Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) (9 page)

“You’re alive,” she whispered. The words were an accusation… and a curse.

I closed my eyes.

“I did try to save you,” I whispered back.

“Too late,” she scoffed. “Far too late. You were so content inside your little world, that you could not see that mine was burning.”

She threw up one skeletal hand and pointed at the grate above us.

“What is this place?” The words wrenched out of my mouth, despite my every effort. I had a hunch where this place was, and I didn’t want to know that I was right.

“Rock bottom,” she whispered. “The place beyond the pain, where everything goes numb.” Her shoulders shook in that horrible, bitter laughter again. “See? There is no escape. Except my way.” She lifted her head further, and I could see the dark chord, still wrapped around her throat.

I shuddered back into my body.

I gasped for breath and slid down to my knees. Silent sobs wracked my entire body.

The scent of the old barn was so familiar. The warmth of the candles had drawn out the sweet perfume of centuries of hay and horses.

The perfume filled my nostrils, offering me comfort and solace as it always had. I pressed my hands against the hard floor, letting the foundation hold me together.

“What was that?” Flint asked.

When I looked up, his eyes were wide in his face. I could easily see the whites around the iris. The rest of his face was pale and drawn, almost like a death-mask, though I could see the rapid beating of his pulse in his throat.

I hoped that wasn’t a dark omen.

I crossed my arms over my chest. My own heart was pounding so hard that I could feel it in my head and the base of my spine. My whole body shook, not with cold this time, but with the pain and horror of what I had just experienced.

I gulped back my tears and turned my head, so that Flint wouldn’t see my face. I could not bear for him to look at me. “You saw that?”

I heard the chains clink as he nodded.

“That’s never happened before,” I whispered. I couldn’t seem to make my voice rise any higher. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Still, it appeared to be loud enough.

“Who was that?” Flint demanded. “What did she mean?”

I closed my eyes. I could not run forever. I could not hide the truth anymore. If he hated me, when I was through, then that was nothing more than I deserved.

I already hated myself. Wasn’t that enough?

“That was Kenzie,” I said. How many years had it been since that name had crossed my lips? It felt strange, when once it would have felt so familiar, so safe. Maybe I had avoided her name, so as not to waken the ghosts of my past. It had just been too hard to accept… so, instead, I had chosen to ignore and avoid all thoughts that made me think of her.

“She was my best friend,” I continued, knowing that I had to say this now, or I’d never be able to. “We grew up together. We did everything together. When we were fifteen, she killed herself. I should have seen the signs. We were so close—almost like sisters, really. I should have recognized it. Somehow, I should have been able to stop it.”

I was babbling now.

I shuddered, remembering the night Kenzie died. Everything had been so normal. Kenzie was always so full of life. She had a kind of manic energy that surrounded her at all times. She was fearless, and challenged me to keep up with her. She had feared nothing and no one. She had been the kind of person with that voracious appetite for life and all it had to offer.

She’d been so vital, so passionate.

How had I missed the silences in between? How had I missed the moments that she grew restless in her own skin? How had I missed the days when she seemed so tired she couldn’t even speak? How had I missed that empty, exhausted look that had filled her eyes more and more often?

I’d asked myself those questions a million times, and I still had no answers.

I should have seen it. I should have known that something was wrong. I should have grabbed ahold of her and forced her to tell me what was wrong.

Maybe it was only with the clarity of hindsight, that I could understand what I had missed in those times of silence.

She’d been so happy that last day. She hadn’t been happy in a long time, but she was that day. It was like having her back. She had laughed and danced around, teasing me, playing those games that made everyone love her. She had flirted and teased and made a hundred promises about the years to come.

I wanted to block out those last minutes. She’d smiled almost giddily as she left her bedroom. To get her phone, she said. She’d left it downstairs. She’d be right back. Don’t do anything fun without her.

And, too late, I had felt my heart cling to my spine in warning. It was as if I felt her jump. We raced to the stairs, me and her other friends, screaming for her parents.

She’d tied her phone cord to the banister, at the top of the stairs, the other side around her neck in a noose. Then, she had jumped.

But she hadn’t died. Not right away. She started breathing again after her dad cut her down and started CPR. We had watched that slight, vital, movement of her chest, seeing it as a ray of hope, though her face was blackened and unfamiliar.

