Watercolour Smile (43 page)

“If what you’re saying is true, then why was I taken from the Klovoda?” I started to chew on the pad of my thumb. I held off the panic, instead rolling the concept around in my mind; I tried to see if there was a slot in my memory where the information would fit, as though it belonged there.
Gerald isn’t my father. Tariq isn’t my brother. My mother was
…

“The human government was shutting down our medical centre, where you were being housed, where you were created. They didn’t like what we were doing there, so they seized our records and demanded the children be released into human foster families—”

“Why was I being housed in a medical centre? What were you doing there that the government didn’t like? You sound like you’re reading the script of a bad science-fiction movie.”

Weston made a sound caught between a grunt and a laugh, his hand slapping down onto my shoulder. I cringed, quickly gathering my scattered thoughts and forcing my mind to go blank. For just a moment, Weston narrowed his eyes. I could feel the momentary tension that tightened his grip, and I met his stare levelly. Weston frightened me, but I had a feeling that he was the sort of person who wore his threats boldly. He didn’t seem the sort to hide his intentions. I supposed he wouldn’t need to, if he could control most people. If he wished me harm, I was almost positive that I would know about it. Eventually he eased back into his seat and folded his hands in his lap.

“That is a question you will have to save for the Klovoda’s Komnata, Miss Black.”

“The Klovoda’s Komnata…”
Where had I heard that word before
? It was too hard to concentrate. It was a miracle that surprise could still cripple me. It was a miracle that
anything
could surprise me anymore, but seeing Gerald again had been the biggest shock of my life. I still felt like I was dreaming. 

“Their headquarters, so to speak. It’s where I’m taking you right now, if you agree.”

“I don’t think I really have a choice,” I muttered, staring at the door handle that I had tried to yank off right in front of him. 

“Gerald,” Weston barked.

The limousine rolled to the side of the road and I heard the locks turn over. Weston leaned over and opened the door, pushing it until it swung wide, mocking me with a view of scraggly roadside brush. I knew from experience that it wasn’t particularly easy to jump out of a car and lose your pursuers in roadside forests.

I might be willing to give it another shot, though
.

I edged toward the open door, my eyes flickering from person to person until my gaze snagged on Jayden. Very imperceptibly, he shook his head. I pursed my lips, considering my next move, trying to see it from all angles. There was a good chance that the messenger was at the mountain house, and while I still didn’t trust Jayden, he hadn’t actually dealt me any harm. He had played along when I showed him a fake mark and if I had left the scene of the accident with him instead of Noah and Cabe, things might have turned out differently. He hadn’t been working for Dominic, it seemed, since Noah and Cabe had helped me to escape him, before calling him a double-agent. On the other hand, he had messed with Noah and Cabe’s memories. And Quillan’s. And Webber’s.

He cocked his head to the side, witnessing the indecision that held me in check.

Was there anyone that I could truly trust
? For just a moment, I allowed a swamp of self-pity to carry my thoughts away. Cabe and Noah had betrayed me; Silas was unbalanced, possibly a lunatic; Quillan trusted the hypnotist; Tariq had been keeping secrets from me; and Poison and Clarin were in the same position as every other sworn Zevghéri. They were unable to disobey Weston.

“Of course,” Weston spoke casually, “you won’t get any answers if you run away. You do want answers, don’t you, Miss Black?”

I edged back from the doorway.

“What did you say, before?” I mumbled, remembering my talk with Jayden in the Hollow Ground basketball court. “You said ‘if you agree’. You’re not just giving me a choice; you
need
me to choose.”

Gerald nodded. “Of course. That’s how it works. You won’t be accepted into the Komnata unless you agree to be there. Didn’t Jayden prepare you for this?”

“He didn’t warn me that the Komnata’s
invitation
would arrive in the form of the Voda, Dr. Frankenstein, and my dead father.”

