No Love for the Wicked (18 page)

His fist tightened at my neck, cutting off my air supply. The female shriek cut through the air again. Father turned instantly to the door. For a moment, I was forgotten. He released me. I crumpled to the floor, heaving for air. I twisted to look at the door. Who was that woman?

Father was on top of me before the burn in my lungs even began to heal. He held me on the floor by the hair, his face more savage than I thought possible.

I didn’t want to read his thoughts and tried hard to block out the images, but still I saw. Power. He always wanted more. It was why he’d had children in the first place. The more people who
carried our bloodline, the more powerful he and my uncles would be. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. So he’d started bringing other supernaturals to the estate, experimenting on them, trying to strengthen his power by harnessing their abilities. He’d take their blood and try to infuse it into his own, or he’d use his telekinesis to draw out their energies until they were completely drained of life. As he held me down, the importance of his experiments grew even clearer in his mind. One day he would succeed in killing me, and the strength of my power would be gone. He couldn’t be certain how my death would affect his abilities. He needed another way to grow the Kelch power.

But it wasn’t working. The woman behind the door was nearly drained, should have died weeks ago. In fact, he’d told Uncle Max that she was already dead. But he’d kept her alive. This one, this Marlena, he refused to let go.

“You will forget you ever found this place,” he hissed into my face. “You will never return, never speak of it, never picture it, never think of it ever again. You think you’ve suffered? You do not know of suffering. But you will. If you so much as consider returning here, any reprieve you have ever experienced will vanish. Your life is nothing. Speak, and it will be nothing but suffering.”

Eyes stretched wide, I nodded as best as I could with his grip so tight in my hair. I could feel blood trickle from my scalp. His face tightened. His thoughts slammed shut to me, but not before I caught one last glimpse: he was afraid his brothers would discover this secret place and the prisoner he kept here. He didn’t love her—I don’t think he was actually capable of an emotion like that—but he was obsessed with her. He wanted to keep her despite his brothers’ demands that all the supernaturals brought here be killed after he was done experimenting on them. And now I knew.

Pain. Piercing, all-encompassing, and right in my heart. I hunched on instinct and could see the handle sticking out of my
chest. He’d stabbed me with his favorite blade—the one with the special engraving on it. Now he was twisting it into my heart. I gasped. A surge of power flew out of me. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried, not with this much pain cutting through me. Dark light filled the corridor. His hair blew back from the powerful impact of energy, but he held on tight to my hair and his knife. He wouldn’t let go until the life in my eyes was completely gone.

A soft whine came from behind the closed double doors. I closed my eyes. I would suffer now; I knew it. I would die and come back just as I’d done dozens of times before. Then my suffering would really begin. It didn’t matter what Father said, whether I spoke or thought of this corridor again. I knew his secret now. And for that, I would pay again and again.

I took a long, slow drink of whiskey and stared out at the falling snow from the front window in the farmhouse’s great room. Secrets and power. That was the essence of my father’s existence. I could so easily remember the details of my torture sessions, the gut-wrenching anticipation of knowing I was about to be found in one of my hiding places or the humiliation of my father’s continued hatred. Those things had been so much the norm in my life that recalling them was nothing more than a matter of fact.

But other memories remained hidden in my mind. Secrets. Like the hallway or the woman—things that I truly hadn’t thought about until tonight, when I knew in the next few days I’d be approaching another guarded door that Father didn’t want breached. What kinds of secrets would I stumble upon this time?

I finished off my whiskey and headed to bed.
Don’t think about it.
Speculating wouldn’t accomplish anything. Maybe there
wouldn’t be anything there anyway. Just a list of meeting minutes like Chang was hoping for.

But something inside me knew it would be more than that. Otherwise, why would the thought of sneaking up to Father’s office make me feel the same bone-deep dread that I had felt so long ago that day in the green corridor?

The golden island of my dream had grown to include trees and grasses. The bloody lake stretched farther as well, disappearing into the distance where I’d never thought to look before. I knelt down, and my twin was there, smiling up at me. I touched my fingers to the blood, and her smile widened, calming some of the uneasiness that hovered here tonight.

I had gone to bed worrying about tomorrow’s mission and being near Father again, but now that I was here, dreaming, my thoughts turned to my dream man. Where was he?

“Hello, Magnolia.”

I spun around and saw him approaching from farther inland. He strolled, hands in the pockets of his slacks, eyeing me cautiously.

“You are part of my dream,” I said quickly. “A part of me. You are in my head because my subconscious needed an image to go along with some lingering, fucked-up need to keep ties to my family. That’s all.”

He hesitated. “As you said before, you are more than the others of your bloodline, Magnolia. You can recognize a lie when you hear it, no matter how much you want that lie to be truth.”

