Charcoal Tears

by Jane Washington

  “It’s just a stupid prank,” Cabe muttered, drawing my attention back to him. He seemed every bit as calm as Noah was riled-up. My trembling was getting under control, so I stood up and tried to put some distance between us. Cabe watched me back away and said, “Let’s get out of this house.”

  I started to shake my head, but Noah’s hand landed over my cheek. He hovered, electric eyes pulling me into his turbulence. “It’s a prank,” he echoed his brother. “If they wanted to do something to you, they would have done it already. They’re playing with you. We need to get out of this house for a while. I’ll have someone come over while we’re gone and replace all the locks.”

  Noah and Cabe left the room, and I shared a look with Tariq before we started to follow them. By the time we had returned the car, Cabe’s grin was back in full force. “Now that you’ve given into our inevitable friendship, it’s time for a little fun.”

  I heard Tariq and Noah muttering in the back seat, and then Noah raised his voice. “Fun?” he asked.

  “Tabby’s place,” Cabe replied, starting the engine. The cheery note to his voice sounded off, and I felt a brief trill of alarm at how easily they had brushed off the incident. Both incidents.

  “Good idea.” Noah had a smile in his voice as he pulled out his phone again. “Hey,” he started in a friendly tone. “What’s up?” He paused a moment, drumming his fingers on his thigh. I turned in my seat to watch him and he met my eyes. “I’m with a friend from school.” Cabe stiffened in the driver’s seat, but Noah’s smile had only grown. “Yes,” he said. “That friend.” He pulled the phone away from his face and I saw the words call ended flash across his screen, indicating that his friend had hung up on him. Unperturbed, he dialled the number again. “Don’t be a bitch, Silas. This is important.”

  I listened as he rattled off the facts of both pranks as though they didn’t bother him at all, as though he had every right to share that information with whomever he wanted… as though this were his life just as much as it was mine. I could feel the corners of my mouth turning down, and I looked away from Noah to try and control my rising anger. I caught Tariq’s eye, and saw that he was frowning just as hard as I wanted to, but I shook my head at him. I needed to figure out what was different about these boys, and why I felt so close to them, almost like I needed them in order to simply get through my day. I needed to know everything before I reacted.

  I was living proof that the world was a dangerous and unexpected place.

  “You have yourself a deal,” Noah said, sounding pleased. He hung up his call and started pressing buttons on his phone.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” snapped Cabe.

  “You’ll meet him soon enough,” Noah replied easily. “It’s inevitable, after all.”

  “Like our friendship?” I was joking, but the words stuck in my throat.

  Noah’s teeth flashed and his head whipped up. “Yeah,” he stared at me with an intensity I was getting used to expecting from him, and I quickly looked away.

  They drove out to the bay and parked outside an apartment building. It faced onto the water and had a fairly nondescript look from the outside, though the windows were long and wide, tinted almost to black, and quaint little half-moon balconies splattered the exterior with white patterned railings. There was a well-dressed man at the entrance to the lobby who opened the door for us, and another at the elevator, who pressed the button for us. We stood around quietly until we spilled into the elevator car and Cabe pressed the button for the top floor. The number six lit up.

  “You guys live here?” Tariq asked, a little bit of awe touching his tone.

  “Hmm.” Cabe hummed a non-committal sound.

  There only seemed to be two apartments on the sixth level, and we entered the closest, our small group spilling into a sunny living room. The carpet was an appealing mocha, with snow-white rugs stretching out beneath the leather couches and heavy dark-wood furniture. There was a breakfast bar set up against the window looking out over the bay, and a kitchen tucked off to the side, a wall backing it. It was all very open-plan with the living room sunken a few steps down in the middle.

  “Give us a moment to grab some stuff,” Cabe said, jogging over to one of the doors. “We’re going somewhere after this.”

