Casper’s anger seemed to explode then. “I should have—”
Kit stepped away from Lee and got right in Casper’s face and stood her ground, stopping the man’s tirade from happening. “Cut the shit, Casper. And do not,” she said, her voice rising, “let Rena and her shit bring us all down. Because if you go down, we all go down. You aren’t punishing yourself for this. I’m not punishing myself either.” Kit took one step back, but not before Casper nodded and that detached cool Kit always spoke of returned.
“How did she think she’d get away with this?” Casper asked, his mask of laid back detachment now firmly back in place.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to,” Lee observed quietly, and they all hushed. “What was her end game? Destroy Hammond and Casper, maybe, but especially Kit. But beyond that… Has she even thought of how this would go down?”
“You think she wants us to stop her?” Kit asked, moving back to Lee’s side.
Lee nodded and added, “I think as much as she’s spiraling, she’s been pretty organized up to this point. Once she’s got her revenge, what’s left?”
“Death,” Beast stated matter-of-factly, his British accent coming out stronger than usual. “She can’t live with herself and who she’s become, but she also has more power for hate than for self-loathing right now. And yet, when her goal is met, what else does she have to live for? What else gives her fire?”
It was Eagle’s turn to question next. “What’s she going to do when we all ride her way, Casper?” His thick arms folded across his chest in an imposing manner. He was done.
“I don’t know, Prez. That’s up to you whether we go in guns blazing–”
“Renegade, ring the sheriff’s department and the state police. Let them know we might have a suspect and tell them to meet us at the address I’m texting you right now,” Eagle commanded before looking back to Casper, Lee, and Kit.
“Rena’s got a home, done up with the works so she can live life comfortably, a few towns over. We can make it there”—Casper seemed to think for a moment—“maybe twenty minutes?” he guessed.
“We go in, full ride, get her attention, and we make sure that whatever the fuck game she’s playing is played our way, Eagle,” Kit answered. She didn’t hesitate. She made the decision, and she let Eagle know he could count on her.
“Guns blazing,” Eagle said with a nod.
“Guns blazing,” Stealth answered from where she’d remained quiet.
“Guns blazing,” everyone else, including Lee and a quieter Casper, replied.
Kit’s family nodded and understood that they’d be left behind. All four looked weary but determined.
“Summer—” Autumn started but at Kit’s harsh look, she amended. “Kit.”
Kit nodded in a ‘go ahead’ gesture.
“You sure?” Autumn asked.
Kit held her oldest sister’s gaze, then she met her parent’s worried looks and Winter’s angry but calm facade, and answered, “Yeah, Autumn. I’m sure.” Autumn nodded and walked to her parents who sat on the front step as though in vigil.
It was time to ride.
It was time to bring Spring home.
It was time his Kit, Casper, and even Hammond who was absent, got a little more closure.
Fever
Spring could feel the raw, open skin along her jaw and under her right eye where the woman had punched her, like the coward she was. Spring’s hands were bound above her head by a rope attached to the headboard and her feet were separated and tied to the footboard.
Inside, she felt the shuddering of her spirit, the clawing need to be free from this prison, and the aches and pains of not only being tied up but the bruises on her face, ankles, wrists, and arms.
Outside, she was cool as a fucking cucumber and ready to beat this bitch into the ground.
Spring was no wilting flower, however. She was poised, polished, educated, not to mention she was a fucking Markham. She had claws. She had anger.
The woman who’d taken her would have been pacing had she a set of working legs; instead, the woman pushed the wheels of her chair back and forth in short spurts that moved her only a couple inches each way.
Spring had tried to pretend she was still sleeping, but dear god, if this woman made that squeaking noise with her chair one more time—
“I wasn’t supposed to be this,” she said, just like every crazy person said before they did something even crazier.
“Well—” Spring started, but Jesus, ‘well’ what? But she had to try and talk herself out of this situation. “Well, you don’t have to be this. You can let me go. You can let me go back to my family.” Her voice might have become a bit more hysterical as she spoke. “You can let me go.” She felt tears gather and her voice hiccup, and her cool broke. A cool she’d worked on for so long. Fuck. She needed to get it back, needed to hold onto that cover, hold it all in. If she didn’t, she’d fall apart. And she couldn’t afford that. She’d fallen apart only one other time in her life, and it hadn’t turned out well. Spring was much more human when she held onto her logic.
She took a deep breath, and was about to continue, but that was when her captor turned her chair and faced her. The woman’s dark hair parted more to one side in an updo that suggested she took care of herself, but because of the spike to its ends and the blonde tips at the front, she also appeared slightly rebellious. Well, she guessed kidnapping was rather rebellious.
“I can’t let you go, Spring,” she told her, moving the chair nearer the bed. And Spring couldn’t move.
“I helped you. At the gas station… I thought you needed my help.” Spring’s voice was quiet. She’d meant to be stronger the next time she spoke, but she felt duped. And even thinking that fueled the rage in her belly. “Way to be like the serial killers of old, honey,” she said venomously. But her anger and her comments didn’t seem to faze the kidnapper.
