by Mason Sabre
As Xander nodded, Stephen’s temper stepped onto a ledge ready to bound off into the oblivion. The exchange … he didn’t know what was changing hands, although he suspected it would have something to do with his children. “They trust you. All of them. Aiden trusts you to look after him. Helena trusts you … I … trusted you.” He wanted to sneer. His father had consistently said he was too naive, and now, here it was, smacking him in the face and ploughing through his mind.
“Have you managed to keep this quiet?” asked the unnamed Human. "Or did you raise suspicion and screw this up as most Others do?”
“I told them I was getting a part for the car. They’re women. They won’t have a clue.” The way he stuttered was like a fearful child explaining himself. It was pitiful. He was pathetic. “The witch asked me to pick up some things for her. She is concerned Nick won’t have sufficient blood to keep him going, to the …”
“Blood? For the children you mean?” It was Lee.
"Yes. She is working to synthesise it as you told me to tell her, but he isn't replacing it quick enough. Not for a shifter anyway. All she is doing is draining the life from him.”
A laugh from Lee and then he smirked at Xander. “Drain the fucking life from him then. It isn’t like anyone is going to miss him.”
“Fuck you,” Stephen said, and then he shoved his knuckle to his mouth and jammed it between his teeth before his words came out across the veil of their worlds and let Lee know he was listening. He put himself in front of Xander. “They will not kill you. I won’t let them. I’m going to save you all for myself, and then,” he cast a glance over his shoulder to Lee, "When I am done with you, I will kill every Human involved in this.”
Chapter 27
The moon—a blood-red moon in the darkened starless sky. It called Stephen, but he couldn't hear it. Its sweet song played out with the sound of the rising sun in the morning … music, sounds. They fed his soul and filled it with peace, usually. But today, his soul was quiet. It was as quiet as if he had been dead. He couldn't hear a thing. He was dead. His body was nothing but an empty shell … a shell that had once been his safe place, but it lay cast aside on the floor—a toy the Humans had finished with.
Blinking once, twice, Stephen struggled to see ahead of him. The air around him was too foggy, and it made even seeing his hand something difficult. Everything was a blur … a blur of motion. He was blind as well as deaf, but blind in so many more ways that the realisation of it ate away inside. The lies his friend had told were glass in his throat, and he couldn't swallow them. Not now. Not anymore.
Clenching his fist, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and ignored the searing pain in his temples. There was a face in front of him, a woman. She had a soft and gentle smile, but that was all he could make out. His vision was gone like he had just woken and rubbed his eyes too much. The image of the woman swayed out of focus, and he let out a growl with it.
"Helena," he said. She was the only word on his lips. His force. It was for her alone that he pushed himself to his knees and arched his back so he could get himself sitting up and then he'd be able to move again. Eden must have been taking his blood once more. Part of him wanted her to stop, not for the babies, not for Helena, but just to give him enough chance he could fight his way back to his body and he'd fix it … he'd fix everything.
When he could focus a little better, he realised he was alone. He was still in the house where he had seen Xander, but it was darker now. The dark blue of the sky bled into the room, and the shadows of the moon peeked out at him. If he had been whole, he'd have shifted. He'd have run with every other animal just like him. Maybe his body shifted. That would be strange and odd for Helena and Eden. Perhaps he'd gain his claws and teeth and slash at Xander.
Stephen rolled with the pain, and a cough racked through his body. He spluttered as if trying to get it all out at once. He heaved in a breath between coughs, but his body wasn't letting up, and he felt the pressure in his face and the flush as his mind screamed for breath. He stilled his body … stilled it the same way he would make his mind when it was going into overdrive with all the sounds and the voices he could pick up. It was like having thirty radios continually whispering in his ears and all of them fighting to be the loudest.
The floor was dusty, yet as Stephen dragged himself along it and to the window, he made no tracks. Where Lee had stood with Xander, there was a circle of steps in the dirt … a mark of what they had done. He stretched out, holding his balance so he could get himself upright, but then he reached too far, and the arm that was holding him up gave out, and he landed on his face with a bang. "Fuck."
He hadn't hit anything substantial. It baffled him how he didn't fall through the floors, especially when they had no substance. Perhaps the mind just clung to them too much to let it go enough. He lay face down with his arms out near to his head. Delicate fingers brushed across the tips of his—he had forgotten the woman.
He shuffled himself a little. “Helena?” he said again. He could see the sky from where he was. It had filled with clouds now … clouds that wrapped themselves around the sight of the moon, shielding it from the creatures of the night who’d call out to it in a series of howls.
The woman shook her head.
Her hand was small and bony … old, maybe. She slipped it around his and then pulled him so he could swivel enough to get himself into a sitting position. She had dark wavy hair that fell around the sides of her face and just over her shoulders. She wore a long blue dress that reached down to her ankles, and as she crouched, it bunched on the floor around her. She'd worn that dress the first time he had seen her. No. This wasn't Helena. This was the woman from Lee's office. The woman he had left to die.
When she rose, she smoothed her hand down her dress and across her stomach that would have been swollen with pregnancy. The dress was gaping now.
