A Portrait of Pain

by Jane Washington

  “That’s the second reason.”

  “What’s the first reason?”

  “There will be times where you won’t want anyone barging in.”

  He tilted his head, looking down at me, his eyes gradually darkening the same way the sky does in preparation for a downpour. He was watching the understanding pass over my features. I shifted, uncomfortable with the intensity of his stare. I couldn’t swallow what he was saying with his eyes on me.

  “I thought … isn’t it still a rule?” I fumbled. It was the first time any of them had brought up the rule. The new rule.

  It had happened soon after I rescued Silas from Weston. By then, I had bonded to Noah and Cabe, and things were starting to get … crowded. They agreed to keep sex out of the equation. I hadn’t argued. It seemed like a smart rule, albeit a short-sighted one. I wasn’t sure I could really dwell on it, past that. Just the thought of introducing sex into our relationship was enough to make my head spin and my palms sweat—and the cause of that reaction was mostly panic, which wasn’t a good sign.

  “Yeah,” Noah relented, reading me like a book. He released my jacket, allowing me to take a step back, and then he grabbed the ends again, tugging them together. It was like he was trying to give me back a sense of modesty. “Come on, let’s go and see your new home.”

  We left the laneway for a small, cobbled path, and then passed through the heavy door into a living area. The cottage was mostly made of wood, in the style of a rustic, country cabin. The wall opposite the entrance was fitted with massive windows, displaying a view down the man-made hill that Le Chateau had been built upon, and then further, out across the many miles of empty land. The floorboards were torn up in some places, so we had to be careful where we stepped as we moved into the kitchen, complete with broken tiles and cracked countertops.

  “Come check this out!” Cabe called from below, drawing us out of the kitchen and to the other end of the sitting room, where a small spiral staircase led to a lower level, obviously built into the slope of the hill.

  The area was large, encompassing the size of the kitchen and living area combined, with glass doors leading out onto a small wooden deck. I couldn’t see Cabe, but the spiral stairs continued down, so we followed them to the base level, finding Cabe standing in the middle of a bathroom unlike anything I had ever seen before. The glass walls poked out like the side of a hexagon, clearly mirroring the shape of the balcony above. The extra space that jutted out had different flooring to the rest of the bathroom, which was tiled. The small, once-polished little bamboo boards were stuck together to create a makeshift wet-area. A deep, marble tub had been set into the floor, shaped to fit into the hexagonal glass wall. A shower head dropped from the ceiling, hovering over the bamboo boards beside the tub. The bathroom was in very good condition, possibly because it was so closed off from the rest of the cottage, and there weren’t any actual windows that could be opened.

  “This is amazing,” I breathed out, walking to the glass wall and peering down the slope of the hill. I was standing on the wooden wet-area, and it was beginning to feel strange, being surrounded by so much glass. I peered to either side, trying to catch a glimpse of the bigger house to my left, or to another of the cottages on my right—but they were almost completely obscured by the trees that had grown up between the properties. I could only catch glimpses of colour through the leaves. “Can I have this one?”

  Cabe snorted. “Seph … you could probably have all of them.”

  I turned, a cringe on my face. He was alluding to the fact that I might have been the Voda, if things had turned out differently. The Voda was supposed to be the leader of the Zevghéri people, but I barely even knew the Zevghéri people. My pairs had kept as much information from me as possible, hoping to protect me from Weston, who had the ability to read minds. It was a sadistic twist of fate that had landed me the position of Voda, but my first and only command had been to shift the responsibility onto Quillan—the man the position should have gone to in the first place. The man who had been raised from birth to take the reins. The only man I knew that tried to do the right thing in every circumstance.

  He didn’t have a scrap of Weston in him, and that made him the perfect Voda, as far as I was concerned. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have the Voda power. He had the remnants of it—the lingering influence of it, before I had stolen it from him. It was enough. It would be enough to convince people.

  “I think I can make do with one house,” I said. “I’ll let you know when I need the other thirty or so. When can we start fixing it up?”

  “Well,” Noah spoke up, turning toward the glass so that I couldn’t read his eyes, “you’re still on probation for another three weeks, so I guess we should start now.”

  “Do you think they’ll let me back in?” I mused out loud.

  The Dean of Hollow Valley University—a woman I had yet to meet—had forced me into indefinite suspension, pending expulsion. There had been a formal letter, but no reasons why. It could have been the fact that the relatively uneventful hostage situation had been orchestrated because of me, or it could have been because I had walked around campus with a homemade bomb fused to my neck for a whole day, disguised as an accessory. Or maybe they didn’t know those facts, and it had something to do with me being present when the Voda died … and with Silas, too: a notorious madman as far as most Zevs were concerned, so his testimony didn’t count. Danny didn’t count either, because Danny was a ghost.

  Missing.

  Already forgotten, as though he never even existed in the first place.

  Whatever the reason, the University was trying to decide whether to let me back, and I had a feeling that the result would not be a favourable one.

  “I’m not sure.” Cabe was the one to answer me. He avoided looking directly at me, which told me more than he was saying.

  “It doesn’t matter.” I swallowed a sigh, fighting back the lump in my throat.

