Charcoal Tears (35 page)

“Everything is about to change,” his voice was a painful rasp. “I hope you’re ready.”

He set me onto my feet and I pitched sideways, my arm flinging out to grab a handful of his shirt, except that my fingers brushed the ribbed black vest that he had been dressed in before the party, and it was too hard to grab onto. He caught me again, steadying me, and I spotted my notebook soaking up the rain a few feet away. Unbidden, I thought of the picture I had drawn in Quillan’s office, and the feel of soil between my toes rushed back, except now it was accompanied by the sting of rain and the wonderful ball of flame that now resided in my chest. I ran over to the wet notebook, and then rushed to the others standing beneath the meagre shelter of the bus stop. Silas had his back turned, and I could somehow
feel
the turbulent emotions that shuddered through him, but my mind was snagging on the remembered drawing, unable to focus on anything else. I dug around in my bag for another pencil, and then opened it to one of the back pages, which wasn’t so wet. I started to draw lines again, but my touch was sure this time. The lines connected, curved and straightened, and then abruptly ended.

A touch landed on my shoulder, and I recognised the spring-and-toffee scent of Cabe, dampened by the rain.

“I think I walked this way for a reason,” I said to him.

When the pencil stopped moving, I set off. Cabe grabbed me, spinning me around.

“Where are you going, Seph?” He seemed wary, but there was a spark of something like anticipation in his eyes.

“Something terrible…” I answered, pointing at the lines. “I drew a map. It’s taking me to a grave.”

“The picture you drew in my office?” Quillan asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s go,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

That was all I needed, and it seemed to be all the others needed as well. I turned and walked, my bare feet uncomfortable on the gravel, my scraped knees trembling with cold. A jacket settled over my shoulders, a touch passing over the back of my neck. I knew it was Silas, because I could feel him closer than the others—feel him like he was an extension of myself, a ball of energy and fire, tethered to the end of one of my previously severed strings. I no longer felt like a puppet without a handle. I was simply the centre, and Quillan and Silas were now my extensions. They existed as I existed, borrowing the same life. I felt stronger, yes, but also more vulnerable. I no longer had one body to keep alive, but three.

“So this is what it feels like,” I said as we walked. “I can feel where you stand, even though I’m not looking at you.” I wondered if they expected me to freak out, or demand to know why they had waited. They were uncharacteristically quiet.

“Yes,” Silas finally said. He sounded off.

“Why did you wait?” I walked straight, because my first line was straight. When I hit a bend in the road, my line also tipped to the right, so I followed it.

“You’re not freaking out.” Noah had to raise his voice over the rain. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”

“Maybe I should be,” I conceded. “But I felt what it would be like to go against the bond, and I… I don’t think it’s possible. It would drive a person insane, or kill them.”

“Oh, it’s possible.” Quillan’s voice was dark. “We would know.”

“How?” I aimed the question without glancing away from my map.

“Our father had a pair.”

My feet didn’t falter, but my brain did. My body had a mind of its own, walking the lines that I had drawn with dogged intent while my mind tried to catch up with everything.

“Tabby?” I asked.

“Her and Yvonne,” Noah answered. “Silas and Miro’s mother.”

“But Tabby—”

“Isn’t as fine as she seems,” Cabe interrupted. “Trust me. She’s barely holding it together most of the time.”

“Is that why you haven’t told her about me?”

“One of the reasons,” Cabe answered. “She can’t keep anything from our father. Even though he cast them out, she still runs back to him every time he calls, and they’re both waiting for our Atmá to appear.”

“Why do you not want your father to know?”

The road continued on ahead of us, but my line was cutting sharply to the left. I turned without hesitation, walking straight into the line of shrubbery at the side of the road. A slippery, barely-there trail wound its way beneath my feet as we filed into a line, weaving through the trees and carefully picking our way downhill.

“It’s something we can’t tell you yet,” Silas answered because he was the one behind me. “Trust us.”

“I…” I had been about to say that I
did
trust them, but something stopped me, lodging in the back of my throat. How was it possible to feel so close to someone, and yet still feel like they were hiding things from you? “I need you to tell me.”

“If we did, he would hurt you terribly. He would lock you up until Noah and Cabe came of age, and then he would kill you,” Quillan said. “Weston has an ability, sweetheart, like your forecasting and your valcrick. He can see what people hide. He can hear the whispering of their thoughts, and know the things that they keep hidden within ten minutes of meeting them, unless they guard their minds carefully. He has been hunting for our Atmá for a very long time, but not for the reasons that everyone thinks. He—”

“Miro.” Silas’s voice was a warning, and Quillan fell silent.

“He’ll find out about you eventually,” Silas said as we slid down a particularly steep bank and then hugged the tree line moving forward. “The less you know, the safer you will be. You would have been
much
safer if we had managed to prolong the bond, but it couldn’t have been helped.”

I didn’t say anything more as we walked, and eventually I folded up my wet notebook and tucked it under my arm. I broke out of the cover of trees and we spilled into a graveyard. It was high on the side of the mountain that we had been walking down, and it jutted out, looking over the lights of civilisation beyond. The rain began to clear as I moved cautiously between the headstones.

“Spread out and search.” Noah’s voice was low, his hand slipping into mine.

The others melted away, their silhouettes shifting as they became three more spectres in this place for the dead. Noah pulled me after him, toward a tree in the centre of it all, pushing me gently against the bark and planting his back to me. I supposed they were taking over from here, and I leaned forward to rest my head against his broad back. He reached back, pulling my hands around to his stomach, holding them there. I had though that with only one pair remaining to bond with, the scratching feeling would be gone, but it seemed to be stronger than ever.

“I can’t believe you thought that we would never let the bond form,” he said lowly.

