Watercolour Smile (40 page)

He pushed me backwards, uncaring that I scrambled for the blanket that was trying to fall from my weak shoulders. The back of my head collided with the top of the doorframe, and suddenly Noah’s body was crowding mine. I would have fallen backwards into the seat if it hadn’t been for the hand around my neck.

“I had my doubts… you almost had me fooled—but I saw what you did to those men. You crawled out of that wreckage and you listened to them scream. You…” His eyes flashed, that foamy ocean blue churning into darkness, as though the murk from below had been stirred, muddying the crystal blue surface.

My eyes widened, my throat screaming painfully from his grip. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You killed them.” He answered my unspoken question, and I immediately wished that he hadn’t. “You threw out your arm and electrocuted them as they tried to crawl away. We thought that you would stop once they were dead, but no…” He shook his head and a shudder passed down his spine. “You continued until there was nothing left, until the sparks turned to flame and the flame turned to ash. You continued until the sirens sounded down the road, until there was nothing left in you, and then you collapsed.”

“That’s enough.” Cabe spoke up, having exited the car to stand behind his brother. “We get the picture. You won’t do any good by strangling her.”

“
You saw what she did
!”

I tried to stop them, but the tears were rolling down my cheeks, settling into the grooves between the fingers of Noah’s hand, still wrapped around my neck. He watched them fall, disgusted.

“You almost had me fooled,” he repeated, before backing away and getting back into the car.

I wavered, throwing an arm out to catch myself in the doorframe before I tumbled backwards. Cabe watched me, his face shrouded in the worst expression that I had seen on his face yet: disappointment.

“Don’t try to pull anything,” he warned me, before getting back into the car. “And don’t try to run away. We’re much stronger than you, right now.”

I remained standing; trying to draw in air and trying not to cry. I should have been jacked-up on adrenaline, but my eyelids were drooping again and my body began to sway. I released the doorframe and collapsed back into the car, allowing the door to fall shut as Noah manoeuvred back onto the road. I never consciously gave up trying to heal my throat, but my mind drifted out of consciousness—awareness returning with a sharp stab of panic every time the car jolted my body, only to fade away again before I could grasp it and hang on to it.

At some point the car stopped moving and the seat disappeared from beneath me. I clutched at my blanket with every vestige of energy that remained, reserving no ounce of protest for the arms that carried me. I heard voices, but they blurred together too indistinctly to be familliar in any way, and then everything went dark.

I woke up on a cold bench, completely naked.

It wasn’t the first time I had woken up unexpectedly naked, and my brain naturally conjured up the one name that I associated with such a sudden invasion of privacy.

“Messenger…”

My voice was a croak. Rasping and raw, it was painful to speak… but it wasn’t impossible.

“Oh?” A voice replied, oddly familiar and male. “That’s what you call me? I suppose it makes sense… Do you like them? The messages? I put a lot of thought into them, as you can probably tell.”

“Crazy…” I murmured, trying to force the sluggishness from my brain.

The familiar voice laughed, teasing me with something that I couldn’t quite grasp.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been called that before. But we’re cut from the same cloth, Lela, don’t forget that… and now… now I know your secret…”

His voice seemed to fade away, or maybe it was
me
that was fading away, because the darkness was quickly descending again, suffocating my lungs and settling with a cold weight against my chest.

“How long do you plan on keeping her like this?”

This voice was different, and when it woke me I felt as though some time had passed since the last voice had spoken. The pain had lessened, and I was able to blink my eyes open, though my vision was still somewhat blurred.

“She has almost finished healing herself,” another voice replied, turning my head in their direction.

I blinked until my vision was clear, bringing three faces into focus. Between Noah and Cabe stood an unfamiliar person: he was a bear of a man, with a broad face and thick arms. His mouth was a cruel slash, but he was currently using it to smile, which only seemed to make it crueller. His eyes were small, but intelligent; little pinpricks of awareness that darted about the room with a rapidity only afforded to those with small enough eyes that the eerie flickering might go unnoticed.

