Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (17 page)

She pointed to each of his hands, showing me two small spheres of matter that seemed to hover over his bared palms. One was forming into glistening spikes, and I reached up to brush my fingers against the painting.

Glass
… I couldn’t even reach the canvas through the framing that protected it, but it was still speaking to me, the way all of my own forecastings seemed to. I could feel the cool slide of glass against my own palm, and I instantly slid my fingers to the man’s other palm, my eyes wide and my breath stilting in my chest.
Sand
. I could feel the grains slipping through my fingers, and I traced the faint waterfall that fell from his palm, forming a small pile of sand at his feet. When I was done examining him, I turned back to the Brazilian woman and she smiled, revealing deep dimples in each of her bronzed cheeks. She pointed to the second man, who was cloaked all in white, a crystal globe clasped between his paper-white hands.

“The Seer,” she whispered, with a note of reverence to her voice.

I was hesitant to touch the crystal globe, especially under the weight of so much scrutiny, but I was unable to curb the burning thirst for knowledge that sparked in my stomach. I laid my fingers over the glass that separated me from the painting, reaching into the globe with my eyes and experiencing the endless fall of the world mapped out beneath me. The globe was eternity: past, present, and future. It was knowledge, fortune, destiny, and death.

I quickly pulled my hand away, trying to hide the shake that now seized my wrist. This time it was the woman on my right who spoke, her tone made somewhat more casual by an Australian accent.

“The Elementalist,” she pointed at the third man, who was dressed in a cloak of flames, with water dripping from his fingers.

I glanced back and forth from the Seer to the Elementalist as my fingers brushed over the cool evidence of water and shied away from the heat of the flames. My forecasting had evidently come from the Seer, and my valcrick from the Elementalist. It was strange for me to gaze upon the two and feel the brush of their power as though it still lived. It dwarfed what was inside me.

“And the Reader,” the Australian woman added with a note of finality, as though the fifth man didn’t exist inside the painting.

I passed my eyes over the fourth man: he looked remarkably normal, his cloak threadbare and his lips tilted in a knowing way. He seemed mischievous, unlike the others. I heard the whisperings of voices when I touched above the folds of his cloak. That was where Jayden and Weston got their powers from. I imagined that in modern times, they might have called this man the Mentalist.

“What about him?” I asked nobody in particular, pointing to the last man. His skin had a blueish sheen, the veins visible beneath the surface. His eyes were dark, too dark, and there was blood dripping from his fingers the same way the water had dripped from the fingers of the Elementalist.

“The Dead Man,” a male voice said from directly behind me. Another Australian accent. I turned to find the smiling Atmá of the two women. Now that he was standing closer, I could see the faint mark that marred his forehead beneath his tan. He nodded toward the fifth man. “Other than the Seer,” he said, “the power of the Dead Man is the least common manifestation of Atmá magic. It’s the power over life and death.”

“But more often death,” the Japanese man corrected, his tone deep and final. Clearly, he didn’t want the subject discussed any more than the Australian woman did.

“Welcome to the Komnata, Lela,” the man still standing behind me bowed lightly, sweeping his hand toward an empty chair. “Thank you for accepting our invitation. My name is Jack. Why don’t you join us for tea?”

“My name is Seraph. Er, Seraph Black. It’s the name my mother gave me.” I walked toward the chair numbly, my eyes swinging back to the portrait even after I had taken a seat. Jayden moved to sit on the arm of my chair, and Weston lingered in the open doorway, his arms crossed over his broad chest, the mosquito net buffering against his back.

“It has taken substantial effort to get you here, Seraph.” The woman who was close to Weston’s age spoke, sitting back into her chair and crossing her legs as she regarded me, brushing a silky strand of brown hair from her face.

Some of the others also took or re-took their seats, leaving only the paired women standing together, and the Japanese Atmá standing against the wall to my side, her pair at her back.

I merely nodded, unsure how much I could trust these people. Nobody had actually ever said anything negative to me about the Klovoda—only it’s Director, and Weston. Now Kingsling was gone, and only his council remained. Still, the guys had put themselves at risk again and again to keep me from this meeting.