  College.

  Another experience soon to be lost.

  “Enough,” Noah declared, dispelling the unspoken grief that had come back to hover around us, wrapping us in unwanted familiarity. “Let’s make a list of the stuff we need. Seph, can you go upstairs and measure that sink in the kitchen?”

  He pulled a tape measure out of his pocket, tossing it to me. I fumbled, and it smacked my knee after I dropped it, falling to the ground with an awkward thunk. Cabe grinned, but Noah’s breath deflated from his chest on an exasperated sound. He walked over to me and picked up the tape measure, pressing it into my hands.

  “Pay attention,” he said quietly, squeezing my fingers around the tool. “This is the real world. Right here. If you don’t come back down to earth soon, you’ll get stuck in the memories, and that is not a place you want to get stuck in.”

  I nodded, pulling myself away and disappearing upstairs. He was right. I needed to get myself together. I needed to remember that there was emotion outside of grief and life outside of trauma.

  I pushed everything out of my head. Everything but the measurements I wrote and the materials I listed, not that I was really great at citing materials. New tiles, and stuff to cover hole in cabinet would have to do. I wasn’t avoiding the issue—I’d grieved enough for a lifetime, and eventually, it began to feel as though I didn’t need to keep grieving new things. Like when you study the basic knowledge of your craft for years so that when new tasks come up, you feel like you don’t need to study for them anymore, because you’re already an expert in your field. Well, I was an expert in the field of grief. So I wasn’t avoiding, I was just trying to be productive.

  We spent hours in the cottage, talking and compromising over small details. It was supposed to be my house, but Noah and Cabe still managed to make their mark on it, the same way they had made their mark on me. After we finished assessing the cottage, we moved to the larger house. It was in a better state, having been lived in not so long ago; it only took us an hour to list all the needed repairs. The sound
of an engine idling outside signalled the completion of our task, and Cabe moved over to the window, glancing down at the street.

  “It’s like he knew we were about to get to his house.” He sounded amused. “Silas is here to make sure we don’t buy him rainbow curtains and paint unicorns on his bedroom walls.”

  I chuckled, moving for the stairs and making my way outside. Silas was out of his car, though it was still running. He shut the door, causing sunlight to reflect off the steel-grey surface for a moment, flashing into my eyes and temporarily blinding me. By the time I lowered my hand from my eyes, he was before me. He gripped my elbows, lifting me up until my face was close to his, my body tucked tightly into him.

  “Are they watching?” he asked, dark eyes glinting.

  He was in a good mood.

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Good.” He smiled, blinding me for a second time with the brilliance of it, and then his lips were on mine. The kiss was fast and hard, rushing heat right down to my toes and then leaving me empty as he set me on the ground again.

  “Hi,” I croaked, staring up at him in shock.

  He grunted out a response, all humour wiped from his eyes. He looked like he was a second away from grabbing me again, and I knew that the joke had turned on its head. He had intended to mess with Noah and Cabe, but he was playing with fire. There was something strong between us—heavy and multiplying with each breath tugging at my chest.

  “Hey!” Noah called out from above, the tone of his voice sharp. “Are we at the grabbing and kissing stage already?”

  Silas blinked, breaking the spell, and his smile reappeared. That was the reaction he had wanted, apparently. I turned, seeing Cabe and Noah hanging out the window.

  “Did you forget to wear your garlic necklace again today, little devil?” Cabe called out, a small smile twisting his lips.

  “Are you a vampire now?” I asked Silas, casting him a sideways glance.

  “Apparently.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

  “It’s a demotion, I think. You used to be King of the Underworld. Now you’re just a vampire. You’re losing street cred.”

  “Don’t challenge him,” Noah groaned from above, obviously having caught my words.

  “One day I’ll just be me,” Silas replied, “And then you’ll all be in trouble.”

  “Speaking of trouble …” Cabe pulled out of the window and reappeared a moment later in the doorway, walking toward us. “We’ve chosen the houses.” He pointed to the cottage beside the larger house. “Seph likes that one, and there are three more, as you can see, so I guess it’s fate.”

  “That, or this is the only straight part of the road going up,” Noah added, having followed Cabe out of the house. “Want to pick your place?” he asked Silas.

  Silas shrugged. “I don’t care. Just don’t give me rainbow curtains.”

  Cabe and Noah blinked at each other before cracking into grins. I couldn’t help the laugh that spilled from my lips.

  It was the reminder I needed: even though so much had happened, even though so much had changed … we were still the same people underneath it all.

  I turned away from the window so that I wouldn’t throw my fist through it. Silas had taken off already and I was grateful, because I didn’t need him giving me the look. The look that said he understood, and that it amused him. He always seemed to know when I felt like punching something, and he always smiled at me when it happened, which only frustrated me even more.

  That was probably why he did it.

  He had driven off to distract Seraph for a while, because I needed to get this shit under control before she found out about it. She had a saviour complex and the last thing I needed was for her to run off on another suicide mission, trying to save us all. If she decided to run again, she had better take us all with her, or else we were going to have serious issues.