  Noah wandered into the kitchen and we followed. He opened the fridge and brought out a collection of things. Tariq and I stood there watching as he gathered the ingredients for sandwiches, and then I stepped up quietly beside him. We coordinated smoothly, and soon had four chicken and salad sandwiches made. Noah bumped me out of the way and laid them out on a tray to set into the grill.

  He turned the oven on and tapped me on the cheek. “Thanks for the help, pretty girl.”

  Tariq cleared his throat and we both turned. I jumped a little bit. I may have forgotten that he was there at all.

  “Aren’t you worried?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know.” I twisted my hands. I’m terrified. “I can take care of myself.”

  He nodded. It was the reason I always stood between him and Gerald. “I know,” he said, hesitating. “But they even knew that you came crying to me last night. That’s why they put the pictures in my room this time.”

  I tugged on a strand of hair hanging over my shoulder, letting it slip through my finger and wrap around of its own accord.

  “I have no idea how they knew that,” I admitted.

  “We’ll find out.” Noah leaned up against the counter. “I’ve got someone working on it.”

  “Silas?”

  “He’s a bit of a genius. You’re in good hands.”

  “Does he go to our school?”

  “No, he’s a little older.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “You’ve told him about me?”

  Cabe’s door banged open and he shot Noah a look. They seemed to communicate something with each other, and then Noah was pulling out the sandwiches. We gathered to eat and I passed the other half of mine to Tariq out of habit, even though he had his own. Cabe swung a sports bag over his shoulder and we all descended back to the car. We drove back into the city and parked outside a cute little brick home with a well-manicured garden out the front. Despite the inviting façade of the house, there was something off about it. I couldn’t place the feeling until we reached the front door, and I found myself staring up at a surveillance camera.

  Cabe and Noah walked straight in without knocking and Tariq followed them, leaving me to linger in the doorway. I glanced toward the window beside the front door and caught the glint of metal. Caught by my own indecision, I hesitated too long, and then Cabe was calling out for me. I stepped through the doorway and followed the smell of cookies down the long hallway.

  “Cabe!” A woman’s voice carried to me as I reached a kitchen area. “Noah!” I couldn’t see the woman, but I slipped forward, planting myself directly in front of my little brother.

  He set his hands on my shoulders, squeezing lightly. I relaxed, not realising that I had jumped into defensive mode, and stepped away as the woman released Cabe and pulled Noah into a hug. She didn’t seem to notice us until she released him, and then she did a double take. Her eyes widened, peering at me, moving from my hair to my skirt to my shoes and then back to my face. She repeated the examination, slowly pulling her mouth closed.

  “Who’s this?” She barely even glanced at Tariq, which I found strange, seeing as we were both equally as unfamiliar to her.

  Cabe cleared his throat, pressing a hand to the back of his neck, like he was suddenly wondering if this was a good idea. “Seraph.”

  “Seph,” I corrected lightly.

  The woman hurried to me and grasped my hands. “She’s gorgeous!”

  Noah coughed. “Enough, Tab,” he said under his breath, as I stumbled back a step, breaking her grip.

  I saw the resemblance as she tried to mask her frown. She had Noah’s electric blue eyes and sleek blond hair. She was their mother.

>   “You don’t live with your parents?” The question slipped out before I could stop it, and I quickly grew red, turning away with embarrassment.

  The woman recaptured me quickly, flashed a brilliant smile, and placed a hand against Tariq’s arm. “You must be her brother? You look just like each other. I’m Tabby, their mother.”

  Tariq mustered a smile and Cabe materialised at my side, gently extracting me from his mother. She watched him slip an arm around me and draw me to Noah, and she seemed to forget about my brother again. Noah observed it all with amusement.

  Cabe whispered in my ear as he herded me away. “You either can’t get it out or can’t keep it in, right Seph?”

  I wrinkled my nose and Noah laughed.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Cabe gave me a little push beyond Noah, toward a hallway. “We’re going to play in the garage for a while, Tab. Come on, Tariq!”

