Watercolour Smile (13 page)

“You only get one question,” he muttered, nudging my face to the side and hovering his mouth over my neck. “Dare.”

“Smash. Paperweight.” Forming a proper sentence wasn’t possible with the imminent threat of his mouth on my skin.

He tipped me backwards as he reached behind me. He felt for one of the paperweights and then fell back again. I could feel the cold glass against my back as his mouth finally fastened onto my neck. I arched against him, my fingers moving to the back of his neck, pressing into his skin. I heard the thump of the paperweight as it dropped out of his hand and then his hands pushed under my camisole to settle around my waist. He lifted me slightly, heaving me close enough that my chest was crushed against his. His breathing changed, his hands on my waist constricted, and I tilted my head back as his mouth moved down to my collarbone. There were wings of enkindled valcrick spluttering about, winking at me and zapping my body in tiny pinches that made me catch my breath. The static in the air drew tightly around us and the ceiling light suddenly exploded, a rain of sparks falling from the fixture, momentarily lighting the room before sending us into sudden darkness.

“Tell me to stop, Seraph.” His words came out on the point of a breathless grumble. “Tell me to kiss you. Tell me to stop touching you. Tell me that you hate me, or that you want me. I can’t stand this purgatory.” His hands were constricting so tightly that the fingers of his opposite hands were almost touching, and it was bordering on too painful, but the feel of his tongue sweeping over the rise of my collarbone turned the sting into a rush.

“Silas…” I released his name on a breath and his lips lifted back up to my mouth, hovering but not touching. He was giving a rare glimpse into his mind, and it was more intoxicating than the alcohol that I had consumed. I wanted more of his words. I wanted to drink whatever truth he had, just to taste it, to know that he had offered it to me willingly.

He groaned. “Say it.”

I was saved when a knock sounded at the door. Silas froze and the knock sounded again, more insistent. He stood and turned, setting me gently onto the edge of the bed before taking several long strides to the door and pulling it open.

The lights were on outside and I could see Hunter clearly beyond the outline of Silas. She blinked in surprise—despite the fact that she had been knocking on his door—and ran her eyes slowly over him before glancing past him. The room was too dark for her to make out details, so she quickly shifted her attention back.

“Hunter.” He was toneless. “I’m sorry I pushed you.”

“You’ve done worse.” She smiled for a moment, but her lips trembled. “Can I come in?”

“I’ve got company.”

She tried to look past him again but he stepped further into the doorway, closing it halfway behind him.

“I shouldn’t have called.” He sounded resigned. “It was just… habit.”

“Is it the girl? God, Si, she’s like seventeen or something.”

“I’m aware.”

“I had no idea.”

“There’s nothing to have an idea about, Hunter. I’m just…”

“You’re just fucking a seventeen-year-old?” She spat. She seemed to regret it as soon as she said it, and she stepped back, running her hands through her hair.

“That’s enough,” Silas said, taking another step out the door and inching it closed even more. “She’s in a bit of a situation right now and I’m helping her. I can’t deal with two women at once.”

“Women aren’t things that you
deal
with,
zalupa!
No matter…” Her voice drew further away in a flurry of angry Russian-sounding words. I heard a car door slam, and then Silas was closing and locking the door again.

He switched on the bathroom light and then came back out, drawing his hands through his hair in frustration. I still hadn’t moved from where he had set me, and I had a hand pressed to my mouth. The room was a blur, but his face was clear.

I was drunk and he had lost control.

“Welcome to Wonderland,” I said, slumping back onto the bed.

He half-scoffed, half-laughed, and then the light was cut off as he closed the bathroom door. A moment later the shower started up and I climbed up to the pillows. I pulled off my shoes and socks and slid between the bedding, falling into a deep, dizzy sleep.

When I awoke the next morning I felt like there was a weight on my head, holding me down. I struggled to sit up, and saw Silas on the couch, his long legs propped up on the coffee table, his head tilted back. He was surrounded by fallen cards and broken shards of glass. I clutched at my head as I tiptoed to the bathroom and closed the door, shucking my clothes and huddling in the shower. The pressure on my brain turned to a dull thudding and then finally morphed into a full-blown headache. I groaned, resting my head against the tiles.

