Watercolour Smile (15 page)

“In a place I’m not comfortable revealing to strangers,” I finally said.

“Hmm…” He stroked his chin with a broad-fingered hand, casting his gaze over me, examining my neck, my arms, my wrists. There was a tempered frown spiking at the edges of his mouth and he raised a hand. A moment later, the man with mismatched eyes was jogging down the hill. He stopped beside us. “Jayden.” Weston’s voice was almost a growl. “I want to see her mark.”

Jayden turned his smirk on me and I stumbled back a step. The fear spiked in me, breaking through my barricade, and that was all it took to bring the others down the hill. Silas and Quillan moved first, followed by Noah and Cabe. My brother trailed behind, hesitantly. Anger flashed in Weston’s eyes, but he focussed back on me. I wasn’t lifting my shirt, so I assumed that Jayden was holding back for the moment—probably at the approach of the others.

“Father.” Quillan sounded calm, despite the fact that they had all come rushing to us. “I think that’s enough. You’re frightening her.”

“How would you know?” Weston pulled himself to his full height, rounding out his shoulders and setting his narrowed eyes onto Quillan’s face, full of accusation.

“She just jumped away from you.” Quillan’s tone suggested that his answer was obvious. “And you called Jayden down—everyone’s scared of him.”

“Very well.
Silas
.” Weston’s eyes flashed to Silas for the first time. “Come here.”

“
No
.” Quillan cut both of his hands through the air, a sharp and desperate motion. “Don’t do this here. You’ve been trying to get us back all this time, don’t ruin it now, Weston. If you do this, we won’t
ever
come back.”

Weston said nothing, and I watched as Silas stepped forward, coming to stand beside me. He radiated tension, his fists clenched by his sides, his wild eyes brimming with burning hatred. I wondered why he obeyed, but I wasn’t able to hold the thought for long, because Weston held out a hand and Jayden passed him a knife.

Silas glanced sideways at me and then quickly refocussed on his father. He opened his mouth to say something, but Weston cut him off.

“No talking,” Weston said easily.

Silas’s words choked off, his jaw working like he was grinding his teeth. I glanced back at Quillan, fear seizing up the base of my neck. He met my eyes and shook his head incrementally. I returned my attention to the knife; it had a black leather handle and a serrated edge. It was also approximately the size of my forearm. I wondered how Jayden had been hiding it. Weston held the same horrible smile as before, and he stepped toward his son. I stumbled back out of instinct, but a hand caught my arm, holding me steady. It was Noah, and judging by the way his fingers were biting into me, the terror threatening to break through my turbulent self-control was justified.

“Brace yourself.” Noah curved over me, his words stirring lowly against my ear, gritted out in a barely-there whisper.

Why my mind chose that moment to remember the way Tabby had slapped me after I told her that I was bonded to Silas and Quillan, I had no idea, but it made what Weston was about to do blindingly clear. I re-fortified that precious wall around my mind and reached blindly for Noah’s arm. I gripped him tightly and set my jaw in a painful clench as Weston took a step toward Silas, his cerulean gaze touching upon parts of him in an examination that felt oddly clinical.

I had expected him to attack slowly, menacingly—or else wind his arm back and perform a dramatic slash… but he was smarter than that. Or… perhaps he was crueller than that. His arm was an abrupt blur of movement. One minute he was staring at Silas, and the next, the button fastening Silas’s suit jacket together popped off as his jacket parted, falling open. A thick red stain was spreading over his light-blue shirt, and he stood tall and silent throughout it. The pain crashed over me in a wave, rolling me around and threatening to shove me under. Darkness flitted over my vision and my hand twitched, aching to cradle my stomach. Instead, I swallowed my howl of pain and stood as tall as Silas, clinging to my mental barricade as though it were the only thing keeping me together. Weston watched me throughout the process—ignoring his son completely—his expression unreadable. I wasn’t sure what emotion—if any—was displayed on my face, but from the way his eyes darkened with a brief flash of annoyance, I assumed that it wasn’t what he wanted to see. He frowned at Silas and then slowly, his eyes moved to Noah, travelling down his arm to where I clutched him in a white-knuckled grip.

“Noah.” He sounded surprised.

