Hidden (Hidden Series Book One) (11 page)

Ken’s hair wasn’t as funny as it was before.
I was lost in the idea of the hunters and agents – the people
looking for me – being superhuman. That’s how they’d done it, won
the war, tamed our kind. Technology wasn’t the great equalizer like
Sophia thought. It was whatever these powers were. Lydia Shaw was
ten times more terrifying now.

Nathan and I said goodnight on the stairs
that separated our floors a little after midnight. The one-arm hug
lasted exactly three seconds. Easily the best three seconds of my
life. So great that it never had to happen again. Having this
impossible friend was good enough. He never had to like me in any
other way.

“Christine,” he called from the floor below
me. I went down to see him. “I just wanted to say that I’ve never
talked to someone this much. You’re my first real friend.” Caring
about someone was new and odd. I frowned because I didn’t know what
else to do. “Just in case I’m being weird or lame. Or laughing too
much. It’s just that I went seventeen years without friends. I’m
new to this.”

I didn’t know how old he was until then. He
looked older than seventeen. It was the muscles, I guessed.

“You’re my first friend too. And I won’t
notice you being weird because I’m … pretty strange myself.” He
laughed and waved. I stood there until his door snicked shut.
“Goodnight,” I whispered, too late.

His door cracked open, and I paused on the
stairs. “Goodnight,” he said, hearing me with keen ears.

Something touched my arm and woke me up. It
was cold, like frozen fingers. I figured I’d imagined it and turned
over. Then the icy bones brushed my ear. I popped up in bed, seeing
nothing in the dark room.

I tucked my head under the comforter. It met
me under there, touching and freezing my cheek. I jumped out of bed
and turned on every light in my room.

It was four in the morning, and I was
clearly losing my mind.

“I can’t be depressed
and
psychotic,”
I said.

I convinced myself that I only needed a
glass of water and a few more hours of sleep to be sane again and
to stop imagining things.

But I
didn’t
imagine the argument
floating up the stairs. It grew louder as I rounded the second
floor.

“I had no choice,” Emma said.

“There is always a choice!” Sophia yelled.
“Show me your hands.” I kept moving to where I could see them and
crouched down in the corner. Sophia inspected Emma’s palms
intently. She traced the lines there, shaking her head. “Remi is
just another Edith. All this partying. I told you I didn’t like
her. She’s trouble, just like your sister.”

“She’s not like Edith! She’s not making me
do anything. The guy was following her. I think he was a hunter. I
didn’t want to lead him here.”

Then I was glad she did whatever she’d done
to stop him. If he’d followed her, he could’ve found me and turned
me over to the woman who’d bring me back to hell … in the event she
didn’t learn the truth about me.

“That is not an excuse to use magic in
public, which you have done far too many times.” Emma mumbled an
apology as she cried. “I love you, you know that, but I can’t allow
you to do things like this. I won’t let you turn into your sister.
She refused to listen, and that got her killed. I won’t be able to
handle that with you. Tell me everything about tonight.”

“We told you. Remi got into an argument, and
the guy wouldn’t let it go. We … handled it in case he was pressing
her buttons on purpose.” Sophia groaned and whispered something in
another language, I’d guess Spanish. Emma shook in her arms,
struggling to free herself. The lights shut off, and the living
room filled with hundreds of votive candles, casting shadows
everywhere. “Please. I’m sorry,” Emma said. “Wait, Sophie!”

Sophia pushed Emma from her arms and
gasped.

“You blinded him and left him there! Suppose
he reports that!”

“Remi was shifting in front of him,” Emma
cried. “I had to! Don’t kick us out. Please. It was just me. Not
Paul or Remi. They didn’t know what I was doing.”

“This is not the Emma I know. You are not
hateful!” Sophia’s voice was angry, disappointed, nothing like when
she’d told me that after stopping me from killing Sienna and
Whitney.

“I won’t ever do it again. I swear,” she
cried. “I’m sorry.”

“I can intercept a report if there is one,
but you have to be the one to restore his sight,” Sophia said. “And
it will require your blood.” Sophia snapped her fingers, and a
knife appeared in her other hand.