The woman’s hysterical laughter bounced off the walls in an ominous echo. Then, her angular face tilted a bit to the side. “You’re just like her, you know. You’re colder, of course. It’s to be expected with what you are.” Spring didn’t know what that meant, but then again, this woman was totally off her rocker. “Kit always had this fire, even if she has tempered it since…” The woman shook her head as though to dispel unwanted thoughts and then her unfocused gaze landed on Spring once more.
A memory came to Spring then.
The van had pulled in next to her own at the gas station, and when the woman had gotten out and asked for help, Spring hadn’t hesitated. A good human being didn’t say ‘no’ to a petite woman who had service stickers on her vehicle and lived in a wheelchair. She couldn’t remember much. Being knocked out, a hand across her mouth. A strange chemical taste on her tongue. And the woman had apparently taken the time to hit her and beat her up a bit, if Spring’s aching and bruised body was any indication. Before she’d gone under from the beating and the chemical, though, she’d heard the woman whisper in her ear as she’d passed out. She’d thought when she’d first woken up that it was just a dream, but now she knew it wasn’t.
Spring looked up at the ceiling, maybe trying to avoid the situation she’d been put in. “When I was passing out in the parking lot, I thought you whispered, Summer needs to pay.” She couldn’t keep looking away though, and so she met her captor’s gaze once more. The woman had such a friendly looking face, but those eyes...
How had she not noticed her eyes before?
Deep brown.
So deep.
And so dark.
Empty, like this woman had felt the weight of the world at one point, and she’d sunk under the force of its lessons. The world had a way of doing that. Didn’t mean you had to be the world’s tool and make life a hell for others. “Why are you after my sister?”
Her jaw hardened and she turned around to wheel herself back to the window. As though she thought better of it, she instead swung back to the bed, jarring the frame and causing the surface beneath Spring to shake
violently.
And then the woman told Spring a story.
She told Spring a tale of two young women who’d been naïve and rushed in their shift duties, who’d been too green to understand that even a simple mistake could forever change a life.
She told Spring of her trials, of her loss, and oh, god—
Spring gasped when the kidnapper told her of Summer’s trials as well.
“Summer never—”
Spring’s cool had broken again and she tried to pull it back in, tried to reign in her reactions. This woman didn’t deserve her emotion. Summer—fuck, not Summer...Kit. Kit deserved her tears and emotions, but this woman didn’t.
Spring would cry later.
For now, she’d listen.
“What they did to us,” the woman Spring now knew was Rena whispered. Then, Rena’s insanity-lit eyes fell on Spring as she tilted her head once more. “What would it take to break someone like you, Spring? Would you faint after just a couple breaks?” Rena asked as she moved closer to the bed and placed her hand around Spring’s knee. “I’ve always wondered if your kind are just as breakable as people like Summer and me. Would you have sex with someone who was basically your brother or would you rather die?” Rena’s voice rose and the pressure on Spring’s knee increased.
Spring felt her heart stop even as her bile rose. Deep breaths, girl. Deep breaths.
Spring needed to distract her. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do, until help came?
“I’m sorry for what you and Kit went—”
“It’s Summer!” Rena screamed, her eyes alight with an untamed flame that spoke of fanned embers that hadn’t been tempered or cooled in years. Crazy eyes. “Not Kit! She can’t hide from what happened to me and to her by changing her name!” She did the wheelchair pacing again, this time moving that inch back and forth, but jarring the bed frame with each hit forward.
On the inside, Spring flinched with each hit, knowing Rena wasn’t above taking her hands to Spring.
On the outside, she lay on that bed, chin tucked, lips pursed, eyes forward in concentration.
The movement stopped suddenly and she felt Rena’s hands once again glide along her leg. Rena pet Spring like a dog, taking special care to always return to Spring’s knee, but Spring kept her gaze forward. She wouldn’t react.
“I’m sorry,” Rena said, but Spring didn’t find comfort in that statement because the frenetic manner in which it had been spoken was at odds with the phrase itself. So was the movement of Rena’s body so she was leaning over Spring.
Spring’s heart rate increased and she willed it to slow, focusing on anything else but Rena’s hand touching her leg.
“Rena, we didn’t know what had happened,” Spring continued, but she wasn’t paying attention to Rena any longer. She just needed to talk, to distract. “We didn’t know. We thought you had—”
Rena’s elbow now dug into the area around Spring’s knee and she squeaked at the tweak of pain.
“Died?!” she roared. “Yes, I know what everyone thought. You all thought I had died, and let me tell you”—her breaths were harsh, erratic, stunted and Spring could feel Rena’s anger like a living thing—“let me tell you… I wish I was dead.”
And now she’d wheeled forward, so she was face to face with Spring, leaning over her, imposing and scary, and that unbanked fire of crazy in her eyes was full-on serial killer mode.
She really needed to stop thinking ‘serial killer’ in her head. It wasn’t helping with her calm.
Neither was the elbow digging into her knee.
