by Tessa Adams
I stare, fascinated, as blood leaks from a cut on his upper lip. He wipes it away with a careless flick of his hand, but the look in his eyes is anything but careless. I should probably apologize—for self-preservation, if nothing else—but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s nice to know he’s got one human vulnerability. Besides…
“You had that coming,” I tell him.
“You’re right. I did. I apologize.” He steps closer and I realize that weird electric current is back. Or, more accurately, it’s been back for a while, humming right under the surface, just beneath my skin. But now that Declan is so close, it’s intensifying until I can barely think.
Until all I can do is feel.
That’s dangerous, though, so I fight against the feelings. Do my best to ignore them. Which is nearly impossible, especially when Declan reaches out a hand and strokes my cheek.
“What happened to your face?” he asks.
I don’t know how to explain when I’m not sure I understand it myself. “I fell.”
“At the lake?” His fingers probe the wound gingerly.
I jerk my head away. “It was slippery.”
“I bet.” He pauses for a second. “Thank you for finding her.”
As if I had a choice. I start to snap at him, but his words seem sincere, as does the sudden sadness on his face. “Were you…together?”
“Not for years. But she was a good friend.”
I hate the relief sweeping through me at that news. “I’m sorry. For Lina, I mean.”
“Yeah, me too. But that’s life, isn’t it?”
He sounds callous, but only if you don’t read between the lines. Declan looks…weary, and I’m reminded of just how long he’s been alive. I think of what I’ve seen in my twenty-seven years on Earth and wonder how the hell he even gets up in the morning. I have a feeling he’s seen more death and destruction than any person should have to.
I lean forward, give him a brief hug because he looks like he needs one, though I refuse to examine the need I have to soothe him.
“Thank you.” He smiles as he strokes the backs of his fingers down my cheek. “It’s nearly time,” he murmurs.
“For what?”
He doesn’t answer as his fingers toy with my lower lip for one second, two. I can barely breathe. My diaphragm feels frozen even as every nerve ending I have is lit up like Times Square.
“Declan…” I don’t know what I want to say, don’t know what I’m asking. Only that now isn’t the time for this—whatever this is. Not when I still stink of death and not when I can actually see flames flickering in his eyes. He’s on edge and I’m tapped out. It’s not a good combination for anything, even conversation. Especially conversation when I know that I need all my wits about me if I have any hope of holding my own with Declan. Already, something he said is niggling at me, but I’m not lucid enough to figure out what it is.
He pulls away abruptly. “I’ll walk you to your door.”
“It’s a safe neighborhood. I think I’ll be okay.”
“When are you going to figure it out?” he asks, escorting me onto my front porch. He holds his hands out for my keys and for some reason I give them to him.
“Figure what out?” I ask as he inserts the correct key into the lock without asking.
“It’s not the threat you can see that you have to worry about.” I start to ask him what he meant by that, but he distracts me when he continues. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”
I look at him like he’s crazy as he opens the door, then hands the key back to me. “Oh, yeah. Because I want to relive tonight over and over again.”
“I can help you sleep, if you’d like.”
“No, thanks.” I know he means a spell, and while it’s tempting to let him do that for me, the truth is, I just don’t trust him enough. This is the man who left me alone on the worst night of my life. The fact that he’s here now, seeing me home when I don’t need him, doesn’t make up for the fact that he skipped out when he did. “While I…appreciate the offer, I’m pretty sure I can take it from here.”
He takes a step back. “I guess this is good night, then. I’ll see you soon.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s okay. I do.” He looks almost tormented by the thought, which only reinforces all the reasons I shouldn’t be standing here talking to him. “I’m going to go in now.”
He nods. “Eat your Snickers. It will help with the shakiness.” Then he touches me, a brief brush of his hand against my shoulder. I feel the tension slowly leak from my shoulders. “Good night, Xandra.”
“What did you do?” I demand as he turns and walks away without answering. “Damn it, Declan!” I start down the steps after him, intent on telling him off for messing with me when I expressly told him not to. Except I’m talking to myself, because Declan is already in his car and pulling away from the curb.
Which should be impossible, when one second ago he was standing in front of me. But my brain has been blown enough tonight without me having to worry about the laws of physics and how easily Declan breaks them.
Exhausted, annoyed, frustrated—with both Declan and myself—I turn and walk back onto the porch. I desperately want a shower and then, after that, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I know I should go to sleep—I’ve got to be at Beanz by four thirty and it is already well after midnight. I so should have finished up that cookie dough this afternoon. I could have had an extra hour in the morning.
Not that I could have known the night would end up like this. Hell, I’ve been living it for the past few hours and I still can’t believe it.
I shut the door behind me, lock both locks and put the chain on—something neither Lily nor I usually bother with. But after what I saw tonight, I have a feeling I’m going to be walking around jumping at shadows for quite a while.
“So, you’re not dead.”
Lily’s voice comes from the corner and I realize she’s been sitting here in the dark, waiting for me for goddess only knows how long.
“You want to tell me what your disappearing act this evening was all about? And why you’ve forgotten how to answer a text—or your phone?”