Weston cracked a smile. He was genuinely amused. “Ignore him,” he said, flicking his eyes to Kingsling. “He’s under my watch right now. He goes wherever I go. I suppose you could say that he’s grounded.”

“Why is he smiling then?”      

“
Ignore him
. Listen, Miss Black, this isn’t as dramatic as it seems. I found Gerald a few weeks ago in a Spokane hospital, abusing his morphine drip. I took him to Maple Falls with me in the hopes of reuniting him with his son, but Dominic mistakenly took my sudden arrival as a sign that I was about to take your case off his hands, and so he arranged to have you detained. He had no right to do that and he will be severely reprimanded for it…” Weston paused, because Kingsling’s laughter had risen in volume until it was almost shaking the body of the car. Weston frowned at the larger man until the laughter tapered off, and then he continued. “Unfortunately, there are only so many incidents that we can ignore before we have to call you in. Since your situation is a unique one, we thought that we would give you some time to adjust, but your actions have made our interference necessary. It would be irresponsible for me to continue turning a blind eye to you simply because my sons have taken a particular interest in keeping you from the Klovoda. I assume that they are doing it to get back at me, because they understand how important you are. I’ve allowed them their fun, but now the fun ends. You’ve gotten yourself involved in not
one
, but
two
homicides since moving to Maple Falls.”

“I didn’t kill Aiden, and I have no idea what happened in that car crash.”

“Even if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time…
both
times… it remains that you were involved in some way. You need the support of the Klovoda right now, Miss Black. It’s time you returned home.”

“I don’t have a home, Weston.” I narrowed my eyes, glancing down at my lap as I allowed the reality of everything that he had said to properly sink in. “I never had one.”
It’s their fault my mother—no,
Maryanne
—died
.
Every bruise, every tear of shame, every sleepless night clutched in the throes of terror had been their fault. My mother—
Maryanne—
had fallen for the elaborate ruse that was her own marriage
.
“The closest thing that I have to a home is wherever Tariq is, and Tariq isn’t waiting for me in the Komnata.”

“Tariq isn’t your brother, Seraph.” This was said by Gerald, his tone achingly triumphant. “Haven’t you pieced that together, yet?
He
figured it out years ago.”

“Tariq knew?” I asked, the ache in my chest intensifying. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“I assume,” Weston spoke, cutting off whatever Gerald had been about to say, “that he was protecting you. Didn’t you do the very same thing when you felt threatened by your stalker? You removed him from the situation by running, leading the attention as far away as possible.”

“Alright then,” I murmured. “If we’re going to talk about my
stalker
, maybe one of you can tell me what that mattress was doing in the driveway?”

I allowed Weston to take the full brunt of my question. He met my eyes levelly, swallowing every inch of surprise until his poker-face began to get beneath my skin. I squirmed, and he reached out to touch my shoulder. To anyone else, it might have seemed a gesture meant to convey sincerity—his eyes were certainly attempting earnestness.

“Did the stalker leave you another message?” he asked.

I frowned, because the sudden attack on my mind had taken me by surprise. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been prepared for him to attempt to read my mind the moment his fingers touched my shoulder, but I had severely underestimated him. His previous touches had lacked the power that now thrummed in repeated insistence against the barrier I had constructed to keep him out of my head. My breathing became laboured with the effort it took to keep him out, and I clenched my fists in my lap as his fingers began to curl inward with a familiar bite. It was the grip of a person who was trying to control their violence.

I winced, because it was a feeling that I immediately associated with Silas. I knew that something had slipped through my barrier, because Weston frowned, apparently confused, and the pressure against my barrier increased tenfold. I doubled over from the pain, but Weston continued. He was beating down my wall, and there was nothing that I could do to stop him.

Time for Plan B
.

I grabbed at the strongest of my unthreatening memories—the random images that affected me the most without containing any information that would prove dangerous—and shoved them through the crack that had fissured in my barrier. I attacked him with the knowledge of what he had done to me, and I let him feel how very much I hated him for it.

