Watercolour Smile (2 page)

“Busy as in you’re the reason a confiscated container of C4 has gone missing from the Klovoda’s off-site training grounds?” Dominic interrupted me from my thoughts.

“They weren’t using it.”      

“They confiscated it for a
reason
.” He sighed the admonishment, probably amused more than he was aggravated.

“You’ve got no grounds to scold me here, old man. Only Maritime Law would be able to accommodate the kinds of punishments
you’d
be entitled to, after everything you’ve gotten up to in the last ten years.”

“Har, har.” Dominic hacked out a sarcastic laugh that carried the punishment of his last cigarette, and I waited until he finished coughing. “Just make sure you’re not caught. We might have Weston on our side, but it’s only because of the hypnotist—if we didn’t have him, we’d have nothing… and the rest of the Klovoda are getting suspicious.”

“I took it off their hands, Dom. They should
thank
me. I’m being a good Samaritan.”

“I’ll have them send a fruit basket.”

I smirked and clicked a button to end the call—something that Dominic would be well and truly used to by now. The servant was already hobbling out of the manor to set himself upon the front steps like a wrinkled, old bulldog. He raised a weathered hand in greeting, and I parked the truck, jumping out of the cab and retrieving the padded box of blasting caps. There were only two packed inside, since I ran the risk of exploding my car with any rogue friction… but two was all that I needed for now. I had hidden the rest in a safe place.

“Evening,” I greeted.

“Good evening, Master.”

“Take those bags out to the warehouse, will you? We’re heading back to Maple Falls next week. My work here is almost done.”

“As you wish, Master.”

I wasn’t an angel by any measure.

I tried to do the right thing. I only wanted to protect myself, but sometimes that meant that other people would get hurt. It was an unofficial side-effect of my safety: the loss of everyone else’s. Sometimes when I went to sleep, I would see the faces of the people I loved, and I would see the targets above their heads—each brandishing a name in sloping, red handwriting.

Tariq—
Gerald
.

Noah—
The messenger
.

Cabe—
The messenger
.

Silas—
Weston
.

Quillan—
Seraph
.

We all had our demons.

No, I wasn’t an angel—and over the years my appearance had begun to reflect my
true
nature. My hair was a cloud of shadow on a moonless night deprived of starlight. It reminded me of the midnight air of any place of darkness; mist-clogged graveyards, heavy and solemn; polluted skies, sucked of luminescence. Sometimes I stared into the strands, trying to get lost in visions of places beyond my touch. Even an imaginary, onyx necropolis was a haven for me… preferable to the living dead that clogged my home: Gerald, our own personal demon, and my brother and I, barely daring to betray our living breaths for fear of discovery.

On its own, without the heaviness of my imagination, my hair might simply have been dark. Black. Plain. My eyes had no such leisure. They told stories unbeknownst even to me. They carried a weight of their own, a knowledge and a hidden augur that frightened me. If you stripped away the illusion, they were an ordinary set of blue eyes marred by the conflict of a violet that smoked almost to blue-black, and a green that danced with the kind of shadows that would keep you up at night—and not in a good way.

I wished that the peculiarities ended there, that I could stop, say
end of story
, and I’d be a simple girl, with a not-so-simple darkness eating away inside of me yet again. But that was not possible, because I now also had a very,
very
complicated relationship with four different men. One of them was my teacher, another was his borderline sociopathic twin, and two of them were pretending to be my brothers.

I had been turned inside out, and the complicated murk from inside was manifesting in ways that I could never have predicted.

It was closing in, surrounding me. 

I considered it
one
relationship that I had with the four of them, but that was only because there was a component that ran true and unmalleable in my interactions with each of them, as indistinguishable and stubborn as if they were all the same person. I fight that component when I don’t like it, and fuel it when I do.

I have that control; I realise that now.

“Are you listening, shorty?” Poison poked my arm, and I didn’t answer her, so she poked me again, and again.

Poison and I had grown close since Aiden’s death. She was a constant enigma to me, but I didn’t often push her for information about herself. There was something tragic about her, some kind of horrible vulnerability beneath the surface of her blustering antics. I had once asked her why people called her ‘Poison’, but she hadn’t answered me. The smile had slipped from her face and all that had remained—for an agonising, elongated moment—was hatred. I didn’t think the venom in her eyes was meant for me, but I never brought it up again.

“No.” I eventually turned a smile on her. “I’m not.”

She rolled her eyes and pinched one of my cheeks. “You’re lucky I love you. Now pay attention. Chris wants to go out tonight and I refuse to do this alone. What if he gets handsy?” She covered her chest in mock-outrage, twisting her features into something resembling censure.

I laughed at her, because if anyone was going to get ‘handsy’ on a date consisting of bad-girl Poison and band-geek Chris… it would be Poison.

“He won’t do anything ungentlemanly, I’m sure.” I patted her knee. “You’ll be fine.”

She dropped the textbook that she had been pretending to read and rounded on me, swiping my sketchpad from my hands. My pencil dug into the page, cutting a thick, grey line across the sketch, too deep to rectify.

“Seraph Ophelia Black, you
will
come on this date with me!”

“My middle name is Lela,” I grumbled, trying to erase the line with little success. “And I don’t see why you need
me
there.”

“If you don’t agree to this, I’m going to call up every girl that Cabe has ever slept with and invite them all to his birthday party next month. It’ll be a surprise party, and they’ll be the only ones invited. I’ll even record his reaction and put it up on YouTube. Do you think I’ll need to hire a hall, or would my mansion be big enough?”

“Poison! That’s so mean!”

She waggled her eyebrows at me. “Everyone is starting to wonder what’s up with those two. They haven’t hooked up with anyone since they got here. Noah isn’t getting into fights, Cabe isn’t playing pranks—”

“What kinds of pranks? We could say it’s because they ran out of girls to sleep with.”

