Lead Heart

by Jane Washington

  Concentration was etched into the slant of his dark eyes, and I realised that he wasn’t just looking at me, he was looking past me, into me. He was sharing in my realisation that things had changed.

  It was unsettling.

  “It’s natural,” he murmured, sounding as though he was trying to convince himself, apparently unshaken by the fact that he was responding to feelings that I hadn’t yet formed into words. “You have no one else to lean on… not in the way you need it. Not in the way your bond needs it.”

  His voice was low, but I still shifted in his arms to look over his shoulder. Noah and Cabe weren’t close enough to have heard him, but they were sneaking glances at us as they slowly covered the paintings I had done with fresh paper. I tore my eyes from them because just the sight of the walls had sent a renewed rush of pain vibrating through my body.

  Quillan winced, feeling it too. He sank into one of the chairs facing the front of the lecture hall and I made to move from his lap, but he jostled me absently, bundling me tighter to his chest, his eyes fixed blindly to the front of the room. He had lifted me higher, not even realising what he was doing, but it put my face closer to his, and I found myself staring at his mouth, remembering the day before. He had kissed me. He never kissed me.

  “Is the bond really that powerful?” I asked, my voice barely there. “Can it really make us feel things that we don’t actually feel?”

  He leaned his head back, closing his eyes. He was breathing deeply, evenly, but the rapid thudding of his heart gave him away. “I wouldn’t say that I don’t feel that way about you, Seph.” His throat worked as he spoke. He didn’t want to release the words, but was forcing them out regardless. “I just don’t… want… to feel that way. It’s powerful enough to force me to act on it, and I don’t want to do that either.”

  His eyes opened halfway, and I realised that I had been leaning toward him, because there was suddenly only a breath of air separating us. He lowered me a little, settling me back onto his lap, but then suddenly hissed out a breath and stood, dropping me to my feet. He walked back to the paper room, speaking lowly with Noah and Cabe. I turned my back on them all, wishing that someone would stop the song that was still looping on repeat, because the words were eating away a hole inside my chest.

  I’ve got chills,

  They’re multiplying.

  And I’m losing control…

  I slapped my hands over my ears, bundling myself into a tight ball as I rocked slightly on the chair, trying to imagine myself away from the situation, aided by the darkness behind my closed lids. The song itself was so absurd to me: the memory of the upbeat, Broadway-style original warring with the slow and haunting rendition that was currently playing. I couldn’t consolidate the two sounds in my head, but that only made me turn to the lyrics again in search of meaning.

  You better shape up,

  Because you need a man,

  And my heart is set on you.

  You better shape up,

  You better understand,

  To my heart I must be true.

  You’re the one that I want…

  It was going to send me spiraling into a dark trap of insanity if I didn’t put a stop to it soon. I stalked back into the room, squaring my shoulders. They all looked up as I entered, but the fervor had taken a hold of me again, and I couldn’t care less who was there to witness it. My vision of the room became blurred as I stumbled toward the pile of supplies. My hands sifted blindly through, my fingers sensing what I needed as I kept my head up, fixed on a blank spot on the wall, seeing but not really seeing.

  “She’ll come. She’ll come to save you, won’t she?” None of the occupants of the room had spoken the words, but they sounded eerily inside my head anyway.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Who’s where?” Cabe answered.

  I flinched, because the reply had sounded too close, too real, when I had been expecting the ghost in my head to speak instead.

  “Don’t make a sound,” I heard Quillan murmur, as I tried to block out their voices.

  “Who’s there?” I repeated, desperately grasping for the now-fading voice.

  I fumbled with whatever instruments were beneath my fingers, finding purchase in something resembling a paintbrush and something resembling a wooden palate. I began to spill colours onto the palate, a frown pulling heavily at my mouth as I chased the vision.

