If there was one thing I was grateful to Kypherous for, it was that he’d taught me that trust needed to be earned.
“What kind of classes were you thinking of taking?”
“Well, after seeing you move, I was hoping maybe you gave one-on-one lessons?”
“Only for self-defence,” I said, “special circumstances…”
He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “You sure I can’t persuade you to make an exception for me?”
“Positive.”
He laughed nervously and pressed his hand against the back of his neck as he stared at the floor. “Sure, I get that…”
My shoulders were beginning to ache, the tension that kept me so rigid was creating knots in the back of my neck.
“Look, I teach some smaller classes,” I said, “more advanced stuff, it’s not a one-on-one like you wanted but if you can keep up, you’re welcome to join.”
Eli’s face brightened. “Do we have to audition or something?”
I laughed, the sound startling him and his warm eyes widened. “Nope, no audition. It’s intense, though. We weed out those who aren’t capable of keeping up pretty quickly, so—” I shrugged.
“Gotcha, prepare to have my ass kicked.”
I nodded. “You’ll find the sign-up downstairs on the board if you’re interested, along with sign-ups for all the classes we’ve got here.”
The tension in my body was beginning to ebb away, there was only so long I could keep my body in such a state of alarm. And aside from moving like a predator and exploring the space, neither of which was a crime, Eli hadn’t done anything to warrant my overreaction.
“Thanks,” he said, “and really, I am sorry—”
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” I said, “not your fault.” Drawing a deep breath, I let the last of my tension fade. “I haven’t seen you around town before…”
“I just moved,” he said. “Got a job working in the high school. I’m the new chemistry teacher.”
I nodded and smiled politely. The idea of him in a lab coat mixing strange chemicals in a beaker over a Bunsen burner just didn’t quite add up.
There was a moment of awkward silence that stretched between us like taffy.
Eli broke first. “You want me to give you a hand locking up?”
“I’ve got it, thanks.”
“You sure? I mean, clearly you can take care of yourself,” he said, gesturing to the staff still in my hands, “but I heard what happened to that girl last month. These days you don’t know what’s lurking in the shadows.”
“Pretty sure anything hiding in the shadows is afraid of me.”
He hesitated and I could see the cogs whirling in his mind. As my words sank in, his expression changed and he took a step back, his shoulder bumping the door hard enough to cause the glass to rattle in its frame.
“Okay, then,” he said awkwardly, “I’ll check that list out.”
Before I could answer he turned and fled the room, leaving me to stare after him. After everything, all of my nervousness over whether he was a threat or not, and he’s the one to high-tail it out the door because I alluded to the fact that I wasn’t human.
There were still humans who had issues with the preternaturals. Some of it was a heightened sense of self-preservation and really I couldn’t blame them. We were stronger, faster, and lived inordinately long lives, many of us were practically immortal.
And then there were the other humans, the ones who feared us not because we were a threat to them but because they resented our abilities. Both kinds would see you dead but it was the latter that I really disliked.
Mostly, it was easier to live among them without drawing attention to the fact that I could rip a door off a car. It was my one rule and I stuck to it wherever possible.
Yet, in the space of a couple of hours, I’d managed to break that golden rule twice. Once with the asshole in the traffic jam and now with Eli.
And what I’d witnessed in Eli’s eyes had been fear. Honest to God fear, the kind I hadn’t observed in a very long time. Unease settled in my stomach. Emotion like that in the humans was destructive, they couldn’t be blamed for it. The destructive nature of their fear was the very foundation of their survival. Without it, they’d have been wiped out by the preternaturals a long time ago. As it was, they outnumbered us by roughly ten-thousand to one. They survived by sheer force of numbers.
We had strength and magic on our side but odds like that couldn’t be overlooked. If they decided to wipe us out, they would probably succeed.
Pushing the hair from my face, I replaced the staff in the cupboard and flicked off the lights, locking the studio doors behind me. I took the stairs two at a time and locked up the downstairs reception area.
I pushed all thoughts of Eli from my mind. He was a problem for another day and with a bit of luck he would stay away…
I glanced down at the sign-in sheet and my stomach sank. His name sat at the bottom of the list.
Eli Raphael.
Despite the fear I’d seen in his eyes, he’d still signed up. Some humans liked the thrill of fear that being around preternaturals gave them. Adrenaline junkies. They were the most dangerous of all. After all, it had been one such half-human who’d taken my grandmother’s head as a trophy.
Chapter 12
The car rolled to a halt in front of my house and I reached down into the passenger foot well, lifting the Division 6 files back onto the seat.
Two small hands slapped onto the window on the driver’s door and I practically jumped out of my skin. Wide blue eyes peered in at me, sending a spurt of joy rocketing through my system. Merry slapped her hands against the window, leaving foggy palm prints in her wake as her grin widened.
Pushing open the car door, I barely managed to get one leg out before she’d propelled herself into my arms. Her small hands gripping both sides of my face, her cold fingers pushing and pressing against my cheeks as she examined me, tilting my head this way and that as though committing my features to memory.
