Sinful

by Jenica Saren

  "Who's Betty?" I asked in confusion.

  "Apparently, she's very bitter," Gatlin supplied unhelpfully.

  "You're in a very good mood this morning," I pointed out to Ria. "Any particular reason why?"

  She tapped her chin thoughtfully and took a sip of her coffee before responding. "If I'm being totally honest, I have a really fucking bad feeling about today and I'm trying to ward off all the bad mojo by being positive."

  Six sets of eyes turned to her and stared on in shock. Not only was it the first time any of us had heard her say anything about the power of positive thinking, but it was also an all-around odd statement.

  "My inner self visited me last night," she explained. I could feel all of us suddenly go on high alert. "But not like the evil version. It was my original self. The one that teased me, warned me, and encouraged me for years. It was weird."

  Gatlin, his eyes shining with barely-restrained anger, stood and leaned on the table. "How do you know it's not a trick? That's really fucked timing, don't you think?" He demanded. His questions were perfectly valid and only gave voice to what the rest of us were thinking.

  "Well, here's the thing," she started, still appearing calm. "When I saw her last night, I had this feeling like someone knocking on a door while I was talking to her. Like someone else was trying to get in, and it felt really bad."

  We stared on and waited for her to finish her story between sips of coffee. We were all uneasy, but I felt as though I could almost see for myself what she was talking about.

  "So, I kinda got the chance to see the difference between the two energies for myself. The energy that feels familiar is my... Hallucination. And the version that feels somewhat oppressive and mean is this imposter-slash-invader."

  Everything she was saying made sense, to a degree. The only thing that I was still left feeling unsure of was why now? Why, when we were about to embark on a mission, would her original inner self return? If it was, indeed, the original product of her mental illness, why would the imposter allow the original any free reign?

  Could the false version be preoccupied? Could they be preparing for something?

  "Something like fortifying defences," I mumbled aloud.

  "What was that?" Ria asked, her brows drawing together as she focused her attention on me.

  I cleared my throat and propped my chin on my hand. "Something doesn't feel right to me, either," I told her while I simultaneously projected my earlier thoughts to my brothers. "I can understand why you're feeling uneasy and I commend your positive outlook."

  Ria positively beamed, borderline glowing and appearing happier than I had seen her in a long time when we weren't doing this as a family unit. Those made her incredibly happy.

  While she went back to her coffee and kidnapped the newspaper I'd had propped by my elbow, my brothers and I engaged in a silent conversation.

  None of us were feeling good about the turn of events, and Ria's nonchalance concerning the issue certainly posed a large problem. It was almost like she had completely blocked the memory of the false projection from her mind and was attempting to fall back into her old rhythm.

  In fact, that was probably exactly what had happened.

  We all ate the rest of our breakfasts in silence, Ria reading out comic strips to us and telling us all our horoscopes.

  One day, I would have to be the one to break it to her that horoscopes were no more real than Santa Clause. Because I would be nicer about it, of course.

  As much as I loved my brothers, I would be the first to admit that they were all a bunch of jackasses that lacked a certain amount of tact.

  "Is everyone and everything ready to go?" Eliam finally asked, rising from his spot at the table and clearing plates.

  We all nodded and Ria enthusiastically jumped up to join him. While they cleared up, the rest of us rose from our seats and moved to the foyer to collect everything that we had prepared.

  We had iron chains, amber pearls, and a shield potion that we had obtained from the nereids for Ria. There wasn't any way in hell or on earth that we were going to let Ria go in unprotected, not after last time and not with us not knowing whatever was lurking inside that protective shell.

  "Everyone set?" Ria asked as she entered the foyer with us, grabbing her coat from the hook and pulling it on.

  "Are you sure you want to be there?" Beck asked seriously. "We don't know what's in there and none of us want to be caught unaware."

  It was likely the shock of hearing him so serious that made her hesitate, but she did hesitate. "I'm part of the team, right? Not a Sin, obviously, but we've been through enough now for me to confidently call myself a team member," she stated, her jaw set and fists curled. "Loosely translated, that means I'm going."

  Beck raised his hands. "Fine, fine. I was just making sure. Don't wanna see that particular rack mounted on a wall, you know," he teased, earning a cool glare from our favourite honourary Sin.

  "Take this, then," I said, handing the potion over. "It should last for a good twelve hours or so and you'll have to drink it."

  Her nose scrunched up adorably as she took the tiny vial from my hands. "If it tastes like cough syrup, I'm going to concoct a very creative revenge plan," she warned.

  "It should certainly not taste like cough syrup," I reassured her, a small pang of guilt hitting me in the chest.

  Shrugging, she popped off the cork top and downed the contents in one gulp. Then the gagging started. "What the fuck was that?" She demanded angrily, thumping herself on the chest to quell her urge to regurgitate the potion.

  "You don't want to know," Kellan informed her simply. "Now let's get going."

  Ria approached Kellan and tucked the vial away in her pocket before latching onto his arm.

  A few seconds later, we were all standing, once again, outside the church that I knew still plagued Ria's dreams. The crew had already mostly arrived and it was starting to sprinkle. I likely should have insisted she wear a scarf and gloves, but I doubted she would have listened anyway.

