Watercolour Smile (38 page)

“Nah.” I rolled my eyes, and then laughed again, leaning back over the railing to look up at the ceiling of the club. It was a mess; huge aluminium pipes connecting in plain sight, an air-conditioner duct poking out, paint peeling off. “And you finished my drink, so you can’t drive.”

I pitched forward when he pulled at my hip. He was probably trying to prevent me from falling over the railing, but he only succeeded in making me fall into him instead. I pushed off, but he wasn’t trying to hold me there. Danny wasn’t such a bad guy, I surmised, but I really couldn’t deal with him right now.

“Bathroom,” I said, jerking my finger over my shoulder.

“Again?” He folded his arms, the silver appearing in his mouth again as he considered me. “I think you’ve had enough, Stephan—er, Seraph. I know that you’re an Atmá, but hiding from your pair and trying to dull your strain with drugs like this… it’ll only lead to more problems.”

I paused, half turned to walk away from him. “How…?”

I felt him move behind me, not touching me, but close enough that he could lower his voice. “We spoke about it at Poison’s party, remember?”

“Right.” I nodded, even though he was behind me. “I’m not taking drugs,” I added, walking away from him.

The walls started to spin again once I was safely inside a bathroom stall, and I whipped out my phone, misjudging my grip as it slipped right out of my fingers, bounced off my knee and fell to the tiled floor. I pitched forward, trying to catch it, and ended up smacking my head against the stall and joining my phone on the floor. I lay there, groaning, as footsteps announced a group of girls entering the bathroom.

“Duchessss?” a girl cooed, the sing-song quality edged with malicious humour. “We know you’re in here!”

“There,” another girl said. “I see her phone.”

The footsteps drew nearer and a hand tangled in my hair, pulling tight. I yelped as someone tried to drag me out from beneath the stall door. I scratched at their arm, feeling rewarded by the screech on the other side of the stall. More hands joined in as I scrambled for my phone, and they extracted me from my hiding place, tossing me against the wall beneath the mounted hand dryers.

“What have we here?” Amber headed a contingent of glossy-haired, high-heeled club girls, planting her hand on her hip as they flared out behind her.

“What the hell,” I groaned, my voice sounding muffled. “What did you put in my drink?”

“Do you like it?” Amber was smiling as I clutched my phone behind my back. I ran my fingers over the screen. It was shattered, and I quickly pulled my finger back and let it fall to the ground. “It’s new,” Amber continued. “My father wanted me to test it on you. How do you feel?”

“Your father?”

“Poor
Seraph Black
. She’s doesn’t know anything, does she?” Amber turned to one of her club warriors, and the two girls shared a pretend pout of commiseration. “My father,” Amber stepped to my side, “is Dominic Kingsling, bitch.” She knelt down, taking a hold of my right shoulder. “But you won’t remember that by the time the drug is out of your system. You won’t remember
anything
. Now let’s go for a walk, what do you say, hmm?”

I didn’t say much at all, since talking was proving to be increasingly difficult. Some part of my brain acknowledged the fact that I was being carried out of the bathroom, but I felt as though I were floating down the corridor, lifted by silky wings. It was soft and spongy. Comfortable.

I could go to sleep
…

I could have… until the cloud that carried me grew spikes, spearing me with the tiny pinpricks of a thousand needles.

The sensation disappeared as the cold air from outside blasted me in the face. I heard what sounded like the slamming of car doors, and saw what might have been a limousine, and then time seemed to skip forward. I was suddenly inside the cabin of a vehicle, my cheek sticky against the leather seat, my hands secured behind my back with something cold and plastic.

“Messenger?” the single word came out scrambled, sounding more like
meshmener
.

“What did she say?” someone asked.

“Who cares,” another answered. “She’ll be unconscious in no time. Seems like the S20 drug is working perfectly, Kingsling didn’t have anything to be worried about after all.”

“Yeah,” someone agreed. “She’s not flipping out at all. More like going to sleep.”

“So, what now? We just take her clothes off and snap a few dirty pictures, that’s the plan? Seems a bit boring. The least we could do is spice up the photo-shoot—get a little action on camera. He said to make it as filthy as possible.”

“He wanted it to
look
as filthy as possible. He wanted to make it
look
like something had happened. We aren’t being paid to stick it to her, dude.”

“Think of it like method acting.” The speaker chuckled. “The best way to make this photo-shoot look realistic is to make it
real
.”

A chorus of laughter rang off the end of that statement, indicating that there were more people in the limousine than I had originally thought.

“Drop-off point is half an hour away, lads.” An unfamiliar voice rang out from the direction of the front of the car.

Thick fingers slipped into the front of my blouse, getting a hold of the material and pulling my torso up until faces swam into focus, though the features remained blurred to me. The fingers curled into a fist, and the fist twisted until the loud tearing of rent material filled the suddenly silent space. The limousine hit a bump in the road, breaking the man’s hold on me and sending me into another ungainly sprawl. My face landed on something soft, my arms still twisted painfully behind my back.

Another bout of laughter rang out, one of the voices much closer than the others, reeking of bourbon. A hand tangled in my hair, shifting my face tighter against the softness beneath my cheek. It began to grow hard.

“Well then, since you’re already there...” The voice had become husky, gravelly with some kind of perverted undertone.

I could barely
think,
let alone fight, but I attempted to draw on my valcrick anyway. The man continued his assault, rubbing my cheek against himself as his free hand found its way into the crop top I had worn beneath the blouse. A camera flashed.

I screwed my eyes shut.