“Nenna, Nenna,” she said in her sing-song voice. She hadn’t yet mastered ‘Jenna,’ the ‘J’ tripped her up, making her more and more frustrated every time she tried to wrap her tongue around it and so Nenna was as close as she’d come. It was a name I was more than happy to carry. Scooping her up, I slammed the car door behind me. It wasn’t safe to leave the files in the car, but I wasn’t going to carry them and Merry into the house together. The last thing I needed was for her to get a read of the pain and suffering the victims had gone through. Trauma like that, she probably wouldn’t sleep for a week.
We reached the door and she pressed her nose to mine, her blue eyes so close I had to cross my eyes to focus on her.
“No sad,” she commanded, her serious tone bringing me up short.
“I’m not sad.”
Merry shook her head before tilting it to the side. She watched me with an expression that was so beyond her years it stole the air from my lungs.
“Nenna, no have sad,” she repeated, touching my cheek just beneath my eye where my tears had dripped earlier. How could she know? It should have been impossible, and yet the more time I spent with Merry, the more I realised that everything was possible.
She grabbed my face, drawing me closer. “Home now.”
I held my breath, her eyes locked on mine, the seconds ticking by as rain soaked through my jacket. Finally, she nodded and released my face. Wriggling free of my grip, she slid down my body and darted into the house letting out a particularly loud whoop of joy.
I watched her go, the hairs along the back of my neck prickling. Something had definitely happened, I could feel it in my bones but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Closing my eyes, I drew in a deep breath. I was lighter, the events of the day drifting off as I let the breath out. If it had been anyone else meddling with my emotions I might have been pissed as hell but it was Merry and as such was impossible to get angry at her intrusion. To her, my sadness was something to be
fixed and she was the one to do it. The implications of messing with other people’s emotions was beyond her understanding. She wanted me to be happy, relaxed even, and so I was.
Stepping into the hall, warmth flooded around me, causing my rain damp clothes to steam in the air. It didn’t last, the temperature dropping suddenly as I took another step down the hall. The drastic plunge causing my breath to form white clouds in front of my face.
“Behave.” The warning in my voice was implicit.
The front door slammed shut behind me. The vase that sat on the windowsill inside the door teetered on the edge of the stone shelf. Rocking back and forth, the motion caused by more than just the slamming door. I lunged forward but the vase fell still, the temperature spiking suddenly upward. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I’d imagined the interaction but I knew better.
“I swear I’m going to have you exorcised if you don’t play ball,” I muttered beneath my breath as I slipped out of my jacket and hung it on the hook in the hall.
“Did you say something?” Carolyn asked, appearing in the door that led into the kitchen.
“How have the other houseguests been today? Any problems?”
Carolyn shook her head. “Nothing since you found the box on the porch this morning.”
I’d completely forgotten about it and Carolyn’s reminder had me narrow my eyes at the vase.
“Did you find Merry’s bracelet?”
“No, and Merry has no idea where it is. Every time I ask her about it, she gets upset.”
Crossing the grey flagstones in the hall, I grabbed the vase and tipped it over. Merry’s bracelet spilled out into my hand. It buzzed with an energy that prickled and bit at the skin of my palm like a thousand angry ants disturbed from their nest. Carolyn sucked in a breath, the sound whistling through her teeth as I held the bracelet up to the light.
“How did you know?”
“Let’s just say I had a little help,” I said, passing it over to the other woman.
The spirits in the house had never agreed with one another. I’d always known one was malevolent, but being a gorgon, malevolent spirits weren’t exactly an issue. The other entity was more of an echo, probably a past occupant. It didn’t have the strength of the other but its presence was a comfort I hadn’t known I’d needed. It was nice to come home to someone, even if that someone was invisible and dead…
It hadn’t even occurred to me that they might rat each other out.
Following Carolyn into the kitchen, the scent of her homemade bread hit me full force and my mouth started to water. Despite having eaten my weight in food at Quinn’s restaurant my stomach decided it was ready for round two.
“You bake?” I asked, flopping down at the table as Merry carried a small chart over to me. It was covered in pictures and she mulled over her choices before pointing at the image of a cookie.
“Merry, you were told no biscuits before bed,” Carolyn said. Even with her back to the table, she obviously knew exactly what her daughter was up to. “Yeah, a little,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“So long as I can have some,” I said with a grin. “I’m completely fine with you baking.”
Ignoring her mother, Merry pointed a little more firmly to the image before she cast a longing look in the direction of the cupboard.
Nodding, I pushed up onto my feet as Carolyn turned around, presenting the newly cleansed bracelet to Merry.
“Look at what Jenna found,” she said, crouching down to fasten the delicately beaded piece around her daughter’s dainty wrist.
Pulling the cupboard open, I silently fished two Oreo cookies out of their foil wrapper, concealing them in my palm as I nonchalantly moved over to the loaf of brown bread cooling on the counter top.
“It smells amazing,” I said, drawing in the warm comforting scent of the bread.
“I hope it tastes as good as it smells,” she said, “it doesn’t always work out that way.” Joining me at the counter she shooed me away as she took a bread knife down from the cupboard.