I laugh at her tone, at how much she sounds like an annoyed mother whose daughter has just missed curfew. I laugh and laugh and laugh, the sound tinged with hysteria that I can do nothing about.
“Xandra.” Her voice filled with concern now, Lily stands up and snaps on a nearby light. “Holy shit! What happened to you?”
“It’s been a long night.” I head to the shower, conscious as I do that I’m probably dropping mud all over Lily’s clean hardwood floors. She’s not OCD about much, but the floors are kind of her thing. If they’re dirty, she freaks out.
Nothing I can do about that now. I’ll just have to mop when I get home from work.
Lily follows me toward my room, and the fact that she doesn’t say anything about the mess I’m making is a definite indicator of her level of concern. Though she does pause along the way to grab a trash bag.
“Tell me,” she says, gesturing with the trash bag so that I know to drop my clothes straight into it instead of on the floor. I spend a second mourning my favorite sweater, but in the grand scheme of things, a ruined sweater doesn’t seem so bad. Especially since I’m not sure I’d ever be able to wear it again anyway. Memories from tonight are not ones I particularly want to hang on to. Hell, I’m not sure I even want to tell Lily what happened. Not because I want to keep it a secret, but because I don’t want to bring the ugliness into our home.
Still, I owe her an explanation, so I begin the story with halting breaths and choppy sentences. As I talk, I begin to strip. First the shoes. “I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a new pair,” I tell Lily as I hand her the beloved, and now ruined, Jimmy Choos.
It’s a mark of what a good friend she is that she barely hesitates as she tosses them into the trash bag. “They’re just shoes,” she tells me.
She must have been more worried abo
ut me than I thought.
I strip my sweater off just as Lily clicks my bedroom light on. She screams and drops the trash bag before I can launch the ruined garment into it.
I whirl around, visions of an attacker tearing in my head. “What’s wrong?” I demand when I don’t see any kind of threat.
But she’s just staring at me with horrified eyes, both hands clasped over her mouth.
“Lily? Are you okay?”
“What happened to you, Xandra?” She crosses the room, puts tentative fingers on my arm.
I glance down, try to figure out what has her so startled and nearly scream myself. My entire upper body is covered with bruises. My arms, my breasts, my stomach—and judging from the way Lily is tracing crisscrossing lines across my shoulders, so is my back.
“What the hell happened to you?” Her voice is shaky now and there are tears in her eyes.
“I don’t know.” But then I think back to those agonizing minutes when I relived everything Lina went through. “Are there any cuts?” I demand, craning my neck to get a look at my back.
“No. Just bruises. But these look like whip marks. And I swear this is the imprint of a fist.” She swallows audibly. “Were you attacked, Xandra? Were you—”
“No! I swear, none of this happened to me.” I rush to tell her what happened and as I do, her eyes grow wider and wider.
“Dear goddess, dear goddess, dear goddess.” She repeats the words over and over again as I strip off my jeans and stand before her in my wet bra and panties. Then she looks me over, writing down every injury she finds. Most are bruises, like the whip marks across my back but every once in a while there’s a cut like the one on my face.
I have a shallow slice on my left thigh, a welt on my right hip. There are some scrapes on my breasts and ribs that I know I got from the tree branches near the lake, but all the other injuries seem to be shallow imitations of Lina’s.
“Psychic echoes,” Lily breathes, running her hand lightly over the array of bruises that decorate my ribs.
“Watch it!” I yelp when she presses a little too hard.
“With physical manifestations. I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” she whispers. “It’s definitely not white magic doing this.”
Like I need to be a Heka scholar to figure that out? If she’d been there, if she’d seen and felt what that monster had done to Lina, then it wouldn’t even have occurred to her that it could be anything but the darkest magic that did this.
I shudder at the thought. I don’t like that it was this close to me, that it got the chance to mark me like this. “What does it mean?” I ask, forcing my voice steady by will alone.
“I have no idea.”
“Is it inside of me? I thought magic like this could only touch you if you open yourself to it. If you let it inside.”
Lily must hear the rising panic in my voice, because she grabs both my arms with gentle hands—enough to get my attention but not to hurt. “Xandra, you’re one of the best people I know. Whoever did this, however he did it, his magic isn’t inside you. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know what dark power feels like and what I feel coming from you is nothing like that.”
I’m abruptly ashamed. I’m so caught up in freaking out that for a moment I forgot Lily had lost her only brother to the lure of dark magic. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “You have every right to be concerned—there’s nothing to apologize for.”
“None of this should be happening at all. I’m latent!”
“You were latent. Now I don’t know what you are. But you’re definitely packing some kind of power.”
“The belladonna—”
“I don’t think so.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I’ll do the research, but that’s pretty much an old witch’s tale. Your mom got suckered.”
“Then what’s going on?”
“I have no idea.” She gestures to the bathroom. “Go take a shower and while you’re in there, start at the beginning. You need to tell me everything. I have two weeks before I head back to school—I’m going to run this to ground before then, or die trying.”
