Falling Under (5 page)
His carefully planned strategy had changed because of her. He would spend his last breath making sure he never tainted the one true thing he’d ever really known.
The usual silence of dinner with Father had given me the opportunity to push my food around my plate listlessly and relive the moment when the new boy, whose name turned out to be Haden Black, touched me without touching me. No matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, the feel of his breath against my ear as he whispered to another girl kept me riveted to the same memory, over and over. The way he looked at me while he did it … I could have sworn he knew what he did to me.
Even as he frightened me, he intrigued me.
Thankfully, he had been easily avoided for the rest of the day. We had only one class together and our desks were on opposite sides of the room. Not that I hadn’t been hyperaware of him, but at least I couldn’t see him.
Father took a business call at the table. He rarely did that. Sometimes when I watched him talk to strangers, I noticed he didn’t look so much like my father. With me, he carried himself so severely, so guarded.
When he spoke on the phone, even though he was businesslike, he relaxed. His features softened. His brown eyes warmed. My father had impeccable taste in clothes, his hair, though thinning, still had a bit of wave and only a little gray, and I always thought his hands were almost elegant the way he used them in conversation. But it was only when he wasn’t talking to me that I thought he might actually be a handsome man.
“Please pass the carrots,” I said when he finished his call.
Father shot me a perplexed glance as he handed me the bowl. For all our estrangement, he knew my eating habits, and carrots were never my favorite. Mostly I just wanted a reason to interact with him.
“Thank you.”
“Hmmm,” he answered.
Perhaps it was the lack of sound sleep that clouded my judgment, but a small ball of anger fizzed in my chest at the way he treated me, and I wanted to provoke him into something—anything—besides this stoic cordial acquaintance association we had. So I asked, “Did my mother like carrots?”
He reacted, like I’d known he would, as if I had slapped his face. Shock paled his skin, and then red replaced it. “What does it matter what kind of food your mother preferred?” He punctuated each word with a punch of mettle. Father didn’t appreciate things that came out of nowhere.
“I just … I just want to know her better.”
He’d recovered himself and masked his face in cool indifference once again. “I loved your mother, Theia. It pains me to talk about her. She did not like carrots, as I recall.” Father wiped the corners of his mouth, though it wasn’t necessary, as he ate with a precision that a surgeon would envy. “Your mother didn’t like much that wasn’t junk food.”
I’d gotten that from her, my love of junk food. That made me smile.
Father pushed away from the table. “Perhaps if she’d learned to take better care of herself, you could be asking her these questions.”
My smile was quickly replaced with a tug of longing at my heart. He’d known that would hurt. I deserved it, I suppose, for bringing her up. My mother was a forbidden subject unless to provide my father a cautionary tale in order to bring me to heel.
He blamed her for dying. I suspect he blamed me for killing her.
He left me sitting alone at the table, though I was no lonelier than I had been when he was still in the room.
I resolved to practice violin for an hour after dinner. I promised myself an hour of whatever I wanted to play instead of what had been prescribed for me to practice. Getting lost in music meant I wouldn’t have to think about my father, the burning man, my strange dream, or Haden Black.
As a child, I took to music quickly and with what seemed to everyone else very little effort. I could never explain to them that the hard part of playing the violin was not the notes or the finger placement, or even the calluses. It was the pieces of me I had to sacrifice when I pulled the songs out. When I played for myself, I belonged to the song, and the song became the
real
Theia. Without a tutor or an audience, my own world opened up. A world richer than the one where I lived. A place where I didn’t feel bound to expectations or fault. When I played for others, the opposite was true. The songs I played for them weren’t to unlock my world; instead, I disappeared in a way, and was able to open up theirs.
real
Theia. Without a tutor or an audience, my own world opened up. A world richer than the one where I lived. A place where I didn’t feel bound to expectations or fault. When I played for others, the opposite was true. The songs I played for them weren’t to unlock my world; instead, I disappeared in a way, and was able to open up theirs.
It was a heady thing, to be told as a child that I touched people so deeply. Strangers. I’d been told I was gifted, but so often it seemed that what I was given was a gift for others.
And so I used to long for the time alone with my violin, to escape and release the girl I wanted to be from her captivity inside the girl I really was. Used to. Lately, I no longer felt compelled to make my own music, but the last two days had wearied me. I needed a holiday from me.
As the sun sank into the horizon, I played from memory the melancholy tune that had lured me into the labyrinth the night before. I’d chosen the sunroom off the kitchen, with the wicker furniture and ferns, because it had the best view of the setting sun; I’d chosen the song without realizing I’d done so until I’d been playing for ten minutes.
By then, I also realized I was crying. Real tears rolled down my cheeks, plopping onto my violin, but I didn’t stop playing. The song took root inside of me, like an invasion. Each note I played felt like I was searching for something; if I could whittle to the core of the song I would have it. Yet the more I played, the more mysterious and elusive whatever I was searching for became.
As I played, I became one with the song and unburdened of my life. The further I reached for the tune, the more the world fell away. Suddenly, I walked through the hedges and smelled the night air. A waking dream. Part of me knew I was still in the house, but part of me had been set free.
I stepped on a twig and it snapped beneath my foot. The noise startled the birds that had been hiding in the hedge and hundreds of black-and-white doves ascended from their perches at once. The sound of the multitudes taking flight thundered deep in my ears, and the mass of the birds covered the moonlight. Leaving me in the dark.
I covered my head and crouched low, trying to shield myself from the swarm. The lack of light disoriented me and chilled the evening by several degrees. That the moonlight was warm in my dream struck me as odd. My heartbeat accelerated and so did the song. It got faster and faster until the sound made me dizzy.