She didn’t open her eyes. The cord had cut a deep furrow around her slender neck.

Even then, it felt like Kenzie wasn’t there anymore.

It had been later, nearly a year later, that her parents gave up and unhooked her from life support. She’d been brain dead that first night, the doctors had said. What they hadn’t said was that we were keeping her around for ourselves, not out of any hope that she would miraculously come back to us.

It took the living a year to let her go. A year to let her body finish the process she had started.

I wondered if any of us every truly had let her go. I wasn’t sure that was possible.

FLINT

T
he words came slowly. Win’s eyes had taken on the kind of stupor of someone in a trance. I could see that she was reliving the horror of what she had seen. She rehearsed the words—the terrible words—in a flat, pain-filled voice—the kind of voice that only those who had experienced life-changing grief could understand.

I had heard that tone in my own voice. I knew that she understood. We had both lost someone that we loved in a violent manner. Did it really matter that much that whether the violence had been from a killer or themselves? In detail, yes. In pain… no.

And she had been the one to find me, too, after my attempt at taking my life. Guilt filled my chest in a rush. I must have awakened so many memories, after my attempt to take my own life.

She’d been a stranger. She had no real responsibility for me.

She could have left me there. She could have walked away, and avoided so much pain, but she hadn’t. She had brought me into her home, and was doing what she could to help me—even though I could see how much it was hurting her. She accepted that pain with a grace that shamed me.

She had been so young when it happened, but her face told me that it still felt like yesterday to her. The pain was still fresh and new, the reasons still baffling in the way that all tragedy is, at core, senseless.

When Win’s story was done, she sat quietly on the floor of the old barn, her face drawn into an expression of introspection. Her fingers traced patterns on the floor. Knots, I thought, or circles—all bound together in an endless cycle.

I saw the moment she came back to herself. She shook her head, as if shaking off cobwebs, and looked up at me. Her grey eyes were wide and tragic—and filled with self-loathing.

“I must disgust you,” she said.

Her words shocked me to the core. I stared at her. “Is that what you believe? That you should disgust me because you lost your best friend?”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I should have stopped her. I should have known. I was her best
friend
. I… should have known.”

I lifted my hand, making the chains tighten around me. The weight grounded me in an odd sort of way, despite the discomfort. “Her suicide is not on you. She made the decision. You didn’t. If you had stopped her then, she still would have found a way. You were there for her, I can tell, even in those last moments.”

The corner of her mouth twisted. “Intellectually I know that,” she said wryly. “I’ve had a dozen therapists tell me so. But here,” she pressed a fist against her stomach, “it still feels like I didn’t do enough.”

“I know the feeling,” I whispered.

She looked at me then, really looked at me. Her intelligent, grey eyes observed me, as if for the first time.

I felt like she was trying to read my soul. Perhaps, to figure out what it was that drove me to the edge of my own cliffs. She had avoided the wondering, I realized. Now, she wanted—perhaps even needed—to know, to understand.

Had she never felt that consuming emptiness that had sought to drown me ever since Natalie was murdered? Had she never experienced the gulping quicksand that was grief and depression? She had known loss. She had known pain. Yet, somehow, she had never succumbed to the temptation to never feel again.

“You’re nothing like her,” she mused. “And yet—”

And yet, I had attempted to kill myself.

The least I could do was explain—at least as much as I understood myself. It was like trying to explain a cave to one who had only seen the sun. Or to describe bitterness to one who always found the sweet.

She was wrong, though. Her friend and I—we were similar. We had both succumbed to the quiet. We had both rushed into the embrace of oblivion. I didn’t know her reasons—or if there was a name for the face that had haunted her—but, I knew mine.

Mine was weakness.

“There was a woman,” I said. I spoke the words calmly, though I had promised myself long ago that I would never tell this story to anyone. Maybe it was because I had seen the cavern of pain inside of Win, trying so desperately to make sense of something senseless. Maybe it was because I felt that she, out of anyone I’d ever met, might understand.

Perhaps the jagged edges of her own torn soul might fit mine. Perhaps, leaning on each other, we could understand something beyond the confused pain of grief.