  I was happy enough to escape the kitchen, but the house in general still made me uneasy. I waited for Noah once I was out of eyeshot of his mother, and he led me down to the garage with the other two trailing behind. There was a ping-pong table set up and a couch facing a gaming system. It looked like a typical teenage boy’s playroom. Tariq made a beeline for the ping-pong table and Noah stepped up to the challenge. I drifted off to the window, glancing out onto the street. Cabe eventually managed to draw me down to the couch and we started playing a video game where robots had to make their way through obstacle courses. It was pretty funny. After an hour or so, I was hanging off the side of the couch, laughing. Cabe groaned and threw his controller down, causing the other two to come over.

  “What happened?” Tariq looked at the screen.

  “She killed me again.” Cabe groused.

  “Aren’t you on the same team?” Noah squinted at the screen.

  “Yup,” I replied happily. “Wanna play?”

  “You’re on, pretty girl.”

  Noah fell onto the couch beside me, and I had to draw my legs up to make room for him. He picked them up and pulled them over his lap. Cabe passed him the controller and captured my feet. I tried to subtly pull my legs away, but Cabe held tight, the expression on his face casual. I didn’t dare look at Tariq; it was too awkward. I started playing mostly to distract myself from the scratchy feeling creeping along my skin, setting my teammate up for inevitable failure, but just before I pressed the button that would send Noah’s character falling to his death by collapsing the platform beneath his robot, Cabe started tickling my feet. I squealed, jerking one of my legs back. Noah pressed his torso forward, preventing the movement, and Cabe recaptured my foot.

  “Nice try.” Cabe flashed a beautiful smile at me, and I laughed.

  “You’re evil,” I said.

  “You’re sneaky,” he countered.

  A ringing sound cut through the room and Noah dug into his pocket, pulled out his phone and pressed a button, flashing it up to his ear.

  “Silas?” He waited for a long time, listening. “Hmm… Alright. But if you can hack the signal, wouldn’t they simply be able to hack it back?” Pause. “Better to destroy it. Set up a new one. New cameras. Thanks.”

  He hung up and I drew my legs back. This time they let me.

  “You’re house was bugged,” he said apologetically. “Only in the hallway and the common areas. Whoever it was didn’t have access to the bedrooms or bathrooms. The other pictures must have been taken from outside.”

  “You said to put in new cameras?” I asked.

  “We’re going to keep an eye on the situation.”

  “What do you mean, keep an eye on the situation?”

  “Once we cut their signals and set up a new private network, they’ll have to get close to your house to hack it back. If they do come to your house, we’ll be watching.”

  “You’ll be watching my house,” I repeated numbly. “Can’t you just set up cameras on the outside?”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. Our guy has based the new security system on your home computer—”

  “We don’t have a home computer,” Tariq interrupted.

  “You do now.” Noah waved a dismissive hand. “And to regain control of the new system, your… er, photographer will need to get inside the house and access the computer. There are endless reasons for a person to be inside your house. They could be a friend of your father’s, a tradesman, a salesman, or even one of your own friends. There’s no way to know unless we can physically see that computer at all times.”

  They played games for a little while longer as I debated what Noah had said, and then Cabe stood, stretching. “We’ve got practise.”

  “You’re on the team already?” Tariq perked up at this.

  “Yeah,” Cabe grinned. “Want to come watch?”

  Tariq nodded enthusiastically and they drove back to the school. I drove my own car and left Tariq with them since their car was still parked there. I parked behind the council building and jogged down the street to our house. There was a new key under the mat, just as Noah had said there would be. I unlocked the door and pushed inside, looking around. I couldn’t spot the cameras anywhere, but I wondered who this Silas was, and if he was watching.

  I found the rest of the keys on the kitchen bench and swapped my old ones as the door creaked open behind me. I swung around, finding my father’s eyes locked on me. He was drunk, and home early. Usually he didn’t stumble inside until around four in the morning, sometimes later. His eyes narrowed and he moved toward me. Cautiously, I put the counter between us. He didn’t even glance at the keys.