“I’m sorry.” And he was. Not that he had done anything, but for who Lee was, for her … for the child of hers that she would never see grow old.
Silent tears fell from the woman’s eyes. They spilt down her cheeks and onto the dress, making it dark where they hit. She looked more than just sad, Stephen thought. There was a depth to it. Loss, grief. Even in death, she was grieving for the life of the baby she would never meet.
"I don't know what it is you want." He had lost her at the facility. Honestly, to himself, he had forgotten about her too. He could have remembered her later, maybe when his body was back when his mind wanted to do that thing at night and go over every past failure. She'd come to him eventually in his thoughts. "I have to go to my wife. I'm sorry."
It might have been harsh to say and leave her with whatever it was she wanted, but she was dead, so was her child, and there was nothing he could do about either of those things. But he could save Helena, and he could protect his children … if … if he figured it all out.
He got to unsteady feet and staggered a little before finding his balance. The draining feeling waned a little, and he supposed Eden must have finished taking his blood.
The woman raised a hand in front of him, and when he took a step, she placed cold fingers against his chest.
“I have to go.”
She shook her head and stared at him with glassy eyes full of hope.
But no … no more loss, no more death. He was a father, a husband. He owed it to them to help them firstly. “I can come back. Okay? I just have to get to my wife first.”
The woman said nothing. She was just like Joey with that, who, right then, was missing. Perhaps he had gone with his treacherous father. Maybe he had done what was needed and left. It had been Joey who had led him there, who had been the one to expose what was going on. He’d make sure to thank him next time he saw him, and he tried to ignore the niggle in his mind that wanted to ask why a son would do that.
He blinked at the woman and resisted the urge to reach out to her and offer her reassurance. At home, when he worked for his father, he was the one who could calm the pe
ople down, offer them reassurances, and come across as the caring one, when his father couldn’t, but something in him, his tiger perhaps, recoiled at the mere thought of contact with her. She was infected, no. That was the wrong word, but there was something.
The woman had other ideas. As Stephen went to step around her, she grabbed his arm. Her cold touch bordered on icy and a cold sensation shot through Stephen's skin in waves of frosted pain. It was like the reverse of holding silver. Silver was like tiny little red-hot ant teeth under the surface, but this was cold … cold and dead.
The touch made his tiger rear, and it slammed into him so hard that it almost took Stephen off his feet again. The hackles on his neck stood to attention immediately as the cold from her grasp spread around every inch of his body and made him shiver.
He should have been able to get his arm free from her, but when he tried to wrench it away, he couldn’t. Her fingers a vice grip around his wrist. “What the fu—”
His words cut off when she tugged at him and led him out of the building. His mind fogged again, like the fog in the room before had found its way into his mind. He didn’t give up trying to get his arm free, but not even her fingers gave way a little.
“Where are we going?”
No answer. Just another tug and another fruitless fight from him to get free.
“Hey,” he said. “I have to go. I can’t go wherever it is you want.”
The ground was just a solid mass, and Stephen tried to dig his heels in, almost literally, but he ended up stumbling as she held him. She shouldn’t have been able to do that. He was bigger than her, stronger. Even his tiger called to him in protective protests. He wanted to go back to Helena. He needed to go back to her. A fundamental part of himself needed his mate.
He didn’t remember the way to the facility, and, if anyone had asked Stephen how they got there, he’d have not been able to tell them. He knew the house, and he remembered being dragged out of it, but between that, and standing at the room where the woman's body lay, it was like he had been switched off and then switched back on again.
With sudden force, too, the woman released his arm. He clutched at it and staggered back. She wasn’t going to get another chance to take him somewhere. If he’d had his body, she’d not have been able to do that at all. He told himself at least.
The woman and her baby, their bodies, lay at his feet as he had seen them before. They were sad, pitiful, and yes, there had been an injustice served to them both, but there was nothing Stephen could do for them. It wouldn't matter where the woman took him. She was dead; her baby was dead. "I'm sorry. I just don’t understand what you want.”
He couldn’t even reap their souls. Not that he could see any balls lying near to them, but if he could, it would make no difference.
With one weak arm, she raised her hand and pointed to her child.
“What? What do you want?”
Thick dark eyes stared at him, framed by a white face and the expression of a woman given up. She opened her mouth, almost like she unlocked her jaw and her chin dropped painfully low. Then she let out a loud, high-pitched wail of a scream. Stephen put his hands over his ears to block the sound out, but it was no good. The noise was too loud.
When the woman grabbed for him again, he tried to twist his body away. She stopped screaming, but the sound rang in his ears, and probably would for a long time. She got his hand, and instead of taking him somewhere as she had before, she pulled him down and thrust his hand against the baby, but it went through, like everything else real in the world, Stephen couldn't touch it.
"See," he said. She let go of his hand, and he waved it through her body and her child's. "There's nothing. I must get back to my wife. She needs me.”
The woman shook her head, and then she got Stephen’s hand and did it again, putting it to the baby. She was determined. Almost like if she kept doing it then he could do whatever it was she was asking for.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, and then her face distorted into crying again and she let out a sob.