  “So what you’re saying is that these people have been living among us for years—centuries even.” The newscaster’s voice dragged over my nerves like razorblades, drawing my eyes away from the window and back to the screen.

  “Longer,” the guest speaker returned. “They’ve been with us from the beginning.”

  “The beginning?”

  “The beginning of mankind.”

  Wrong. I wondered if that was what they actually thought, or if the information given to them had been tampered with. The information being wrong was a good sign for us. The humans didn’t need to know that we considered ourselves to be a more evolved version of them, that our scientists and archaeologists had found the remains of the Original Atmás to be human in almost every way … except for a few signs of further evolution. The changes in the Original Atmás had been repeated in their offspring, and everyone who came after. They were stronger, more striking. Their brains were more active—they were able to access a larger portion of the organ than most humans, though it didn’t necessarily lead to increased intelligence. It allowed them to wield their abilities and bond to their pairs.

  “What are they, exactly?” The woman leaned forward on her desk, the barest hint of perspiration breaking out across her forehead.

  I was only seeing the televised room through the widescreen hooked to the wall of the Klovoda’s new conference room at Le Chateau, but even I could feel the tension in there. I could imagine that every person in that studio would be silent, gathering around to watch the truth unfold. This wasn’t like the other times that information about our society had been leaked, turning up on a whack conspiracy site, most of the details wrong. This was real. This was happening. I had never agreed with my father, but it wasn’t lost on me that everything he had done, he had done in the name of protecting us from the humans … and now that someone was breaking their neck to expose us, Weston was dead.

  The timing was unbelievable.

  “We’ve started calling them sorcerers,” the guest speaker replied, wincing as she said sorcerers, “for lack of a better word. We’ve found many references to them in the material that was sent to us—material that our experts have had to scour through before we were able to go public with this revelation. We’ve been able to keep it under wraps for weeks, but this isn’t something you want to sit on for too long.”

  “You said you found many references,” the woman replied, shuffling her papers to mask the tremble in her hands. “What else are they being called?”

  “Witches, pagans, mutants. They had multiple names for themselves, too, but even those names have changed, throughout history.”

  “And what do they call themselves now?”

  “The Zevghéri.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “We don’t know, there are many words in their language that are completely unfamiliar to us. Zevghéri is one of them.”

  I strode over to the remote, turning off the screen and tossing the remote back to the table, threading my hands through my hair. We had watched the recording of the talk show over and over, drinking in every possible detail. It was still unbelievable. Hopefully it was just unbelievable enough to be completely disregarded by the public. The female host hadn’t been sweating from fear—she had been embarrassed. Embarrassed that her superiors were making her talk about sorcerers as though it was a viable topic. That was a good sign, but the fact that they were talking about it at all was a very, very bad sign.

  Jack sat in an armchair, his face in his hands. He looked to have aged several years in the months since Weston’s death. His beach-blond hair was looking more beach-grey, and the expression in his eyes was always tinged with stress. Taking control of the Klovoda in a time like this was not an enviable position … but then again, taking over the Voda position wasn’t any better. Sophie and Sophia were by another of the windows, looking as unmatched beside each other as they did beside their Atmá, Jack. Sophie was slim and sporty, her eyes an energetic blue; whereas Sophia was dark-skinned and carried herself in a proud, calm sort of way. I supposed that they were both bea
utiful, in their own ways, but my concept of real beauty had shifted toward a tiny individual with raven hair, ghostly eyes and more inner strength than any person I had ever come across.

  The Sophies weren’t talking, but the way they stared at each other made me think that they were having a silent conversation of some kind. It was the way of closely knit, bonded individuals: to communicate in forms that other people didn’t recognise. The rest of the Klovoda was gathered around, looking as though their world had just been tipped on its head. We all knew that the general population as a whole would disregard a news story about witches and sorcerers; but where there was smoke, there was always fire. The fire was now blazing right in the center of our society, and it wouldn’t be long before people were drawn to it. Drawn to the source of the rumours and stories.

  “How could this have happened?” Yas murmured, her face still slack with shock. “There were safeguards in place, and safeguards to protect those safeguards, and then a metaphorical dragon to protect those safeguards. Granted—we’ve made some enemies these past few months, but this isn’t just going to affect us. This could be suicide. Mass suicide.”

  Yas looked no better-off than Jack, even though she had taken a backseat to the decision-making. She mostly organised the logistical side of us all basing ourselves at Le Chateau—monitoring the labourers and other humans that we needed to run jobs for us. It might have seemed sexist, to delegate these tasks to a woman, but Yas had proven herself less than capable in too many situations.

  As a long-standing member of the Klovoda, she had proven herself to be too callous to second-guess Weston’s methods. As a leader, she had proven herself to be the weaker of her and Jack, and as a mother … she had proven herself indifferent beyond hope. Personally, that made me trust her less. Cabe almost dying had dragged out her maternal instincts for barely a second, before she had locked them away again. She still hadn’t attempted to reach out to him, and she never would. They both considered Tabby to have been Cabe’s real mother. Yas was only the woman who birthed him and gave him up without hesitation, simply because it was how Weston wanted things.