I stifled the gasp in my throat. I wanted to
run now, to hide from the magic and the blood and the eerie glow of
the candles. Sophia had never looked more like a witch than she did
now. Like the kind of witch I’d always thought I was. The kind of
witch she’d said didn’t exist.

Sophia led Emma to the middle of the living
room and positioned candles in a circle around her. Emma kneeled in
the circle, drying her face, and her cry simmered to a whimper.

“First, you must cleanse,” Sophia said.
“Take the darkness out of your heart. Confess what you have done
and pledge to live in the light.”

Emma held her hands over the candle in front
of her, hovering just above the flame. Her whispers were fast and
in French. She looked like she was praying.

The candles blew out all at once. I jumped
but made no noise in my chilly hiding spot.

“You have been heard,” Sophia said. The
candles ignited again. Sophia gave the knife to Emma. “For this man
this child has harmed tonight, she offers this, her blood, as
penance for his sight.”

Emma slid the knife over her palm, gasping
and wincing, sobbing now. She let her blood drip over the candle.
As it hit, a purple, misty vine erupted from it. It danced around
her circle, engulfing the flames.

I’d never seen it before, our blood’s
reaction over fire, but I’d feared it with everything in me. It
wasn’t a myth, not something else the nuns exaggerated. I brought
my hand to my chest, feeling my heart trying to escape.

Sophia whispered the same healing spell
she’d used on my knee into Emma’s hand. She pulled the weeping girl
from her circle and wrapped her arms around her.

“Never again, Emma,” she said. “Next time, I
will have no choice but to ask you and your friend to leave.”
Something close to a thank you came out with Emma’s sobs. “I’ve
warned all of you.” Sophia’s voice shook and she paused, rubbing
Emma’s back. “If you bring attention to Christine, you will no
longer have my protection. I will have
no
choice. There will
be nothing I can do to save any of you if she is hurt.”

Hurt? And what did this have to do with
me?

They disappeared into the kitchen, and the
temperature rose in my corner. I had to be imagining the
unnaturally cold touches. More evidence of my mental instability. I
went upstairs without the water, avoiding the magic and Sophia and
the obvious fact that she wasn’t being completely honest with
me.

A flick of a lighter made me shake and pause
on my stairs. The glow lit Remi’s face at my door. She clicked it
off, then on again. She was smiling now. “Enjoy the show?” she
whispered, so low I had to strain to hear her. I hunched my
shoulders as if she could see me. I hadn’t been alone with her as a
person, but she didn’t have any noise around her either. I wished,
for a moment, that Sophia didn’t think I hated magic so I could ask
how this worked. Why couldn’t I hear them? And how did I pull
random information out of the air like Sienna’s phone number? And
why did she need a room full of candles to get the truth out of
Emma? Why not just read her mind?

At my door, I stepped around Remi and her
lighter. She didn’t budge. Choosing to ignore how incredibly creepy
she was being, I walked into my room and turned to shut the
door.

She stopped it with her foot and jumped back
like it had hurt. She grunted and shoved the lighter in my face,
bringing her nose to mine.

“I’m only going to say this once,” she
whispered. “Nathan is mine. And believe me, I will fight you for
him. You won’t stand a chance, especially since you don’t use
magic.”

She snarled, closed her lighter, and prowled
away like nothing had happened. And I stood there in my doorway,
freezing cold, wondering if I’d ever woken up in the first
place.

After I tossed and turned in my bed for an
hour, I convinced myself that I hadn’t dreamed that. Sophia had
really yelled at Emma. Her blood had really fogged the living room
with purple smoke, and Remi had really threatened to fight me over
Nathan.

Before yesterday, I would’ve wanted to burn
her alive for that stunt. And as I recalled that insane moment at
my door, a part of me wanted to run down to her room and react the
way I should’ve – not mute and restrained. I should’ve at least
told her to get the hell out of my face.

And I wondered what Sophia meant about me
getting hurt. By Lydia Shaw? Her hunters? And then there was the
way that Sophia had treated Emma for doing something less evil than
what I had planned for Sienna and Whitney. She hadn’t asked me to
cleanse. And as I lay there, the idea of washing my soul clean of
all the things that had happened at St. Catalina took over me until
I couldn’t think of anything else.