The blood of the lake churned. A light breeze ruffled the trees along the shoreline.

“Who are you?” I said, ignoring the tremble of my voice.

The man smiled sadly. “No one who is going to hurt you, Magnolia.”

“Then why are you here? What do you want from me?”

Waves started to crash against the shore. The breeze grew stronger and whipped my hair around my face. I glanced down, and my hands had shifted again.
Good.

“I’m here because I recognized your power.” He kept his hands in his pockets, his face calm. “I wanted to get to know you. Being near you, even in your dreams, it makes me feel…good. I like you.” He was making an obvious effort to be nonthreatening. I didn’t buy it.

“You look like my father and uncles. You’re from them, aren’t you? They’ve sent you to find me. Well, you can just go to hell. Because I’ve already done my time, and there’s no way you’re taking me back.”

My words were slurred as my teeth grew in number. I crouched down with my clawed hands ready.

His eyes flared red like the last time. “I am not here to hurt you, Magnolia.” He spoke with precise enunciation. “I am not from your father or your uncles. They don’t have the power to be here with you. You know that.”

“Then who are you?”

He slowly took a step forward, his red eyes locked on mine. “You said you had the ability to trust and to be trusted. Well, prove it. You and I have shared many conversations in this dream place of yours. Never once have I tried to hurt you or manipulate you in any way. I simply want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“You manipulated me by lying about who you really are. I thought I’d made you up.”

“That was completely unintentional. I assumed you had realized from the beginning that I was alive outside your mind.”

He stopped a few feet away from me. I remembered our previous encounters. He’d looked and acted so much like my family, but with an interest in me instead of hatred. Slowly I straightened. He nodded toward the bloody shoreline, where the waves had started to calm.

“I believe she’s trying to tell you something,” he said.

I glanced down at my reflection and saw for the first time that my twin wasn’t smiling. Instantly, I dropped to my knees. “What did you do to her?”

“I’ve done nothing,” he insisted, still staying back several feet, giving me space. “She is a part of you, and I’ve told you, I have no desire to hurt you in any way.”

I touched my fingertips to the blood’s surface. My claws vanished the moment I thought them away. My twin raised her hand as she always did, as if she could touch her fingertips to mine. But then she turned her hand so her palm was flat underneath the surface.

I recognized the scar immediately. It had been branded into my own flesh time and time again for as long as I could remember. Two Xs, one over the other, with the sides linked by a curved line, making the mark seem more like a butterfly than a brand. All of Father’s older tools—the ones Grandmother had used on Father, Max, and Mallroy when they were boys—had the emblem, the maker’s mark from whomever had custom-made the torture instruments before I was even born.

I looked at my twin as she lowered her hand again. “Did Father have you tortured before killing you?” I asked out loud. “Even as an infant?”

A moment passed, and her serious expression faded. She smiled again, just as I always thought she should.

I turned back to the mystery man. He was gone. I looked all around the golden landscape and out over the red lake, but he was nowhere. Turning back to my twin, I knelt down again and played my fingers back along the blood. She smiled that wide smile once more.

“Why the hell is Cordele leaving me messages about seeing a movie?”

Heather laughed. “How many times do I have to tell you? She wants to hang out with you. It’s not that big of a deal.”

Pacing the living room floor, I had my cell phone in one hand and my whiskey in the other. I’d tried everything to distract myself from my dream and from the gala that was only a few hours away. Replaying Cordele’s message over and over had turned into the favorite pastime of the hour. “Are you going to the movie too?”

“I wasn’t invited,” Heather said.

The idea of just hanging out with Cordele still didn’t sit well with me. I got that she had been trying to be friendlier since I’d returned, but she’d kept her thoughts so focused on random nonsense, it didn’t make sense. I mean, if she was sincere, she’d want me to see it in her thoughts. Right?

“You should do it,” Heather added. “I’ve always gone to more movies with my girlfriends than I do with Jon. Even before we were ever boyfriend-girlfriend.”

I stopped pacing. “Is that what you call him? Your boyfriend?”

She chuckled again. “I guess so. I mean, I’m thirty-one years old, so saying I have a boyfriend feels a little stupid, but it’s the easiest way to describe our relationship to people. I suppose I could say significant other, but that’s kind of a mouthful.”

Hmm.
I started pacing again. “So this Cordele movie thing—you really think I should do it?”

“I told you she wanted to get to know you better. It could be fun.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Are you ready for tonight?” Her voice grew softer. My stomach clenched.

“I still have a few hours before I have to get ready.”

“Well, I better get going. I don’t have a fancy dress to wear or anything, and I still have to get the surveillance stuff together. Try to get some rest this afternoon, OK? Tonight is going to be fine. Jon’s confident, and so is Thirteen. I’ll call you tomorrow, regular time.”