Whatever reason, the words began to flow from my lips. They should have tasted bitter, but instead, it was a relief to speak them. They fell easily. They had been waiting, I realized. The words had waited on the edge of my tongue, waiting for their turn to be released.

“I loved her,” I said. “It would have been impossible not to love her. She was beautiful, and funny, and smart.” An image of Natalie smiling danced through my memory, her eyes sparkling with laughter. Even when she had staggered under the pain of carrying my father’s triplets, she had never wallowed. She had laughed and smiled… until the end. There had been no place for laughter there.

“She was also married to my father,” I added, with an acknowledging grimace that I was pathetic enough to fall in love with my own stepmother. “She was much younger than he was, more my age, but they were married, and she was pregnant with his babies—triplets actually. You know triplets run in my family?”

She nodded slightly, her eyes never leaving my face.

I forced myself to be completely honest. “I don’t know if she ever felt the same way. I never said anything to her—how could I? I know that she cared to me. We were… friends.”

I paused and gulped down a rush of fear. I didn’t want to relive those last moment, frantically racing through the snow. I didn’t want to remember the frantic thudding of my heart or the moment when I realized that we were too late to save her.

“My father murdered her,” I said, my voice flat and hollow. The violence of my words were at odds with my tone. Try as I might, I could not distance myself from the memory. I could not stand on dry land. The words brought me to the brink of drowning.

“He cut open her belly and delivered her babies and let her bleed to death. I couldn’t stop him.” My voice broke. I swallowed and soldiered on. “I was too late. She never knew how much I loved her. I never had a chance to tell her. Even in that last moment, the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I watched her life drain from her, and couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

My body shuddered. I was not weeping, yet, but my body trembled with the effort not to let Win see my weakness.

“You didn’t kill her,” Win said softly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I might as well have sliced her open myself,” I snapped. “If I had told her that I loved her—we could have left, we could have escaped my father and she would still be alive. But, I kept silent. Even when I learned what my father was—I didn’t warn her.”

“What was her name?” Win asked. Her voice was gentle.

Her words punched the air out of my lungs. I wasn’t sure I could speak her name and not threaten my own sanity. I was already on the brink.

But, I had already come too far to stop. I had to keep moving. I had to set Natalie’s spirit free. Hell, I was, or had been, a medium. I knew the consequences of people refusing to let their loved ones go. I couldn’t consign anyone I cared about to a fate like that—cursed to walk the earth forever.

“Natalie,” I said. I wanted to bury my face in my hands, but the chains surrounding me wouldn’t let me. “Her name was Natalie and she has three beautiful babies that she never got to meet. Two little boys and a perfect little girl.”

“My magic hasn’t worked since then,” I added softly. “It knows that I didn’t do enough to save her, so it left me. It found me unworthy. I can’t even try to speak to her—because I can’t see spirits anymore. I… don’t know who or what I am. I thought I was a good man, but I let my father deceive me. I let myself be lulled by his lies.” I felt tears begin to slide down my face. Unlike the others I had wept since that fateful night, these didn’t hurt. Their heat warmed the skin of my face as they dropped; thawing a deep path that felt like it carved all the way down to my core. I had been so afraid to speak these words. I’d been too afraid of the answers to ask the questions that haunted me day and night. “Am I evil, like he was? Is there any good in me at all? What if I am a monster, too?”

“If you have to ask, then you are not,” Win said, her jaw tightening in a definitive way. She brushed her lavender curls back with her finger tips. I focused on the movement, so I wouldn’t have to read the expression on her face. I was not ready to face any doubts she might feel about me, not when I was drowning in a sea of my own. “Only good people care about the condition of their souls. If you were evil, you would have felt nothing when… Natalie… died. Or you would have wallowed in it. All these things you are feeling are just proof that you are fundamentally good.” She smiled sadly. “You are not your father, Flint.”

I felt like I had been socked in the stomach. Such a simple thing to say—that I wasn’t my father. But, no one had said them to me. When I looked in the mirror, I could see his features there. Everything I did, everything I saw, I felt him there, tainting the very air I tried to breathe.

I was not my father.

No, I wasn’t my father.

But, then, if not his son, who was I?