“Stick with me cupcake, no changing the subject and no joking around. Everyone is getting suspicious, and suspicious isn’t a good thing around here. I
should
set Cabe up with someone—Noah too. Soon enough Lord Weston is going to find out that you’ve bonded—”

“
Shh
—” I slapped a hand over her mouth, checking to make sure that nobody stood around us.

She pried my fingers away. “And then
hell will descend
,” she finished in a quieter, albeit much more dramatic, tone.

“Why do you think Tabby hasn’t told him yet?”

“Because she’s still suspicious. You don’t give that woman enough credit. She’s got issues up to her eyeballs but she’s smart. She’s
very
smart. You told her you bonded with the Quillans, but Miro avoids you like you’re contagious most of the time and Noah and Cabe are always around, hovering and being general annoying bodyguard-oppressors. I don’t know what Silas does. Nobody does. He probably returns to the underworld to make sure his demons aren’t slacking on their torture schedule or—”

“Silas isn’t a demon, Poison. We’ve been over this.”

“I’m going to need proof. Have you ever seen him sleep? I bet he hangs from the ceiling—”

“Also not a bat.” I sighed. 

“I was thinking more along the lines of a vampire. And I know he disappears all the time, but have you ever marked off the days on a calendar? I bet it has something to do with the moon—”

“Ahh, werewolf. That’s a new one.” I clapped my hands slowly, showing that I was impressed.

Poison’s mouth quirked up into a wry smile. “Anyway,” she said. “With all the rumours that are circulating, Tabby’s probably thinking that the bond with the Quillans is just an elaborate farce to protect some other truth. She probably thinks that you have no idea of the gravity of what you were saying. Let’s be honest, when it comes to Zevghéri politics, you’re pretty clueless.”

I flopped back into the grass, my arms stretching out either side of me. The tree above me swayed gently, and it was almost calming. The leaves were beginning to turn yellow in preparation of autumn, and the cold breeze had a bite to it that was currently being assuaged by the lazy gaze of the sun. I stretched my arm out in the still-warm grass, trying to catch the edges of the receding sunlight, my mind snagging on yet another thing that was lying just out of my reach.

“Miro and Silas don’t want to get too close. Not while Noah and Cabe are trying to prolong the bond.” I said the words slowly, like I was hoping that they would sink into my brain and settle there, and I would be able to accept the truth of them and move on. Instead, they churned uneasily in my stomach, making me swallow tightly and give up my grapple for sunlight in favour of balling my hands into fists—as if the hint of perspiration that was suddenly misting my palms would be visible.

“It makes sense. I’ve never even heard of two pairs before. I can’t imagine how it would work. If Noah and Cabe can’t bond, it’s only fair to maintain a little distance.”

I shrugged against the grass. “So Cabe and Noah need to show a healthy interest in other girls for a little while? I’m not going to stop them.”

Poison’s narrow-eyed consideration honed in on my face, and she tucked her legs beneath her, pushing up onto her knees. This meant that she was now looking down at me, which somehow deepened the suspicion and disapproval set into her striking features.

“Look,” she said, “I know it’s not…”

“Ideal?” I supplied, and she cringed, so I continued while I had the upper hand. “Fair? Moral?
Feasible
?”

“Alright, Grandma! I’m sorry that despite having known about the true nature of the bond for
months
, your delicate sensibilities are still reeling. I apologise for that, I really do, but you need to start taking them seriously. I promise you this: they are taking
you
seriously.”

“You don’t know that,” I deflected, causing her brows to draw down heavily. I was lying, probably, but I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t acknowledge what was happening, what had already happened, and what it all meant. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “And it’s not that I’m not taking it seriously. All I’m doing is supporting what you said; I think you’re right. They should date. They should show an interest in other girls. Go out and stuff. Dissuade suspicion.”

“Silas and Miro too.”

I opened my mouth to agree, but the words got caught, and a strangled sound escaped instead.

Poison gave me a look of pity, and I averted my gaze to her skinny jeans, catching a glimpse of pink through the ripped pocket. Despite my current roil of emotion, it made me want to smile. Poison was very dramatic with what she wore, and powder-pink underwear certainly didn’t match her current ensemble. Her singlet was cut off at the stomach, and it depicted an image of Charlie Chaplin riding a unicycle, which might have made her seem a little geeky, if Chaplin’s top-hat hadn’t been cut off to make room for a deep plunge of cleavage. Her eyeliner wasn’t too thick, but it was smudged into a smoky charcoal glare, the only makeup that she wore. The whole look was pulled together by a cut-off leather jacket with silver studs on the pockets and the collar turned up. There was also a Batman pin hooked into the zipper.

I hadn’t spoken to Poison about my feelings for the guys, and she didn’t push me for explanations, but she knew that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the whole love-at-first-sight side of the bond, and she knew that I
had
feelings for them, she just couldn’t seem to figure out what they were.

She wasn’t the only one.

Poison huffed out a resigned breath. “Look, just come on the date, okay? Mike has nice friends; he won’t set you up with any weirdos. You don’t even have to do anything. Just sit there and let them ogle your crazy-beautiful face for an hour or two.”

“Can Noah and Cabe come as well?”

Poison sat up suddenly and loomed over me. “Seraph Judith Black—”

“Lela.”

“You
have
to get it through your head. You’re not,” she lowered her voice to a whisper again, “bonded to just anyone. Lord Weston is the Voda.
The Voda
. I’ve told you this before.” She held out her arm, fingers directed to the sky, and then she pointed at her elbow with her other hand, making her arms into a ninety-degree angle. “This is the bottom of our society. Who lives down here?”