  "Good, we're ahead of schedule already," Eliam mused aloud. "Rafe, with me."

  As Rafe passed by Ria, he snagged up her wrist and gave it a gentle squeeze. She looked after him with intense longing and even stronger concern.

  Despite the bravado, it seemed that she was genuinely worried about whatever feeling she had. After ignoring her gut feeling last time, I knew that none of us were going to do so a second time, not when the previous time had put her in mortal peril.

  "Everything alright?" I asked her, sidling up to her.

  She shot me a small smile and nodded. "Yeah, I'm good, promise."

  I remained unconvinced. "You know you can talk to me, right?"

  Her head bobbed up and down in a nod absently as she stared after Eliam and Rafe while they talked to the workers. "Yep. Positivity, right?"

  "Right..." I didn't like that she didn't feel that she could share the source of this feeling with us. It was our own fault.

  Deciding to give her space, I started walking toward my brothers as they started back. Eliam appeared relaxed, but I could feel the tension rolling off of him. Rafe seemed mostly indifferent all around.

  "We all set?" I asked, shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans.

  "Everything is ready to go, now we just go and standby," E confirmed.

  The three of us walked back to our little motley crew and relayed the information to them, all the while Ria just stared blankly ahead at the church and its barrier.

  One of the machines roared to life. We watched and listened as the workers directed the operator in the right direction, all of them keeping an unwittingly healthy distance from the barrier.

  Humans, however dull they could be at times, were extremely perceptive when they weren't paying attention. It was one of their more beautiful qualities.

  A movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention and I turned just in time to see Ria moving her hands from her ears again. She looked troubled, more so
than before.

  Just as I was about to ask if everything was alright again, the workers called for the first swing.

  The moment the iron ball connected with the barrier, Ria let out a bloodcurdling scream and her hands flew to either side of her head. She dropped to the ground and continued screaming. She was in pain, so much pain.

  "Ria!" The six of us shouted in unison.

  When all she did was scream again, I realised that she was right.

  Something was very, terribly wrong.

  20 Ria

  Screaming. The barrier was screaming.

  All morning, I'd been getting a nasty ringing in my ears that felt like I'd just reached peak altitude in an airplane. But that sound was nothing compared to the shrill, piercing sound of the screaming that the barrier was emitting.

  It sounded like it was in pain.

  Dully, I could hear the guys calling out to me, but their voices were overpowered by the echoing noise pounding against my skull.

  There weren't a lot of things that I knew about the magical side of the world that I lived in. In fact, I could name everything that I knew on one hand. But, one thing I knew for sure was that the barrier was alive and it was hurting, crying, begging for the pain to stop.

  I feel you, magical eggshell. If you could stop shrieking for five seconds, maybe I could help.

  Unsurprisingly, the sound didn't stop.

  There was something that felt like it was literally tugging on my brain, trying to get my attention like a puppy wanting to go outside and play, but this felt much more urgent. On instinct, I tried to take a steadying breath and focus on the feeling. It was my lazy attempt at meditating, but the real deal was a little difficult at the moment.

  Seconds later, I was back in a familiar white space. "Shit," I breathed.

  "No, it's me, it's me!" I called out from what seemed like the other end of a long, borderless tunnel.

  "You wanna tango again? I got around your nasty little trick once, I'm not going through that bullshit again, so fuck the fuck off," I snapped.

  As my mirror image came closer, I immediately noted minor differences. Like the night before, this version of me looked more like me. More like the inner self that I remembered. No heavy red tint to my hair, no strange purple aura. And, as she got closer, I noted that the little freckle was on the same side as mine.

  Small relief.

  "What the hell is going on?" I asked my inner self.

  She smiled sadly back at me and placed a hand on my shoulder when she was just a foot or so away. "I tried to tell you before," she - I - said. "Something bad is coming your way. Something really, really bad."

  "Well, no shit, Sherlock," I replied sarcastically. "I only have a magical piece of bulletproof glass legitimately screaming at me. I'd say it's about a four on the bad scale."

  Her expression said she wanted to reach out and shake me, and I didn't blame her one bit. "Ria, listen, please," she pleaded. "That thing that's been talking to you, that thing that overpowered you, it's all a lie. Nothing about it is as it seems. It's dangerous and you need to get away, get the guys away."

  In all of my years of having a tiny version of myself in my head, not once had she ever sounded so sentient and aware. Mostly, she commented on things already going through my head, but this? This was new and almost as disturbing as the barrier's cries.

  "How do you know so much?" I asked warily.

  She groaned in frustration and bit down on her lower lip. Huh. I hadn't done that in years. "Please stay focused," she demanded nicely. "If that barrier comes down, it's going to be a shitstorm of epic proportions. There will be a lot of casualties and a lot of heartache. You can't let her out."

  A familiar banging sound echoed around us and my inner self turned white. "I can keep her out for a while longer, but I can't do that if she gets out in the physical world. That barrier is keeping the world safe, Ria."

  "Her?" That was the point that I fixated on. My inner self kept referring to whatever this was as her and she. "Who is it? Does she have a name?"