The lock splintered, snapping off the door as he forced it open. I mourned the loss of it, because I knew that there was no way he would allow it to be repaired. It had been my last vestige of hope—the only remaining barrier between myself and the monster that lurked beneath my bed every night.

“Don’t—Gerald,
please don’t do this
,” my mother pleaded, her green eyes wide with despair—there was no fear. She was accepting the loss of this battle before it had even begun.

Gerald swiped at her to push her out of the way, and her head cracked back against the wall. I began to cry, because there was red spilling between her fingers when she clutched at her head.

“Mum—”

Gerald’s hand slapped over my mouth and he pulled me upright, turning me until the back of my head was pressed against the swell of his stomach.

His gut curved at just the right angle to force my head down, giving me the perfect vantage-point to follow the red smear on the wall down to the ground, where my mother now crouched. Something was wrong. Gerald pushed her all the time, and sometimes she bled, but this was different. There was a bubble of blood at the side of her mouth, and her eyes were rolling into the back of her head. I struggled against Gerald’s hold, hearing the sounds of Tariq shifting around in the room next door. He was trying to decide whether to come out or not. I was always angry at him for days when he
did
come out, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He heard the bangs, my mother’s pitiful moans, or my angry screams. He couldn’t help himself.

“Mum…” he was in the hallway, his hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her into a sitting position. Her head lolled to the side, and he grew panicked, his tiny shoulders shaking. “Mum! Wake up! You’re bleeding. You need to wake up so that you can take us to the hospital, mum! They can fix you again, like last time, but you need to wake up!”

Tariq’s eyes had always been a bright green, unabashed with a youthful innocence that constantly amazed me. How he had managed to hold onto it for so long was beyond me, but that night I saw it die. The tears flooded his eyes, drowning out all remnants of the eight-year-old who had been desperately clinging on. He groaned—
a terrible, mourning sound. Gerald began to laugh, the sound brittle with insanity. 

“Go,” he said, still laughing. “Go call an ambulance, boy. We can’t have her dying in the hallway.”

Tariq scrambled to his feet, his expression set, his hands stained red. He must have been holding my mother’s hands, because hers were red, too. I wanted to pull away from Gerald and cover my own hands in blood, because I wanted to be like them, not him. Gerald must have felt my instinct to begin fighting again, because he spun me around and grabbed my chin, forcing me to look up, and up, and up… until my cheeks were puffed by the force of his grip, and my eyes had slammed unwillingly into his.

“It’ll be another ten minutes before the ambulance arrives,” he said, puffing my cheeks out even more to give me fish-lips. “Ten minutes of time-out might do you some good.” He let go of my face and bent to kneel before me. “What do you think, darling?”

His eyes had that particular gleam again. In hindsight, I recognised it as the beginnings of a different kind of hunger, a hunger that didn’t manifest until many years later, though the appetite to bully me with his gender, with his mature knowledge, was building. He reached around and smacked me, his hand grabbing, pinching, before smacking again. I whimpered, and the gleam in his eyes intensified.

Dimly, I realised that Weston was trying to pull away from me. He was trying to escape from the memory that I had trapped him in, and I supposed that being in the mind of ten-year-old girl being molested probably wasn’t very high on his bucket-list.

“Don’t,” I ground out, gritting my teeth and grabbing his wrist to keep his hand anchored to my shoulder. “Finish it.”

“Finish it,” Gerald groaned
.

He held my wrist, pumping my hand…

Weston jerked away from me, turning to the window so that he didn’t have to look at me. His jaw was clenched tight, tension set deeply into the faint creases that lined his face. His arms were crossed tightly over his broad chest, trying to shield him from whatever sensations lingered in his head. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew that he felt my hatred.

He probably returned the sentiment, by now.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I pressed, supressing my own reaction to the memory.

“You’re strong, Miss Black. I’ll give you that.”

“Of course she is,” Dominic uttered, turning his beady eyes from Weston to me. “I made her, didn’t I?”