by Susan Vaught
My father came closer and filled up my world. I couldn’t see anything but his angry eyes, and the way his white teeth flashed when his mouth twisted into a sneer.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
My stomach clenched, because that was the thing I had always wanted to know about him—what had happened to fill him with so much violence?
He raised his open hand, knuckles toward me, and I knew he meant to knock me to my knees. I had to hit him first.
My muscles quivered. I clenched both fists, but didn’t swing.
“Don’t,” I begged him, and I sounded and felt like a scared little kid as I stared into those dark eyes and tried to find some emotion or concern—anything but rage.
There was nothing.
But no matter how mad I got, I couldn’t hit my father.
I wasn’t going to save Darius or my new friends or anyone else.
Coward. Worthless child.
My arms sagged to my sides, and I closed my eyes.
I felt the thunk in my teeth and my bones, but no pain followed. I didn’t stagger, and I didn’t fall.
The thump and clatter of a heavy weight hitting the floor made my eyes fly open.
I hadn’t been hit at all. It wasn’t me collapsing to the floor, unconscious from a blow to the head. My father lay in a heap at my feet, blood oozing from the right side of his face.
Addie stood over him, the frying pan she clutched still raised like a baseball bat. Her expression was full of pain and horror, and the colors coursing over her skin defied labels.
“Addie,” I whispered, stunned, then suddenly terrified for her and for my father, too. I reached for her, but she shrieked and stepped back from me, her eyes wild.
She kept the frying pan raised as she shifted her gaze from me to my father. She said something about healing herbs and spells to make sure his brain didn’t swell, but I didn’t know for sure whether he was alive.
Neither of us seemed able to check.
I didn’t want to touch him. I also didn’t want to take my eyes off Addie, because she seemed to be coming apart.
Seconds passed. More seconds.
My father didn’t move.
Addie wouldn’t lower the frying pan, and she wouldn’t let me come close. She backed away until I would have had to step over my father to get to her. She muttered a healing spell, and it slammed into me like so many electric tingles. Every cut and bruise on my whole body fixed itself at once, and it hurt.
Maybe the spell hit my father, too. It might have hit the neighbors or people three miles away. Addie was using raw power, no talismans or potions or powders to call it or control it. I was pretty sure my father didn’t know she could do that. Unchanneled power was as dangerous as a flood or a thunderstorm. Like an act of God or a natural disaster, it ran its course until it finished.
Addie’s hair stuck out wildly, and her smooth apron had gotten puckered and wrinkled. Her brown eyes had gone dim, and her skin was all dusky and dull. Whatever she had just done had drained her near to nothing inside.
“Addie,” I tried again, and her gaze snapped to mine.
I saw clarity. And agony. And betrayal.
“Get out,” she said, her voice like a dozen demons trapped in a well.
We stood in the hallway together, gulping air that smelled like blood and the ashes of a dead man’s hand. My skin crawled with the uncontrolled power in the air, and my heart raced.
Then I turned and ran.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I have to go back and see how he is.” My chest hurt, my hands ached, and my eyes burned so from tears that I could barely make out the faces in front of me.
“You know you can’t.” Darius’s voice was soft, but it wasn’t enough to make me calm down. “Sounds like you barely got out of that house in one piece.”
I shook my head and tried to pretend my father hadn’t been about to do ... I don’t know what to me because I defied him. I just kept seeing him lying in the hallway of our house, bleeding.
What if he died? What if he was already dead?
Levi eased toward me.
I backed up, and my shoulders hit Darius’s front door. “Stop,” I warned, raising my fists. My voice sounded crazy.
“You wouldn’t hit a murderer,” Levi muttered. “You won’t hit me.”
Forest had him dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with silver Aerosmith wings, but it didn’t make him look any less scary. His long black hair was pulled into a ponytail, and his pale face seemed twice as white. The air around him glittered silver and black, dark and light, and shadows moved on the walls and ceilings.
