Entropy (The Countenance Trilogy 3) (12 page)

A shock of white light bleaches out my visual field as I fall to the floor with an unceremonious thud. My body lurches and bucks, as I fight the nausea that sometimes comes with the ride to the flip side.

My eyes adjust to the over-bright light as I stumble to my feet in this whitewashed universe. I jog down the glossy corridor of this underworld that’s technically not under anything. It’s in another dimension all together, suspended from time like some lone forgotten planet floating through space. Outside these walls sits a dark-sooted world filled with a scarier-than-hell dilapidated mansion, the burnt out streets are populated with the dead from some long forgotten century.

I stick my head in door after door, but there’s no sign of the haggard witch. Her lab is empty, so I head down a carpeted corridor to a cavernous room loaded with glass caskets—each one of them filled with a body suspended in blue fluid. It’s the Count resurrection facility, but, of course, I hadn’t always known that. I didn’t know for sure until Laken came along. It’s hard to believe she was here once. Floating in one of these tubes, wearing her Ezrina-issued wetsuit.

“
Ezrina!
” I roar her name out like a battle cry. This place is so large you could easily squeeze in a couple dozen airplane hangars and still have room to park a cruise ship.

“Here,” she says it low, calm as hell, and nothing grates on my nerves more. The longer the Counts hold my mother and Laken’s family hostage—
Casper
—the longer Wes has to bond himself over Laken’s heart like some psychotic epoxy.

I walk to where she’s seated. Her disfigured frame sits hunched over a long, metal bathtub while her hands busy themselves with the project at hand.

A bevy of prehistoric tools sit by her side on a metal tray, laid out with meticulous precision. If she’s anything, she’s neat about how she runs this slaughterhouse.

“What’s cooking, good lookin?” I peer over her shoulder. “Shit!” I jump back, knocking over the tray of torture mechanisms and two jugs of purple liquid sitting beside them.

A pair of familiar looking corpses lie prone in the tub. The eye from one is missing. The lip on the other is torn up the side as if a fishhook ripped right through it. Their fingers are reduced to nubs, both their throats are shredded open with the skin hanging loose in strips, the muscles protruding as if they had been through a cheese grater, and then it all comes together. They were clawing at their throats, their eyes, their mouths.

“What the hell happened?” I whisper.

“Didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?”

Ezrina’s been bottling up Counts for the better part of a century. I would have sworn she had this down to a morbid science.

“Antidote.” She shakes her head as if she has somehow harnessed the ability to care about these poor souls.

“Crap.” I pat her gently on the back. “I suggest you stick with the original recipe. You know what they say—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I look around at the facility of long dead, forgotten Counts and wonder how many of these souls are just as sweet and innocent as Laken. “I think I’m going to step out and say hi to Richard and Kara for a minute. When I come back I want you to fill me in on the progress you’re making with the—” I freeze. Everything in me turns brittle as glass. “Antidote…” I lock onto her bloodshot, swollen eyes that look as if she hasn’t slept in ten thousand years. “Ezrina, no.” I shake my head.

“Yes,” she says it low. Her voice carries like a funeral hymn throughout the facility. She looks down at the two sleeping babes, drowning in lavender solution. “Say hello to Richard and Kara.”

Fuck.

Wesley

On Sunday, Laken rides shotgun as Jen, Blaine, and Fletch ride out with us to her mother’s birthday party. The Anderson estate is an architectural marvel. A limestone structure of the highest quality with its ornate, dual wrought iron stairwells, enough marble and granite to make any mausoleum proud. Of course, the only corpse taking up residency in this place is Jones, and I’ve got one serious fucking bone to pick with him.

Laken gets settled in the family room with Jen and Fletch while Joy, the housekeeper slash chef, finishes up with a big Sunday brunch.

“I think I’m going to see what’s holding Jones up.” I give a gentle kiss to Laken’s cheek as I head out of the room.