  “You ran away from me today, Seraph. You’re a bad daughter, you know that?” His voice was deathly soft. “I’m going to have to punish you.”

  I tensed my muscles, preparing for a fight. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “You’re drunk.” My voice was cold and strong. “Go to bed.”

  “I knew you’d come back.” He laughed, and the smell of alcohol washed over me. “Come here, daughter, give your daddy a hug.”

  “Back off, old man.”

  He lunged, belying the sluggish act that he had been putting on. I ducked to the side and he spun quickly to follow me, trying to back me into the kitchen. I kicked out, narrowly missing his groin and catching the fleshy part of his gut instead. He fell back against the counter and grunted in pain, but pulled himself straight and came for me again. He swung out and I tried to dodge again, but he had anticipated my move by swinging wide. He caught me across the cheekbone. My head whipped to the side and I felt the familiar electricity surging into my fingertips. The air crackled with it, and my father sensed it.

  “Going to use your little magic trick, eh?”

  “Don’t make me, Gerald. Go to bed.”

  He turned, apparently deciding that it wasn’t worth getting zapped again and made to move toward the stairs. He reached out to the railing, but then twitched his hand higher, yanking a small frame from the wall and throwing it. Caught by surprise, I didn’t block the frame that smacked into my collarbone and he laughed derisively as he retreated. I fell back, rubbing at the spot on my chest. I could feel the bruise already.

  The frame was on the ground, broken now, and I glanced down at the smiling faces as I picked it up. I had stopped actually looking at the sparse photos that littered our house—they were remnants of a past life, of different people. The family that had lived here before ours; admittedly, a family with our names and our appearances… but a different family all the same. The previous Seraph Black met my stare now, a crack fissuring ominously across her throat, a web of broken glass mottling the previous Tariq Black’s blissfully young face. Maryanne Black stood aside in the picture, somehow managing to escape the carnage of ruptured glass, simply by setting herself apart from the other occupants of the frame. She had serious green eyes and a generous mouth, set into a generously dishonest curve. Dimly, I wondered if she smiled the same painful smile in the other pictures around the house… but I didn’t have
the heart to check.

  I shoved the broken frame into a draw and headed back to the kitchen. My father’s keys were on the side table next to the front door and I switched his front door key before heading outside to the garage. I unlocked it and left it open, sure that my father was going to pass out for the rest of the night. He never usually dared to show his face again after I reminded him my ‘little magic trick’. I had done it the first time when I was thirteen. Spurred on by the sudden urge to shove him, I had somehow managed to electrocute him instead. He’d been fried. He peed himself, and Tariq had helped to lock him in the room while he was knocked out. He said nothing about it the next day, but we gained a very valuable weapon.

  I surrounded myself with my colours and began to work on the painting I had started the day before. The second coat was easier, but I still took my time with it. As the sky darkened, I hit the light and continued to work, losing myself in the soft pastel colours and the emerging face that stared back at me. Just like the picture that Gerald had thrown at me, this painting tried to reflect a familiar face back to me, but I had changed it too much for it to be an honest portrayal. The eyes were mismatched, one a blue-green and the other a blue-violet. It was hard for people to meet my eyes, which was why I so often stared at the ground. The nose was small and narrow, tipped up a little bit at the end. The lips were soft and bow-shaped, a light pink. The jaw was angled but delicate, giving an exotic shape to what should have been a clenched jaw. The cheekbones were high and sloping, the eyebrows softly arched instead of pulled together in a frown. The curl of the hair was fat and lazy, the colour dark as night. It was me, but it wasn’t me. This girl was free. I had painted the pain right out of her eyes. I had brushed the smile onto her lips, the ease into the set of her jaw. Her skin was unmarked, unbruised.

  She wasn’t me.

  A sound broke through my reverie and I jumped away from the painting, looking out to the entrance of the garage.

  “We were dropping off Tariq,” Noah said, stepping into the garage.