With a father like Gerald, it surprised me that I had allowed myself to drink so much. Perhaps I simply associated Silas with alcohol, since he always seemed to be sitting in a bar, though I had never seem him drunk.

Had he been drunk last night
?

I wrapped a towel around myself and stumbled back to bed, hunting down my phone and checking it to make sure that Tariq hadn’t called to find out where we were. He hadn’t, and I was too relieved that I could go back to sleep to think twice about what else the lack of communication could mean. I tied my towel tighter, covered it with a blanket, and descended back into unconsciousness.

A knocking at the door woke me up the second time, and I grumbled something, pulling the blanket over my head. I heard the sound of broken glass being ground under booted feet, Silas swearing, and then the door opening.

“…Few more hours.” I heard his voice, and I piled another pillow over my head to block it out.

The door closed and then the bed dipped, and I went back to sleep again, glad that Silas had abandoned the couch. We slept for most of the day, and the sun had begun to set by the time he shook me awake. I sat up suddenly, my head tender but clear of pain. I reached for my phone again, something niggling at the back of my mind.

“Tariq hasn’t called,” I said, dialling his number.

“Seph?” he answered after a few rings. “How’s the king of the underworld?”

“The what?” I flopped back down, relieved to hear that he sounded fine.

“Silas. Cabe called me to say that he had a freak-out and you followed him to Portland.”

“King of the Underworld?” I laughed.

“Don’t you dare tell him that I called him that.”

“He’s really not that bad.”

“Hmm, so what are you doing in Portland then?”

I glanced over at Silas, who was propped up on one arm, unabashedly listening to my conversation. There was a hint of a smile at the edges of his mouth and his hair was sleep-tousled, his dark eyes fixed on me as I struggled with what to say. I needed to tell Tariq about Gerald, but now wasn’t the time. I didn’t even know what to say, because I hadn’t heard anything back from Quillan about the Zev he had sent to check out the house.

“I’ll tell you everything when we get back,” I finally said. “See you tonight.”

I hung up and Silas got up from the bed. “Get ready.” He moved toward the bathroom and then came back out to drop my clothes onto the end of the bed before going back in and calling out through the closed door, “We’re leaving in ten minutes. I need another shower, and then I’ll feel human again.”

I waited until the shower started up before crawling out from beneath the blankets and abandoning the towel that I wore in favour of my clothes from the day before. They smelled like tequila, and it made my head spin unpleasantly, but I pushed past it. The hotel room was an absolute mess, and I gathered up the cards, carefully avoiding all of the broken glass. I microwaved the food from the night before that we hadn’t eaten and curled up onto the couch to stuff as much of it down as I could manage in the ten minutes allotted to me.

Silas got out of the shower looking a little worse-for-wear, with dark shadows smudged beneath his eyes and a flicker of wariness in his expression. He shook his head when I held out the plastic container of noodles and then sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the couch.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For… all of it.”

“I don’t think there was any damage done. I opened most of the windows downstairs before we left.”

He quirked a brow as a brief moment of surprise passed over him, warming my chest with an even briefer feeling of accomplishment. “You did?”

“Yeah.” I grinned. “Turns out I’m not as silly as I look…” I paused, the fork falling from my mouth, my whole body going slack. “Oh my god. I painted… I painted the house burning down! The day I met Noah and Cabe…”

“But that was months ago.” He sounded perplexed, and I couldn’t blame him. The time frame that my paintings followed from conception to reality seemed to be wholly unreliable.

“Yeah.” I frowned, setting the container aside. “Empty… the house was supposed to be empty. I remember feeling that the whole painting was empty.” I shook my head, standing to clear up the food containers. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

We cleaned up the hotel room as best we could and Silas went to settle the damages with the front office as I got into the BMW. He told me to start driving, so I did, assuming that he’d catch up to me sooner or later. I dialled Quillan and put the phone in my lap once I was back on the road.