  “…you don’t know her like I do. She’ll find a way around them, even if she has to betray them…”

  I reared back from the wall, the palate clattering to the ground and the brush falling numbly from my fingers. The echo of a voice was chillingly familiar, but faded away even as I grappled to hear it again, to force it into clarity.

  I crouched to retrieve my implements but ended up scrambling to form a scene on the floor instead, forcing the splattered paint to merge into comprehensible images before the vision could fade away from me completely. I brushed my fingers through a glob, spreading it down to form the neck of a man, broad shoulders, and hands that hung limply, secured by blocky shackles. I continued down further, shuffling back on my knees as I formed a naked torso. It was littered with wounds and hunched over as the person sat on a slab of bench, legs extended to a box on the ground. I jerked away from the box as the pain began to numb my arms; I reached back up to the man’s head. My fingers carefully formed an impression of his face.

  “Paraponera clavata, they’re called,” a voice whispered ominously. “The bullet ant…” The words became garbled as I wrangled with the vision, the speaker sounding as though he was speaking from underwater. Eventually, the words became clear enough for me to understand again, but by then… I was already wishing that I couldn’t hear the conversation at all. “A single bite can be as painful as a bullet punching through your skin,” the garbled voice warned. “And you’ve got a whole box of them there…” The speaker’s voice faded away again, and this time I didn’t scramble to bring it back.

  I finished painting the man slumped over the bench, my heart throbbing painfully. I felt the reverberation of a steel door slamming shut more than I heard it, but my hands didn’t attempt to paint the door or chase after the person who had exited it. Instead, I was pulled away from the outline of the man I knew to be Silas. My fingers escaped to another spill of paint, which spread into the base of a structure, arching upward with the coaxing of my fingers to form the bars of a cage. I was blind to whatever colours my fingers had reached for, but my mind was picking up on details that remained hidden from the paint: the stench of blood, the graininess of an unclean floor, the dankness that came from being hidden below the earth.

  I sensed death nearby, and a chill raced down my spine.

  My hands began reaching for the box at Silas’s feet, unable to part from the vision until it was complete. I tried to pull away again, to draw on some other detail, but the person who had spoken earlier in the vision was now gone.

  Only the box was left.

  My hands shook uncontrollably, a sob tearing at my throat.

  “Stop her…” someone pleaded—someone outside of the vision—but it was too late.

  I screamed, my body hunching over as shock after vicious shock of pain bolted up my legs.

  “Angel…” I could feel Silas slipping away from me but I didn’t have enough control over my forecasting ability to hold onto him for any longer. “If you’re there… if you’re seeing this. Don’t come. Don’t try to save me. You have to stay away…”

  My hand slipped from the painting, marring it in a way that had never happened before as I slumped over, catching myself against the ground, my cheek stuck to something red.

  I had drawn the box in red.

  Everything else was grey.

  “That’s enough,” Noah spoke up, seemingly for the first time since entering the room, though he might have been speaking the whole time and I simply hadn’t noticed. “Why are you showing us this, Miro? What the hell is going on?”

  I push
ed up on weak arms, unsurprised when they buckled inward and I hit the ground with a jarring smack. Quillan was there in a second, pulling me gently upright.

  “You needed to see,” he answered Noah tightly. “What was in the box, Seph?”

  “Hurts…” I muttered. “Can’t feel my legs…”

  He passed a hand over my thigh. “You’re fine, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with your legs. You’re not injured anywhere.”

  I slowly focussed on his face, blinking away my tears as the comprehension slammed into me.

  “Shut that off,” I groaned, slapping my hands over my ears.

  Cabe walked over to the phone in the corner of the room and pressed a button on it to stop the song looping before slipping the phone into his pocket with a frown. He must have recognised that it was Silas’s. I pulled my hands from my ears hesitantly, scared that I might accidently hear the song again.

  “He knew I would paint him eventually.” My throat was dry enough that my voice rasped. “He must say it whenever he’s alone.”

  “Say what?” Quillan prodded, his eyes digging into me.

