by Sarra Cannon
He trembled as my fingers slipped up and under his shirt, touching the flushed heat of his skin. His mouth opened and his breath fell hot against my cheek as I ran my hands up and down his back, my mouth on his cheek and chin, the rough stubble abrasive against the soft skin of my face.
His hand tensed against the back of my neck and he tugged on my hair, pulling my head back from him so he could claim my mouth for himself.
Effortlessly, he lifted me from my knees, then pushed me fully back onto the cushions of the couch, his body heavy against mine.
Finally, his hands left my face and neck and explored lower, my blood pulsing with need as his fingers dug into my thighs. I opened beneath him. My legs wrapped tight around him, drawing him closer.
His mouth moved from my lips and he traveled lower. My head dipped back against the couch, giving him access to my neck. My nails dug into his shoulder, desperately wanting more.
My breath came faster as I moved against him, cursing the clothing that kept us from fully knowing each other’s bodies.
His teeth grazed against the sensitive spot just above my shoulder and he tensed, his entire form growing rigid against me. His hands gripped me so tightly the pain of it was almost ecstasy. Almost torture.
Then, suddenly, he released me, moving up and off of me so fast, the absence of him was disorienting.
I sat up, laboring for each breath as my heart pounded violently against my ribcage.
“What?” I asked. Had I done something wrong? He was turned completely away from me, one fist resting against the stone mantle of the large fireplace.
I stood to go to him, but he turned and the darkness in his eyes stunned me. Scared me. I stopped without taking another step, waiting for some kind of explanation.
“We need to get changed and get back to the club,” he said. His entire demeanor and tone had changed, as if he had become another person in the space of ten seconds.
I adjusted the borrowed shirt on my body, covering myself back up as best I could. “That’s all you have to say?”
His face was hard edges, his expression closed off. “What more do you want from me?”
I swallowed the hurt that threatened to rip me apart. I pushed back the desire that I had actually dared to let consume me. Instead, I invited in anger. I embraced it and let it flow up through me, burning me like those golden flames.
I knew how to be angry instead of hurt. I knew how to hide disappointment and pain. If he didn’t care to even acknowledge what had just happened between us, and if he could honestly turn his desire on and off like that, then I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me protest.
I covered myself in I-don’t-care. It was a mask I had created for myself after years of living with a mother who had never loved me.
“You’re right, it’s probably getting late,” I said, grateful when my voice sounded relaxed and indifferent. I was good at hiding my bitterness. “I need to get home and change before my shift tonight anyway. My roommate is probably worried sick. In fact, maybe it’s better if I take a few days off.”
“No,” he said, the volume of his protest making me jump.
I took a deep breath.
Stay calm. Don’t let him see you upset. Don’t be vulnerable.
“Why not?” I asked, meeting his gaze straight on as a challenge. “You said yourself you can’t keep me safe from the Devil. And if you can’t keep me safe, then why should I even bother working at Venom, anymore?”
His jaw tensed. “You’ll be safer with me than out there alone.”
I shook my head, sadness flushing through me. “I’m not so sure about that.”
I turned on my heels and walked back toward the grand staircase, feeling his eyes on me the entire time. It was a miracle my knees didn’t give out on the way up. On the outside, I managed to hold myself together, but on the inside, my heart was aching. I cursed myself for caring about him this intensely. How had this happened so fast? I was usually more guarded than this. I should know better.
I found my way down the hallway and through the hidden entrance to the narrow staircase. The stairs opened up to a small room at the top with five doorways. Crap. Which one? It ruined my cool and confident exit if I opened up some stupid closet door and tried to walk inside. I didn’t remember seeing four other doors in here last night, but the whole thing was kind of a blur.
I bit my lip, my heart racing as I heard his footsteps on the stairs behind me.
I reached for the handle of the first door to the right, but as my hand touched the antique bronze knob, Rend placed his hand on my arm.
“Not that one,” he said.
I yanked my arm away as if his touch were poisonous to my soul.
“Franki, I know I owe you an apology,” he said. “I should have never kissed you like that. I let a weak moment get the best of me.”
It wasn’t the kiss I wanted an apology for.
I held my feelings inside, unsure how to respond, but not wanting him to know how he’d hurt me.
“And you’re right,” he said. “I don’t own you. Working at Venom is one hundred percent your choice, but if you come back, I promise I’ll do my best to keep you safe for as long as I can.”
I swallowed and turned toward the next door. “I can take care of myself.”
The words came out of my mouth, but I knew I didn’t really believe them. Who was I kidding? I didn’t know the first thing about protecting myself from vampires and demons and witches. I had no idea how to control whatever power I happened to possess.
“Franki—”
“Don’t,” I said, raising my voice and lifting my chin. “I never should have come here.”
I looked into his eyes and hoped he couldn’t see the struggle deep inside.