“But Miro and Silas will be turning twenty-six next year—”

“We would have done it before then,” he sighed. “When have we ever made it seem like we didn’t… didn’t…
ugh.
” He spun, his hands cushioning my back as he crowded me against the bark of the tree. “We’d do
anything
for you.” He breathed softly. “How is that not obvious to you?”

“Over here!” Cabe’s shout forced Noah to fix me with one last stormy glare before he pulled me from the tree.

We arrived at the same time as Quillan and Silas, and we all just stood there, staring at the freshly-dug grave, shovel still wedged into the turned-up earth. It was completely filled-in; the earth had fresh boot-tracks over the top. I dropped and started to dig away the dirt with my bare hands.

“Seph, what—”

I shrugged off Quillan’s touch, my breath ragged with the insistent pressure in the back of my skull as I dug. This wasn’t supposed to be here. I had come too late. I had been too broken to draw a straight line. When my fingers scraped something, I heaved back an armful of dirt and stared down into the pale face, my brows drawing together.

Aiden stared back at me.

The boys all fell forward, clearing away more of the dirt as I sat there, staring. There was something clutched in his hands, and as the boys cleared out more of the dirt, I reached forward and extracted it. It felt like the canvas-paper that I painted on sometimes, and I rolled it out over the grass behind me, my dirty fingers running over the details of a shadowed staircase and menacing balustrades, a figure at the top and a scattering of money at the bottom. In red crayon, someone had scrawled a message.

Peek-a-boo. I found you
.

The messenger was back.

I pulled back like the painting had burnt my fingers, and turned, dropping it onto Aiden’s chest. Four sets of eyes focussed on it, and I stood, swallowing down my grief and panic.

“We need to find his pair,” I said.

“It’s too late.” Cabe sounded strangled. “If he’s dead, so are they.”

A cry tore from my throat, and I clenched my fists. Whoever this person was, they had been at the party. They had followed us to the mountain house and had seen me with Aiden. They had killed him simply for talking to me, for trying to help me when I was upset.

“Is it your father?” I asked into the night, my voice carrying eerily now that we were no longer whispering. I wondered if the bastard was hiding in the straggle of trees arching up the side of the mountain, watching down with a smile on his face.

“No,” Noah admitted. “Weston wouldn’t bother with these kinds of games. If he knew about you… well, it would be obvious. This is something else.”

“Can you take me back to the party?”

I watched as Quillan rolled up the painting and stuffed it through the back of his belt. Without any words spoken, the others had begun to cover up the grave again.

“Why?” Quillan asked, watching over them.

“I need to find Poison.”

He nodded, and pointed out something when the others moved away from Aiden’s grave. Noah reached over from the grass and ran his hands through the dirt, messing up the leftover imprint of somebody’s boot. When the grave site had been rid of any evidence of us being there, we started back up the side of the mountain. After my second time slipping over, Quillan took my notebook from me and Noah hefted me onto his back. We returned to the cars and Quillan and Silas gathered my scattered things littering the bus stop and road, and got into Silas’s car, speeding away. The rest of us got into the Lincoln and Noah drove back to the party.

20

The End of the Beginning

There were police cars surrounding Poison’s mansion when we got there, and kids were filtering out onto the road, standing among the crowd that stared up at the house.

“Cabe, can you grab some clothes?” Noah asked, pulling up to the curb.

“Sure. Wait here.” He got out of the car and walked a little way down the road, disappearing behind a tree.

I watched as a four girls walked down the side of the road, heads bent together, whispering frantically to each other. One of them paused as they passed the tree and looked to where I assumed Cabe was hiding. She seemed surprised, but that expression quickly melted into something resembling disbelief, and then excitement. She waved her friends ahead and moved toward the tree, disappearing. I waited anxiously, drumming my fingers on the side of the seat until Cabe appeared again suddenly, jogging back to the car and ducking inside.

“Here.” He dropped a pile of clothing onto my lap.

I looked down, blinking slowly.

“You just undressed someone?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Actually, she kind of undressed herself.”

“You were there for minutes, Cabe!
Minutes
!”

He smirked, and Noah tried to smother a laugh, but I heard it anyway. I glowered at them both and then climbed into the backseat next to Cabe.

“Sorry, pretty girl, but you’re not the only one with skills.” He leaned back and crossed his arms, delivering me a wink as I started to peel off my wet dress.

“Whatever,” I grumbled, using the sodden fabric to clean the mud off my arms, legs and feet. “How can you see a dead body and get a girl to take her clothes off all in the space of an hour?”

“Two girls,” he amended, his eyes glued to my hips as I tilted them up from the seat, pulling the skinny jeans up.

Noah’s golden head appeared between the two seats as I pulled on the girl’s shirt.

“Having fun?” I muttered.

“Immensely,” he assured. “I had you pegged as the kind of girl who has the secret female capability of getting changed underneath other layers of clothing.”

“My other clothing is wet and muddy.” I arched a brow, checking over myself to make sure that I was presentable. “How do I look?”

“You looked better a few seconds ago.” Cabe offered.

I gaped at him, barely believing that he could be still joking in the situation that we were in, and then I opened the door, closing it firmly behind me as I made for the house. I wasn’t wearing any shoes, but it probably didn’t matter, since most of the girls had their heels dangling from their hands by this time anyway. The top part of the house had been cordoned off, and the police were trying to herd everyone else out, so I quickly skipped off to the side, heading down a hallway into a mostly abandoned part of the house. I eventually found myself in a massive indoor pool area with a gym off to the side. There were glass doors leading outside, and I almost turned back to the main part of the house before movement caught my attention. I glanced back and sucked in a breath as Poison pushed open the glass doors and stepped in, her eyes meeting mine.