  “You have to stay away,” I repeated angrily, pushing out of Quillan’s arms and rising unsteadily to my feet. I pitched sideways and he caught me, but just as quickly stepped back to give me space. “He knew the song would make me want to reach out to him. He knew I would see him eventually.”

  “Who?” Cabe asked quietly. “Silas? You… you saw him? You…” He frowned, walking to the base of the painting I had just done on the ground.

  It wasn’t exact—a result of all the spilt paint and my less-than-refined technique of spreading the paint around with my hands—but the hang of the head, the strong line of the shoulders, the muscles bunched up in pain… it was all unmistakably Silas. Cabe’s mouth dropped open and recognition sparked in his golden eyes, lighting up something that rebelled against belief, flocked toward hope, and shrank from reality all at once. I knew the look; it was one I wore often. He turned back to the walls that he and Noah had been in the process of covering and his eyes grew even wider, the dread inside him seeming to win against his other emotions. Noah didn’t move closer, but I could tell that he wasn’t far behind Cabe in his understanding of the situation. His pale eyes moved slowly from my still-shaking legs to the red box on the ground and to the wounds on the walls before settling on my paint-splattered hands.

  “You’re bonded to them,” he spoke faintly, but his jaw was set. He didn’t need convincing. He knew.

  I turned toward Quillan and found him staring at me, instead of Noah. This seemed to be the real reason that he had brought Cabe and Noah in. He wanted them to start seeing things and realising things for themselves. We had both underestimated their inability to go against the false beliefs that had been planted inside their heads, so the only way to get them to discern the truth was by playing on their emotions and allowing them to naturally come around to the conclusions we needed them to. Unfortunately, I wasn’t convinced that this conclusion would help us, because it had the potential to put an even bigger barrier between them and me. If they knew that I was bonded to their brothers, they would try even harder to stay away from me out of respect for their family.

  “How did we not see this earlier?” Cabe asked. “How did we not even consider this as a possibility?”

  His expression had turned completely inscrutable. That wasn’t a good sign. Cabe was absurdly good at hiding his emotions—so good, in fact, that he never appeared to hide anything at all. His true feelings were always carefully tucked behind whatever emotion he wanted to display, so when there was no emotion on his face whatsoever, it hinted at the immensity of what he was hiding.

  “Only you can answer that,” Quillan replied, casting me one last look before walking out of the room. Again.

  I watched him, flabbergasted, as he disappeared. Not wanting to be left alone with Noah and Cabe while Quillan’s words still hung heavily in the room, I quickly hastened to the doorway.

  Almost there… almost…

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Noah asked, side-stepping until he was blocking my path.

  Cabe seemed hesitant to join his brother, which was a first, but he eventually stood beside the other, notching their shoulders together as though I might actually attempt to squeeze between them.

  “I’m late,” I said, my eyes cast downward. “I need to… to… damn, I’m covered in paint.”

  “Tariq said I should carry this around.” Cabe extracted a cloth bundle from his bag and handed it to me. “So that’s one mystery solved.”

  “It sucks, not knowing everything, doesn’t it?” I pulled on the drawstring of the cloth bag, peeking at the change of clothes inside. “Thanks.”

  The change of clothes was actually a precaution that we had started taking after one of Amber’s pranks the year before, but I didn’t bother correcting him.

  “You’re welcome. How long have you been bonded to Miro and Silas?”

  You should know, you were there. “A while.”

  “Why wouldn’t they tell us?” Cabe was clearly troubled. He didn’t like the idea that he and Noah had potentially handed their brothers’ Atmá over to the very people they should have been protecting her from. “Seriously, why didn’t we figure it out earlier? And what about your boyfriend? Why does the Klovoda think that you’re bonded to someone else?”

  “Only you can answer that.” I borrowed Quillan’s line, seeing the sense in his reply.