And I don’t ever plan to come back.
Those were the words I wanted to say, but I knew I would be lying. I couldn’t walk away from him forever any more than I could deny that I belonged here in this world of magic.
“Come back tonight,” he said softly. “At least to let me explain what it is you’re up against.”
I took a deep breath. How could I say no?
It would be torture to be around him. The memory of his kiss still burned on my lips, but something had made him pull away from me. My heart couldn’t handle that kind of push and pull for long. I needed to get as far away from him as I could before I disintegrated into a pile of ashes in his hands.
But I needed to know about my family. I needed to understand who the Devil was and why he found my blood so valuable.
I sighed and looked at the door leading back into Venom. “I’ll come back when and if I’m ready,” I said. “Don’t ask me for more than that.”
Rend stepped toward me, but I pulled away, not wanting to feel his touch on my skin. I was terrified that if he touched me again, he would own me and I would never be able to get away from him. His eyes searched mine.
There was still so much unsaid between us, but for now, it would have to wait.
Instead, I opened the door and walked through, crossing back into Chicago and the Hall of Doorways.
Chapter 7
Not Exactly Nothing
I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath. I threw a wishful glance back toward the door with the crow embedded on its front.
I hadn’t even gotten the chance to really talk to Rend about the crows. How many of them were there? Why had they never come to find me? What did he know about my mother?
If the answers were behind that door, I wanted to go through and face them, no matter how dangerous.
But now was not the time to be going through strange doors. For all I knew, the crow door could lead me straight to hell. Or Kansas. Who knew?
Someday, though, I would go through that door and learn the truth.
I reached for the handle of the door that would lead me back to Venom and without another glance back at Rend’s door, I stepped through to the main part of the club.
I
ran straight into Azure.
Literally.
A tray full of glasses flew out of her hand. She cried out as they all went tumbling toward the floor. I jumped back, waiting for glass to shatter and spray across my legs and bare feet, but before the glasses hit the floor, they froze in midair.
I gasped, taking two steps back in surprise. My eyes traveled up to Azure’s face. She stared down at the glasses with great concentration, one palm lifted and curled, as if she held them in her hand. She raised her palm up and all ten glasses followed her movement, rising through the air and back onto her outstretched tray.
“Whoa,” I said. “That was amazing.”
She glared at me, then slowly let her eyes travel down my body. Shit, I was still wearing Rend’s shirt and my hair was probably tousled, like I’d just had a good ride in the sack.
I straightened the shirt and squared my shoulders, daring her to say one damned word to me about it.
She cleared her throat, the muscles around her mouth tightening. “Well, I guess now we know where you disappeared to last night.”
I was all ready to tell her to fuck off, except that there was a twinge of sadness mixed into her hateful tone. Even though she turned away to try to hide it, I saw her eyes fill with shiny tears.
Crap, did she have a thing for Rend? Had he treated her like this, too? Kissing her and leading her to believe there was something between them, only to back off just when things were getting intense? I felt cheap and used, suddenly sure that what I had thought was special between Rend and me was just some kind of game he liked to play.
“Look,” I said, reaching out to put my hand on her arm. “It’s not what you think, trust me.”
She snapped away from my touch, her glare back. And this time it had daggers in it. “I’m sure it’s completely innocent.”
Sarcasm dripped from her tone like acid.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest, feeling slightly naked even though I still had my dance outfit underneath. “Fine, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, but Rend was just trying to help me out,” I said. “Nothing happened.”
Okay, so not exactly nothing but she didn’t need to know that.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” she said, sniffing and turning back toward the bar. “It’s none of my business.”
No, it isn’t.
She obviously wasn’t going to respond well to my attempts to be nice, so screw it. I had enough problems without worrying about her.
“Okay, well, see you around, then,” I said. She didn’t even bother to look back at me or say goodbye. She just continued to clear the used glasses from the tables.
I glanced back before I disappeared behind the black curtain and watched for a long moment as she used her magic to clean the place. Glasses flew through the air in perfect lines, lifting from the tables to the bar where they dipped gently into a large sink full of soapy bubbles.
I briefly wondered why, if she could do that with nothing more than a flick of her wrist, she’d been using the tray at all. I wondered what kind of things I might be capable of if I stayed in this world a little longer.
I shook my head and went back to the dressing room, changed back into my own clothes, and left for home.
Chapter 8
Something In The Shadows
I got on the ’L’, but didn’t get off near campus. Instead, I kept going, taking the familiar route back to my mother’s old house.
I hadn’t been there in a full year.
Time had been hard on the place.
Greyish-white paint chipped off the exterior, leaving the boards shabby and dirty. The bushes that lined the front of the house were overgrown and misshapen. Paper cups and other trash disintegrated in the weeds that owned the small front yard. The bay window to the left of the porch that my mother had prized was now covered in dirt and grime, the lace curtains inside yellowed and torn in two places.