“I assumed everything was fine,” he answered by way of greeting, “since there were no emergencies called into the Kenton police department last night, and you didn’t call back.”

“Are you holding up a finger right now?”

“If you were here, I would be.”

“I’m sorry, Miro.”

“No you’re not.”

A laugh escaped me and I quickly covered the phone, but I was pretty sure that he heard it anyway. “Sorry,” I repeated.

“You didn’t mean it that time either.” His tone had softened.

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“You already owe me, remember?”

“So now I owe you double. But I’m keeping one of them because you conveniently left out how Hunter usually calms Silas down.”

“It’s not entirely what you think, Seph. Silas could have hurt someone, and Hunter knows what she she’s getting herself into whenever we call her to calm him down. You don’t, or didn’t—we couldn’t risk you being the one to confront him.”

“Well… I’ll admit. It was an experience.”

“How did you do it?”

“We drank tequila and played truth or dare.”

He barked out a laugh. “What? Are you serious? Where the hell did you find a high-school party in Kenton?”

“Very funny, but the joke is on you, Bossman, because it worked.”

“You were in way over your head, weren’t you, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” I admitted with a sigh. “It was terrifying. Miro?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t think we can make the it back tonight. I need to be with Tariq for a little bit.” There was no way that I was leaving Tariq behind this time, but I decided to broach that subject later. “Will we… I mean… is there a body for a funeral?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, on the edge of saying more, but seemed to decide against it.

“What about the two guys?”

“They were dead.” He said it tonelessly, but I knew that he hadn’t been planning on telling me unless I asked. “They asphyxiated with the rope tied too tightly and gas leaking all over the house.”

My fingers on the steering wheel tingled with shock, and I quickly pulled over when I saw the wings of light. Whatever this valcrick was, it wasn’t harmless. I jerked on the handbrake and set my hands on my thighs, breathing deeply.

“He killed them.” My voice broke. “He…”

“We’ve had the surveillance cameras taken out and all of the evidence cleared,” Quillan said cautiously. “The police might start investigating, and I assume that it will lead them back to the two dead guys, but considering what they were involved in, it’s not entirely surprising that they’ve suddenly disappeared.”

“They’re dead,” I repeated numbly. Two more people that I had held the power to save. Two more lives that I had failed. “I should have done something. I could have cut them loose.”

“I don’t think Silas actually meant to kill them,” Quillan admitted. “He was probably expecting their backup to arrive and find them like that. We all watched the surveillance tapes from yesterday and he had it all set up for someone to find. He wanted to send them a message, scare the crap out of them…” he trailed off, and I realised that he was holding back.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Seph…”

“Just tell me.”

He sighed, and I knew that he was scrubbing at his face. I could hear the rustle of fabric against the mouthpiece of his phone. “Silas was right. More people did arrive. They didn’t set the two guys free, though. They left them there to die, and set fire to the house.”

A chill crept through me. “W-what do you mean? Y-you said that there was still a body to bury?”

“They set the fire in your father’s room. We have half a body. The Zev that we had on standby called the fire department and they got to it in time.”

That made it a little better, but only a little bit. Silas hadn’t
meant
to kill them.

A car pulled up behind me and I picked up the phone, turning it off speaker. “I have to go, Quillan.”

“Did you just call me Quillan?”

“Ah, yeah. Sorry. That’s what I call you in my head,” I muttered absently. I was watching Silas in my rear-view mirror as he got out of the car behind me and walked around to my window.

“At least you don’t call me Bossman in your head,” he said as Silas tapped on my window.

I rolled it down. Silas reached through and plucked the phone from my fingers. He glanced at the screen, saw
Miro Quillan
, and put the phone to his ear.

“She’s supposed to be driving, you know.”

I snatched the phone back in time to hear Quillan’s answer, “Why, Grandma, what big teeth you have!”

Despite everything that we had just discussed, despite everything that had happened the night before, despite the kiss, and Hunter, and Gerald… I found myself laughing. “It’s me again.”

“Ah, you survived another encounter with the wolf. I’ll say goodbye now, before he huffs and puffs and blows up the car.”