Watercolour Smile (23 page)

Hawk spun, his eyes widening on Cabe. He was about to ruin the whole ruse, so I blew him a kiss and waved a few fingers at him. “Bye, Hawk!”

His perplexed eyes met mine and he seemed to catch on. He smiled, shook his head briefly, and walked off without another word.

“Let’s get you home.” Cabe still sounded angry as he walked in the opposite direction. I hurried to catch up with him.

I hovered outside the door to Silas’s technology lair, my grip tight around the phone in my pocket. I knew he was there, because I could feel him on the other side of the door, a concentrated form of energy, shifting restlessly about the room.

“What?” he finally grumbled, his voice muted by the heavy wooden panelling of the door that separated us.

I opened the door and stuck my head in. “Are you talking to me?”

“Is there someone else lurking out there?”

“Nope.”

“Then yes, angel. I’m talking to you.”

“Ah.” I stared at him, my fist tightening around the phone. After a moment, I backed out and closed the door again.

“Seriously?” His voice was muted again.

“Pretend I’m not here!” I called out.

I heard his grumbling sigh a bare second before the door flew open and he manifested inches from me. I quickly ran my eyes over him, wondering if he had somehow gotten bigger. It must have been the overwhelming cloud of temper that hovered around him, increasing the volume of his presence. I took a clumsy step backwards, and he shot into motion, hooking a finger into the neckline of my shirt and pulling me forward. He turned as I neared him, ensuring that I spilled into the room, and then he snapped the door shut and leaned back against it, folding his arms and bending his knee, anchoring his booted foot against the wood panelling in a familiar pose. He did it all so fluidly, so precisely, that it barely even jostled me. One minute I was standing outside, and then next I was inside, facing the wrong way.

“What do you need?” he prompted.

“Okay, wow. You’re not very good at making people feel comfortable, are you?”

“You clearly have something to tell me.”

“Debating it.”

“Your debating is distracting.”

“Your brooding is distracting!”

“I don’t brood.” His smile twitched into being as he spoke, as though to prove his point. It wasn’t the infectious, overwhelming smile that I had seen on occasion, but something that sparked a mischievous flare in his eyes.

“Yes you d—”

He was off the door in a second, his hand covering the lower half of my face, cutting my words off. He turned me until his chest was to my back. “Is it easier like this?” His words stirred my hair. “When you can’t see my face? That’s why you were hiding behind the door?”

I wondered at the tension in his voice, but shoved away the concern, since it was impossible to map his moods on a good day—and today didn’t seem to be a good day. I was afraid of his reaction to what I needed to tell him, and that fear was threatening to manifest in ways that only he would understand.

At least I assumed that was why I did what I did.

He grunted out a sound that was suspiciously close to amusement, but otherwise didn’t budge. “Did you just bite me?”

I tried to speak, but the works were dashed against his hand, and only garbled sounds came out.

“I accept your apology,” Silas replied, sounding entertained.

In response, I bit him again, digging my teeth into the fleshy part of his palm and holding on. Eventually he pulled his hand from my face, but I didn’t release him. He turned his hand—with me attached to the end of it—until I was standing to the side of him, almost facing him. I blinked at the simmering amusement in his eyes, on the point of marvelling at his unpredictability. Did he really love violence that much? Or was it me?
Am I really that unthreatening?

“I get the point, angel. You can stop trying to eat me now.”

I gradually released him, and then quickly licked the spot now marked with an impression of my teeth, cleaning off the drool that I had left on his skin. A rush of feeling thumped in my chest, burning and urgent, and I clamped down on his hand before he could pull it away from me. For the first time since I had bonded with Quillan and Silas, I was entirely unsure whose emotion I had just felt. I couldn’t decipher, even now, what he was feeling and what I was feeling… there was only the one rhythm of beating—his heart, or mine, I didn’t know. It was a staccato pattern, a dithering stutter that occasionally thudded and occasionally skipped. Silas didn’t say anything, and I stared at his hand, my brows drawn low in confusion. His skin was a rough caramel colour, and I could clearly see the indentation that my bite had made.

I moved his hand back to my face and he stepped closer, following it. I glanced up, but his face was masked. Every trace of amusement, anger or annoyance had been filtered away, and only his features remained, terrifyingly impassive. I returned my attention to his hand and touched my tongue to his palm again. The same feeling assaulted me. It was a strange kind of sentiment, foreign but not alien. Not
unnatural
, but… new. It was suspiciously close to desire—desire turned to flame; an anxious battle of carnal impulse and oscillating restraint; a flame-walled box that pushed from all sides until only crimson uncertainty remained, licking at the charcoal remains of whatever people we had thought ourselves to be.

Mine or his
?

I traced one of the lines along his palm with the tip of my tongue, causing my lips to drag along his skin, and the feeling intensified. I caught a tease of valcrick behind the curtains drawn over the wall of windows to my left, and Silas released a ragged breath.

“Seph?” Quillan called from the hallway outside. “Everything okay?”

Silas’s palm curled, catching my jaw and quickly lifting my head. His eyes slammed into mine, burning with the same feeling that had been assaulting my chest. For a moment he said nothing, and I watched as his eyes became wide, and then he left me, pulling open the door to admit Quillan.

“I found a phone.” I spoke as soon as I saw Quillan, briefly wondering why it was so much easier to release the information when I wasn’t alone with Silas. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and offered it up.

“Whose phone?” Quillan asked as Silas took the phone from me.

“I think it’s the messenger’s. I found it in the janitor’s closet.”

“Janitor’s…” Quillan frowned, giving me a confused look. “I’m missing something here. What were you doing in the janitor’s closet?”

“Just… um… talking.”