The bottom step had all but fallen in completely now, and I stepped over it to walk up to the small porch.
Guilt still twisted in my stomach. I should have taken better care of this place, but money was tight and I needed every dime to pay for school.
The deed was still in my mother’s name. Without a death certificate or any idea where she was or if she was okay, there was nothing else to do with the house than just leave it to rot away. Looking at it now, I realized I should have made it more of a priority to pay someone to take care of the place.
Mom had loved this house. She’d fought so hard to pay for it and keep it, saying how proud she was when she’d finally been able to pay it off. And it had been a very rare thing to see my mother excited about anything.
She was such a loser, always numbed by drugs and alcohol.
But the day she closed on this house, she’d been completely sober. I still remembered her blue eyes being so bright, they almost sparkled.
She’d been happy.
At the time, I’d resented this stupid house. Yes, it was nice to get out of cramped apartments and not have to move around every few months. But at the same time, she had never once looked at me with the same pride and happiness. She’d rarely ever smiled at me, much less been happy about having me in her life. I was nothing but a nuisance to her my whole life and she never let me forget it.
The leaves had just recently begun to change and fall and they covered the small front porch entirely in orange and red and brown. They crackled under my feet.
The porch itself seemed to be holding up all right except for one area in the front corner that had collapsed, the boards sunken.
I sat down in the old swing hanging from the ceiling of the porch. I must have come out here a thousand times when I was younger and needed to get out of the house so I didn’t have to stare at her zombie eyes. Sometimes, the house had felt like a tomb. It often felt as if my mother was already dead. She was just waiting for her body to follow her to the grave, so she’d entombed herself inside this house.
I still wasn’t sure how she had gotten the money to buy the place outright. It hadn’t seemed that strange when I was little, but back then I didn’t understand how money and loans worked. I just knew that one day we were worried about getting evicted from yet another apartment and the next, we were moving into this place and Mom never mentioned needing to leave. She’d promised me we’d never have to move again.
And yet she had left. Three years ago, I had come home to find the entire place empty, as if she had packed up and moved again. Only, this time, she had forgotten to take me with her.
I stood and stilled the swing. The old memories here were already pulling me into their sadness. What was I even doing here?
I shook my head and looked around. Was I hoping to find some kind of answers here? Some kind of proof that Rend had been right about who I am and where I came from?
The front door was locked.
I stretched up and searched for the spare key above the door frame. It was still there after all this time. Probably, no one had even touched it since the last time I had come here to sulk.
I opened the door and put the key back where I’d found it.
“Hello?” I called into the house. I don’t even know why I said it. It was obvious no one had been in here in a long time, but I guess I just wanted to be sure.
Some stupid part of me imagined the furniture she’d sold off in the months before her disappearance would be back, set up just like it used to be. She’d be sitting there on the old flower-patterned couch smoking a joint and in one of her better moods. I could picture it now as if it were real.
“About time you brought your lazy ass home,” she’d have said. “Get into the kitchen and make us some dinner. I’m starving.”
The very idea that I thought of this as a fond memory was so incredibly fucked up that I wanted to punch the wall. She had been a terrible mother and if she was dead, the world was better for it.
But even as the thought came into my head, I knew it wasn’t tr
ue. There were times when I had seen the light in my mother’s eyes. Times when I had so desperately wanted to believe she loved me.
I realized then why I had come all this way. Why I had come back to this house of horrors.
I wanted to feel close to my mother. I had somehow believed that being back here, in her house, would allow me to see the truth. Was she really dead? Or had Fallon been lying just to upset me?
My eyes filled with tears and for the first time in three years, I let them fall.
There was no one here to see me or judge me. I was alone with my memories and my pain.
I wiped the wetness off my cheek and walked into the empty living room.
Something in the shadows caught my eye and I sniffed, then walked over to it, crouching to get a better look.
With a trembling hand, I reached for it, taking it between my fingers and twirling it around with wonder.
A single black feather.
Rend had been telling me the truth.
Chapter 9
Why Hadn’t He?
I stayed at my mother’s house for a few hours, wandering around the empty rooms and looking for any clues that she had been here recently.
I kept the black feather in my pocket, convinced it was one of hers.
I thought of the dream I’d had and the flutter of wings in the alley the other night after I’d followed someone who looked like her out into the darkness. My mind raced ahead, trying to make sense of all the questions running through it.
Was my mother dead? Or had she been at Venom the other night?
But if that was her, why would she have turned herself into a crow and left me there with those other demons? It didn’t make sense. Just because she didn’t want to be around me anymore didn’t mean she would willingly lead me to my death. I refused to believe that.
If it wasn’t her, though, who could it have been?