It’s her mother’s forty-fifth birthday, and we’ve descended like flies to help her celebrate when I’m pretty sure Jones is well aware of the fact she isn’t the real deal as far human incubators are concerned, not in any way, shape, or form.

I listen to the thump of my own footsteps as I head over to his office and, just as I figured, he’s staring at his laptop, deep in thought, as a voice emanates from the speakers.

Jones looks over in my direction and raises a brow. “I’d better go,” he says, shutting his laptop in haste.

“I wish I could say I was sorry to interrupt your meeting.” I let myself in and shut the door. For a moment I contemplate beating the shit out of him just for the hell of it, but the truth is, I’m exhausted after the drive, so I slump into the cold leather chair and glare at him while channeling all of the hatred I can muster. “Why’d you do it?” I rub my palm into my eye until it feels as if I’m about to launch it into my skull.

He rocks back in his seat with his hard-boiled stare, his thick lips pursed with disapproval. “Traditionally, family members come together to commemorate the day of their birth. It’s called a
birthday
. Most people are just happy to be invited—eat some cake and share some laughs. But I suppose that’s a little too much to ask from you—isn’t it?” He scowls into me as if this must be true.

“Where’s my mother?” It comes out flat as if I were asking about an old jacket I left behind.

“She’s on her way with that annoying Fem she likes to lug around.”

“The other one—the
real
one.”

His milky blue eyes widen. His face elongates like that painting from Munch. I should do one myself and put Jones’s likeness in it. Maybe stick a sickle in his neck just for fun. God knows I’d love to make him scream.

He shakes his head, stunned by the horror. Jones was never one to hide the way he feels. If anything, he’s the opposite of Edinger.

“You know?” He tilts into me as if this were an impossibility.

“I know. And what should be more staggering to you is the fact that Laken knows, too.” I shoot daggers into him with my hardened gaze. “But you already knew that didn’t you? She never once believed that bullshit about falling from the tree house.” A dull laugh pumps from my chest. “You thought you had it in the bag. You were so close to pulling it off.” I lean forward, elbows to the knees. “You know what I can’t figure out? Why? Why pull two kids from the country and gift them with the riches of the world? What makes Laken and me so damn special?” I don’t bother including Fletch in that equation. Something tells me he’s here on someone’s coattails, and I’m guessing that would be mine since we drowned in the lake together. “And how the
fuck
did you get me to play along for so long?”

“Deep hypnosis,” he breathes it out as if he were in a trance himself. “You were the perfect Manchurian candidate—you all were.” He folds his hands together staring past me at nothing in particular. “Is she angry?”

“Hell, yes, she’s angry. She wants to kill every Count on the planet, and once she finds out you’re responsible, she’ll want to start with
you
.”

“You’re in that number, Wes.”

“You still didn’t answer my question. Where’s my mother?”

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you—she perished.” He cuts his hand through the air as if he were stating a fact, but something in that movement makes my head spin and triggers about a dozen different memories concerning that skeletal, pasty-faced version of my mother that doesn’t, in fact, have any relation to me at all.

“Whatever the hell it is you’re doing,
stop
. Where’s my mother?” It rips from my lungs with a ferocity I didn’t know I had. A part of me still doesn’t accept any “past” I had outside of Laken. It’s as if she were the only true bond I had. I remember my grandfather—my mother in the kitchen baking pies as if she were about to open a factory. I can still see her soft features, her mousy hair always away from her face and the scent of lavender whenever she held me. A pang of grief washes over me at the memory, and suddenly I want nothing more than to find her and hold her.

“Her body was interned. We always take care of our own.”

I sink down in my seat and take it all in. I can’t trust a word the bastard says, and yet I believe him, and my heart feels as if it’s just been wrung out by a giant. “I’m taking Laken to the Ensign meeting. She’s agreed to be my Essential.”

His face bleaches out at the thought of me fucking his niece on some stone altar.

