A Portrait of Pain

by Jane Washington

  We drove for half an hour, and Seph didn’t wake up.

  We drove for an hour, and Seph didn’t wake up.

  We arrived back at the college after an hour and a half, and her eyes were still closed, her body limp in my arms, the valcrick still nudging beneath her skin. The campus had been purged of most people, with only one team of special ops personnel remaining—the team made up almost entirely of Zevs—and several bombs squads. I counted out the vans and surmised that there was a squad for each of the common rooms.

  They would be working out a way to get into the rooms without triggering the explosions.

  But they didn’t know about Danny’s penchant for backup plans.

  “Here,” I said to Miro, holding out the girl in my arms.

  He took her without even looking at me, but as soon as she was tucked securely against his chest, he tore his eyes away from the strand of hair that was sticking to her face, painted in blood. He looked at me, and he knew what I was going to do.

  “You’re going after Danny.” Cabe was also looking at me. He was angry.

  “He’ll kill you,” Noah added, sounding just as pissed. “You can’t, Silas.”

  “You all know that he has a backup plan.” There was a tremble in my voice: the only sign of the detonation set to go off inside me. I felt exactly like that ball of valcrick holding back the fire. There was only so long that I could last. “You need to warn whoever’s running the show in there.”

  I didn’t wait for a confirmation, I just turned from them and walked back to the car. I yanked open the door and slid in, turning over the motor. Miro could drive fast, but he couldn’t drive like me. I might have scraped a tree and dinged the bumpers of a few cars, but I still made it to the Komnata in time. I scaled the hill leading down to the water’s edge, checking the time on my phone. I had twenty-two minutes until the campus exploded.

  I placed my hand against the door of the boathouse, but it wouldn’t budge. When Kingsling had been the Director, he had given me free reign to come and go from the Komnata as I liked … but Kingsling wasn’t the Director anymore.

  “Motherfu—” I exploded, but a voice behind me cut off the expletive.

  “You need one of the Klovoda members to invite you inside.”

  I spun. Jayden had followed me down the hill—had been following me since the cemetery, probably.

  “Invite me ins—” I started, but he cut me off again by brushing past me and shoving the door open.

  “We need you,” he said.

  That was enough of an invitation. I followed him in, and watched as he stepped into the lone boat looking down the ramp into the water. The Komnata grew into being right before our eyes, and I felt a strange, subtle ache inside my chest. Even six months ago, with Weston forcing the barrel of my own gun against my head, things had been simpler.

  We didn’t waste any time. As soon as the bridge formed to the first platform, our feet were pounding across. I glanced toward the water, to where I had pushed Cabe off and accidently speared his chest. Grief twisted inside me, dancing with that same, sickening whirl of feeling. Not even that had felt as serious as this.

  What if she doesn’t wake up?

  “You’re alive,” a voice declared, as we barged into the first open cottage. Andre had been the one to speak, and he was staring at Jayden.

  “Silas.” This had come from Jack—who must have finally escaped Le Chateau. “Come with me.”

  I didn’t hesitate. I marched past Andre, and five more agents. Jayden was similarly silent, only two steps behind me.

  “The humans have left Le Chateau,” Jack announced as he led us across another walkway, and through several more elevated cottages. Some were filled with college students, some with agents. Everyone was nervous, skittish, silent. “Their investigation was extensive. We had to prove that we’ve been working alongside them with the permission of members of their government for years. Decades. Turns out, they uncovered even more secrets about themselves than they did about us. They’ve backed off for now—after reports that Seraph was at the college, saving students and fighting against the ‘terrorist.’” He said that last word with his fingers curled above his head and a sneer in his voice. “They’re still looking for her, but they’ve switched most of their attention to him. We were able to disprove many of the recordings that Danny put out there to make her look like a murderer. We showed the full footage of the gunmen threatening to shoot Noah and Cabe before she blew up that van, and we showed security footage from the nightclub of those dickheads dragging her off to the limousine and molesting her before she blew it up.”

  “I don’t care,” I finally snapped, my patience breaking. “I couldn’t care less what the humans think about her right now. I need to see Danny.”

  “Where do you think I’m taking you?” Jack turned slightly, looking at me before pushing another door open.

  This cottage was different—it was a room I was well-acquainted with. The Komnata hadn’t exactly held a prison, but the ‘holding room’ wasn’t far from one. Danny was slumped in a chair, bars forming a cage around him. His hands were chained to the bars at his back, and his feet were chained to the legs of the chair. His eyes were open, tracking us as we entered the room.

  “What’s the trick?” I demanded immediately. “What’s going to happen when they get those kids out of the common rooms?”

  He smiled, and we fanned out around his cage. Jack on one side, Jayden on the other, me in front. I had never wanted to hurt another human being so badly before in my life.

  “We’re so similar,” Danny said, staring up at me. “So similar. No wonder she likes you.”

  The comment was meant to rile me, but I brushed it off. I knew exactly why Seraph liked me, and it had nothing to do with the waste of breath sitting in front of me.