  She stared long and hard at me, as though assessing me before deeming me worthy of the knowledge she somehow possessed.

  "Lillith."

  Lillith? Another series of loud bangs shot through the white world we were in.

  "As in, the seventh Deadly Sin? That very same Lillith?" I asked incredulously.

  "Yes, yes, now please go!" She commanded.

  Before I could say or ask anything back, my inner self threw out her hand in my direction and I went flying.

  Sitting upright, my vision swirled and tilted as four eyes swam before me. Amber eyes, framed by a mane of chestnut hair, a light dusting of stubble, and eyebrows drawn together in concern. I had to make myself blink a few times before I was able to focus and bring it down to the normal two eyes that I knew he should have had.

  "Hey," I said, dazed. "You okay?"

  Gray barked out a mirthless laugh. "Stop going unconscious. Really. If there was a Sin of unconsciousness, I would swear you were its embodiment."

  "I was unconscious? How long?" I asked, still trying to get my bearings. I recalled the high-pitched screaming sound from before and struggled to remember something that felt astronomically important.

  "Only a couple of minutes," Rafe reassured me from Gray's side.

  I nodded, but I was more focused on trying to remember whatever important thing it was that I felt like I had forgotten. It felt like when you walk into a room and completely forgot why.

  My gaze wandered to the construction workers, who were all talking and communicating something to one another, even over the monstrous sound of the big ass machine. "The barrier is alive," I told the guys.

  When no one responded, I turned to each of them to find that they were all sharing mutual looks of scepticism.

  "Alive? How so?" Beck was the one who finally asked. Playful, comic relief Beck. When I thought about it, he had seemed a bit more serious lately.

  "As in, it feels pain and was screaming," I told him plainly. "That's what I was hearing. You guys didn't hear that at all?"

  Six blank stares met my own and my heart plummeted. Had I... Had I hallucinated the whole thing? Was I going completely insane? The most probable answer was yes, I was. The least probable answer and the one I was most sure of was no, I one hundred per cent wasn't.

  Gatlin knelt beside me and ran a gentle hand through my hair while Eliam knelt on the other side. My mind flashed me with the most vivid imagery of a delicious Sin sandwich. When I wasn't hit with punishing pain, I grinned.

  Well, I grinned internally, because I didn't feel like grinning on the outside.

  "You're still new to sensing magic. That screaming sound was probably so prominent to you because you'd never been around it before," Gatlin said soothingly.

  Eliam nodded in agreement. "Magic being broken is no small thing and your newly aware senses are probably overwhelmed," Eliam added.

  Shaking my head, I tried to stand but fell back on my ass. "You guys don't believe me," I mumbled, torn between being devastated at their lack of faith in me and being downright pissed.

  "Guys," Rafe said quietly. "A minute, please?"

  Everyone shared a look, but the remaining five brothers eventually got up and walked away.

  "You know that it's not that we don't believe you, right?" He coaxed. "We care about you so much."

  All I could do was stare at him. The words weren't coming, no reply sitting at the tip of my tongue. People who cared about other people didn't constantly treat them like they were clueless, did they?

  Rafe looked upset, but it was nothing compared to how I felt. "Our goal isn't to make you feel less or like your thoughts and opinions aren't relevant. We all love you so much. You're family."

  Just then, it felt like some sort of dam had burst somewhere inside me, this intense knot that I hadn't realised was there snapped apart like a rubber band ball too large. He threw around that word like it justified making me feel like I wasn'
t part of the team, like I was nothing more than a pet along for the ride that they couldn't trust to leave home alone.

  He said they loved me out of nowhere, nothing to prove that, nothing to back up that statement other than a near hook-up in my car. Was that familial love?

  No, I didn't think it was.

  Hot, angry tears poured down my cheeks as I tried to shove away from him where he was crouched beside me. "Don't," I told him.

  His forehead creased in confusion. "Don't what?" He asked.

  "Don't throw that word around like that when you don't mean it," I snapped back.

  "Ria-"

  I cut him off, raising my hand. "No. When we're all together, having fun and enjoying life, I feel loved, I feel like part of the family," I stated firmly, trying to sound sure and determined through my sniffling.

  "That's good, because you are," he said softly.

  Angrily wiping away at my face, I shook my head, my hair flying everywhere and beanie starting to slip. "And then as soon as it's time to put that to the test and treat me like an equal, I'm just that stupid human living in your house that has sex sometimes and a lot of fucking baggage. I get it. You guys keep making it abundantly clear that I'm only worth anything when it's for fun."

  Rafe winced and drew back. "That's not true," he defended, his voice quiet. "Believe me."

  I shook my head again and looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. I'd spent years being in the public eye, exposing more than just my body when I was on stage. I knew, from very recent personal experience, that it was easy for people to only see me as someone to bring the party, liven up the room.

  Someone only good for fun.

  Be happy, be bright, don't be serious, no one wants to hear what's wrong with you.

  It was how I managed to make myself successful in such a brutal and cutthroat field of work, it was the truth. But the problem was that no matter how hard I tried to push down the longing for so much more, the acceptance of the good and bad parts of me alike, it was still there. That desire wasn't going away after a few shots and bad jokes.