Lead Heart

by Jane Washington

  “Yeah,” Tariq replied, settling himself between the silent giants and punching each of them on the arm. “Those are their hood names. Dre,” he pointed to Andrei, “and Hamburger.” He pointed to Hans.

  “Um.” I was at a complete loss for words as Hans and Andrei turned to do some kind of a handshake with my brother, both of them smiling. I looked to Noah, but his face was completely stoic. Cabe was smiling, but when I silently widened my eyes at him, asking for an explanation, he only shook his head.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Noah said, pulling my phone out of his pocket and dropping it into my lap. “You probably want this back.”

  “Thanks,” I said, switching it on and quickly sending off a message to Poison and Clarin.

  Poison’s reply came through first, reading: Find me as soon as you get here.

  Clarin’s was next, and I laughed quietly as I read his reply. It was exactly the same as Poison’s.

  Cabe, who had been reading over my shoulder, also laughed. “If science would have allowed it, those two would have found a way to become your pair by now.”

  “Poison isn’t gay, and Clarin is. That makes the whole pairing thing a little difficult, doesn’t it?”

  “Poison might not be gay, but she talks about your boobs enough to be toting a line, and Clarin could just kiss you to form the bond and then never touch you again.”

  “Really? You think? I’ll keep that strategy in mind for my own bond. Thanks for the tip.”

  Cabe fell silent, and Noah shifted uncomfortably on my other side, but neither of them dared to voice a protest or make any further jokes about the situation with the silent giants—and Tariq—listening in. We all retreated into contemplative silence for the rest of the drive and didn’t seem to rouse until the limousine stopped moving. I slid out after Cabe and texted Poison and Clarin to ask where they were.

  “See you!” Tariq called out after us.

  I turned to wave at him as Hans and Andrei fist-bumped him in goodbye and the limousine pulled away to take him to the high school. There was only a bare scattering of students around the parking lot, but they still covertly watched as we made our way toward one of the faculty buildings. I spotted Amber surrounded by a small group of girls and I immediately started to look for Noah—before pulling up short, because of course… Noah was standing right beside me.

  And I had kissed him.

  Obviously seeing the same thing that I had seen, Noah stopped in much the same fashion.

  “Crap,” he mumbled.

  “What?” Cabe asked, following the direction of our eyes until he spotted Amber. “Oh, crap.”

  Amber chose that moment to notice us, and I could see very clearly as the awareness slowly filled her expression, followed by disbelief, and then devastation. She set her jaw, pushing away from her friends to stride toward us. For a full minute, I considered simply turning around and running for my life, but some kind of sick fascination held me in check, and I knew that I was curious to hear what she would say to Noah.

  Or what Noah would say to her.

  Groaning, I fell back a step, but Noah grabbed a hold of my arm, preventing me from going anywhere.

  “Stay,” he said quietly. “Save us having this conversation later. You might as well hear it now.”

  I suddenly decided that I didn’t want to hear it, but Amber had arrived, and she was staring at Noah with tears tracking down her cheeks.

  “You said you’d give it a chance,” she flung at him—halfway between a plea and an accusation. “You promised me that it wasn’t because of her, and yet here you are. You came here together, after ditching me last night.”

  “I also told you that I’d be pissed if you started a fight with her, and what did you do?”

  “If that’s what this is about, I’m sorry, Noah.” She moved closer, peering up at him as the tears continued to fall. “I saw her and I just snapped. I’m sorry. Please, let’s just talk about it, okay?”

  “You can’t talk us into a relationship, Amber.” Noah scrubbed a hand down his face, tension lining his shoulders and carrying thickly in his voice.

  “You said you would—”

  “I said I would think about it. I told you I was confused and I needed to sort some things out. Well, they’re sorted now. It’s not going to work, and you need to leave Seraph alone.”

