Charcoal Tears (3 page)

“Yes?” I tried to stare at my feet, but the brother was too close to me. I ended up staring at his stomach.

His fingers caught my chin, lifting my head up. I jumped at the touch, and he blinked, surprised. The same feeling that had assuaged me at Cabe’s touch now radiated from his brother’s fingers, spreading over my neck and heating my cheeks.

Cabe chuckled. “You idiot, Noah. You scared her again.”

“Can’t help it.” Noah sounded angry. “I almost ran you over his morning.” He directed this at me, his eyes flicking over my face, and then lower, cataloguing all of me.

“Yes.” I lifted my chin, forcing his eyes back to my face.

“And you didn’t move.” There was something compelling about his eyes. They drew me in until the storm surrounded me on all sides, his influence closing in on me like an actual physical force, tossing around my thoughts before they turned to words and fell across my lips, extracting things from me that I hadn’t even admitted to myself yet.

“I have no idea what came over me.” My voice was breathless. “I’m sorry. I—ah, I hope… there’s no damage?”

He grunted. “I think your self-preservation mechanism is damaged.”

Cabe punched him, and I glanced over into the warmer eyes, some of the tension draining away.

“Ignore him.” Cabe smiled. “He wanted to make sure I didn’t break you when I fell on you. He’s a hard-ass, but he cares.”

Noah stepped back, turned and thumped his brother in the stomach. “Shut up, man.”

Cabe sucked in a breath and rubbed at his stomach. I used the moment to my advantage, slipping away from both of them. Cabe turned to the side as I passed, but caught my elbow again.

“Let me walk you,” he said, still rubbing the spot where Noah had punched him.

“Okay.” I didn’t pause, and he fell into step beside me. Surprisingly, Noah shadowed my other side.

“Keep walking,” Noah barked at a group of lingering students who were leaning against the wall outside the cafeteria, whispering to each other and staring at us.

I jumped and slowed my walk as the other kids snapped to attention and scrambled away. Cabe and Noah slowed on either side of me, and confusion descended like a heavy fog in my brain. This wasn’t normal, was it?

“You seem to be settling in easily,” I finally said, not aiming the statement at either of them in particular. “Be careful. They might make thrones for you.”

Cabe snorted. “High school. Always the same.”

“Right.”

“Who was your friend?” Noah asked.

“What friend?” I searched my brain, trying to think of anyone that I might consider a friend other than Tariq. There was the girl that I sometimes sat with on the bus when we didn’t have enough money to put petrol in the car, or the boy at the corner store close to the school who made terrible coffee but always smiled at me, or—

“The boy you were sitting with at lunch.” Noah threaded me a look, arching his brows.

“Ah, Matthew. I don’t know. Today was the first time we’ve actually spoken.”

Cabe started to laugh, but Noah’s head snapped up, and they shared a look over my head. Cabe quietened.

We neared my art class and I opened the door, trying to act casual when they followed me inside. Quillan glanced up from his desk, tilting his head to the side. He seemed to be expecting the new boys, but his eyes narrowed fractionally when he spotted me standing between them. It wasn’t a look I was used to from my art teacher, so I quickly slipped away from Noah and Cabe to find my easel in the back of the classroom. The rest of the students were all setting up and chatting happily. Art class was pretty relaxed.

The boys approached Quillan and I watched them from behind my blank canvas. Quillan had his long legs propped up on the desk in front of him, his black hair waved back from his forehead, styled to perfection as always. Quillan smiled easily and often, but the mirth never reached the darkness of his eyes. He was always approachable, always gentle, and yet he seemed so far out of reach that I sometimes wondered if he existed on a separate wavelength to the rest of us. We could see him, and interact with him, but he was only half here. Though Cabe and Noah were certainly visually impressive, Quillan’s looks bordered on unnatural perfection. He was lean, but towered over anyone in the vicinity, and there was always something commanding about his presence, a powerful influence that simmered in the soft black velvet of his eyes. His eyes were actually blue—he had told the class once—but I only ever saw the black. Most of the girls harboured secret crushes on him, but I had never held an attraction to him. Yes, he was beautiful, but he had become a guardian, of sorts, in the time that I had known him. He was always watching over me, his gaze protective, always checking up on me, his questions kind.

They were talking softly with each other now, and Quillan slid a look to me, his squared jaw flexing with a half-smile. Shocked, I retreated behind my canvas again and blindly picked up a paintbrush. I arranged my paints, embraced the racing thunder of my heartbeat, and began to paint.

2

Down Will Come Baby

I started with blue, outlining a raging ocean shore, violent with the foam of churning force, with the promise of deep and dangerous depths beyond the reach of human senses, and then I began on the sun. The sky wasn’t normal, not in this painting. It was warm and soft and everything that makes a person smile. The rays were golden, and they dipped beneath the ocean to shimmer in dancing patterns across the water, drawing the two opposite forces together. I felt people moving around me, but I ignored them, until I heard Quillan’s surprised voice at my ear.

“You’re painting again.”

I dropped my paintbrush and he swooped down, collecting it.

“Y-yes,” I stuttered, my eyes averted from the painting.

Behind Quillan, Cabe had set up an easel beside me. He hadn’t painted anything, but his eyes were fixed on my canvas and he was smirking. Quillan looked at my painting, and I had the strangest feeling that he knew exactly what had motivated me to paint it. His eyes flicked over my shoulder and narrowed again. I looked behind me. Noah was sitting on a bench against the wall on my other side, his legs propped onto a stool in front of him, his eyes fixed to my canvas. That’s all he had been doing, apparently. Sitting there. Watching me paint.

“It’s good, Seph.” Quillan turned his attention back to my work. “It’s very good. Stay behind after class, I’ve a few things to discuss with you.”