“Yes,” Rena said, and before Spring understood what she meant by the word – that she was answering a question Spring hadn’t thought or voiced, but that her body had asked in elevated fear, knowing what was about to happen—Spring’s world caved in.
There was a deep searing heat, a strange crack. And she didn’t know if she heard that crack or if she felt it first, but that painful warmth, good god…it spread its toxic waste along the nerves surrounding the tissues in her knee, and her vision became black as the pain reverberated through her system.
So. Much. Fucking. Pain.
Her scream seemed to bounce off the walls, catapulting her back into the nightmare of that pain, that—
God. Jesus. Mother Mary. Holy fuck.
There was no word for this bleeding heat seeping into her consciousness, no word for this world shattering—
“Why?” she screamed and she wished they were somewhere other than what was obviously an off-grid cabin, just so the world could hear her pain. “Why, Rena?” She drew out the words, her screams an echo of such torment.
And even as the sharp notes of her nerves adjusting to the shock of what Rena had done to her knee died down, the ache was still the only thing she could feel.
Her captor’s hot breath was at her temple, but Rena wasn’t answering her question. Why would she? Why would someone so crazy even listen to a goddamned simple question?
Spring heard only her own labored breathing. But it was the other sensations that made the pain worse.
Rena’s breath was right above her, minty fresh and so clean it made Spring want to vomit at the contrast to who this woman truly was on the inside.
“I don’t think Summer will ever realize what I went through in that house, listening to what they were doing, feeling the blackness take hold and drown me… Waking up later, though, unable to move…they’ll never know…” Rena’s breaths against her temple would have been a nuisance if Spring didn’t have the pain to rely on. And still, she felt each of those breaths like a death sentence.
One. In, out.
Two. In, out.
“I hate her,” she finished.
“Yeah,” Spring replied sarcastically, unable to help herself and apparently channeling Winter, “I kind of got that, honey.”
And she hated Rena’s breathing.
They all had their crosses to bear, right?
And that breathing… Spring wanted to crush her windpipe, give her a taste of the pain she was so keen on dishing—
Rena’s hand moved to Spring’s elbow and Spring’s bravado and inner sarcasm came to an abrupt halt as she screamed, “No!” Then, the cool as a fucking cucumber Spring Splendor Markham, begged. “Please, Rena. Please. I’ll do anything. Please, please, please, please, please. I’ll do anything, Rena. Please don’t—”
But she should have remembered the woman’s eyes.
Spring’s elbow snapping was more real.
Not that the pain from her knee hadn’t been real.
Aw, fuck no. The pain had been more real than anything.
But she’d known the elbow break was coming, and it wasn’t better to know.
It was worse.
This time, she knew she heard the crack before she felt the shock of it hit her system, sluicing through her bloodstream, along her spine and shooting up and down her arm like an impure and acidic rain. It slid along the nerves of her body, not just at her elbow. No, her whole arm felt as though it’d been set on fire, excruciatingly burning as the nerve endings there lit up.
And then, she was nothing.
She was nowhere.
She was pain.
Only pain.
Her knee didn’t just hurt.
Her elbow didn’t just hurt.
Every fucking part of her body hurt.
The hits came.
One by one.
A beast unleashed.
Rena’s minty fresh breaths still touched her temple…
And she heard her captor’s words now as though they were far away.
But Spring knew Rena’s anger had been set loose because her body was jostled over and over, and the woman in the wheelchair, the one who’d once been a friend to Summer Markham, took her fists and open hands to Spring, her rage a sharp blade against Spring’s raw nerves.
The black shadow of oblivion which had threatened only a few minutes earlier finally took her, and she fell into its comforting embrace.
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But even in that falling, a slight internal smile formed when she heard the shouting.
Psychos weren’t the only beasts.
Some beasts were on Spring’s side.
Her last thought was that this woman had messed with the wrong sisters.
Kit is so going to kick your ass.
And if Kit didn’t, Winter would.
And if Winter didn’t, Autumn would.
Their mother might be an off her rocker hippie, but she’d done the mom thing right: she’d brought all four seasons into the world.
And when you waged war against one season, well… Rena Granger should have been more careful, because Mother Nature was an unforgiving bitch.
What Dreams May Come
There’s a reason they call war a terrible beauty. The very act of war reveals the strong and the weak, the victor and the runner up, the characters of all involved including the monsters and the destroyers of dragons. The blood of our enemies mingles with the blood of comrades and friends and family, on fields and desert floors that won’t ever have remembrance plaques. And we find out the truth about ourselves. We are stripped bare and exposed for the lies we’ve told not only to others, but to ourselves.
Kit would never be the girl she once was. It was impossible to go back now. But she’d come to terms with that so long ago. She wasn’t a princess in a tower. She wasn’t weak. She also wasn’t the monster she’d painted herself as either.
She used her anger to fuel the activity of fixing the A/C on their family’s godforsaken truck. She only drove the damn thing maybe a few times a week for hardware store deliveries or to grab groceries, but otherwise, her dad had it most of the time. Or Spring. Spring had been using it often as well. Before she’d been—
A Terrible Beauty Page 9