by Nicole Thorn
“I’m sure there are lots of things wrong with me but nothing in this sense. I don’t want you because I want her.” I gestured to Manny, who turned wide eyes onto me. Her mouth parted slighted, like she was surprised. How could it have surprised her, after everything that happened last night?
Crimson snorted, shaking her head. “Right. Well, lucky you.” The last was spoken to Manny. Crimson poked Manny in the nose. “I hope you’re prepared for when things go wrong with mega-freak over there. Because something will go wrong. It always does when he’s around.”
She sauntered away, with Jade scrambling to follow. The Merry girl cocked her head at me and said, “I’ll see you around.” Then she turned to follow the other two girls while I stood there with my hands in my pockets.
Manny cleared her throat. I turned to look at her. “Does that kind of thing happen a lot with you?”
“Only since Hel broke up with me,” I said, frowning. “I don’t know why all her friends hover around me when they know that it ended badly with her, or why they would risk their friendship...”
A small laugh burst from Manny, and she peered up at the sky. “I know why, Becket. Just trust me that it makes sense.”
“Okay,” I said.
She took my hand, and we started walking down the street again. When we turned onto my street, my heart sank to my shoes. I didn’t want to leave Manny, especially when she would have to deal with her parents. There was something about them that hit me wrong. Her father’s eyes were too cold, I thought. Her mother was too vacant.
I stopped in front of my house, shuffling my feet. “Are you sure you’ll be okay with your parents?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Manny assured me.
I thought about offering to kill them again but decided against it. She hadn’t seemed impressed the first time I offered, so I didn’t think doing so again would help. I looked up at my house and said, “I should get inside before my father wonders where I am and what I’m doing.”
Her mouth tightened. “Are you going to be okay in there?”
I didn’t want her to worry, so I said, “Yes.”
Manny shuffled her feet and rocked back on her heels. “You should see if he’ll let you have dinner with me tomorrow. You know, after we’re done dealing with all of this, and we can maybe relax some?”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“Good. Bye, Becket.”
“Goodbye, Manny,” I said, and walked up to my front door. When I glanced over my shoulder, Manny still stood on the sidewalk, with worry in her eyes.
X
My father had been furious yesterday. He had sent me upstairs and told me that he would deal with me later. It had been an entire day, and later had not yet arrived. I worried that he wouldn’t talk to me in time for dinner with Manny. I didn’t want to disappoint her.
Shoring up all my courage, I pushed my bedroom door open. The hall stretched before me, strangely menacing. I had walked these halls a million times but it was like malice had leaked into the wood, leaving a viscous tension to ooze through the whole house.
Swallowing past the lump of fear in my mouth, I left the room and went downstairs. I could hear my father in his office, typing on his computer. He didn’t sound aggressive, and I took that to heart. There was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be furious with me but I had to hope.
Or maybe all I had was hope.
I knocked on the doorjamb. My father tensed, then lifted his eyes to stare at me. They weren’t hostile but cold. So cold that it pierced through my skin and seemed to leak into my blood. I knew that it hadn’t. He wasn’t a blood worker, and even if he was, I could counteract whatever he did to me. The logical thoughts did nothing to ease the nerves in my gut.
“Good afternoon, Becket,” Dad said. “What are you doing down here? I could have had a client, and you would have been interrupting very important work by leaving your room.”
I swallowed. “Sorry, Dad. I wanted to talk to you about something?”
“Is that a question, or a statement? Do you know if you wanted to talk to me about something?”
My eyes dropped to the ground, and I amended the sentence. “I want to talk with you. May I please come in?”
He left me standing there for a full minute. I could hear the clock ticking on the wall behind his head, and counted the little sounds. “All right,” Dad said. “You may come in. You can even take a seat while we... talk.”
I stepped into the room, closing the door like I knew he wanted. Then I sat down across the desk from him and raised my eyes to meet his. He had lost the brutal chill but there was still something in his eyes, something that lacked warmth. “I’m sorry for everything,” I said.
“Which part?” Dad asked.
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Words seemed to have escaped me.
Dad nodded and leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m not mad with you for what happened at that jewelry shop. I understand that you had to protect your friend. That’s the right thing to do. Noble, even. The police seem to understand that what you did was self-defense, and since there’s no body, they aren’t going to charge you with anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What I’m upset about is the fact that you didn’t call me. I texted you, saying that you could come home, and you didn’t respond. I spent the entire night wondering where you were, if you were alive, or if you had taken off. That’s not something you do to your father, Becket. Then, when you woke up in the morning, I assume in Manny’s bed, you didn’t let me know you were okay. You went off with her, not caring that I had worried myself into a ragged mess.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “You did it once, and that’s enough. I can’t let it slide. It would be bad parenting.”
“Does that mean I can’t go out with Manny tonight?” I asked. “She wanted to take me to dinner.”