  “What’s the trick?” I asked again, walking to the table against the wall and running my hands over the selection of knives. My father had used them on me all the time, so I knew which ones hurt more and which ones hurt less.

  “It’s all your fault,” he used to sneer at me. “Miro was supposed to be the one. He was supposed to be the Voda. You stole that away from him!”

  He blamed me for being born, for the fact that Miro had a pair. That was somehow my fault. It could have been Miro’s fault, for forming a pair, or it could have been Seraph’s fault, for being the Atmá … but no. He had chosen me.

  Some madness was unexplainable; that was what made it madness.

  I paused, dropping the blade that I had chosen. I didn’t want to be like my father. I returned to the cage, biting back the overwhelming urge to shove my fist through the bars and mess up Danny’s face.

  “She has your power,” I told him. “She died tonight, and she came back. Did you know that?”

  I wasn’t sure why I said it, but everyone in the room stiffened.

  Danny’s eyes grew fractionally wider, his arms bulging as he stretched against the bindings. “No …” was his only reply.

  “Yes.” Jayden rapped against the bars, his voice full of menace. “Don’t you see me here, dickhead? She saved me, but trapped herself in the explosion. We all watched it happen. She’s done it before—we’ve all seen that too, thanks to you. But none of us realised that she had actually died.”

  “No …” Danny was shaking his head now. “She can’t … no …”

  “You’re not the only one.” I brought his attention back to me. “She has the same curse. She’s fighting the same darkness.”

  She had been fighting it all along.

  “What makes you different?” I had asked her once, back when she thought of me as a stranger in a bar, back before she knew my name or my role in her life.

  I had stared at her, reading the fragility on her features, the fear she had of herself, and the suspicion she had of everyone else. Her eyes had been ghostly, even then, a strange echo of pain that mirrored something inside me.

  “I know how to survive,” she had answered
.

  She had felt it, even back then. She had felt her immortality, and she had resented it. That was the difference between her and Danny.

  “She can help you,” I found myself telling Danny. The other two jerked their heads in my direction, but I kept my attention on him. “She understands you. She’s fighting the same battle as you.”

  His arms bunched again, and he made a sound of pain in the back of his throat. “She’ll never understand,” he screamed, the outburst pouring out of him. There was spittle flying from his mouth and his eyes were wild, everything about him seeming unhinged.

  “Not if you kill her again,” I agreed. “She barely made it through this time—she’s not as skilled as you. If she gets hit again today, she won’t survive it.”

  He didn’t reply, but something passed over his face. I pushed my point home.

  “If she dies, you’ll be executed within minutes by these two.” I gestured to the men standing on either side of his cage. “If you heal yourself, they’ll keep going until it sticks, but she’ll still be dead. And you were right; we are similar,” I lied easily. “But if she dies, so do I. You have nobody left to understand you. Nobody left to play your games with. Nothing but death—however many times you need it.”

  “Where is she?” he asked, his voice faint.

  I glanced at Jack, making sure he had caught that slip. Where is she. So there was more than one place that she could be in danger—not just the college. I quickly switched my attention back to Danny, examining him as the seconds ticked by in an agonising way. I needed to say the right thing. I needed to get inside his head. If he was going to hide another bomb, where would it be?

  No … not where.

  Who would it target?

  The answer came to me swiftly, and pain clenched inside my chest again. It would target Tariq, her real brother.

  “Le Chateau,” I answered, looking to Jack again.

  I could see the realisation rush across his face, and he nodded slightly at me. Of course, Tariq would have been here, with us. Jack would never have left him behind, but Danny wouldn’t know that.

  “There’s a second bomb,” Danny admitted, almost whispering. “I leaked the information about her so that the human government would seize control of Le Chateau. As soon as they did, my guys snuck in and planted the explosives. If the bombs don’t detonate at the college, it’ll set off the bomb at Le Chateau.”

  I glanced at my watch. Eight minutes.

  Jack already had his phone to his ear—he was warning whoever was left inside the mansion to evacuate. I didn’t spare Danny another glance. I turned and left the room before I could change my mind and decide that I wasn’t so different from Weston after all.

  The bombs need to go off.

  I read the text message from Silas three times before shoving the phone back into my pocket. The halls were teeming with students, all of them rushing to escape the building. I had seen one of the timers myself. It had flashed with five minutes.

  The bomb squad had cut through the wall in the first room, expecting the worst, but the timer had continued ticking away. In a matter of minutes, all of the walls had been opened with electric saws, and the students were being herded out of the building. Noah and Cabe were in the thick of the people, directing the crowds and helping to keep everyone calm but moving efficiently.

  I had been there to supervise the first evacuation, but I didn’t last long knowing that Seraph was alone, bundled into blankets in the back of the car. She was in my arms again as I watched the people spill from the building and out into the parking lot. Some of them started running down the hill. Some were collapsed on the ground, clutching at each other and crying. Others were being herded into the vans to be brought back down the mountain. I wanted Noah and Cabe out of there. Silas’s text message meant that there was a backup plan, and that it hinged around whether these bombs detonated or not—which wasn’t a problem, because they were definitely going to go off.

