by Jayla Kane
Raven.
Raven thought she killed him, and her curiosity about her mother’s ridiculous—or not so ridiculous, of course, as its all shaken out—stories turned into a full-fledged obsession. An obsession so all-encompassing I was able to suss it out even though we never, ever spoke, were never alone in the same room for years. And she became obsessed because she believed she could resurrect my brother from the dead, and win my trust and love back. Save me from what happened, and save herself, too.
I would never forget the waves of pain, humiliation, suffering and rage I felt flashing through me in tidal pulses as I accidentally ripped through her mind. Or rather, she dragged me through it—who knows how the connection worked. We were both in the dark.
But one thing I did know, without a doubt, was that I hated my brother.
No fake murder? No crippling loss of what I loved most: Raven. No Ashwood Society. No apologies for taking out my misguided rage on her, no hateful gleam in her eye as she told me it might not be enough that I finally understood her side. No ripped apart, bruised hole in my chest where my heart should be. Leo’s kitchen would be intact. I would be lounging in a ritzy apartment in Cambridge while the love of my life took the T home from Harvard, where I would welcome her with open arms. And no motherfucking magic.
Because I could deal with being a decent fucking fisherman, or whatever the hell Leo was trying to say—I could even deal with an inverted amount of power that I never learned quite how to guide into something useful, if I still had Raven by my side. Hunter was my rock, but Raven was my soul. And without her…
And condemned to constantly stave off madness by working goddamn parlor tricks for the rest of my life…
I hated Tristan.
I don’t know why he stayed away. But I looked at his hands, and they weren’t broken. He could’ve written. He spoke, several times; he could’ve called.
And nothing.
My life: nothing.
I tried to stoke the tiny bit of hope left to me as I’d flown through Raven’s psyche; she did love me. She always had, even when she hated me so much it made her sick to her stomach. Not in the way I’d suspected, deep down, before—not as some kind of twisted fucktoy, exactly, although I’d been happy to play that part. Unfortunately. Because Raven might never let me touch her again. I saw that too.
I’d fucked it up. Maybe I was still in the throes of my crazy this afternoon; maybe I was just reeling from everything. But she was right—it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have shrugged off a fuck like that with a girl who understood what she was begging for, and Raven had no idea. Sure—I could see her enjoyment, too, the bliss her body felt when I was inside of her… I could feel it right now, as I slowly walked down the long driveway to the house, rippling through my skin, a strange, intoxicating sensuality, so different from the way I experienced sex. But straight up kink aside, Raven had been a girl, fucked on a desk, and then ignored. Disregarded like she was nothing. Worse than nothing. Because it wasn’t only that—oh no, of course not… It was that on top of begging me to forgive her while I refused to understand what she’d gone through and sunk deeper and deeper into crazy instead of looking into the eyes of the only woman I would ever love and trying, for one goddamn second, to imagine the hell she’d just escaped.
And she celebrated life as a non-murderer by binding herself to me, batshit crazy and all; she tried. She really did.
I was glad, in a weird way, that my rage had infected her. It made sense, if I could absorb some of how she felt about me, that she would absorb how I felt about her. This thing must work both ways at least a little, but as the Sineater, I was sure I basically infected her with my rage as soon as I touched that smooth, white skin.
And it was protecting her now.
I could feel it, like a shield, wrapping around her. Before, she could hear me from across the room; by the end of the night, I had to hold onto her and force my words into her mind. It almost felt like a… A wall of red, bejeweled, glittering, almost impenetrable. But it was my rage, my wall, so I was able to slip through if I tried hard enough.
I deserved to have to try.
I scaled the corner trellis, climbing up the last bit of the wall easily as I had about a thousand times before, and scooted along the narrow ledge to my window. I had the front corner master suite to myself; Mina and Lucas preferred an ostentatious extension they added to the first floor about two years ago. It looked like a fucking tumor sprouting out of the house, ugly and deformed. But fuck it; they’d never know I was here.