They didn’t scare me. Not even when they howled and honked and started to pull out of the paint and turn into dogs and birds. One of the dogs bristled as it got between Levi and me. My eyes saw it as a beagle, but it was wrong, somehow. The angles were off, like any second it might explode into something huge and slobbering, ready to eat me.
“My father’s no more a murderer than you are.” I shook a fist at Levi and his pet hunting dog, suddenly glad I was blocking the door so nobody could go charging toward my house. “I can’t believe I betrayed my family for you!”
Darius blocked Levi by stepping into his path. “Uh-uh, man. That’s my girl. You stay put.”
“He’s got a right to be mad,” Forest said. “Xavier Martinez killed Levi. Don’t you get that? He murdered him and threw his body on a pile of wood for burning. That man’s as crazy as anybody locked up in the asylum.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that. My father thinks he’s saving the world—and you know there are bad things at Lincoln.”
Please don’t let him be dead.
Levi pointed his finger at me as his biggest, meanest dog growled. “If you take his side, you’re no better than he is.”
Forest stepped closer to Levi, not seeming to notice the five or six hounds growling around his ankles. The tilt of her eyes and the eerie calm she always gave off made her seem like she was from some other planet. She had total control over Levi, when she chose to use it.
“That’s going a little far,” she told him.
He broke off glaring at me long enough to glance at her and say, “The sins of the fathers are the sins of the sons—just ask Imogene.”
He sounded sure, but his eyes darted to Forest.
“That’s in Exodus,” I told him. “But it doesn’t really say that.”
“I don’t care if it says that or not, it’s stupid,” Forest said. “Trina’s not responsible for what her father did, just like Darius wasn’t responsible for what Eff Leer did.”
Levi’s expression stayed mean for a second, then softened. The goose and hound shadows on the wall started to fade, and the real dogs at his feet disappeared like they had never been there, all but that biggest one. “But if your great-greats hurt people, you have to make up for it.”
There it was again. He was trying to sound so sure and so pissed off, but he couldn’t. Not when he wanted Forest to agree with him.
Forest frowned at him. “I don’t buy that.”
“Imogene says she’s unforgiven because of them that went before her,” he whispered, reaching down to pet his dog. That made him look almost normal, but I knew better. “She thinks that’s why she hasn’t died.”
Forest shook her head. “She isn’t unforgiven. None of us are. We haven’t done anything bad.”
When Levi still didn’t back down, Forest brushed her fingers against his elbow. Darius had told me that’s all they could share, quick touches and long looks, because of some weird bracelet somebody fastened on Forest when she was a baby. It lay on her wrist looking like nothing special, just carved wood and smooth beads, but it grew with her, and as long as she wore it, nobody with Madoc blood could touch her without being burned.
Levi’s posture stayed tense, and Forest touched him one more time. He flinched, but something other than pain flickered across his expression.
“Trina’s not her fat
her,” Forest told him. “And you can’t go gunning for him, because he is her father.”
Levi’s eyes got bigger. “What if he’s on his way here to kill us all?”
Forest shrugged. “If he shows up, we’ll deal with him.”
“He’s not coming.” My lower lip quivered even though I didn’t want it to, and fresh tears pooled in my eyes. “I really don’t know if he’s even alive after Addie hit him like that.”
Darius glanced at me over his shoulder. I could tell he wanted to stop guarding me and put his arms around me, and I wished he would—but I couldn’t help thinking, Darius is one of them.
“I’ll probably end up a patient in Lincoln instead of working there,” I muttered. The cess-a-pool. The place I was going to help watch, to make sure nothing truly evil found its way out into the world. “I don’t even have clothes to start my externship tomorrow.”
“Mama will take you to the store,” Darius said. “We’ll get you set for a few days, until we sort this out.”
I hugged myself and tried not to shake. “How are we going to sort out my father?”