Not forever
, I reminded myself.
Just until I was ready
.

“Well…” The brunette spoke up again, casting a glance toward Weston. “We’re glad that you’re finally here. My name is Yas. This is Alice,” she indicated the Japanese woman, “and her pair, Takeo and Adie.”

Adie—the giant red-headed man—bared his teeth in a grin as wide as he was when his name was spoken.

“You’ve met Jack,” she pointed to the Australian man, “and his pair, Sophie and Sophia.”

I snapped my eyes to the two different women, trying to hold back my amusement at their names. The Brazilian one rolled her eyes at me.

“They call us
the Sophies
,” she said.

“These two gentlemen,” Yas continued, indicating the two dark-skinned men and saving me from a reply, “are Nahab and Obasi. Of course, you’ve met Jayden, we should have known that he would be the one to bring you in. He is the oldest of the test subjects, after all, and you are the youngest. I’m surprised your twin hasn’t made contact with you yet: the two of you were very close when you were younger.”

“We were?” I asked tonelessly. If anything proved that the Klovoda was naive to the messenger’s true identity, it was Yas’s casual mention of him, which meant that the messenger didn’t trust them.

Did that make them my allies
? I wasn’t sure.

“You certainly were,” Yas confirmed with a smile, apparently overjoyed to know this simple fact about me. “Never went anywhere without each other. No matter how big of a room we gave him, we’d always find him in a sleeping bag on the floor beside your bed every morning. Have those memories been returned to you yet?”

She switched her attention to Jayden with that last question, but I spoke before Jayden could answer, giving a definitive “no” that echoed about the room sharply.

“Of course.” By Yas’s tone, I would assume that she was trying to soothe over my agitation, but I wouldn’t be soothed.

I stood, moving away from Jayden, away from Weston, away from Yas—who kept sneaking glances at Weston as though she needed approval for each question. The female pair melted away as I walked back to the painting, and I stared up at it, touching my fingers against the plain man. The Reader.

“Jayden was the one to take my memories?” I asked without looking away from the painting.

“Yes.” Jayden surprised me by being the one to answer. “I was only learning my powers at that age, as were you. Frankly, I’m surprised it worked.”

It worked better than it should have
. Maybe that was because I
wanted
to believe in what he had given me. A real family; a mother and father; a house instead of wherever they had been keeping me.

“Will my memories be returned to me?” I asked, my eyes still on the painting, my tone still sharp.

“Yes, yes, of course—” Yas hastened to smooth the way again, but I quickly cut across her.

“How can I trust what he puts inside my head? I know who he is. People outside of the Klovoda call him the hypnotist—he couldn’t sound any less trustworthy if he tried. If he wanted to, he could seriously mess with my mind. I’ve seen the result of his
hypnotism
. It’s convincing. How can I trust him to touch my head and fill it with the truth?”

I chose not to mention that he had already returned some of my memories to me. The last thing I needed was to announce to Weston and the Klovoda that I was the Voda heir.

“I’ll order him to return the truth to you,” Weston said lazily. He seemed to be bored of the meeting already, which was odd, since he had been the one to insist on it.
Hadn’t he?
“That’s my power, after all.”

I rolled my eyes, glad that nobody could see my face. I wondered what Weston would do if he realised that his power didn’t work on Jayden. He seemed to trust Jayden—certainly more than he trusted his own sons. Although Jayden
had
proved remarkably good at collecting information and locking it away.

“Fine,” I said, turning away from the painting. “Go ahead.”

Jayden laughed, his mismatched eyes sparkling in genuine amusement. “Come here, sit. I’m sorry if there are gaps in what I can give back to you… I was so young.”

Gaps
… I could only guess which parts would be blacked out, and I highly doubted that they were due to a lack of skill-refinement. I ground my teeth together, moving to sit back on the chair. Jayden turned his torso slightly, laying his hand over the top of my head, making me feel like an errant child.