Don’t fail me now
, I pleaded with the electricity, something that I had never had to do before.
Please help me
. I felt my fingers twitch, felt the brief flutter of light, and then the dark, unseen world around me descended into chaos. The smell of burnt rubber assaulted my nostrils as the tires skidded against the road, the car losing control in a sudden, frenzied dance for traction. Maybe the car was flipping over... it was hard to tell, because my head had smacked into something sharp. A body was thrown against me, pinning me to something even sharper. Heat roared to life and the grinding of shattered glass was sounding in tandem with the exploding pain in my stomach—a hot agony that spread, sticky and wet, to cover my skin.

I could hear screams, otherworldly in their wretchedness; dark and grating in their intensity; they teased me with a glance at something beyond, something frightening and horribly endless. The screams weren’t mine. They belonged to
them
. The blurred faces… and now their blurred screams would carry them into the endless darkness without me.

I was sure of this, because I was the one who was sending them there.

“I’m on scene. Only one of them. A girl. You won’t believe what I’m seeing right now. I can’t tell how many were in the car, but they’re all… yes… including the driver. Dimitri? She doesn’t have any injuries that I can see… yeah alright. EMT’s arriving now. See you in ten.”

I blinked my eyes open, bringing the night sky into focus. I felt like my bloodstream was littered with glass, and every pump of my heart only scraped the shards against my veins, causing more harm than good. A broken groan echoed from my throat—broken, because it didn’t make any sound whatsoever. The muscles in my throat worked to produce the noise, but fire dragged in its place, and only air escaped my lips, forming a brief white cloud above my face. Legs appeared in my line of vision, a face swimming over me.

“You’re going to be fine,” the woman said, kneeling beside me. She had choppy blond hair and a no-nonsense look in her eye. I wanted to believe her, just because of that expression. She asked, “Are you hurting anywhere?” She was checking me all over, probably wondering where all the blood was coming from.

I was wondering myself.

Everywhere,
I tried to say. It came out as a strangled, croaking noise—a sound I’d never even heard before.

She was frowning, pressing down on various parts of my body, appearing more baffled by the second. She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, leaving a smudge of red on her cheek from the plastic gloves that covered her hands. “Where is all the blood from?” she asked. When it seemed apparent that I wasn’t going to answer her, she directed the question over her shoulder.

With excruciating effort, I turned my head to the side. A man kneeled there, shining a little torch in my eye.

“I don’t know,” a male voice answered—the direction of his voice sounding from some place behind the blond woman. A police officer came into focus, his mouth moving in tandem with the continued speech. “The other bodies look like they’ve been put through an incinerator. There isn’t much bone left, let alone blood. Only a few… ah, pieces, here and there. They’ve been collected.” He sounded like he wanted to be sick.

I blinked as the flashing of lights cut across him, throwing his face into a medley of red and blue, turning his natural skin tone a sallow, yellowish tint. There was a police car angled across the road and an ambulance parked behind it. All around us were mangled pieces of charred metal, some of them still licked by orange flames. A fire engine must have been behind us, because I could see the flashing of its lights across the gravel, and the firemen were hosing down a wreck to the side of the road. I stared at the spray of water, my fingers tingling.

Who had been in the car with me?

I pushed the hands away from my bare torso and struggled to my feet. The male paramedic said something and tried to coax me back down, but the panic was rising swiftly and surely, blocking out everything but a single thought.

Who had been in the car with me
?

I ran toward the site of the wreckage but stopped at the edge, where the gravel met with the dirt, staring at the smouldering mess. My pairs couldn’t be dead, because I was still alive. I spun and faced a small group of people: the cop; the two paramedics; and a few firemen, one of them pushing up his hat. He kept peering sideways at me, apparently astonished by something. I peered down at myself, wondering where my clothes were, and whose blood coated my skin… and then I saw the scars. I rubbed my knuckles over my stomach, smudging the blood. A raised, angry pink line peeked out from the mess of red. The woman paramedic reached me then, draping a blanket around my shoulders and leading me away.

I tried to ask for a cloth or a towel, but no words came out of my mouth. I swiped at my arm to demonstrate.

“You can’t speak?” she asked.

I shook my head, and then swiped at the blood again.

“You want to clean yourself?”

I nodded.

She led me back to the ambulance, forcing me to sit down as she grabbed a pack of alcohol wipes and handed it over to me. The male paramedic remained behind with the cop. Their heads were bent together as they spoke in low tones and stared at me across the shattered glass and half-melted metal scattering the road. I ignored them, focussing on the task at hand as I wiped away the blood that was still slick on my skin. The scars were everywhere, like I had been shredded into pieces and then stitched back together again. I paused when I was halfway through, my hands shaking. The woman watched me for a while, before gently taking the wipes from my hands.

I examined her a little more thoroughly, finding something that I hadn’t expected to see: she was wary, perhaps… afraid… of…
me
? I wrapped the blanket more securely around my shoulders, shielding myself against the cold and the stares. The woman handed me a bottle of water, saying something about smoke in my lungs. I drank, but the water ran down my throat with all the soothing effect of an actual knife.

“Ph...one?” After struggling through a few more sips, I managed to get a single, painful word out.

She handed over a mobile, and I quickly punched in Tariq’s number. It was the easiest to remember, because I dialled it more often than I did the others. I handed the phone back to her when Tariq answered and she brought it to her ear.

“This is Amelia Harrison,” she said. “From the Falls Emergency Medical Services. I have a girl here…”

I stood up and walked away from her, trusting her to get the message across. I clutched the blanket around me as I returned to the wreck. If Tariq, Cabe, Noah, Silas and Quillan were all okay, then I had been in the car with other people… but
who
?