  “Prove it,” Noah retorted harshly, the light blue of his eyes growing cloudy with temper. He wanted me to show him the mark that I shared with Quillan and Silas, but I couldn’t do that without revealing the second mark.

  “When you’re ready. You’re not ready to see it yet.” And there was a good chance that they wouldn’t be the only ones to see, since wherever I was, there was bound to be a camera not far away, waiting to capture something suspicious. Not that the messenger hadn’t already seen my second mark. He had been aware of it ever since the car accident. I could still hear his ghostly words as I woke up on a steel table in one of Dominic’s properties, completely naked.

  “We’re cut from the same cloth, Lela, don’t forget that… and now… now I know your secret…”

  Fighting free of the memory, I set my teeth together, my next words sounding forced and angry. “Get out of my way, please.”

  “No can do.” Noah folded his arms, his body relaxing into something chillingly close to nonchalance. “We can’t let you leave this room looking like that. Jayden’s men are in the hallway outside the lecture hall, they’ll want to know what the hell we did to you.”

  “Shut the door at least. I’m not changing in front of you.”

  “You have no choice.” Cabe was now acting as oddly unaffected as his brother. They were going to try to see my mark whether I willingly showed them or not. “We don’t trust you, so we’re not taking our eyes off you. None of this makes sense, and until it does, we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Fine,” I spat, moving away from them. “Whatever.”

  I knelt next to a bucket of water that had clearly been intended as a wash bucket for all of the painting implements, and began to splash water over my arms and face, washing away as much of the paint as I could manage. I turned my back on them and pulled my shirt over my head, turning it inside out to use it to dry myself. I could feel their eyes on me, equal parts curious and uncomfortable. They seemed hesitant to surround me, which allowed me the freedom to quickly pull a fresh shirt over my head before Noah walked around to stand in front of me. I scowled at him. He almost looked apologetic for a second, before folding his arms and resuming his staring. I quickly pulled off my jeans and almost laughed outright when Noah averted his eyes. They were stuck between respect and distrust, and it seemed that respect was winning. I pulled on the full-length tights and flicked a look over my shoulder, surprised that Cabe’s eyes had been trailing down my legs. He blinked back at me, and then seemed to grow angry. His
eyes narrowed, his arms clinching tighter across his chest.

  “I’m done here.” The short statement sounded more like a reprimand. He turned to leave the room. “You’re on Seraph duty for the rest of the day, Noah.”

  I glanced back to Noah as I pulled on my sneakers. “What’s his problem?”

  “You, usually. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” I avoided looking around the room as I walked out and dug my phone out of my bag, checking the time.

  There were several missed calls from Poison and Clarin, and it seemed that I had been locked up for half the day. I swore quietly, because I was still in possession of their timetables. I texted them to let them know where to meet me and then ran the rest of the way up the stairs, hoisting my bag over my shoulder as I passed. Noah followed after I explained to him where I needed to go. He impersonated a silent shadow as I ran to the café bordering the college’s sporting complex. It was raised up behind the main college buildings, looking down over a hockey field on one side and a football field on the other. The indoor complex was behind the café, and I felt the pull to disappear into the world of sweat and strain. I wished that I had a regular sporting activity like football or hockey. Gymnastics had been interesting, but it hadn’t held my interest past the initial need to learn about it. Maybe I would try running, or swimming. Either way, my body was in desperate need of physical exertion. Soon, I promised myself as I slumped down behind one of the outdoor tables, turning my eyes toward the football field. Noah sat beside me, his body-language uncomfortable, his shoulders turned slightly away from me.

  I watched the people on the field running through training drills, barely paying attention until one of them in particular caught my eye. Since when did Danny play football? I frowned as I watched, observing how well he seemed to get along with the other guys, even though he was a freshmen.

  “Since when did Callaghan play football?” Noah muttered, forgetting that he was angry with me as he leaned over the table to squint at Danny.

  I shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while, I wouldn’t know.”