“I want you to remember…” he murmured.

And I did.

I remembered my own young reflection, and the pink-painted walls of my room in the hospital.
Hollow Ground Medical Centre
. One day I needed to question one of the Zevs about the significance of ‘Hollow Ground,’ since they kept naming all of their institutions after it.

I remembered the sound of Jayden’s laugh as he ran down a corridor out of my sight, my favourite toy clutched to his chest; and the beautiful face of a red-headed girl, Eva. The fourth test subject. I remembered my twin, too. I remembered him with a warm, tender feeling in my chest. I
loved
him; he protected me and kept me company. He was the only one who didn’t look at me as though I were a lab experiment.
Wonderkid
, Jayden had called me. Eva had called me the same thing.
Wonderkid
. They were test subjects, and I was
Wonderkid
. But my brother, my twin… he just called me Lela. I remembered everything but his face and name, and that didn’t surprise me in the least, because Jayden hadn’t kept his identity from me all this time just to reveal everything now.

“Can I sleep in here, Lela?”

I felt a tug on the leg of my pajama pants and I rolled over groggily, seeing my brother by my bedside. I couldn’t seem to focus properly on his face, but I could see his small fingers clutched around the flannel cloth of my pants. I nodded sleepily, and I knew that he smiled, though I couldn’t make it out behind the fuzzy details of his face. He bent and pulled out the sleeping bag that was stored under my bed just for him, rolling it out on the floor and settling comfortably into it.

“Does it still hurt?” I mumbled, coming more awake and finding my voice.

He sighed, and I took that for the answer it was.

“You should tell them,” I urged gently, leaning over the bed to look down at him. “They can help you.”

“It’s a bad power, Lela. It does bad things. I’ll get in trouble. I’ll just look after you instead. That can be my other power. I can have two powers!”

I giggled at his silliness, though I was still scared for him beneath it all. I would always be scared for him. “Just… tell them if it gets worse.”

He was too quiet after that, and awareness settled into me with a sickening heaviness that made my head spin.

It had already gotten worse, and he wasn’t telling me.

Soon… soon… it would destroy him.

The image of my hospital bedroom faded away to be replaced by another; the walls melted into a puddle of pink, only to pull back up again and fade to white, backing away from me and sharpening into the four, flat walls of an empty room.

There was a mirror on one side, and I knew that Weston, Dominic, and the others were behind it.
He
was also there. My twin. He had been growing jealous of the way the adults treated me, and he had stopped confiding in me about his ability. My pet bunny had even turned up dead, her heart suspiciously halted in her chest as though she had simply decided to stop existing… and while I hadn’t brought it up with
him
, I knew that my twin was responsible for it. It was his ability after all. It caused the worry to twist inside of me; twisting and morphing, until nothing about this existence of ours seemed simple anymore.

“Lela… concentrate please.” The voice crackled over the intercom and into the room, causing my mouth to twist just like my stomach.

I hunched my shoulders a little bit, but did what they wanted me to do. I turned to a blank wall and held out my hand, furrowing my brow in concentration. The valcrick slithered down my arm, sparking a familiar warmth in my chest and unravelling some of the knots that held me prisoner. I felt the coat of guilt fall from my shoulders, and I held out my other hand, tilting my face up to the ceiling and closing my eyes. The sparks didn’t attack the wall as I had expected them to; instead, they wormed their way up my arms and over my shoulders, gradually embracing my trembling body.

I knew that the doctors and Klovoda representatives on the other side of the mirror would be whispering and gasping and scribbling their notes, but I didn’t care about them anymore. The valcrick eased my sorrow over the pet rabbit, invading my emotions like a vapor and carrying them away, leaving nothing but simple fact. I wasn’t simply healing myself, because I wasn’t hurt in the physical sense… it was something different. Something that went beyond me. The valcrick was a part of something bigger, a power that merely lent itself to me, and it wanted to ease me.

I felt connected.

“Describe what you’re feeling please, Lela,” the crackly voice demanded, severing my ethereal moment.