His eyebrows popped up. He leaned back in his chair and tossed a pen onto the desk. It skittered across the surface with an abrupt sound that had my nerves frayed. Another apology jumped up my throat but I held it back. If I apologized, then I wouldn’t get to go out with Manny.
I wouldn’t get to touch Manny. Or speak with her. I wouldn’t get to draw something new on her skin, or anything. So, I held my tongue and waited for him to say something. Any punishment would be worth seeing her face again. Worth knowing that her parents hadn’t hurt her for what happened.
“Manny is a good girl,” Dad said. “I like her a lot, and feel like she could be a good influence on you. Maybe she could be the thing that finally puts a leash on you because you need to be controlled, Becket. You need someone to point you in the right directions, or everything will crumble around you. I can’t do it forever. It’s exhausting work.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“Do you have your phone?” he asked.
I pulled the phone from my pocket and showed it to him. My father nodded his head once, and said, “All right. I have to punish you for last night but first, you can go out with Manny. If you call her and tell her something that you never wanted her to know. Something that makes you feel ashamed.”
My mouth opened but no sounds came out.
“Either call her,” Dad told me in a low voice. “Or you will go back up to your room, and you will stay there until I tell you to come out.”
I stared down at the reflective surface of my phone. My eyes slowly drained of life, and I slipped to a place where nothing hurt. A place where I could do what needed to be done. I wanted to see her, and this was the only way.
Something I’m ashamed of?
Manny’s name was in my phone. The only one other than my father’s and Hel’s, actually. We had exchanged numbers yesterday. I tapped her name, hitting the little call button. Then I put the phone on speaker and set it on the desk, like I knew my father wanted.
He nodded his approval as the line started ringing.
; “Hello?” Manny said, cautiously. “Becket?”
“Hey,” I said, trying to pump some life into the word so that she wouldn’t be suspicious. “My father said that we could go out tonight.”
“Oh, good,” she responded. “I’ll...”
“I wanted to talk to you first,” I said. “Something has been bothering me, and I thought it might help to tell you.” The lie left me easily. There was no reeling it back in. Not even for her.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
She didn’t say anything, so I continued talking. “I’ve been thinking lately about something that happened a couple of years ago. I thought you should know about it.”
“Okay...”
“There was this guy I knew,” I said. “His name was Reed, and I met him while walking one day. He was nice to me, like you’re nice to me. I used to sneak into his room at night, when I couldn’t be at home. Dad’s clients don’t like me but Reed didn’t mind having me around. He liked to kiss me.”
There was a distinct silence on the other end. “Did you like to kiss him?” Manny asked.
I frowned, wondering why she would ask that. “I didn’t mind kissing him,” I said. “I didn’t... not want to do it.”
“Okay,” Manny said, and her voice had changed again. That hard quality that she used around me sometimes. Like she wanted to hurt someone, or me. I didn’t understand the things that bothered her.
“Anyway,” I said, swallowing. “Reed came over one day, and he yelled at my father. Accused him of things that aren’t true. Dad had to remove him from our home but that didn’t stop him from seeing me.”
“What happened?” Manny asked with dread in her voice.
I didn’t want to tell her the rest but my father watched me over the phone. His eyes were flat, observing every move I made. They took note of my voice, my eyes, my words. He was there, not allowing me to escape the decision I had made. So, I swallowed and said, “I killed him.”
Silence.
“He came over. He was yelling, throwing things. I didn’t want to kill him but I had to.” In the back of my mind, I could hear my father saying that I could kill Reed, or I could kill myself. I had made the wrong decision. I had known the second I had picked but it was too late. I hadn’t wanted to die but I should have let myself go anyway. “I tried to make quick,” I said. “I didn’t want him to hurt. I turned the blood in his neck into frozen shards and decapitated him from the inside.”
His head had rolled across the floor and touched my feet. I had suspended the blood in the air so that it couldn’t stain anything but that left me surrounded by it. I had stood in the hallway, amidst a spray of blood that would never land, staring down at my friend’s dead eyes, knowing that I had chosen wrong.
I should have died.
“I just... wanted you to know,” I said.
She was quiet for so long that I thought she hung up. When Manny spoke again, her voice was steady. Like a rock in the middle of a field. Nothing could touch it, or make it move. “I’ll be over in a few minutes, Becket. We’ll go to dinner.”
“I’ll see you then,” I said. The phone went dead. I dropped it onto the desk leaning back. My heart beat too hard against my chest, and the world spun around me in lazy waves.
“You did good,” Dad said. “Now, I need to take care of the other matter before she gets here.”
He rose from his seat, pulling the drawer of his desk open as he stood. I knew the drawer had been locked, so he must have been planning this since before I came into the room. He removed three items. One was a blade sharpened into a fine point, the second was a more jagged looking instrument that curved sharply at the end, and the third was a rod that had a metal circle on the end with spokes shooting out. It looked kind of like a rudimentary drawing of a flower to me.
Dad set all of these on the desk, then sat back with his arms crossed. “Pick one.”