  Amber fell back a step, her tears drying up as quickly as they had appeared. Her face twisted into that expression of hatred that she seemed to wear whenever she looked at me, and she took a menacing step forward. I could tell that Noah was about to jump in front of me, so I put a hand on his arm to stop him. Amber glared at my hand, and started to tremble with the repressed need to explode. She whipped a folded bit of paper out of her pocket and jumped forward, punching it into the center of my chest.

  “Here,” she sneered. “He told me to give this to you when you got back together with Noah. He said it would be today, but I didn’t believe him. Congratulations, bitch. You just dug your own grave.”

  With those words, she turned on her heel and hurried away, leaving me clutching the note with frozen fingers. Cabe eased it out of my hands and I frowned as he opened it to reveal a route traced onto a campus map.

  “Should we leave?” Noah asked, staring at the map.

  “No,” I replied, stuffing the map into my pocket. “It could be another bomb. We need to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  I took off at a run before the words were even out of my mouth and I could hear the others following behind me. I had completely forgotten about Hans and Andrei, but I could hear one of them talking into a phone several paces back. I tore through the nearest faculty building to one of the raised courtyards outside the library, where the route drawn into the map had suddenly ended. There was already a large crowd of people gathered in the middle of the courtyard and I pushed through them, trying to get to the center. Soon enough they started to part for me, and I slowed as their stares weighed down on me, too anxious to shake them off as I usually would have.

  When I finally saw it, I buckled. My knees collided with the dewy grass, and my shoulders slumped as I faced the messenger’s latest surprise.

  It was a tombstone.

  RIP

  Seraph Black

  It’s like a stick across your back,

  And when your back begins to smart,

  It’s like a pen-knife in your heart,

  And when your heart begins to bleed,

  You’re dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

  “Alright, that’s enough everyone!” Hans boomed, knocking me out of the stupor that had taken a hold of me.

  Andrei grabbed my sleeve and hauled me to my feet. “We’re going to your first class. Hans will take care of this.”

  Without waiting to hear my opinion, he started to march me away from the scattering crowd. Noah and Cabe followed, of course, and we soon spilled into the lecture hall, where Quillan was waiting. He took one look at my face and folded his arms tightly, his expression growing strained.

  “What the hell happened now?”

  “I just saved a bunch of money on my own tombstone,” I said, disentangling myself from Andrei.

  “What she means is that her stalker planted a tombstone with her name on it in the courtyard,” Andrei corrected me, folding his arms to match Quillan’s stance—like it was grown-up time now or something.

  Quillan growled out a curse, and then another, and then he seemed to pull himself together. “Andrei, we need a minute.”

  “I can’t leave her side right now.”

  “Andrei.” Quillan strode up the stairs, standing before the giant and giving him a stare that even made me want to shrink back into myself. His dark eyes were lit from within by something heavy and unrestrained. He was very close to freaking out again. “I might spend most of my day sitting behind a desk, but I’m just as damned capable of snapping the neck of anyone who might want to hurt that girl—and twice as motived—as you. So, I’m going to say it again, and then
you’re going to leave the room. We. Need. A. Moment.”

  Andrei grumbled something beneath his breath and shot me a look, but eventually nodded and turned to stomp back up the stairs. “I’ll go and help Hans,” he informed us, letting the door snap closed behind him.

  Quillan deflated almost immediately, sinking into one of the chairs and rubbing his hands nervously over his thighs, his eyes fixed to the front of the lecture hall.

  “Does the messenger know that you formed the bond with Noah and Cabe? Is that why he did it?”

  “He doesn’t know,” I quickly replied. “He couldn’t. Not yet. This was a precautionary thing. He knew that Noah didn’t go to see Amber last night, and he told Amber to give me a map to the grave if it looked like me and Noah were together. Or maybe she was supposed to give it to me anyway and she made up the other part.”

  “Now Amber is working with him?”

  “He’s worked with people before,” Noah said. “The people who kidnapped me and Cabe. Plus, there was no way he could have surrounded the entire high school with barrels of explosives last year all on his own.” He moved to sit beside Quillan.

  Cabe followed him, falling into the chair on his other side. “He can’t find out about this. We need to find out about him first. It won’t be hard. Not now that Amber knows.”