I unlatched the window and turned on a lamp I took from my parents’ room after they died, a beautiful Tiffany from the twenties with a riot of colored glass that was dim enough to prevent any light from reaching the hall. I grabbed a blanket from the closet and stuffed it in the crack under the door anyway, then dragged the chair from the desk over and propped it under the handle. I’d practiced that a thousand times too, every night after they died. Lucas had never come back, but I knew, in my gut, he was just waiting for a reason to. He removed any lock I ever had installed, but he couldn’t do shit about the chair.
I took off all my clothes and laid down in the bed.
Wishing, with all my might, that I was somewhere else—somewhere a girl with hair darker than midnight lay sprawled on white sheets, somewhere she might have welcomed me. Somewhere in the past, or maybe a future that could never be.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Six
Jacob
I woke up covered in sweat. As far as I knew, Raven wasn’t dream-walking, just bickering with me in the privacy of my own head when she bothered to, but she’d spent the entire night there anyway. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, even when I was asleep. I felt sick. Some things… I was remembering. The flash of her skin, the length of her spine, the shiver that ran over her when I touched her just… Like… That. Some things, I knew I was imagining. I imagined going to high school with her the way I wanted to when we were fourteen and kissed; I was sure we were going to rule that shit together, side by side. In retrospect, maybe even my money and supposed charm wouldn’t have created a world that was safe for a Creepy Keller, but I was still the reason she suffered so badly. My stomach twisted as images of her humiliation rent my brain again, and I sat up, swallowing back bile. And then, in stark contrast: Raven, glittering under the ridiculous dome of the mirror ball at prom, smiling up at me without a care in the world, her beautiful eyes winking with joy. A tiara, a new dress, a limo and all the cheesy bullshit I could possibly think of. A past we didn’t have. The one I ruined.
I am not a romantic; no one would mistake me for one. I was a guy who habitually let multiple women suck my dick in a day, who stacked them on top of one another like layers in a goddamn sandwich, back-to-back, just to keep from getting bored.
But I loved Raven. Everything about the person I became would be different, if only she and I had been able to be together.
If only I’d chosen to be a better person.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and got up, pulling on some clothes I found in the dresser. I tugged the chair back and pulled the towel out of the crack in the door; I was so goddamn hungry I was willing to risk running into the lord of the house. Such as he was, anyway. The long hallway was empty, unless you counted the eyes of my ancestors, painted in portrait after portrait. They had been hanging on this wall for centuries, and successfully made the entire place feel haunted. The house was grim and dark now, the way it had been for five years; my childhood was full of memories running at high speed through these halls, playing hide and seek and listening to the shrieks of excitement that echoed through the big rooms as we played. So many kids: Tristan, Zelle, Charlie, Raven, Morgan and Baby… But silence was the order of the day, and it had been for a long time. I made no noise myself—years of practice—as I stepped down the long cushioned hall and followed the servant’s stair back to the giant kitchen on the lowest floor of the house.
“Mast
er Jacob,” a voice said, startling me, and I smiled affectionately at Anna as I walked into the balmy square of light from a big window over the industrial sink. She was leaning against the counter, a woman who had to be at least eight hundred years old these days; I’d never seen Anna anywhere but right here, in the kitchen. She made the best food in the world—all of it insanely old fashioned, but, as she said repeatedly when I argued with her in my younger days, nutritious and delicious. I immediately strode over to her and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Still a devil, I see,” she said, blushing. She pronounced the word devil as divvil, the odd accent specific to this corner of the world, where Pennsylvania and Virginia brushed against one another. “Would you like breakfast? Or lunch?”
“I don’t care, Anna,” I told her. “I know it will be good.” I sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed my temples; it took me a minute to register the stillness in the vast room, and when I glanced up Anna was watching me.
“You’ve seen Mistress Raven,” she said quietly, and I sat up and looked at her.
Anna and Sarah were the only staff we kept. They’d been here since… I have no idea. I know they worked for my grandfather, but have no idea when they started. Anna’s face was the same ruddy, pleasant round one I remembered from childhood, her hair dappled with grey. Given my family’s history, was she… Was she magic, somehow?
