Watercolour Smile (9 page)

Tabby let out a frustrated breath, her eyes flashing with the rare glint of hysteria that I sometimes encountered in her.

“I’m going to find out what’s really going on, Noah. I will. I’ll find out what it all means.” She straightened, tempered the foreign look in her eye, and cupped his cheek. “Goodnight, honey. You’ll be sleeping in your own room tonight, won’t you?”

“Sure. Night, Tab.”

She left and Noah closed the door. Cabe opened the bathroom door at the same time. “I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” he said. “Confusing her is good, but I don’t want to push her too far. She might overreact. She might do something drastic to prove it one way or another.”

“We’ll see,” Noah replied. “She hasn’t known about any of us sharing Seph’s bed before now. We’ll see if it changes anything tomorrow.”

I peeked out at them from my huddled spot in the bed. My skin was hurting, my limbs heavy. It was a more painful strain than the last one, but less overwhelming. I had grown stronger over the last few months, so I felt that I could handle the strain better when it happened… until they remained where they were, standing, talking quietly. I shuffled to the other end of the bed and wrapped an arm around Noah’s leg. The material of his sweatpants slid softly against his skin and his hand landed on my head, digging lightly into my hair. It made me feel like a puppy, but I didn’t have the energy to complain as the pain started to fade away.

“No, she hasn’t said anything to me either.” He spoke in response to something Cabe had said—I hadn’t heard. I rested my head against Noah’s hip, my free hand creeping up to his stomach.

I traced the outline of a muscle from one side of his stomach to the middle, and then skipped up and traced the next one. His fingers shifted in my hair, cupping my skull.

“I feel like this is a disaster waiting to happen,” Cabe said, his eyes trained on me.

I finished tracing the muscles that I could reach and then dropped my hand back to the top of his sweatpants to start again.

“It
is
.” Noah bit out the words.

I glanced up, meeting his stormy eyes, and he turned, pushing me lightly so that I fell back against the bed, my hands leaving him.

“Stay right there.” He pointed at me, and then disappeared into my closet.

He came back with a thin scarf, and Cabe took one look at it before springing into action. He swooped me into his arms and positioned me back on the pillows, capturing my wrists and raising them above my head.

“This is for your own good,” he whispered as Noah kneeled on the bed next to me. “Don’t hate us in the morning.”

Noah looped the scarf lightly around my wrists and then tied it off against the headboard behind me. I leaned back, trying to tip my head back far enough to watch. The blood in my veins was singing from their proximity, the itching completely muted, and I didn’t really care what they did anymore, as long as they kept close to me. When Noah was finished, Cabe released me and they both sat back to look at me. I tried to move toward them, but the scarf caught my wrists and held me back. It wasn’t painful, but it was frustrating. An annoyed sound left my throat.

“Is it just me—” Noah’s voice sounded dazed—“or is this even worse?”

His head was tilted to the side and his eyes were alight with turbulence. Cabe glanced at him and then back at me, his eyes trailing up to the scarf and then leisurely moving back down my arms to my face, before flitting lower.

“Much worse.”

I tried to sit forward again, and Cabe finally took pity on me. He pulled the blanket out from under my legs and pulled it over me, lying to my right on the outside. It wasn’t the kind of closeness that I needed, but then Noah settled on my other side, and their warmth gradually seeped through the layers to settle the yearning beneath my skin. I sighed, huffed, and then sighed again, shifting around to get comfortable.

“Stop wriggling,” Noah said.

I didn’t reply, because I didn’t want anything to come out of my mouth that I wouldn’t usually say. Instead, I kept shifting around, the burning need to be close to my pair not allowing me to settle.

“We should get under the blankets,” Cabe pondered. “She’s tied up, what’s the worst she can do?”

“I’d rather not find out.” Noah’s profile was dark, but I gathered that he was staring at the ceiling. I huffed again, trying to kick at the blankets. He turned to the side, his eyes catching mine. “At least she isn’t crying.”

“I’m still
here
,” I grated out, surprised that my teeth were pressed so tightly together.

“She slept in Miro’s lap, that one time.” This was Cabe, and I turned my head the other way, finding him half-bent over me, his eyes focussed on my face. “Is that what you want?”

I nodded, and he seemed to consider me for a long time before he pulled back the cover and slid in beside me, turning me on my side and pressing the length of his body against my back. His arm looped over me to rest on the bed between me and Noah, his fingers curled into a loose fist.

“Better?” he asked brusquely.

I seemed to have floated off into a pleasant trance, and I didn’t even answer him. I closed my eyes and drifted almost immediately off to sleep.
Maybe this was the trick
, was my last conscious thought.
Catch the strain before it gets too difficult, and you won’t shame yourself beyond repair
.

I woke when the door banged opened and someone laughed. I groggily blinked open my eyes and glared at Clarin. He plopped onto the end of the bed and captured my feet in his hands, tickling my soles lightly through the blanket.

“What do we have here?” he teased. “Did saintly little Seph have a visitor last night?”

I made to move, but my hands were still tied up, my face flushed bright with mortification. Noah and Cabe seemed to have disappeared.

“Umm…” I tucked my face against my arm, trying desperately to think of a reasonable excuse.

He yanked the blankets away from me, eyeing my clothes. “You don’t
look
defiled.”

“I
wasn’t
defiled!”

He wiggled his brows at me and then crawled up to straddle me, leaning over to untie the scarf. Naturally, Silas chose that moment to walk into the room.

His steps faltered, his dark eyes blinking through astonishment, before settling into something cold.

“Three seconds,” he said to Clarin, his voice jagged.