“Levi and I will go to your house and check on him,” Forest said, “and do what we can to help with his healing.”
“You can’t.” I shook my head, feeling terror rise like heat to my face. “It’s not safe.”
Forest looked confused. “You said he wasn’t conscious.”
“The house and yard are protected—warded. And Addie’s conscious, and she’s not herself. I’m afraid she’d kill you faster than my father would.”
Addie in her rumpled apron, spent and brittle from the power she had used ... I didn’t want to think about it, but the image jammed itself into my head.
“And how’s she supposed to hurt us?” Levi asked. “She got her own knives or something?”
“She’s not Madoc, but she can use power.” I sighed. “If Addie threw an unchecked spell at you, it could go off like a warhead and take out half the neighborhood.”
“Spell. You mean like a witch’s spell?” On anybody else, Levi’s expression would have been a sneer. On him, it was more like normal. “I don’t suppose you’d care to show me one, would you?”
“I can’t.” I let go of myself and shook my arms to get the blood flowing through my hands again. “I have to use talismans and potions and powders—you know, props. But the supplies are at my house. All I’ve got is my willow charm.”
I slipped a hand into my jeans pocket and took out a piece of woven willow that Addie made for me when I was younger. It was almost a circle, with a cross on the inside. “The only time I can work more than basic spells without props is when I’m upset, and then I can’t control what happens. It’s random.”
“Sounds like Madoc blood to me,” Forest said.
Darius pulled his glasses down, studying me with his eerie white eye. “Nope. It’s something else.”
Forest and Levi didn’t argue, because Darius could see the truth of anyone or anything, see power in all its colors and forms.
Levi studied me for a while, then finally said, “I’ll ask Imogene to go to your house.”
My whole body went tight at the mention of the old woman. I didn’t really know what she was, but she was tied to Lincoln and to the power my father feared and hated.
Who are the real witches, us or them?
“Imogene can leave the hospital grounds?” Forest asked.
“Yeah,” Levi said. “Just not often, and not for long. And don’t worry, she won’t pick any fights.”
My breath came out in a huge rush. I hadn’t even realized I was holding it. Just knowing somebody would check on my father made me feel better.
“Meanwhile, I want to go to Lincoln and keep reading Imogene’s records about the different types of spirits,” Forest said. “I’d rather we know as much as we can before you spend too much time working there, Trina.”
This made me feel so tired and heavy that I sat down in the armchair nearest to the door, trusting Darius to stop Levi and that freaky beagle if they charged. “How can I start work and act like everything’s not totally insane?”
Darius came over to where I was sitting and got down on his knees in front of my chair. His big hands rested on my shoulders, squeezing, then moved to my cheeks to cup my face and keep me looking at him.
“You act a zif,” he said as I studied my reflection in the black lenses of his glasses.
“What?”
“A-s i-f,” he clarified. “As if. Until things are okay, you act as if they are.” He pulled me forward and lightly touched my lips with his. Tired or not, I felt tingles spread across my shoulders, and the soothing comfort of having him so close to me.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Darius said in a low, quiet voice. “Would you rather walk away from all this? Because I’ll go with you, if that’s your call.”
For a few seconds, my heart beat faster, and the room seemed to narrow until I couldn’t see anyone or anything but Darius. I thought about heading back to UK, about getting away from my father again, seeing my friends, and patching up the shredded life I had started to build. I had been doing pretty good at college—and Darius meant it. He’d go with me if I got up from here and drove straight to Lexington.
But what would happen at Lincoln then?
There was evil loose in that hospital, and it was trying to get out and kill people. It would kill people. Imogene and Levi and Forest, they could only do so much. And no matter what Forest said about my father’s sins not being my own, my father had made everything so much harder for them.
If Darius and I walked away from Never, we’d be part of letting terrible things happen. How terrible and where it would all end I had no idea, but it didn’t bear thinking about.