“Go, sit,” she said. “I’ll cut it up.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I slipped the cookies to Merry, who skipped from the kitchen with a wide grin on her ruddy cheeks.
“I hope you only gave her one,” Carolyn said, and I glanced over to find her watching me with one eyebrow raised.
“You know how persuasive she can be,” I said.
“I swear you two are as bad as each other.” There wasn’t a hint of anger or malice in her voice and a moment later she set the bread on the table. It was followed by a slab of butter that shone like melting gold under the illumination of the kitchen light.
“So how was it, then?” she asked innocently. From her, it was too nonchalant and I knew she’d picked up on at least some of my turmoil over the day’s events.
“I thought I was doing a decent job of keeping it buried,” I said quietly, grabbing a piece of the crumbly bread.
Carolyn didn’t say anything as I spread the butter and took my first bite. It was everything my senses had promised and I dropped back in the chair, happily munching.
“You are,” she said finally, “doing a good job I mean.” She folded her arms over her chest, a defensive gesture left over from whatever had gone on in her past. Would she ever lose the haunted look in her eyes? The question popped into my head and took me by surprise. “It’s kind of my thing to know when you’re feeling a little…” she hesitated, stabbing at a crumb left on the table with the tip of her index finger. I didn’t need to be an empath myself to know she was feeling a little off balance herself.
“You can say it,” I said. “I promise not to get offended.”
“Screwed up,” she said finally, raising her eyes to meet mine. “I don’t mean it to sound harsh, it’s just that’s how it comes across to those of us like me.” She shrugged and dropped her attention to the table top once more. She was probably searching for more defenceless crumbs to reduce to dust.
“What’s going on?” I studied her, searching for a hint at what was really bothering her. “Did something happen?”
Silence wasn’t unusual with Carolyn. In fact, since she’d moved in with Merry I’d grown somewhat accustomed to the long silences, brooding emotions, and periods of black depression she sank into every so often. But this was different. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said she was uneasy, which definitely wasn’t the norm.
“What do you mean?” She side-stepped the question with all the skill of someone used to playing this game with interlocutor’s wilier than I was.
“You’re quieter than usual,” I said, wracking my brain for a better way to describe her actions and coming up short.
“I’m always quiet,” she said, “it’s kind of my thing.”
“Fine, then, on edge,” I said. “And before you say it’s because I’m a little screwed up and you’re worried about Merry picking up on it, sorry to break it to you but she already knows.”
“What happened?” Carolyn instantly went on the defensive, her shoulders tightening, face paling beneath the little make-up she wore.
“It’s Merry,” I said with a smile, “she knows, Carolyn.”
The seconds ticked by and the tension in the room started to climb.
“I think maybe it’s time for us to move on,” Carolyn said suddenly.
I felt my jaw drop. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, I was simply a stop-gap until she got back on her feet. If Adrian was to be believed, and he’d given me no reason to doubt him yet, then the one Carolyn was running from was seriously bad news.
My cell phone started to buzz, its vibrations travelling through my leg and up into my chest as though my insides had been hollowed out.
“Why?” I asked, choosing to ignore the call.
“Merry and I need to find some place just for us,” she said, but the lack of conviction in her voice concerned me. “We’ve been scrounging from you for far too long already.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she said, drawing her arms over her body.
“If you don’t tell me, I can’t help.”
“It’s not your job to help,” she said, “your hands are full...” I opened my mouth to rebuff her but she shook her head. “Anyway, it’s nothing we need help with. Nothing happened, Jenna, it’s just time is all.”
It was a lie. I could taste the bitter tang of it on the air but it wasn’t as though I could do anything about it. If she didn’t want to tell me the truth, I couldn’t make her. She wasn’t a suspect who I could beat the truth from. She was an innocent that needed protecting, both her and Merry.
I’d hated the idea of houseguests when Adrian had first sprung it on me, sharing my space… But now, the thought of them leaving filled me with dread. Not even the spirits living in the house would fill the void Merry and Carolyn would create.
I could already imagine coming home as the winter evenings drew in, the house cold and unforgiving… Isolated.
“You should come down to the studio,” I said suddenly, the germ of an idea forming in my head.
“What, why?” Carolyn was already shaking her head before the words even left her lips, and from the way she was digging her fingers into the frayed edge of her jumper, I could tell she was fighting to keep her tears at bay. Digging my nails into my own flesh had been a tactic I’d employed often enough. The pain kept the tears back for a little while at least. It was my own personal fuck you to Kypherous, a defiant act letting him know that he couldn’t have all of me, that no matter what he did, I wasn’t broken, not so long as I could fight the tears.
“You and Merry both,” I said a little more determinedly. “I’ve got some beginner classes in self-defence—”
I could already see the refusal forming in her eyes. Ignoring it, I continued, “Nothing serious, no weapons or anything. Just some moves you can both learn, something to build the confidence.”
“I’m not sure, Jenna,” she said, looking uncertain.
“You’re going to love it,” I said, “and I promise nothing you’re uncomfortable with.”
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