I try to hide the smile forming on my lips. “I’d like to petition for our first request to be utilized immediately following the ceremony.” I know for a fact that the first request can only be utilized by upper echelon Counts after a coupling initiation. And that’s exactly what Laken and I will be, upper echelon. We’ll be committed to the Countenance for all eternity, as well as one another. Any thoughts of leaving the organization—leaving
each other
is cause for certain death.

“I see.” He nods. “I’ll make sure it’s granted. I owe you that much.” His eyes slit to nothing as if he didn’t think he owed us anything at all.

“Why Laken? Why me?”

“Yes,” a soft female voice hums from the doorway, and we turn to find Laken standing there, her eyes wide with rage. “Why me?”

Jones stands in her presence. His features sag as if he were on the verge of tears.

“Can I hold you?” His lips tremble, but he never takes his eyes off his niece.

“Never.” Laken comes over, and I stand beside her.

“I swear to you, Laken, on all that is holy above and below the earth, I only did what I thought was best for you.” He extends his hand as if pleading for her to understand.

“I don’t even know you.” She shakes her head. “Did you know that my mother, my baby
sister
are suffering a fate worse than death?” She chokes the words out just this side of tears.

Jones doesn’t say a word.

“Then you do.” She takes a step forward, her eyes drilling him a new one. “Please, if you care about me the way you say, help me get them out alive. Right now.”

Jones lets out a breath and sits back down in his seat. He stares off at the wall a moment.

“It can be done”— he leans hard in his seat—“but there needs to be a sacrifice in exchange for their bodies.”

“Like a person?” Laken is eager to get to the bottom of this. “Take me. Let them go right now along with Cooper Flanders mother and my friend Casper. I swear to you, I will gladly take their place.

I slip my hand over hers.

No, Laken, please
. I give her fingers a gentle squeeze.

Jones looks down at our conjoined hands, and his lips twitch with disapproval.

“They wouldn’t want you, Laken,” he says it plain as a fact. “They’re not interested in your bloodlines. Besides”—he rocks back in his chair despondent—“it’s against inter-angelic law to hold one of our own.”

“Then let me see them,” she pleads. “Let me talk to them.”

Jones shoots a look to me. I know what he’s thinking.

“I don’t have that kind of pull,” I volunteer before he can accuse me of holding back.

Jones spears through me with a viral look that says he knows far more than he’s letting on.

“You, young Wesley, have far more pull than you realize.” He stands and walks around to the side of his desk. “One day, I imagine very soon, you’ll both realize who you are and what you’re to become. Every Count has a role to play, some are created for noble purposes and some for common.” He looks from me to Laken, grim with his inflexible hard-lined stare. “Every person comes upon that hour in their lives when they must to decide who they are. This is your hour.” He walks out the door, and it clicks shut behind him quiet as a whisper.

Laken turns to me, unyielding in her anger. “Who are you going to be, Wes?”

“We’re Counts, Laken. And for the first time in our lives, we’re going to use this to our advantage.” I pull her in by the hips and tuck a kiss in the warmth of her neck. “We’re going to free your family”—I lift her chin with my finger and dot a kiss over her lips—“we’ll free any damn person you wish.”

I land my mouth over hers, and Laken stiffens for a moment before her body relaxes into mine, and she meets me right there with a kiss that tastes like a hazy summer morning, like crisp fall afternoons spent jumping in stacks of dry leaves the color of gold and crimson. With every moment that beats by, Laken’s kisses remind me of Cider Plains, of home, and yet I don’t miss it, or crave it, or want any of it back. With Laken by my side, I already have all I need.

This is our time—the hour we decide who we are.

We aren’t subject to the Counts.

We are the Counts.

Lunch goes off without a hitch. Joy had a five-star spread under the veranda, and the sky sews up its pregnant clouds as if waiting for our gathering to conclude before pouring down its wrath. The table has been cleared, and the candles blown out, leaving her mother with a small stack of gifts surrounding her.