We all turned to look at Noah, and Noah grimaced, gently extracting himself from me. Weston gestured to him and he stepped forward. I expected arguments to spring up, but Quillan and Cabe seemed too shocked to react, and Silas was facing the other way.

As soon as Noah reached Weston, Silas suddenly gasped and fell back, shoving trembling hands through his hair like he had been released from some kind of spell. My eyes traced his staggering steps backwards, until his shoulder bumped into Quillan’s, and then I finally saw his face. There was a whiteness around the pinched corners of his mouth, and his dark eyes were full of pain, though it didn’t seem to be the same kind of pain that was still reverberating through me. It was not a pain born from bruises and cuts—despite the fact that he was now in serious need of an ambulance. It was a remembered pain: the kind of shell-shocked trauma that rushed back to a person in moments of repeated abuse.

I knew the look.

I had worn it for most of my life.

I was moving to Silas before I could stop myself, my hand curling around his arm. I needed to do something. I needed to get him to a hospital,
or kill his father
…

Instead, I tried to calm down my mind, frightened that the hot slick of agony that crawled over my stomach, or the clawing of despair that clogged the back of my throat would peek through at any moment and Weston would be able to feel it all. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the fact that Noah was now in the same position that Silas had been in. I couldn’t watch it happen again, and it would be easier to not flinch at Noah’s reaction if I didn’t watch. I pulled out a random memory, my last desperate attempt to stay in control. With my eyes screwed tightly shut, I could control the urge to scream, though I suspected that the blood loss was already reaching a dangerous point, because my head was swimming and my body felt faint. The images flickered before my closed eyes in a scratchy, flawed movie reel. They were random moments of happiness, distorted and replayed, stunted and skipped, but it was the best I could do with the pain still rocking through me. I heard the tinkling of my mother’s laugh and watched Tariq score his first goal. I felt the raw swill of soil sinking between my toes, and allowed the memory of sunlight kissing along my skin to warm me from the inside. I didn’t even realise that the valcrick had risen to the surface until it surged, in a tottering kind of rush, down my arms.

Winking lights teased the seam of my closed eyelids and I peeled my eyes open as spidery white veins crawled over my hands to Silas’s arm, delicately straining toward his torso. The spindly filaments seemed to move with a kind of hesitant innocence that made inexplicable fondness lurch within my chest. Silas sucked in a sharp breath and I double-checked to make sure that no dangerous thoughts had leaked through.

I realised that everyone was staring at us in utter stupefaction, and so I closed my eyes again, sinking into Silas’s side. They were fascinated with the valcrick, and I didn’t care, so long as it distracted Weston from using his knife again. Silas made another noise beside me, sagging slightly next to me, leaning his weight onto Quillan. I opened my eyes again. The valcrick had formed a golden web over the blood-soaked material that stuck to his stomach, but more than that… the material had thin wisps of smoke curling away from it.

I jumped away from him, surprised, and the web disintegrated, unravelling from him in dusty, bespeckled patches that fell halfway to the ground and then winked into nothing. Silas straightened and pulled at his shirt, ripping some of the buttons to part it. I stared at the straight, irritated red scar that puckered over his stomach. Blood was caking into the muscles that ridged his torso, but it looked like the wound had been sealed.

“Huh,” I muttered, shocked.

Weston stepped around Noah and clicked his fingers, muttering a word beneath his breath. Instantly, every person around us melted away. They moved too fast for me to stop any of them. I glanced backwards as my pairs jumped into one of their cars and Weston’s group hovered at the very edges of the car park. Tariq, I noticed, remained.

“W-what?” Tariq spluttered, staring at Weston’s hand, still raised.

Weston smiled politely. “I’m the Voda,” he explained, even though that didn’t really explain anything to Tariq or myself.

“Huh,” I repeated, a little louder.

“You’re not bonded to Noah and Cabe.” Weston levelled me with his eyes, tilting his head to look down at me. “They didn’t even bat an eyelid when you went to Silas. They were relieved that you were comforting him, I could feel it. There’s no way that they would feel that way if you were bonded to them… but you don’t appear to be bonded to the other two either; you felt no pain when I cut Silas and you were hanging onto Noah. So to whom
are
you bonded, Seraph Black?”