“You’re awake.” He spoke through his cruel smile, the deep tone of his voice finally registering in my mind. This was Kingsling. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Black. Though the circumstances are not altogether ideal…” he trailed off, shaking his head with deliberate slowness. “Such a pity that I will now be forced to lock you up.”

“Lock me up?” I croaked, surprised that I had managed to speak at all. “I don’t understand. What for?”

“Why,” his shock sounded forced, but his words quickly distracted me from the observation, “for murder, of course. Seven counts, to be exact.”

“I wouldn’t.” I shook my head, the aching in my skull a mere echo of pain by now. “You’re lying.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Kingsling folded his arms, shaking his head again. “We mustn’t lie, Miss Black. There were two eye-witnesses.”

He didn’t need to point out
who
. They were standing right next to him, and Noah
had
mentioned something…

“No.” My voice gained strength, tinged with desperation. “You set me up, this can’t be true. Why was I in the car with those people in the first place?”

“The Klovoda decided to call on you, so I deployed several of our human agents to accompany you back to the Komnata. We hire private security from within the ranks of certain trusted firms in the human world. You took advantage of the weaker men. They were innocents, tasked with a simple job. You murdered them in cold blood. You’re a very dangerous person. Too dangerous to be allowed out in the world.”

“I don’t believe you,” I repeated, shaking my head in tandem now with Kingsling.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “There is only one place left for you, now.”

As though summoned by his words, the doors opened to reveal three men, all wearing fatigues and ribbed vests. They pulled me from my cold bench, and I glanced down at myself, glad that I had been covered with a paper gown at some point. I had assumed that I was somewhere more official, but the steel table that I had been lying on had belonged to a kitchen, and the kitchen belonged to a private residence. I examined the place as I was marched along by the three men, taking note of the pictures on the walls, the artefacts lining the tables, and the coats hanging by the double-doors at the end of the main corridor.

They took me to a study, pushing aside a tall display cabinet to reveal a door only half the size of a normal door. One of the men unlocked it, and then pushed me into the room ahead of them. I almost fell down the staircase that immediately alighted beneath my stumbling feet, but managed to catch myself on a hand-railing at the last moment. One of the men prodded me from behind, silently telling me to keep moving. I climbed to the bottom of the staircase and found myself in a narrow basement room. There was a bare toilet in one corner, a rusted washbasin, and a single cot without pillow or blanket. One of the men pointed to the cot, so I moved to sit on it. He nodded, and then they all turned to climb the staircase.

Perhaps I should have fought them, but I was suddenly under-confident in my valcrick. Why had it been so hard to conjure in the car with Noah and Cabe? Was it true, what Kingsling was saying? What Noah had accused me of? I couldn’t make sense of it all, and my mind was simply too weak to try to sort through the tangled mess of accusation and denial.

I waited for hours, but nobody came. I spent the rest of the first day sitting at the top of the staircase, my ear to the door. On the second day I found a hole in the wooden floor above me, and poking it revealed that there was a rug covering it. It was directly above the fourth step from the top, approximately the size of my thumb. I thought about making it larger and escaping through it, but there wasn’t anything I could use in the room below, so I settled on pressing my ear to it, day and night, until my neck began to spasm from the effort. Dominic Kingsling didn’t live in this house, that much quickly became clear. The house seemed to be empty the majority of the time—excluding the person whose booted feet I could hear patrolling by the door to my basement room three times a day. Kingsling only appeared when another person came to the house. He would arrive ten minutes before them with a team of two servants—whom he would set about the house in various fake tasks of home-making. I would smell the food that they cooked, to make it seem as though people ate meals in this house.

The food was never eaten, though.

Not by them, and not by me.

As soon as the guests left the house, so would Kingsling, taking his servants with him.

It was on one such visit that I heard the familiar voice of Weston. He was almost shouting, so I could hear him from the moment he stepped into the house.

“
Where are you keeping her
? This is entirely too far, Dominic, even for you.”