I swallowed. “There is no room on my chest for another scar.”
“Then we will put it on your back,” Dad said. “Pick one.”
I looked at the three options. The obvious one would be the sharpened knife. It cut through skin like butter. The only problem being, the cuts could get so much deeper than a person meant. It was easy to assume one needed more pressure to cut through flesh. Even with my magic, I couldn’t stop a severe wound from killing me. As for the other blade, I knew from experience that it tore flesh instead of cutting it. It left behind ragged scars so much darker than my skin tone.
Then there was the third option. My heart and stomach turned sickly but I pointed to the third thing. “That one,” I said.
My father smiled. “That’s what I hoped you would choose. You’re getting so good at this, Becket.”
Dad rose from his chair after putting the other two blades away. He lifted up the third weapon, which looked to me like a decorative fire poker, and walked over to his fireplace. It was one of those that could be turned on with a flick of a wrist. Heat blasted against my side as he did just that, setting the flowerlike end into the flames.
“Remove your shirt,” Dad said.
“Okay.” I stood up, pulling the bit of fabric over my head. It folded neatly, and I set it down on the chair I had vacated. My entire front was covered in scars. There wasn’t room for another but my back still had free space, as did my legs. There was a spot right between my shoulder blades that practically begged for a scar. I had six slashes down my lower back, all of them raised just enough that I could feel them with my fingers. Those were my oldest scars. I had gotten them the week after my mother left.
Dad pulled the rod from the fire. It glowed orange bright but he still reapplied it to the flames. “Lean over the desk. Put your chest flat against the surface.”
“Okay.”
“Try not to move at all, or this could get much worse than it needs to be.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t scream, either.”
“Okay.”
“You can’t tell Manny about this. She would feel bad.”
“Okay.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
The hot metal smell filled the room as he removed the rod from the fire. I watched him come over to me, then closed my eyes to breathe out. He said that I couldn’t scream. As the heat approached my back, I slipped away. To a place where nothing hurt, a place where I could float. There was nothing around me but empty space and the sound of silence, so potent that it pressed against my ears.
The agony in my back was a distant thought, as was the smell of burning flesh and sizzling skin. There was nothing around me but the promise of quiet. I wanted the quiet so badly. To be able to sit around and think of nothing. Do nothing. Be nothing. It was all a siren song that became harder to resist with every day.
Then he removed the rod from my skin, and I could float back down to my body. The area right between my shoulder blades howled with pain but I pushed that aside. I focused on stopping the bleeding. The wound was still there, the pain still fresh but no blood would leak down my back.
“Stand up,” Dad said.
I did as he told me to.
He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around. “You did good, Becket. Didn’t make a sound or move a muscle. I’m proud of you, and I want you to know that.”
“Thank you, Dad.”
“I love you, and only want what’s best for you. You know that too, right?”
“Of course.”
“Good,” Dad said, smiling brightly. He patted my cheek before setting the still-hot metal into a bucket of water I hadn’t noticed. Steam rose up in a plume that filled the room. “Now, let me bandage that before Manny gets here. No need to scare the poor girl, right?”
“Right.”
Chapter Twelve
Blame
Manny
Not once in my life did I ever think I was capable of murder. Not really. And then I got a
phone call. There wasn’t a part of me that believed Becket was responsible for that murder. I’d only known him for a few days but it was more than enough. I knew him enough to know that he wouldn’t up and kill someone without a reason. It took me no time at all to put it on his father. Had to. I knew what that meant.
The only thing in question was, why did Becket call and tell me that? If he really just wanted me to know, wouldn’t he have waited until we were in person? It was private and painful, so he should have waited. Nothing about the last time I saw him suggested he’d been burdened with a secret. So, I put that on his father, as well.
Either way, I was getting him the fuck out of that house.
I stuffed my backpack full of things after I’d changed my clothes, ignoring the pain in my body from the assault the day before. I promised him a nice date, and he would get it. Not a date. A night out... with a friend. Something stupid to worry about right now but it popped into my head. As I was changing into a blood red dress -- because I thought he would like the color on me -- I thought about those stupid girls all over him. Hel was dumb enough not to enjoy a boy who could go all night long but clearly, her friends didn’t agree. I didn’t like them touching him because they didn’t care about keeping him safe. They wanted fun, and they didn’t care if it would hurt him. I was his protector now, and that meant I was allowed to hate them for wanting what they wanted.
I had plans for Becket tonight because I wanted to make sure he got a break from the hell in his head. It would have been small but maybe he would like it anyway. Because I would be there. He said he wanted me... but I could pretend that meant something else for now.
My parents had ignored me for the most part after I’d gotten home. After they got every bit of information out of me, they took off. It would probably come back around later but the store mattered more than I did, so lucky me.
Climbing up to my window, I struggled to get out of my room. My parents were gone but Lane had a couple of friends over. I wasn’t up to explaining my plans to him, and I didn’t have time to let him hurt me before I left. Becket needed me.