“I haven’t fully bonded at all,” I said. It was the truth, in a way. I was supposed to be bonded to two pairs, and I was only bonded to one.

I figured that with Weston’s ability to see the truth, I would have to stick with very specific statements. I wasn’t sure how his power worked, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

“I see.” Weston tilted his head in a way that sent a chill down my spine. It was a slow movement, and it revealed the cogs turning behind his eyes; something that Quillan did a lot. “And that’s why they’re keeping you close? Because they don’t want you to bond to your pair?”

There was no way that I could dodge that question without lying, so I simply shrugged. Weston didn’t seem convinced, but he wasn’t calling Jayden back either.

“How did you send everyone away?” I asked.

A smile spread; slow and predatory, causing me to edge a little toward Tariq, wanting to shield him with my body as I often used to do with Gerald.

“I’m the Voda,” Weston reiterated. “It’s the power that we inherit upon the death of the previous Voda.”

“So you have two powers?” I forced myself to sound impressed.

He didn’t answer with words, but his smile gained a sharper edge.

“Seriously?” Tariq spoke up, causing my posture to stiffen defensively. “You made them all go away with your
mind
? How come it didn’t work on me?”

“You’re not a sworn Zevg
hé
ri.” Weston addressed him and dismissed him within the same glance. “Nor is your sister.”

That was why he needed Jayden to control me. The power of the Voda only seemed to extend as far as the Zevg
hé
ri… or, at least, the ‘sworn’ Zevg
hé
ri. Whatever that meant.

The adrenaline from coming face-to-face with the infamous Weston was beginning to wear off, and my system felt like it was being drained, depleted of all bluster. My eyes found the ground and my shoulders shrugged forward. We had convinced him, for now, but he had made it clear that our games so far had been futile. He had noticed. He had probably been watching the whole time.

“Miss Black.” Weston stepped forward until his shiny black shoes breached my little bubble of personal space. “I do not care, personally, who your pair is.”
As long as it isn’t Cabe and Noah, or Silas and Miro
, he left it unsaid, but he paused and I saw the twitch in his eyes. “But I
am
interested in you. Your power is extraordinary; I can see why my sons have been hoarding you away. I’d heard rumours, of course, but you’ll forgive me for needing a more personal… confirmation. My Director, Dominic Kingsling would very much like to work with you. You should think about it.” He pulled out a business card and handed it to me. “I’ve been told that you already have his number. This is mine; I’ll be in touch.”

Tariq and I watched as Weston walked away. Him and his contingent piled into two limousines, and as soon as they rolled out of the car park, the boys spilled out of their cars. Silas stalked to the nearby wooden fence and started ripping into it. Tariq sucked in a breath beside me and I grabbed his arm as he stumbled back several steps.

“Wait here,” I cautioned him.

The others had paused, halfway between Silas and me. They seemed torn, like they didn’t know who to go to. I ran over to them.

“Is he okay?” I asked breathlessly, rocking on the balls of my feet.

“We haven’t seen Weston in years,” Cabe said softly, almost whispering. “He kept torturing Silas to test the reactions of girls who he suspected might be bonded to him and Miro. When Silas was twenty, Weston went too far… he… he almost didn’t survive that time, so we all left. It was the only way to keep him safe. We snuck him out of the hospital and came here. Until today, Weston has been keeping his distance.”

My heart felt like it was splintering into a kaleidoscope of colourful anguish, flashes of wrath and misery vying for control of my body. Quillan cursed, rubbing at his chest like it had hurt him, too. I had already known that Weston didn’t like Silas, but I hadn’t realised that he had been torturing Silas to find his Atmá. I knew what it was like to be abused, to have someone take out their twisted demons on you, and you alone… but my father was weak, and Weston wasn’t. My father could hurt me, but only as much as I allowed him to; in the end, I always won. I suspected that Silas didn’t understand that feeling—the safety of superior strength.

I walked past the others to Silas, who now had blood coating his hands. He had ripped out five of the wooden palisades from the ground and had snapped off several of the planks connecting them. He raised one of the planks, intending to smash it into a tree. I caught the end of it. His head whipped around in my direction and I stalled at the wild look in his eyes, trying to stop myself from flinching.