“Act a zif.” I let out a breath, keeping my eyes on Darius. His respect—and my conscience staying clean—seemed like a fair trade for everything I was giving up. “All right. Guess I better get busy practicing my nothing’s-crazy face.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
When I took my assigned wad of keys from Ms. Miller, my supervisor at Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital, my hands shook.
Act a zif ...
I had to get the extern hours for my future as a social worker. I needed a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s if I really wanted to do it right. The bonus was, I could help our little group of fighters keep an eye on what was happening at Lincoln in the process. But mostly I wanted to help Darius and keep him safe from my father. If I could just understand the real fight going on at Lincoln, maybe I could make my father understand it, too.
Time to be a good actress. I made myself smile. My new black skirt and white blouse itched. My new black flats pinched my toes. I smelled like Darius’s mother, because I had used her soap. Not that my nose was good enough to tease out that scent from the vanilla and cinnamon and pumpkin and watermelon and citrus and pine scents of the air fresheners, unlit candles, and potpourri in the offices all around us.
Act a zif ...
I couldn’t whimper or shut my eyes or obsess about my father. Imogene was due to check in again in fifteen minutes.
Thunder rumbled above the giant stone building, and I twitched at the sound. I had been listening to Ms. Miller for over an hour as she told me how to clock in, where to find my assignments, how to be sure I didn’t transmit infection, and how to report patient abuse if I saw it. We were sitting in her office, where the walls were painted pink. Seriously. It was pale, maybe more of a coral, but it was pink. And she was wearing a slightly mismatched three-piece blue pantsuit.
Why did that matter? I never cared what people wore. Ms. Miller had a big, bleached-white smile and thick bleached-blond hair, yellow on top of blue in front of pink.
I needed an aspirin. Or a nice, coma-inducing tranquilizer.
Rain splattered hard against her screened and barred window, making me jump.
Act a zif ...
Act as if I didn’t want to throw up.
Act as if I didn’t want to ru
n away from Lincoln and never look back.
Act as if I wasn’t about to cry every freaking minute.
Ms. Miller kept talking, but I had no idea what she said. I caught the “You’ll be starting on Unit C” part, though, and I managed to keep focus through, “It’s our chronic ward. Today I just want you to observe, get to know your people.”
She blinded me with another megawatt smile.
My people. Who were my people again, exactly? Surely she couldn’t mean my father, the man I left for dead. Or Addie, who had bashed her husband in the head to save me.
I held back a sigh and kept right on trying to act normal.
We left Ms. Miller’s office and walked into one of the hospital’s long, tiled hallways. Rainy gray light spilled from open office doors, mingling with the hall’s white-blue fluorescence until the whole place seemed overcast. It reminded me of Addie’s funeral home, how everyone who worked there tried to make it bright and happy, but in the end, it was what it was—a place where the dead came to be stuffed in a box.
I shivered and clutched my notebook to my chest.
Darius had been waiting right outside Ms. Miller’s office door. My own personal bodyguard, all glamoured up by Forest and Levi to be invisible. I couldn’t see him, but I caught the scent of his aftershave and heard the comforting whisper of his breathing. I imagined his big shoulders going square as he fell into step behind us. His handsome face would be grim and stern and he was probably checking out each of the multicolored offices in case some monster came hurtling out from behind the fake fig trees.
The farther we got away from the office area, the more the building smelled like stone and cleanser and dampness, and the grayer the floors and walls seemed to become. Thunder kept up a steady beat, and when we passed windows, hard rain was hammering against the safety glass.
Ms. Miller led me through so many locked doors that I lost count, each set seeming bigger and thicker than the ones before. When we finally got to a door marked CAREFUL, AWOL RISK, ENTER WITH CAUTION, I felt like I was in the center of a giant maze I could never escape. I held the door long enough for Darius to get through, then moved my hand. The door slammed with a loud, metallic clang. I found myself looking back at a tiny square window, set just above eye level.