Clarin finished untying the scarf before leaping off me. “Hey,” he held his hands up jokingly, but even I could see the wariness in his eyes, “wasn’t me! I found her like that. I was just untying her.” He tossed the scarf to the bed.

Silas glanced at me, and I tried not to notice the way his eyebrow twitched in question.

Clarin might have suspected that I was bonded to Quillan and Silas—since I had told Tabby as much, but he also saw the way I acted with Noah and Cabe. He hadn’t actually vocalised an opinion to me at all. He avoided the subject carefully.

I yawned, arching into a stretch now that my arms had been freed. “Morning, Silas.”

I couldn’t help the smile that spread over my face at the sight of him. His knuckles were smooth and unmarked, his face rested and neutral. He hadn’t gone out last night, and it made me unbearably happy, despite our turbulent relationship.

“Angel.”

I stumbled from the bed, giving Clarin a light shove. “What are you waking me up for?”

“The grim reaper over there
asked
me to.” Clarin nodded his head in Silas’s direction.

Silas kicked back against the wall, folding his arms and resting his dark eyes on us, saying nothing. I moved to the closet and pulled open the door, freezing. I turned back to the room.

“Clarin, could you give us a moment?”

“Sure.” He made for the door, but glanced back at Silas. “Please don’t eat her, or take her back to your demon’s lair to share her soul with the rest of the boogiemen.”

Silas’s lips twitched, elongating the scar on the left side into a menacing hint of lazy mirth. Clarin blinked, and then shook himself, as if bringing himself out of a daze—though perhaps, more likely, he was trying to fight off the usual terror that people felt when confronted with Silas’s modicum of emotion. I opened the closet door wide when Clarin left, and Cabe and Noah strolled out, as casual as if they’d been having a tea party, instead of hiding from Clarin.

“Um, what?” I managed.

“We heard him thundering up the stairs.” Noah grinned. “We’re trying to save our reputation, remember?”

“Why’d you tie her up?” Silas asked from the other side of the room.

I turned to him cautiously, but there was no anger in his expression. There was nothing in his expression at all.

“This,” Cabe swooped up the scarf and fluttered it out, “is a magical Seraph-deterrent.”

“I see,” Silas said. “Pack it with her stuff then. We need to leave in half an hour.”

Silas and I arrived in Seattle at midday. As soon as I spotted Tariq at the station, I dropped my bags and ran through the crowds to pull him into my arms. His face was blessedly, beautifully the same.

He laughed and patted my back awkwardly. “Hey there, bundle of joy. What did you do with my sister?”

I pulled back and shook my head. “Sorry, I’m just happy to see that you’re okay.”

“Never been better. Silas left me the keys for his Jaguar. They were in a drawer of business cards for pretty much every police officer in Washington, so I only took it out once…” he trailed off as Silas came up behind me. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down.

“Hello, Tariq,” Silas said easily, though an
easy
tone for Silas was something resembling the way every evil witch preened… right before they locked you in a basement.

“H-hey,” Tariq stuttered, shooting me a look. “Did the trip go okay?”

I nodded and Silas moved past him, toward the car park. Tariq watched him go and I patted his arm. “Don’t worry about him. Tell me what’s been happening? How’s school? How’s football going?”

“I speak to you every few days.” Tariq’s worry eased with a small smile. “There’s nothing new to tell you. But you look different.” He paused as we reached the car—Quillan’s BMW. “You’re… I don’t know. Are those new clothes? You seem really happy.”

I got a person killed
.

I got
three
people killed
.

That makes four in total. My ledger was really adding up.

“Sure.” I forced away my niggling depression and jumped into the car.

Silas drove us back to the apartment building, grumbling about the BMW the whole way, like driving it was stooping too low for him. He parked in the basement, and I had the distinct feeling that he was dragging out Tariq’s discomfort by slowing down when he walked past the Jaguar, sweeping a cursory glance over it. We piled into the lift and I stared at the buttons for the other floors as we climbed.

“If you guys own this whole building,” I ventured, “what’s on the other floors?”

“More apartments, a gym, a pool,” he shrugged. “We don’t use the rest of it. We rent it out.”

Silas disappeared into his own apartment as soon as we reached the top floor, and I sat down with Tariq in the piano room of Cabe and Noah’s apartment, absently picking at the keys as I told him everything that I had been leaving out of our conversations together over the last few months. He almost imploded when I tried to talk about forming the bond with Silas and Quillan, so I skipped over most of the details and only told him what he needed to hear. By the time I got to Aiden’s story, my tears were beginning to make the piano keys slippery beneath my fingers, and as I told him about the last painting I had done, I stopped playing altogether.

“But how did you know that Gerald did it—or, would have done it? He wasn’t in the painting?”

“No, I just felt it. I heard him speak.”

Tariq’s eyes travelled to the window. “This is a lot to take in.”

“I know…” I softened my voice. “I’ll stay here with you this weekend but then I need to go back to Maple Falls. This guy, whoever he is, will be paying attention to everything that I do. I don’t want to bring you into the whole mess. He left another message for me just before we left.”

“What message?”

“Well… no
actual
message or anything this time. Just a few broken dolls. I must have done something to make him angry. I was starting to think he had moved on—either that, or Silas had secretly hunted him down and disposed of him.”

“What do you think you did?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it… I had just come back from a double-date with Poison. So… maybe it was that.”

“He’s angry that you went on a date?” Tariq seemed confused. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s the only thing that really makes sense. If he doesn’t want me to form the bond with Noah and Cabe, he probably doesn’t want me dating other guys either. But that’s not important right now. Will you stay away from Gerald, please?”

“I guess.”

“Thanks, Tariq. We’ll send him money in the mail. Enough to live by, but not enough to… you know.”