I was still awake when the sun crept through
my curtains and Sophia came in to clean. “Good morning, love,” she
said. My eyes were open and fixed on the swirling pattern etched in
the bedpost.

She sighed, taking in my mood. “What is it?”
she asked. “Bad night?” I nodded.

She sat on the bed next to my legs, patting
my knee; it felt like a gentle order to talk.

“I heard you with Emma this morning. I saw
the cleansing. I heard you threaten her,” I said, barely
whispering.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, love. Some
things require more intense rituals. I know what you think about
magic, and I’m sure that didn’t help.”

“It wasn’t that, Sophia. It was the other
thing. The thing you said about me. About putting Emma out if she
called attention to me.” She brought her hand to my cheek and
sighed. “You made it seem like I could get hurt from that.”

“Honey, I’m sorry you heard that.” She
stared at me for a long minute, rubbing my face.

“What aren’t you telling me? Is it because
of what I almost did? Would I be in danger of … like … getting my
head cut off by a hunter or something?”

“Oh, no, sweetie,” she crooned. “By hurt I
meant … upset in any way. I promised you that you would have peace
here. I don’t want you worrying about their problems. Emma has
issues to deal with. Paul is spoiled and doesn’t think. And I don’t
even know what to say about Remi. I want you to be happy, and I
worry they will ruin it.”

Oh
. I closed my eyes. I’d missed the
obvious reason.

She didn’t want me to be upset. She knew
what I was like when I was angry. Murderous.

She wanted to protect them from
me
.

“Sophia,” I said, sitting up in a hurry,
ready to spill what I’d ruminated about for hours. “Can you do the
cleansing with me? The candles and all of it? Just like you told
Emma, I need to live in the light.”

She grabbed my hand and rubbed the back of
it with her thumb. I took a deep breath, ready to do magic on
purpose. The creepy, intense magic I’d witnessed earlier. She
surprised me by chuckling.

“You do not need to cleanse. You haven’t
done anything wrong in your entire life,” she said.

“What are you talking about? You saw. That’s
why you came.”

She chuckled again. “You
almost
did
something. You don’t have an ounce of darkness in your heart,
angel. Your challenge is cheering up. My challenge is making sure
that happens. Nothing more.” She pulled at my arms until my head
was on the pillow. I felt like a toddler. I wasn’t tired until
then. “Just sleep, sweetheart. No more talk about cleansing or
magic.”

My eyes fluttered before I could
protest.

I slept past noon, but I wasn’t any more
rested than I had been before. I wanted to believe Sophia knew me
better than I knew myself, but apparently, she couldn’t hear my
mind like I couldn’t hear hers. She didn’t know how close I’d come
before that moment after the fire alarm. The many times I’d wanted
to kill, actually planned it.

She’d missed those sins.

She wouldn’t help me cleanse, but I hadn’t
needed her help to do any of the magic I’d done before. I could try
it on my own.

She called at one, asking if I’d gotten out
of bed and if I’d eaten. I lied about both. I felt bad about it
after, and I went downstairs to make a sandwich.

Remi was sitting on the counter, her back to
the door, with her phone to her ear. “I know,” she said. “It’s
Sophia. She always knows where they are because she tells Emma to
stay away. Before we moved here, she’d call a few times a week to
tell her where not to party. It’s going to be harder to get Emma to
disobey her now, but friends come and go.” She chuckled and turned
around. She smiled and winked her ice-blue eye at me. “I have a new
friend. He’s much better looking and doesn’t have an annoying
accent. I’ll call you back.”

I walked into the kitchen like I hadn’t been
eavesdropping. I made my sandwich in silence. I could feel her eyes
on me. She didn’t mention last night, and I really wanted to forget
about it, so I definitely wasn’t bringing it up.

“Hi, Nathan,” Remi said. I hadn’t heard him
come in. He waved to her.

“Hey, sleepy head,” he said to me. “Did I
keep you up too late?” I shook my head, smiling already. “I had to
do yard work today. It was fun. You missed it.”

He pointed at the bread, and I slid it to
him. He held out his hand. Assuming he wanted the peanut butter I’d
left open, I reached it to him, and he smiled; I’d guessed
right.