“I’m sorry.”
She let go of Stephen and turned to leave.
This wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t.
But then he thought about the stripes on Lee’s face, and Freya’s words, and realised, perhaps … it was.
Chapter 28
He was falling … falling into a bottomless dark pit down to the bottom of his life. He hit the ground and lay there. His mind wasn't up to much, and his head had all but given up trying to understand just what it was people wanted from him. People always wanted something, except before this. Before Exile, he'd thought that need, the greed, it always belonged to the living, not the dead.
“I can’t do anything for you.”
The woman had gone now. She’d taken off somewhere in the middle of his repetitive realisation at what he had caused and his falling to the ground with it. She’d be back … when that need got too much for her again, or maybe when she decided he understood, she’d come.
The woman’s face was grey, not the ghost woman, but the body of her. Her skin had lost its tone, its elasticity. Stephen had seen enough dead people in his lifetime, but he’d never had the chance to sit there and study them. Not that he wanted to. The baby had a faint blue line across its top lip, Stephen recalled his mother had said babies have that sometimes, especially those lost to the world in their sleep for no reason other than they’d been called back to the other side.
Stephen sighed and let his shoulders slump as he ignored the twinge in his back. It ran up the centre and spread out around his shoulders. It would have been so much worse if he had been in real form, but the pain in his head was enough. A faint line of lightning veered around his eye all the way from his cheek to his temple. He pushed at it.
Back when he had lived on the other side of the waters, he had been a warrior, a fighter. The problem had always been the same, and Humans had numbers. For every one Human that got removed from the equation, another ten took its place. They were bacteria germinating and rotting the world at an alarming rate. Each born with hate in their hearts, shaped and moulded by the very people who called themselves parents … but Humans … they had done this to the woman and the baby. They had left them to rot in a rotten, damp closet. Only when their bodies would decay enough, would they ever be removed. For now, they were forgotten.
“Fight. I have to fight.” With a body heavier than it had ever been before, Stephen got himself to his feet. He stood with a stooped back and braced himself in case he fell again. When he was steady, he pushed against shoulders weighted down with self-doubt, self-loathing, and a whole ton of give-up. It was a good job there was no mirror around the place. Who would want to look upon the defeated reflection of themselves with acceptance?
Hatred rose in Stephen’s gut like a snake, the instant he emerged from the locked room and staggered into the office. At the desk, Lee clicked through documents on his computer, and then he leant himself back in the huge leather chair and clasped his hands across his stomach.
“I can hear you breathing, you know? I might not be able to see you, but I know you’re there.”
Stephen didn't answer. As Lee moved his eyes to glance around the room, the stripes across his face moved with the skin, red slivers inside his flesh. Stephen pictured that day when he had carved those stripes. He brought up the feeling that was a swell in his chest at the excitement he had felt. Even then, standing in front of Lee, he could bring those feelings about himself. He thought he should regret what he had done … all he had caused, but no. He didn't.
"I am surprised you haven't given up yet. You don't even realise I have been a step ahead of you the entire time." He fixed his gaze to where Stephen remained silent. "Did you think it would be so easy for you to walk out of here?" There was a picture on the desk. The centre focus was Benjamin Norton, but on one side was Lee, and the other side was his brother, the dead brother. "Of course, yo
u did get me with my brother. For that, you will pay. I was going to let you die where you were, but not now. Not a chance. We've got a score to settle. I owe it to my brother."
Lee waited. The leather of his chair creaked when he moved again, and the mechanism under it gave off a squeal as he pushed himself back, a satisfied expression. "Do you have nothing to say?"
“You don’t have the balls to kill me,” Stephen said.
The desk rattled when Lee slammed his hand against it in victory. He laughed. “I knew you were listening. I fucking knew it. God, I wish I could see you. I’d love to see the look on your face just now. God …” he’d taken his shoes off, and when he got up from his seat and walked across the tiled floor, there were no sounds. There was a small rug on one side of the room, where he went to, not caring about Stephen. "Funny how things change, isn't it Nick? I mean, once, you had me laid across your table and did this." He pointed at his face, "And then I had you on my table more times than you could probably count. Doesn't that piss you off? Everything I took from you? You don't even realise how far ahead of you I have been this entire time. Sometimes it was a challenge to contain myself around you. When you left on the bus and Xander told me everything was ready. Do you remember I wished you a safe and pleasant trip?"
The pulse in Stephen’s neck throbbed painfully. It bulged under his skin, hot with need and the want to break across the veil of the worlds. “This is about revenge?”
That laugh again. “No, Nick. It is not. This is about more than you could ever understand. More than any of you would ever understand. When I kill you, when I take every last bone from you as you lie helpless in front of me, that will be revenge. You will know it because you will beg for my forgiveness.”
“Your forgiveness?” Even though Lee couldn’t see him, Stephen shook his head. “He begged me you know? Your brother … he held onto me and pleaded with me not to kill him. When we fell from the bus, he broke my fall. His fingers dug so desperately into my arms. I heard his skull break as it hit the ground. Have you ever heard that sound? The crack?”