see the confusion in her expression, mixed with annoyance. Silas didn’t move, and she tried to lean forward again. I jumped up, but his hand shot out at the same time and she went flying back off her bar stool, crashing into someone standing behind her.
A hand caught my ar
m and tugged me back into my booth seat. Shocked, I glanced at the person who had pulled me back. He was a few years my junior, the youngest in their group—and certainly too young to be sitting in a bar. They seemed to be a family, the father was opposite me, and the two older brothers beside the younger one; they all had the same cornflower hair and blue eyes, with squared-off jaws and wide foreheads, displaying various stages of age in their similar features.
“Wouldn’t do that, darlin’.” The father across from me gestured toward Hunter, who was flame-faced now and putting herself to rights. “Never get involved in a lovers’ spat with a guy who looks like that.”
The older brothers mumbled their agreement and I obediently sat back, sinking closer to the younger boy beside me as Hunter stormed past. I sat up on my knees to look over the booth as she made her way to the car. She glanced around upon realising that I wasn’t there, and then shrugged and got in, speeding away in a cloud of gravel. Well, there went that plan.
“Great,” I mumbled, as the phone in my pocket vibrated with a missed call.
Silas had turned back to the bar, but he seemed to be doubly as tense as he had been when I had snuck in. I pressed a button to return Quillan’s call and climbed over the boy next to me, settling myself into the corner of the booth as the dial tone sounded in my ear. Strangely, the family didn’t seem to mind me inserting myself into their group, though the boy’s eyes had grown wide as saucers. The brother on my right side shuffled a little closer, leaning forward on the table like he was shielding me from the rest of the bar.
“Hello?” I whispered as someone picked up.
“Talk to me,” Quillan said. “I’ve got you on speaker.”
“You didn’t tell me Hunter was… whatever. It would have been nice to know exactly how she calms him down, prior to watching what I just had to watch.”
“She was supposed to keep you in the car.” Quillan sounded angry.
“Well he pushed her off a bar stool, and she just sped away in a storm of gravel. So what the hell do I do now?”
“Where are you?”