  My brothers finally made it back to my side and we all got into a car, backing to the line of trees, watching as the last of the students were herded into vans. Noah was driving because I still couldn’t release Seraph. I felt like I needed to hold her together. If I didn’t she might break up into pieces.

  The first explosion triggered the second, and the third was a ball of fire seen through the rear-view mirror as we turned the car to follow the last van down the road. The fourth explosion signalled the demise of one of the Zevghéri’s most sacred, historical buildings, but I couldn’t give a damn. When we reached the base of the mountain, we didn’t stop with all the other vehicles. We didn’t pause to watch as the anxious crowds of gathered people spotted their loved ones piling out of vans, crying their relief out into the air.

  We couldn’t watch, because it felt like our loved one was dying. Slowly slipping away right before our eyes.

  Noah turned toward Seattle, pulling onto the highway and pushing the car above the speed limit. We were all pulled toward the fifth piece of our puzzle, feeling the need to reunite as a group, and Silas was at the Komnata. I had no idea whose car we were driving—several of them had been left in the lot, some with keys inside and some without. They probably belonged to Danny’s comrades, or to some of the fallen Klovoda agents. There were so many possibilities, because even though we had saved four groups of people, we had still managed to lose so many in the process leading up to it.

  “How is she?” Cabe asked—the first of us to speak in a long time.

  I looked down. The blood had dried on her face, but her skin was still paler than usual. Moonlight-pale. Her skin was made entirely of the silvery-white scar tissue generated by her healing valcrick. The valcrick itself was still visible, flickering beneath her skin in slight, hesitant patterns. It had always seemed alive to me, but now it seemed almost confused. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to shout at someone. I could even feel dampness pricking at my eyes, so I quickly looked away, my hand cupping her face, my thumb stroking across her cheek.

  “She’s the same.” My voice sounded broken.

  Only forty-eight hours later, we were barricaded inside Seraph’s cottage back at Le Chateau. The doors were locked, the curtains drawn. The outside world was waiting, hovering, but we wanted nothing to do with it.

  Jack had supervised the removal of the bomb in the mansion’s cellar, and Jayden was leading the hunt for any of Danny’s accomplices who might have escaped the Klovoda agents inside the college. Miro had wanted to be as far away from Danny as possible, so we had shifted Seraph back to the cottage. Tariq, Poison and Clarin were knocking on the door every other hour, but Cabe went up each time to tell them that nothing had changed.

  She was in the middle of the bed now, her body held in Miro’s lap. Cabe was on one side, and Silas on the other. I was lying across the foot of the bed, fighting a lingering sickness that wouldn’t diminish. It reared back up whenever I looked at her, panic fuelling it until I wanted to heave with the force of it all.

  “Why do we let her make the decisions again?” Cabe eventually asked.

  Nobody laughed, but Miro released half of a grunt. It was a question we asked often. Mostly, we were joking. Now, I was pretty sure that he was serious. Cabe was holding her hand, sitting up against the backboard, her arm stretched across his lap. Silas was lying completely flat, staring at the ceiling. He had a dead look on his face that I couldn’t stomach.

  None of us had eaten, or slept, in almost two days. I felt half dead myself.

  When the knock sounded at the door, none of us moved to answer it.

  “It might be Tariq again,” Cabe finally said.

  I stood, moving toward the stairs. I reached the top level and pulled open the door, finding myself face-to-face with Andre. There was a suited man standing either side of him.

  Jack had struck up a deal with the human agency on Miro’s behalf, allowing a certain number of representatives access to Le Chateau. Oddly enough, the way the Zevs and the humans had managed to work
together during the ‘Mt Baker Bombing’—which was the label they had given to the nightmare two days ago—had resulted in a tentative peace between the two races of people. The media had started to report that the footage of Seraph leaked to the press had been doctored, and the information was fake. This wasn’t entirely true, but there was a reason they were now trying to bury everything. We were all aware of the reason, even if we weren’t saying it aloud.

  They wanted to use Seraph.

  Whatever threat she presented was outweighed by her usefulness as a weapon, if wielded correctly.

  “She’s not available,” I stated, moving to slam the door.

  Andre stepped forward quickly, inserting his foot in the doorway before it could close. I slammed it anyway, applying a little more force than was necessary. He didn’t flinch, and the door bounced back. I crossed my arms over my chest, standing sentry. He could stop the door from closing, but he sure as hell wasn’t getting past me.

  “When will she be available?” he asked politely.

  “She still hasn’t …” I broke off, unsure how to phrase the statement.

  Andre arched a brow, his curious gaze flicking over my shoulder. He had very pale eyes, the colour mismatched. I was a damn Adair, brother to the Voda: I knew everything there was to know about him, even if I wasn’t in the Klovoda. His power was as ferocious as it was chilling: a mastery over water and temperature. He had surpassed even Eva in his control of the water element, which had recommended him to one of the top agent positions—though it was the offshoot of his ability that truly made him powerful. He could magic water from thin air, and freeze that water into ice. I had read all about what that power could do in his case files.