“Oh hush, old man. The experiment worked fantastically. She killed all seven of them and blew up the car and then she healed herself completely. We monitored her throughout the last phase of healing, it was incredible.”

“She’s the only other subject in her batch left alive, after her twin. We can’t afford to lose her to one of your insane experiments.”

“We didn’t lose her.”

“That’s not my point!” Weston strode into the room above me, his steps rapid and furious. “We’ve lost too many of them to your games. Your S20 drug might increase power, but it takes away the inherent stability of the Zevghéri magic. It’s no wonder she killed them all, she couldn’t have stopped it even if she had tried, and I’m sure that she would not have wanted to try. Who did you send to escort her? A bunch of dirty humans? Were they convicts? Addicts? I’m sure you would have offered a little extra motivation for her powers to react to the drug.”

“But this experiment
worked
.” Kingsling was still standing in the hallway, his voice more muffled than Weston’s. “And it revealed something else, too. Something that you will be very interested in.”

Weston sighed, his footsteps retreating. I heard the creak of a chair, and then another sigh. “Go ahead,” he offered. “Tell me.”

“Her twin checked her for marks. He said he didn’t want anyone else looking at her while she was naked. He’s a possessive freak—”

“Get to the point, Dominic.”

“She still hasn’t developed a mark. She’s not bonded to anyone, she doesn’t even have a pair out there, yet.”

A flashback distracted me from their argument, the words of the messenger ringing about my skull with a ghostly quality that distorted the familiarity of his voice.

“…
We’re cut from the same cloth, Lela, don’t forget that… and now I know your secret
…”

The messenger had seen my marks. He knew. But now I knew something about him—something that he had been alluding to for a long time now.

He thought he was my twin.

Maybe he was.

Was that possible
?

“That is interesting indeed. And the twin has yet to form a mark?”

“He’s as blank as she apparently is. We’ve been checking him once a week. If it wasn’t for S20, his powers would be killing him. It seems to be quite the substitute.”

“If she hasn’t developed a mark then why didn’t your drug stabilise her powers? Why did she kill your men? She reacted to the drug the same way the bonded people do. It pushed her ability out of control.”

“Well,” Dominic chuckled, “that may have had something to do with the men I sent to pick her up. Not really the savoury sort, those fellows.”

“I knew it,” Weston growled, the sound of his booted feet hitting the floor again as he ate up the carpet above me. “You can’t pull shit like this, Dominic. One of these days it’s all going to catch up to you, and I’ll have you answer for everything. All of it.”

Dominic laughed again, the booming sound breaking off into a raspy cough. “But you can’t control me, can you,
Lord
Weston? Your blood doesn’t work on me. I found a way to beat your power, just as I found a way to create those Atmás for you.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dominic. I’m still the Voda, and I don’t plan on dying anytime soon. You need to release the girl. We agreed that we wouldn’t force her. She needs to be properly taught and integrated, like the others—not tested and tortured. Do you really think that she will help us now, after what you’ve done to her?”

“Frankly, I don’t care what she does,” Kingsling replied, sounding casual. “I don’t see why we need her, when we have the others. Can’t three of them be enough? We never expected
any
of them to survive, we hardly need four of them. Leave the girl to me, let me experiment on her.”

“She was always the strongest of the four. I’ve had my eye on her for a long time, and you know it.
She
is my choice.
She
will be the one to save us.”

“Is that how it is?” Kingsling asked, amusement lining his gravelly tone. “She’s a little young for you, don’t you think? We agreed that the subjects would only be paired with each other to keep the bloodlines pure, or have you forgotten? I never thought your obsession to bear an Atmá would bring you this low.”

Weston shot down each question with a disgusted noise, originating from somewhere deep in his throat. “I’ve not forgotten, it’s the very reason I allowed her twin to enlist the hypnotist in his stupid ploy to erase any possible romantic relationship between Seraph and my sons. I would never have allowed the hypnotist to touch them if I wasn’t loyal to this experiment.”