  “She won’t tell us anything,” Noah scoffed. “Not after this morning.”

  “Are you sure you guys don’t remember anything?” Quillan questioned them, not for the first time, apparently.

  “Nothing,” Noah confirmed. “The false memories didn’t name him, or show his face. He was just the boyfriend, and somehow that made sense to us.”

  “Other people know,” I mused quietly. “The entire Klovoda knows who my twin is. Weston knows who he is. Jayden knows who he is, but he isn’t going to tell me. It didn’t turn out so well for me when I questioned him the other day, which is why I didn’t bring it up again to the Klovoda.”

  “If Jayden knows…” Quillan began, trailing off.

  Cabe and Noah turned to stare at Quillan, and Cabe shook his head, his expression drawing tight with pain and distress.

  “No,” Cabe said, still shaking his head. “It’s impossible. Silas can’t know who the messenger is.”

  “If Jayden knows, Silas knows,” Quillan countered, sounding resigned.

  “What?” I demanded, rounding on all three of them. “What are you even talking about? How could you say that?”

  “Easily.” Quillan rolled his eyes. “I haven’t seen Silas since you healed him. He checked out of the hospital and cleared a bunch of his stuff from the mountain house. This isn’t the first time he’s kept a secret from you to try and protect you. He obviously found out who the messenger is, and now he’s going after him. It kind of makes sense… to catch an invisible person, you have to become invisible yourself. At first I thought he was just hiding from the Klovoda or Weston, but this… this makes more sense.”

  “But… he was with me last night,” I managed to declare, my words escaping on a strangled exhalation. “He can’t disappear. He can’t… he can’t…”

  I was on the floor beside Quillan’s chair, my head falling onto his knee as his hand settled gently on my head.

  “He’s going to get himself killed,” Noah groaned, sounding as helpless as I felt.

  “We all know he can’t kill himself without hurting us as well,” Quillan countered, trying to be the voice of reason. “He won’t let it get that far.”

  “He can’t,” I repeated. Maybe it was the only thing I could say, but it suddenly seemed very important.

  “He’s not answering,” Cabe announced, indicating that he had tried to call Silas. “What time did he leave you last night, Seph?”

  “I don’t know. I was asleep.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back tonight?” Quillan asked, his fingers stilling in their calming tugs against my hair.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket and fiddled with the buttons instead of answering Quillan. I didn’t like that Silas was pulling away from everyone, but what could we really expect after he had spent so many months being tortured by Weston? He probably wanted to be invisible.

  Making up my mind, I navigated to his contact and quickly typed out a message.

  Will you come over tonight?

  I stood and walked down to the stage at the bottom of the lecture hall, needing the privacy of my own thoughts as I waited for a reply. I paced from one end to the other, my brow furrowed and worry gnawing a hole in my chest. I didn’t even know if he still had his old number, or if he was in possession of a phone at all. When my phone finally vibrated, I pulled it out of my pocket so fast that I almost dropped it.

  You’re a terrible trap, angel.

  My heart sank, and I had to swallow back against the sudden threat of tears.

  “He thinks that you guys put me up to it,” I called up to them in a strained voice. “I don’t think he’ll come back again tonight.”

  “He will if you ask him to,” Quillan returned calmly.

  The others didn’t say a thing. Noah had his jaw locked and Cabe seemed too worried to speak. I stared at the screen of my phone until the words started to blend together, and then I forced my fingers to type a single word.

  Please.

  His reply was instant.

  You can do better than that.

  I sucked in a breath, clenching the phone in stiff fingers as I marched up the aisle of seats to where the others still sat. I hurled my bag at the ground and ripped off my jacket and scarf, taking a second to deliberate my next move before looking Quillan squarely in the face.

  “You might not want to watch this.”

  He only frowned in response.

  “I warned you,” I mumbled, bending down to pull off my shoes.

  “What are you doing?” Cabe asked, standing from his seat.