How else could she know about Raven? I almost voiced the thought out loud, but as she set a plate down in front of me she gave me a small smile. “You haven’t had that look about you in a long time, if I may say so, Master Jacob.”
“Anna, you know you can say whatever you want. And one day, maybe before I’m dead, you’ll refer to me as Jake.” I tucked in to some sausage and biscuits, sliced apples in syrup. Anna canned like a madwoman, and I grew up eating an old-fashioned diet full of starch, carbs, sugar and salt. Rarely ever got sick, and I’m pretty damn sure it was because of Anna’s cooking. She clucked at me and went back to whatever project she’d been working on over at the counter. I took another big bite, then settled back in my seat. “What look is that, exactly? I’m just curious, Anna.” She was more of an aunt to me than Mina ever was; the problem was that Anna had never appeared in any other room of the house. The more I thought about it, the weirder that seemed. She didn’t even have a car here, as far as I knew. Did she walk home in the dark to town? Or was she… Was she some kind of ghost?
“Master Jacob, whatever are you thinking, love?” She patted my cheek, and it certainly felt real enough; so had the swats on my ass I got growing up when I acted a little too big for my britches while stomping around in her domain. Never anything to sting—nothing like Lucas. But real. Definitely real. Feeling a little relieved, I sighed.
“I have had the most f—weirdest couple of weeks, Anna… I think I’m just having a tough time of it.”
“You’ve just started college, love. Things are changing.” She never sat at the table, not when we were here. If I came in the kitchen at the right time, I could find her sitting here herself for a second before she sprang up and tutted over to the counter; it was a huge, twelve foot long mahogany masterpiece, kept in pristine condition. It had once fed the entire staff required by my ancestors, and from the looks of it that was about fifteen people. But Anna didn’t eat here with the ‘masters of the house.’ Or their guests—Raven had been down here alone plenty of times, stuffing her face with biscuits just like this. “You have missed her, haven’t you?”
Maybe Anna was just telepathic, like Raven. “I… I don’t know how to answer your question,” I said, watching her. No idea what she knew about the situation. “I guess…” Yes. I’d missed Raven terribly. But I still missed her—maybe worse. “Anna, I… I made a mistake.”
“Did you?” She was quiet, her face thoughtful. “And what was that?”
Anna’s reluctance to dine with us had never kept her from speaking her mind or thinking twice about asking Tristan and I personal questions. It was comforting, in a strange way. “I was… I was unkind to Raven.”
“Have you apologized?”
“Of course,” I said, as if I’d done this when I should’ve—I was flushed with shame, oddly enough, by her innocent question. She read the truth on my face easily and leaned on the counter, her broad mouth puckered as she thought.
“Forgiveness is a funny thing,” she said after a long time. “Eat your breakfast; do something that needs to be done. It sounds to me, Master Jacob, like you have growing to do, and becoming a man is hard work.”
“Do something that needs to be done?”
“You’re in school,” she said, efficiently cutting more biscuits out of the dough on the counter as she spoke, sending me one more pointed glance over her shoulder before she focused on her task. “I’m sure, even on a Saturday, you have work to do—and if not, there’s always the garden.”
“I hate the garden—”
“But your mother didn’t,” Anna said quietly, then turned back to face me, eyebrows low on her ruddy forehead. “Raven didn’t. Tended it herself; seen her through the window, many times. Women like beauty, like wildness—and they like a man who can turn the soil. Eat your breakfast, and go do something that needs to be—”
“Done. Got it,” I said slowly. Fuck it. It was creeping up on eleven in the morning; the sun was shining, and she was right; I had my ‘gifts’ to use, Leo’s advice tying in with Anna’s perfectly. The garden was a good place to expel some of this energy, since my preferred activity was probably permanently off the table. I swallowed the rest of my breakfast and fought off the image of Raven naked, snowflakes steaming on her white breasts, and thanked Anna with another kiss before wandering out to the backyard.
