Watercolour Smile (42 page)

Silas wasn’t reacting to any of it. The sociopath that lived inside of him had risen to the forefront, pushing the volatile man that I knew into the background and seizing control of his body, drawing him away from me, step by measured step. Any second now, he would slip through our fingers, and I couldn’t even fathom what he would do, and who he would do it to. His fingers were twitching. He looked capable of tearing a full-grown man limb-from-limb, except that the dark look in his eyes was too methodical for that.

I continued speaking. “They took me to Kingsling. You know, Dominic Kingsling? The messenger was there. He called me Lela. Kingsling said that the messenger was my twin. But Lela is my middle name, not my real name, and I don’t have a twin, so I don’t know what to make of that. Kingsling locked me in the basement. I think he wanted to experiment on me, but he doesn’t know that I have two pairs. The messenger knows. He knows everything. He lied to them. He told them that I don’t have any marks at all.” I pulled at the ends of my hair, beginning to choke on my own panic now. “Cabe broke me out, he—”

Silas was gone. Like trailing smoke on a breeze, his menacing presence simply filtered out of the room, carried by the sheer urgency of his need to purge his mind of violence. I ran after him, Quillan close behind me. We spotted him halfway down the hallway, his prowling stalk seeming to emanate from the tension coiled around his shoulders. It was a tangible, living thing; brushing down his legs and snapping angrily with each silent footfall. Quillan took off, but they were both too fast for me. By the time I reached the front door, they were already out of sight.

I ran after them all the same, my movements becoming jerky with panic, my legs wooden and my back stiff. The panic was hindering me, making it too hard to function. I was suffocating on it. I opened my mouth, unable to help the cry that broke free. It was anguish and loss, anger and fear, all screamed out into the wind.

“
Silas! M-Miro
!”

Lights began to turn on in the house behind me, but I was beyond caring. I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the driveway, and even then, I only stopped because something was blocking my path.

“
What the hell is she doing here
?” Noah’s angry shout wasn’t enough to pull my attention away from what lay before me.

I felt that I had been standing there staring at it for hours… but it could only have been minutes.

The pounding of so many feet on the driveway behind me was drowned out by the incessant noise of my heart palpitating in my ears, and the sounds of Noah and Cabe amidst a scuffle went all but unnoticed, stored away in whatever part of my mind was currently storing facts that it was unable to process.

“
Stop fighting
!” Tabby cried.

“Seph?”

It was Tariq’s voice that finally broke through my haze, and I turned my horrified eyes on him.

“Don’t come any closer,” I warned him.

I cursed the quiver in my voice. He must not have heard me, for he stepped closer.

“Seph? What’s happening?”

I grabbed his arm. “Please. Go back into the house. Lock the doors, please—”
Please, oh god, don’t let him see it
.

He pulled away from me, breaking my hold. He had already seen it. How could he not? It was glaringly obvious, sitting beneath the dull glow of a street lamp. To anyone else, it might have looked like a joke. A cruel prank. Not to us—we knew that abandoned mattress lying at the base of the driveway like we knew the backs of our hands. We had cleaned our father’s vomit off it. We had hosed it down after he had urinated in the bed—which he did at least once a week. We knew those sweat-stains, those frayed edges.

We were familiar with the brownish-red stain that blossomed out, covering the faded material in his lifeblood. One side of the mattress was charred black, eaten away by the same flames that had eaten away half of Gerald.

What we
weren’t
familiar with was the burnt carcass that reclined in comic morbidity, one arm bent against the ruined mattress to lift the spine and cock the blackened skull in a curious way—as if to say, ‘Can I help you?’

It was like something from a shop of horrors. Was it possible to buy fake dead bodies? I needed to find out.

“Don’t,” I whimpered, as Tariq began to mouth the words on the mattress. They had been scrawled in the usual slanting, red handwriting, running alongside the thigh-bone of the… thing.

I charge my daughters, every one,

To keep good house while I am gone.

You and you, and especially you,

Or else I’ll beat you black and blue.

I turned, ready to march back up the driveway, but I was strangely glad for the hand that held me back. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go, or who to ask for help. I didn’t know how to protect Tariq, or myself.

“What does this mean?” Tariq asked, once he was certain that I wasn’t going to run away.

“I don’t know,” I told him, as another hand found my shoulder, tearing me away from Tariq.
It means I’m about to be punished
.

Noah stared down at me, Cabe two steps behind him, looking a little worse-for-wear.

“What does that mean?” Noah echoed. I could feel the emotion in his fingertips. It was the same panic I had felt. It was the same panic I could now see in Cabe’s eyes.

“It means you need to find the others,” I said. “Silas and Miro. They’re in danger.”

“That’s my girl,” a voice pierced our secluded bubble of panic. “Always thinking of others.”

I turned slowly. Shock seemed to have loosened Noah’s hold, though his touch lingered, his fingers curling into the collar of the shirt I wore. He didn’t seem to want to let me go. I could feel the suspicion and confusion that radiated from him.

A form had materialised—only a shadow—some way down the road. I pulled away from Noah and brushed past the others, my feet walking of their own volition, stepping me right into a waking nightmare. The man took shape the closer I walked, and that scared me. I had expected him to shimmer away, like a mirage. My eyes touched upon his stringy hair, and his broad forehead, before drinking in his sharp green eyes. It was like drinking the worst kind of medicine. My stomach began to roll.

“Come say hello to Daddy,” Gerald goaded me, opening his arms for a hug.

The ghost of my scumbag father didn’t seem happy that I wasn’t running into his arms for a reunion. He clucked his tongue and strode forward, taking my arm and escorting me further down the road.