“Theia, stop at once!”
I was back in the sunroom, sweat pouring off my body. My father stood in the door, bellowing at me to stop playing.
I couldn’t pull myself out of it, even though he bade me stop. My whole body jerked, and what I played sounded more like noise than music, but I couldn’t stop. Faster, faster. I must have looked like I was having a seizure. My violin started to smoke—that was when Father crossed the room and forced my arm still.
“Theia, what the hell are you doing?” He wrenched the instrument from my hand and I slumped into the chair.
I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t even be sure I was really in the room with him. I’d been possessed by something. Something unforgiving in its quest to take over my life.
My father stared at me for a few seconds. I wonder what he saw, what he thought. I’m sure my face was flushed and my eyes were wild. A person doesn’t play an instrument so fast that it begins to smoke without her appearance changing too.
Maybe I’d imagined the smoke—it couldn’t really do that, could it?
I met his eyes.
“Theia,” he began, and then guarded his face again. “For heaven’s sake, sit up straight.”
And he left the room.
CHAPTER THREE
T
hat night, the labyrinth wasn’t a hedge of green, but instead walls of twisted branches barbed with thorns, and no signs of vegetation … or life. The gnarled, sharp sticks were plaited together so tightly that no light poked through the walls, but some of the sticks stuck out and scraped my skin if I passed too close.
hat night, the labyrinth wasn’t a hedge of green, but instead walls of twisted branches barbed with thorns, and no signs of vegetation … or life. The gnarled, sharp sticks were plaited together so tightly that no light poked through the walls, but some of the sticks stuck out and scraped my skin if I passed too close.
A new song pierced the night air. In the thrall of the music there was no escape, not for me, but still I walked slowly, each step carefully choreographed, wary of stirring up anything like the birds I’d encountered earlier. I wrapped my arms around myself, with no other protection from the chill or the razor-sharp branches. I didn’t really want to be there. My fascination with Haden Black notwithstanding, the nocturnal adventures scared me. I shouldn’t have been so lucid if I were only dreaming. And if I were sleepwalking outside, I worried I could really hurt myself.
I think Father knew all along that I had the capacity for this kind of trouble. That must be why he’d always tried to tamp down my natural inclination towards being free-spirited like my mother. Maybe he was right to try and stifle this predilection—just look what I’d done when left to my own devices.
The lure of the maze’s center pulled me too strongly to be denied, like an echo of my own heartbeat. When I reached the clearing, I searched for my host—half hoping and half dreading his reappearance. On a dais, the same faceless quartet played their haunting, moody song. In front of them, a ballroom floor of sorts showcased pairs of ghoulish dancers. They were costumed in silks and lace, the ladies’ hair in elaborate updos and cascading curls. The gentlemen, all very graceful, were also decked out in formal wear of black tuxedos with jewel-toned cummerbunds and ties.
But their faces … each was unique in a completely horrible way. Some were fleshless skeletons, bones with empty sockets. Others were worse, with one feature malformed or missing completely. Noses like beaks, mouths where noses should be, eyes set too far apart—and yet they danced beautifully, as if they were enchanting and not horrifying. As if it were perfectly normal that a gaping mouth should open to two sets of gnarled teeth.
I wished I could unsee the dancers and their morbid expressions. So far nobody had even glanced at me, a fact I was grateful for. Then the dancers parted as if invisible walls had moved them away from the middle.
Him.
My pulse pounded so hard, my skin rippled. I tried to breathe in deeper, but I couldn’t fill my lungs with enough air. It was as if he commanded all the oxygen, like a vacuum or a black hole. Around him, his cheerful ghouls danced merrily.
Tonight he wore a top hat, which he removed with a flourish when he bowed, reminding me of a wicked Mr. Darcy. He was definitely mischievous—and dangerous. Due to my strict upbringing, my etiquette was impeccable, so of course I curtsied in return and then felt stupid and childish.
The heaving of my chest suddenly embarrassed me. I didn’t wear a bra to bed and his smile suggested that he could see that very well from his spot in the middle of the parquet floor. Crossing my arms over my chest would have been even more obvious, so instead I stood still. Very, very still.
I swallowed as he replaced his hat and slowly paraded past his morbid partiers. They smiled at him adoringly—at least it was similar to smiling—and quickly filled in the middle, never missing a step of their intricate waltz.
Haden stopped in front of me, the material of his formal black suit shimmering like the night sky. “Theia, a pleasure to have you in our company once again.”
His voice caused rolling shivers up and down my spine. “Who are you?”
In response, he only smiled while his gaze roamed my body.
“I saw you today … at school.”
He cocked his head. “Did you, now? Would you like to dance?”
He stepped towards me, and I instinctively moved back a step.
“No.” I shook my head, and he laughed the way adults laugh when a child amuses them. Despite the chill in my bones, my skin flushed white-hot. “I don’t … dance. I don’t know how anyway.”
“Then we shall teach you. You of all humans should be a wonderful dancer.”
“Humans?”
“Forgive me. I slipped, didn’t I?” He gave an exaggerated shrug. “Still, dancing will be natural to someone like you.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?”
“I’ve heard your violin, Theia. It sings like an angel in your hands.”
Other books
A Love by Any Measure by McRae, Killian
Codex by Lev Grossman
Billingsgate Shoal by Rick Boyer
Deadly Little Voices by Laurie Faria Stolarz
The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) by Zen, Raeden
Karate-dō: Mi Camino by Gichin Funakoshi
Field of Screams by R.L. Stine
Merry Wives of Maggody by Joan Hess
How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend by Janette Rallison
Bridgehead by David Drake