That’s what this would be, if we had a normal house, a normal life. The Warfields—a name that came over on the goddamn Mayflower, probably—arrived here, helped found this town with a bunch of other witches, probably, and built themselves a gigantic British country ‘house.’ Like Downton fucking Abbey, minus the charm and the snappy wardrobes, but with a fair dose of its cutting wit. Although, honestly, I loved it here—I loved living here when there were people here. When we were kids and we went out to the ‘garden,’ as my mother always called the vast expanse of grounds immediately behind the house, it was a perfect playground. Huge, beautiful flowers, mounds of bushes to hide in, tons of strange statues sitting in little concrete ponds begging to be stomped in… It was a children’s paradise. Four acres of amazing adventures to be had. But it bordered the Orchard, which had a fairy tale feel, for sure, but the kind that ended with us baked in a pie. The Orchard still creeped me out, and the scariest night Hunter and I ever spent was the one we sat perched in the topmost branches of a tree in November of our Junior year, determined to win a bet with some dipshit two towns over. I didn’t need the money, but I sure as hell liked spending his. All the same, we never slept, and Hunter and I still hadn’t spoken about the things we saw down there in the dark—or, at the time, I imagined I saw.
Now, the whole world was full of possibilities. If I was some kind of witch—that’s a warlock, right? Like the 80s movie?—then who knows what those things were? Maybe they weren’t shadows; maybe monsters were real too.
So Anna, the cook I’d known since I was born, wasn’t a ghost. But I was really beginning to suspect there was something strange going on there. And the Orchard might actually be full of the monsters Mina always said lived inside it. And the love of my life and I were blood-bound by a spell neither of us understood, and if I didn’t do a little magic—outside of the bedroom—I was going to go straight up Charlie Sheen, at best, and full blown Gary Busey at worst—or maybe not. Maybe it would be much worse than that; no one seemed to know.
But yesterday, before I made it snow and came so far inside of Raven I knew she had to be feeling it even now, I was… It wasn’t worth looking at it—at the way I’d spoken to her, the tunnel vision, the way I acted afterwards. I thought I had suffered enough to deserve to hurt her, to withdraw, to
control her and manipulate her. And then I got a good look in her head.
My real punishment for being selfish, stupid and cruel wasn’t living without the truth about Tristan. It was living without her—forever. Because how in the world could she forgive what I’d done?
How could I ever forgive myself?
She hadn’t wanted to show me. Hadn’t meant to. Those memories were of things I was sure she didn’t think about on her own, if she didn’t have to for some reason—they’re the kind of thing you bury, or it will chew on the back of your mind until you crack like an egg. Convince you you’re worthless, undeserving of happiness, of life. I’ve been bullied. I know.
As I walked through my mother’s overgrown garden, looking around me at the rubble, the weeds and detritus spread across the paths, I remembered the first time Lucas hit me. It was sudden—out of nowhere. I’d been running down the hall, playing with Morgan and Tristan, and Lucas was sitting in the library. I came into the room, searching for them, and he waved me over with his finger in front of his lips, a silent gesture beckoning me forward and telling me to be very quiet. I crept towards him, thinking he was about to point out their hiding place to me, but instead when I got close enough he reached out with that hand and snatched my ear, yanking me towards him. He hit me in the face with his other hand and hissed that libraries are quiet places, and I was too loud. Something in his face told me to shut up—I wanted to protest that I hadn’t even been loud in here, I was out in the hall, and besides, weren’t the other two just as noisy? But I realized, looking in his eyes, he would welcome the correction as an excuse to hit me again. My cheek stung. When he let go, I fell on to the floor and scurried away from him, afraid he would kick me. And he laughed—laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, a four year old boy crawling in fear away from him.
I don’t know how many people hit Raven; hopefully none, and not with my direction in any case. I’d never asked for that. The possibility still existed, and it made my stomach turn. But hopefully none had—it wasn’t the same set of circumstances, took a different kind of cruelty; you couldn’t just hit people in high school without consequences. All the same, they for damn sure made her feel like she was crazy. That’s the part no one can explain about getting bullied—when you finally tell, when you finally ask for help, and the person you’ve turned to says, ‘well, I’m sure you’re exaggerating.’ Or ‘it can’t be that bad.’ Or ‘I think you misunderstood.’