What Lily doesn’t say but what hangs in the room is that if we don’t figure out what’s happening, she won’t be the one who dies. After all, how many times can I go through what happened to me tonight?
I start the shower and she turns her back while I strip off my muddy bra and panties, dropping them in the garbage bag with the rest of my clothes. Then I step into the shower and let the boiling hot water wash away the dirt and the blood and the tension. If only it could wipe away the memories as easily.
But they’re still there, pouring out in fits and starts as I wash my hair and scrub my body again and again and again. Lily doesn’t say much, just listens. But when I reach for my bottle of Amber Romance shower gel for the fourth time, she quietly says, “Enough, Xandra. You’re clean.”
“I don’t feel clean.”
“I know. But you are. You have to trust me on this or you’ll peel your skin right off your body.”
That doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe then I’ll finally stop feeling her cold, clammy body under my fingers. Against my legs.
“Besides, that can’t feel good against those bruises.”
Funny, but I barely notice them. It’s not that they don’t hurt—because they do—but they’re nothing compared to the anguish that threatens to rip me apart every time I think of Lina and the girl back home in the forest. I try to block the pain, to focus on the rhyme and reason of this whole situation, but it isn’t easy. Not when I keep thinking I’m to blame for their deaths.
The way I see it, either there’s some strange connection between the killer and me, which allows me to feel things about the murders, or those poor women were just pawns, a way for him to strike at me without actually going after a member of the Ipswitch royal family. I really hope it’s the former, no matter how scary and twisted that is. Because the alternative—that I’m responsible for the brutal deaths of two young women who look an awful lot like me—I don’t know how I’ll live with.
At Lily’s continued urging, I finally flip the shower off. When I turn back around, Lily’s arm has crept around the edge of the shower curtain and she’s holding one of the big, fluffy red towels I love.
“I’ll make some tea,” she says.
“You don’t have to do that. I know you’re tired.”
She snorts. “Don’t be a martyr. Besides, I want to do your tarot again.”
“I’m not being a martyr. And there’s no way you’re doing my tarot, ever again.” I climb out of the shower wrapped in the towel, then turn to get my hairbrush off the sink.
Lily gasps. I’m about to tell her to knock it off—I know the bruises are bad and don’t need to be constantly reminded of them—when she says, “When did you get a new tattoo?”
A sick feeling starts in the pit of my stomach, separate from the knot that’s already there. “What are you talking about?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she lays her fingers gently on my left shoulder blade and traces a star into my skin.
And not just any star. A Seba.
“I swear these weren’t there before your shower,” she murmurs. “But I suppose they could have just been covered by mud.”
Completely freaked out now, I rip off the towel, disregarding modesty as I whirl to look at my back in the mirror. Sure enough, on my left shoulder blade—underneath a colorful array of bruises—is a silver Seba. And then, about an inch over, arching like it wants to follow the curve of my upper back, is a second one. They are identical to each other, and more importantly, to the one I already have in the middle of my palm.
The one I got from Declan eight years ago.
Eleven
I don’t sleep. Though I escape from Lily’s coddling, and slightly claustrophobia-inducing clutches, sometime around two thirty, I don’t bother trying t
o sleep. One, because I have to be up at four to get to work and two, because I’m terrified that if I close my eyes I’ll be bombarded by images of that poor woman. Of Lina. Or worse. I’ll get sucked into a world where I’m fascinated, instead of repelled, by Declan Chumomisto.
Instead, I sit in the center of my bed, iPod blasting old Aerosmith and Metallica songs, while I play game after game of Mah-Jongg. If I work at it, if I play fast enough, then I can’t think. Can’t feel.
Except, every once in a while I’ll click on a tile and it will remind me of something. The trees down at Town Lake. The bridge. The number seven, which started this whole mess twenty-seven years ago.
Every time they creep up, I push the thoughts away. I concentrate harder on the game, on the music and the lyrics pouring through my earbuds. It almost works. Except I know I can’t run forever. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to decide what to do. Who to trust and who to run from, because the more I don’t think about this, the more I become convinced that I am in really deep trouble. Trouble that pleading ignorance isn’t going to get me out of.
Finally, the longest hour and a half of my life draws to a close and I spring out of bed. I’ve never been so relieved to get to go to work in my life. I dress quickly, in a clean pair of jeans and a bright red turtleneck sweater. I can use the pick-me-up from the color today, plus both garments do a decent job of covering my bruises.
Except for a little cover-up on the cut under my eye, I don’t bother with makeup. Just brush my teeth and run a quick brush through my hair. I look like hell, but I didn’t expect anything else. Combine everything that happened yesterday with a night of no sleep and I figure I’m doing good not to look like a flesh-eating zombie. Although, now that I think about it, my eyes are awfully glazed…
Shrugging it off, I slip into a pair of comfortable red flats and head for the door, picking up my backpack on the way out. Normally, I walk to and from work every day—it’s only about a mile and it saves a parking spot for customers in Beanz’s small lot—but after last night’s horrific stumble through downtown, I find myself craving the safety of my car.