He gave me back my paintbrush and smiled a little. I nodded. I would do anything that Quillan asked me to do, and it wasn’t because I was a model student. It was the voice he used. Quillan asked things of people and they reacted without thinking, without considering, and certainly without arguing. His voice had a pleasant husk, deepening everything he said to a command that tolerated no second-guessing. Some people possessed a natural authority in the way they held themselves, but for Quillan, it was in the way he spoke to people, like he knew what was best for them, like he knew what was best for the world. For a minute neither of us moved, and then he went back to his desk. I began to paint again, and when I had finished, dark cavernous mountains framed either side of the ocean, peaking into the sky. They towered over everything, keeping it all contained, controlled, wrapped in black influence. I finished before the bell rang and simply stood there as it dried, staring at what I had done. I was confused, and my heart was still beating too fast. At the end of the class, I tore the painting from its clips and rolled it up, stuffing it into my bag. Cabe and Noah left without a word to me and I peeked behind Cabe’s easel, feeling an insane urge to laugh at the sloppy smiley face that he had drawn. Cabe wasn’t an artist.

I approached Quillan’s desk and he motioned for me to sit. I pulled up one of the art stools, setting it before his desk. I wasn’t simply familiar with his routine check-ups; I actually looked forward to them. It wasn’t that I ever really told him anything consequential, but Quillan was the only person other than Tariq who ever asked about me. Sometimes I wished that we could have lived with Quillan instead of… but that was silly.

Impossible.

Borderline weird.

“How are you feeling, Seph?”

“Good.” I managed to offer him a smile. “How are you, Mr. Quillan?”

He laughed softly and didn’t answer my question, as usual. “I’m glad you’re painting again. Are you ready to tell me about it yet?”

He was referring to the reason that I had stopped painting in the first place. He didn’t know about the strangle coldness that seized up my fingers, or the tingling premonition that teased the base of my skull, and I wasn’t ever going to tell him. I shook my head.

With a sigh, he settled his palms against his desk and pushed up until he was standing. “You’d tell me if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you?”

I focussed my eyes on his tie; forest green with silver accents, gently contrasting with his white shirt and black pants. The sleeves were rolled up to his forearms, and I noticed for the first time that he wore expensive clothes, just like Cabe and Noah.

“Define trouble?” I asked his tie.

He tapped my chin, once, and my head snapped up. He forced me to look up all the time, but he usually did it with a pencil or ruler against my chin, like he wasn’t allowed to actually touch me in any way.

“You’d tell me if someone hurt you, Seph?” he pressed.

I stared at him, and then slowly got off the stool. He stepped back to give me room, and I was grateful for it.

“Thank you for checking up on me, Mr. Quillan.” I paused with my hand on the door as his sigh drifted after me. It was the first time he had ever pressed me to talk to him, usually he just made gentle enquiries and offered his assistance.

I left quickly, but still ended up being late to my next class. As usual, nobody noticed me enter, and I was just fine with that. As the school day ended, the usual dread settled into the pit of my stomach and I took the fire stairs down to the first floor of the building, not wanting to run into anyone. The sound of voices floating up to me from the landing below made me pause.

“Did you see anything?” I recognised Cabe’s voice, and I froze, ready to turn back.

“No,” Noah replied, “I didn’t. Her wrists were clear, nothing on her neck, or her ankles. I checked all the usual places.”

“And she didn’t notice you checking?”

“Are you serious?” Noah sounded amused.

“Right.” Cabe breathed out a laugh. “But you felt it too, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Noah answered after a pause.

Not wanting them to catch me eavesdropping, I slipped out of the stairwell and braved the swell of students spilling down the corridors. I found Tariq leaning against my car, his goofy grin gone. We shared a grim look, and both got into the car.

“How was your day?” he questioned as we drove. “I heard one of the new boys almost ran you over this morning? Are you okay?”

I tightened my fists on the steering wheel. “People know it was me?”

He patted my knee, trying to be comforting. “Don’t worry, Seph—they described you and I connected the dots.”

“Described me?”

“Yeah, someone thought you were Cabe’s sister.” He laughed. “They were getting all excited, thinking we’d have a new cheerleader for the team.”

I snorted, and he laughed harder. It always astounded Tariq how I managed to fly under the radar, but I wasn’t so surprised. It was the way I liked it. I worked hard for it. I parked a few houses down and we both walked home, slipping through the door with our guards raised.

“About time!” our father thundered from the kitchen.

Tariq paused, and I collided with his back. Slipping in front of my brother, I faced off with Gerald.

“Where were you?” he growled at me. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.”

Yeah right
.

“We were at school.” My voice was cold, firm, as it always was with him. I knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been waiting for us, because his shirt was still crumpled from sleep and his eyes were groggy.

“I’m hungry,” he spat.
We all are
. He narrowed his green eyes at me, bloodshot and swollen—once beautiful, like Tariq’s, but now covered in a film of strain and sin. “Where is all the food?”

“You took the money again, Gerald.”

He spat out a curse and rounded the counter, his hand whipping out with worrying speed, capturing my neck in a claw-like grip. “Shouldn’t you be at
work
then?”

A growl rose in my throat, but Tariq put a palm between my shoulder blades, tempering me.

One… two… three
…“Yes,” I bit out. “I’m going.”

Gerald shoved me back and began to round on Tariq, but I stepped aside to draw his attention back to me. Taking the cue, Tariq rushed up the stairs, and I heard the click of his bedroom door locking.

Gerald must have heard it too. “Get moving, you ungrateful shit!” He shoved me again, and my hip bit into the counter. I shot toward the front door and disappeared before he could do anything else. Tariq was safely in his room. There was nothing left for me there.