  Noah jumped over the back of the seat in front of him, walking down to stand on the stair below me, his expression curious and guarded all at once. I ignored them all, freeing the buttons on my jeans one-by-one.

  “Whoa, Seph, what the—” Quillan surged up, panic in his expression.

  “I warned you,” I repeated, tucking my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans and sliding them down my legs.

  I stepped out of them quickly as Cabe burst out laughing and Noah’s jaw started to shift like he was grinding his teeth. I notched my foot on the chair that Quillan was still standing in front of, peering down at the flowering bruise on the inside of my thigh.

  “Who’s going to take the picture for me?” I asked the room, poking lightly at the mark.

  “Is this some kind of new-age sexual blackmail?” Cabe piped up, his eyes wandering over my legs as he leaned back against one of the seats, folding his arms across his chest and making no move toward my phone.

  “I don’t even know what that means.” I rolled my eyes at him. “But it has to be in an inappropriate place, or he won’t get mad enough.”

  He grinned back and I stumbled over my own smile. Damn Cabe and his stupid smiles.

  Quillan snatched the phone out of my hand, closing his fingers around it like he was seconds away from crushing it into dust. His eyes were fixed on my bruise.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked me.

  “A bruise,” I answered, inserting a hefty dose of sarcasm into my tone.

  His frown deepened and his displeasure swelled until he seemed to grow several sizes bigger. He stepped into my personal space and brought up a finger, holding it right in front of my face. He didn’t admonish me, and I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that he was too angry to form words.

  “What?” I balked. “I get punished for bruising easily now?”

  “Seraph—”

  “Don’t Seraph me,” I griped half-heartedly.

  “Yeah,” Cabe added, sounding highly entertained, “don’t Seraph her.”

  “Go and lock the door, Cabe,” Quillan snapped. “Before someone walks in
here.”

  Cabe jumped over the row of seats to make his way up to the door to the lecture hall. He flicked the lock on the door and then returned to us. Nobody had moved, and I seemed to be stuck in a silent battle of wills with Quillan. Eventually, his eyes strayed from mine, and caught on the bruise that marked my neck.

  He made a scoffing sound and dropped the finger that he had been holding up.

  “Are there more?” he asked.

  “Um…”

  “Show me. Now.”

  “This should be good,” Cabe intoned.

  “Shut the hell up, Cabe.” Noah spoke up for the first time since I had texted Silas, his voice rumbling with angry emotion.

  I glanced over at him, but his eyes were also on my neck. Since he and Quillan really couldn’t get any angrier, I pulled down my neckline and flashed them the other bruise before releasing the material. It clearly hadn’t been enough of a demonstration, because Noah stepped forward and unceremoniously yanked down my shirt again.

  Noah and Quillan seemed riveted to the mark, while Cabe watched my face. He looked like he was feeling a little sorry for me now, but he certainly wasn’t intervening.

  “It’s not going to grow legs and walk away,” I said dryly.

  Noah quickly released my shirt and stepped away, averting his eyes. Quillan had half of his face buried in one of his hands and his shoulders heaved with a deep breath.

  “Will someone just take the picture?” I asked, plucking my phone from Quillan’s fingers and waving it around.

  “Give it here,” Cabe said, snatching it off me and kneeling in front of me.

  Quillan turned away, striding a few rows of seats down. Noah seemed torn, like he wanted to follow Quillan, but also wanted to keep an eye on Cabe. Since Cabe was the only one being nice to me, I ignored the others. He bent his leg and then tapped his thigh. I planted my foot where he indicated and he turned my leg from the knee so that he could get a clear shot of the mark.

  Noah made another angry sound: this one caught between a snarl and something that snagged on frustration. I caught Cabe smiling again.

  “You can help, if you want,” he said.

  Noah seemed to think about it for a second before kneeling on the ground beside Cabe and snatching the phone off him. Cabe didn’t seem perturbed as he leaned out of the way, simply holding my leg from the knee and propping up my foot while Noah quickly snapped a photo. He handed the phone to me and then shoved my jeans into my hands.