He wanted to go for a walk? At this point, I was beyond protesting.
Could you even fight a ghost
? I was tempted to find out, but I was currently too shocked to do anything more than stop myself from tripping as he dragged me along beside him. When we reached a limousine, I almost laughed. There was suddenly no doubt in my mind that I was dreaming. It was the only possible explanation.

Can ghosts drive
?

Gerald opened the passenger door, waving me inside. I stared at the door. The worst that could happen would be a repeat of my last limousine experience. I wouldn’t mind torturing my father’s ghost. Maybe it would give me closure. Before I could properly decide, Gerald shoved me in the back and I flopped forwards, landing on a seat.

Lord Weston was sitting beside me.

The laugh that had seemed inappropriate before now burst forth, loud and obnoxious.

“This is hilarious,” I said. “Someone drugged me again, didn’t they? And now look—I’ve gone totally insane.”

Weston sighed, glaring at Gerald over my head. “I told you not to get out of the car, you’ve scared her senseless. She’s babbling like an insane person.”

“Maybe she was always insane,” someone said from the other side of the limousine.

I squinted at the gravelly voice. “You!” I yelled, my finger extended as though I might shove it straight down his throat.

Dominic Kingsling rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Me.”

I slumped back into my seat, my arm falling down.

What was left to say
?

“I want to wake up now,” I said, moving for the door.

Gerald slammed it in my face and moved around to the driver’s side of the limousine, which brought my unwilling eyes to the front passenger seat. Jayden was sitting there, his torso twisted just enough to bring me into focus. He raised his brows at me—communicating through that one-way radio of his, yet again.

I tried tugging at the door handle, unsurprised that it refused to open. Kingsling clucked his tongue disapprovingly as the engine purred beneath my knees, and I renewed my efforts on the door.

“
Dammit
,” I groaned, slamming my fist against the window. “This was a mistake.”

The limousine was moving, and the mountain house began to draw away from me. I could barely make out the silhouettes of people chasing us down the road.

Weston reached down, and I quickly slammed a mental barrier into place as he tried to help me back into my seat. “I know this is a shock.” He sounded like he was trying to pacify me. “You weren’t supposed to see Gerald like that, he jumped out of the car—”

“Do you know who left the mattress there?” My voice came out sounding accusatory.

“What mattress?” Weston frowned, the horrible force of his blue eyes pinning me for a moment before flicking to Gerald in question.

“I didn’t see nothing,” Gerald said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “I was only gone long enough to drag her back here.”

“How…” I was almost shuddering too violently to speak, but I forced the words out nonetheless, “how is Gerald here? How is this possible?”

“I was hoping to do this in a more dignified manner.” Weston spoke on a sigh. “But I suppose this will do. Gerald is not your real father, Miss Black. He was assigned to you. His faked death was… well, let’s call it a bad managerial decision on my part.”

For some reason, this elicited a throaty laugh from Kingsling.

“Bad managerial decision,” I echoed, shock rendering me unable to do more than repeat what was being said to me.

“Yes.” Weston folded his hands in his lap, taking up too much room on the bench seat that we shared. “I made the mistake of tasking my Director with the job of recruiting Tariq. We wanted him to keep an eye on you. He was supposed to be the one to initiate you into all of this,” he waved a hand around, indicating my current situation. “He was supposed to teach you about your ability, and about the Zevghéri. Since you were raised with humans, we thought it better that a human be the one to initiate you. Tariq refused. He wanted nothing to do with us, and he wanted us to stay far away from you. His mother’s influence, I suppose.”

“So naturally Gerald had to fake his death,” I said, toneless.

Kingsling laughed again, but this time it was in a condescending way.

Weston spoke over him, leaning over to project his voice into my ear and effectively drowning out Kingsling’s laugh. “Dominic believed that by faking the death of Tariq’s father, he might deliver a powerful enough warning to bring Tariq over to our side.”

“We were running out of time to act,” Kingsling interjected, a hint of anger edging his words. “Tariq was hiding away in the Quillans’ building and none of my people could get access, plus he had a hired guard tailing him at all times—also organised by the Adairs or Quillans. We had set everything up for him to find—Gerald in bed, bleeding out, and the hired thugs. They were supposed to rough him up a little bit and then leave. We didn’t realise that
you
would show up instead. And with Silas, no less. That gas prank he pulled really messed everything up. We passed up a body to Gerald through his bedroom window—since it’s the only part of that house that’s unmonitored—and he was supposed to set fire to it to make it unrecognisable, but thanks to Silas, he caused a little explosion instead—”

“Almost blew me fuckin’ leg off,” Gerald interjected. “I spent the next week bleeding out in one of Dominic’s safe houses in Northwest Spokane.”

Kingsling snorted, casting his beady, flickering eyes out of the window.
Man
, the guy was unhinged. He seemed genuinely upset that we didn’t appreciate the finer details of his plan.

I remembered Silas saying something about a cabin by the river in Northwest Spokane. It had been abandoned in a rush, the floorboards pulled up and torn edges of maps and photographs still stuck to the walls. He had also mentioned a lot of dried blood, and bandages in the trash can.

I glanced from Weston to Kingsling and back again. Weston was now looking out of the window, his jaw tight enough to betray the deliberate ease with which his expression had been set. The two men seemed to be locked into some sort of power-struggle, though they were trying not to acknowledge it. I was beginning to feel suspiciously like a chess piece in their invisible game… only, I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be the King or the Queen; the prize or the weapon.

“Anyway,” Weston said, turning away from the window and continuing on as though Kingsling hadn’t spoken at all. “Shall we focus on one thing at a time, hmm?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Let us begin with the issue of Gerald not being your real father. When you were taken from the Klovoda, you were placed with Gerald’s wife: at that time, she was a single woman working with the human government. We sent Gerald along to woo her shortly after, so that he could keep an eye on you.”