“With?” Silas asked.

“Hawk.”

“The football captain?” Quillan folded his arms over his chest, looking perturbed.

Okay… so that sounded bad
. Even so, it was still better than admitting that someone
other
than the messenger had taken a creepy picture of me. A picture that almost everyone in the school had now seen.

I opened my mouth to answer, but Silas abruptly turned and walked away from us, distracting me. He sat down behind one of his monitors and plugged a cord into the phone. He worked silently for about ten minutes before pushing away from the computer and picking up the phone. I moved to look behind his shoulder, and Quillan followed. The passcode screen had disappeared, and Silas only had to swipe across the screen to unlock it before navigating to the message screen. There was only one number in the inbox, and I recognised it immediately.

“That’s odd.” I pulled my own phone out of my back pocket.

There were no new messages, and I even double-checked my inbox to make sure. The only people who had texted me recently were the guys, Poison, Clarin or Tariq. Silas clicked on the message thread that belonged to my phone number, and I scanned the list of texts on the messenger’s phone.

SpyEnable.

MonitorNow Camera.

MonitorNow Voice.

“I didn’t get any of those,” I said. “But that’s definitely my number.”

Silas grunted. “They’re being intercepted by an app on your phone.”

He tapped the screen of the phone he held, right where the message
MonitorNow Voice
showed, and pressed a finger to his lips. We watched on silently as he sifted through the phone’s files on his computer, but then the phone in his lap lit up, and I grabbed his shoulder, pointing at the message being typed out as we stared at the screen.

Find Location.

Silas glanced down, ignored the message, and continued typing on his computer. A few minutes later, the phone lit up again.

Upload Fil—

The message was never finished. As soon as the word
Upload
had been spelled out, Silas yanked the cord from his computer and began to rip the phone apart. He pulled the battery out, the SIM card, and then the memory card. I thought that he would stop there, but he got up and left the room with what remained of the phone.

“What was all that?” I asked Quillan.

“Someone was remotely accessing the phone,” he answered, moving to follow Silas. “I think Silas was allowing it, since the spyware hadn’t uploaded the data the phone had recorded yet, but once the messenger found out where the phone was, he started to remotely upload. I think Silas still got most of the data off it, but it’s hard to find when you have an app rerouting everything to hide it from the phone user.”

“Okay,” I answered. “I don’t know what you just said.”

I followed him to the kitchen and watched as Silas threw the phone into the blender. When Abe and Tabby walked in, he was holding the lid down while the phone pieces danced around inside.

“What is he doing?” Tabby asked Quillan, somewhat cautiously.

“Pest control,” Silas said, turning off the blender. “Eliminating bugs.”

“That’s the third blender this month,” Abe grumbled. “Why do I bother replacing them?”

“It’s okay, Abe.” Tabby pacified the man, an ushering hand on his back turning him the other way and herding him from the room.

She levelled one last look at Quillan before she disappeared around the corner, and I was selfishly glad that something had captured her attention enough to distract her from the usual searching glances that she tossed at me whenever we were in the same room.

“Bugs?” I asked once the room was clear. “Why would the messenger bug his own phone?”

“He’s a suspicious guy.” Silas tried to empty the jumbled and twisted contents of the blender into the trash, but a few pieces seemed to have gotten jammed in the blades. He shrugged, throwing the whole blender in, and then he moved to pass me. He paused in the kitchen doorway, and I heard Noah’s voice in the entryway beyond.

“Tabby said you’re blending electronics again.”

Silas simply walked off.

“Silas?” Noah called after him.

When I walked out of the kitchen, Noah was alone, staring up at the staircase. He turned when he saw us and raised his brows. “What’s up with him?”

“Might have something to do with the janitor’s closet.”

Noah blinked rapidly. “What? You told him?”

“You knew about this?” Quillan asked, moving around me and standing toe-to-toe with Noah.

“What are you talking about? Of course I knew. Who did you think she was in the closet with?”

Quillan fell back a step. “You? She said she was with Hawk.”

“Hawk?”

They both turned to me, looking as confused as each other, and I groaned, hitting the palms of my hands against my forehead. I wasn’t even dating any of them, and I suddenly had multiple cases of misplaced possession to deal with.

“Cabe!” I yelled. Quillan and Noah glanced at each other, and I moved past them, heading up the stairs. “Lucifer!”

Cabe appeared as I reached the top of the stairs, a notebook tucked under his arm. I grabbed his hand and dragged him into Silas’s office, closing the door after Noah and Quillan entered and leaning back against it. I didn’t go as far as notching my foot against the door, but I did channel a Silas-worthy glare.

“I’m explaining this once,” I grumbled. “Only once. If any one of you freaks out,” I flicked my eyes to Silas, who was sitting behind his computer again, his arms folded and his eyes narrowed, “then I will immediately stop talking, and you’ll never hear the rest of it. Understood?”

Cabe laughed. “Wow. Too much Silas. Dial it back a little.”

I rolled my eyes at him and pushed off the door. “Some girls at school stole my stuff and I had to find Tariq to get clothes. That means I had to walk through the weights room in my leotard. Someone on the team took a picture, and it wasn’t of my face. The picture spread around school. I pulled Hawk into the janitor’s closet because he’s the captain of the team. I wanted him to do something about it, but apparently it’s out there now and I have to deal with it. I saw a phone on the shelf behind Hawk. It was recording us, so I put it in my pocket—and I think it’s the messenger’s phone because I was also in the janitor’s closet in third period, and I didn’t notice it then. So the messenger must have seen me go into the closet in third period, and sometime between lunch and fifth period he snuck a phone in there just in case I went back.” I took a deep breath. “I was in the closet with Noah the first time, by the way.”