Fated (10 page)

'I'm thinking of opening a menswear boutique just next door once Mrs Milner decides to retire. What do you think? Will it do well?'

Evie watched Victor as he dropped a take-out bag onto the counter by the till and then turned to study Tom. Tom's eyes still hadn't left Evie's face, his expression begging her to answer him, to show some sign that she'd heard him or even forgiven him. When her expression didn't soften he let his gaze move off her unwillingly. He turned to Victor.

'Yes, I'm sure it'll do great,' he said quietly.

He ducked his head and left quickly, throwing one last glance in Evie's direction. She couldn't be sure but she thought she saw resignation in it. A turning point - as though he'd finally given up. On her, she realised. He had finally given up trying to persuade her. He'd figured out forgiveness was never going to happen. A well of sadness sprang up in her as though a stopcock had broken. It took her by surprise and she turned away from Victor. She didn't want him to see how she was feeling. She was furious with herself for feeling anything at all. She had sworn to herself no more: no more boys, no more forgiveness. If she stuck to that she'd make it out of here. If she didn't, if she gave in to her sadness or her anger, to Tom's lies and pleading eyes, and forgave him or, worse, believed him, then she'd never leave.

For six months she'd held it together and now Tom had gone and tugged at a loose stitch and all her resolve was in danger of unthreading.

'What was that all about?' Victor said.

Evie spun around. 'Don't act like you don't know,' she snapped.

Victor opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and took a sip of coffee instead. 'What makes you most angry? That your friend betrayed you? That she died?'

'Yes!' Evie cried. 'No!' She shook her head. 'I'm angry that he lied. I'm angry that he got away with murder. I'm angry that he killed my best friend and he gets to walk around town still flirting with girls that are way too young for him.'

'
Did
he lie?' Victor interrupted.

Evie looked up, startled. 'Yes.'

'He lied about Anna, sure. He betrayed you. But is he lying about the accident?' Victor pushed.

'I . . .' She faltered, feeling as though the ground had just given way under her. She stared at Victor. What was he trying to get at? Why was he staring at her so intently? 'I - I don't know,' she finally stammered.

He took a step towards her, his voice dropping in its urgency. 'Listen to your instinct, Evie. It's been trying to tell you something this whole time. Is he lying?'

'No,' she answered, unthinking. She shook her head, trying to think straight. The words were becoming tangled. 'I mean, yes. I mean . . .' She paused, her stomach lurching. It was as if the view had suddenly become clear. 'I don't know,' she murmured.

'He's telling the truth. You know it. If you listen to your instinct you'll know it too.'

'What?' Evie demanded. 'How do you know?'

'Six months ago, when the Brotherhood first became aware of your existence, they came here looking for you.'

Evie stared at him, a wave of shock riding through her body. 'What?'

'They came here looking for you. To kill you,' Victor said, scrunching his paper coffee cup into a ball and chucking it over his shoulder into the bin.

He almost didn't need to continue. The pieces were sliding sickeningly into place.

'We don't know how they found you. But they did - and they came after you,' Victor said with a sigh. 'And we stopped them.'

'So what?' Evie asked, praying silently that the pieces were sliding into the wrong places. That she was wrong. Her voice shook when she finally managed to find it. 'What's that got to do with Tom or Anna?'

'We stopped them from getting to you,' Victor said, watching her closely.

There was a silence so steep she felt she had vertigo and was going to fall into it.

'But you didn't stop them from getting to
her
?' The tears welled out of nowhere, spiking her eyes. An image of Anna on the last day she'd seen her, waving at her through the window of Joe's Diner as she worked, flashed through her mind. 'It wasn't an accident. Is that what you're saying?'

'No,' Victor answered. 'It wasn't an accident. And we weren't in time.' He shrugged. 'The Brotherhood didn't know what you looked like. They thought it was you in the car with Tom. As it probably would have been if the two of them hadn't been . . .'

Oh God. Oh God. She sucked in a breath, and then another, felt like she was falling, reached out an arm to steady herself and banged into the rail. She felt sick. She was going to be sick.

'Evie. It's not your fault.' She felt Victor's hand on her back and shrugged it off.

'How can you say that?' She whipped around. 'Of
course
it's my fault.' Her yell broke into a sob. 'It should've been me. And all this time, all this time,' she shook her head, her eyes automatically moving to the door through which Tom had just left, 'I've been - blaming him. Not believing him.
Why
was she in the car? It should have been
me
.' She slammed her fist into the couch as she collapsed down onto it.

'Well, it wasn't you. Fate has other plans for you,' Victor said. 'And you can't go forward blaming yourself, either. You have to let it go.' He knelt down and took her hand in his own enormous one. 'You will learn to only blame the Brotherhood for her death. Do you understand?'

She frowned at him, not comprehending. There was only one thing she could focus on, one thing that her brain kept tripping over on.

She looked at Victor. 'Tom wasn't lying?' she asked again, like a simpleton.

'No,' Victor replied, like she
was
a simpleton. 'Evie,' he continued slowly, 'the score was settled. What the Brotherhood did was kick-start a battle, the worst battle I've ever been in. We came after them in numbers - we needed to protect you. We fought them and we killed them. All except for one - Tristan - a Shadow Warrior. For the last six months the Brotherhood has been finding and training a new generation to replace the lost ones. And now they're back. They're who you met in the parking lot.'

'Well,' Evie yelled, 'why didn't you stop them when you had the chance? When they were weak? Why didn't you go after them and finish them off? Why didn't you stop them from recruiting more?'

Victor shook his head at her before answering. 'We couldn't find them.'

Evie stood up and crossed to the window, looking out at the half-empty street. Just a handful of farmers going about their business. Some high school students messing around outside Joe's Diner. A woman pushing a child in a stroller across the street. How could all this still be going on? How could the whole world be oblivious to the reality of what was happening around them? Unaware that there were other realms in the same way that there were other planets? She scrunched her eyes shut but when she opened them again the street was exactly the same, the sun still shining, her beaten-up pickup still parked with one tyre up on the sidewalk, Victor still standing behind her, ominously silent.

She turned back to him. 'So, this war - it will never end, will it? Because even though you destroy them they keep coming back.'

Victor said nothing, only continued to hold her gaze.

'All you're doing is stemming the tide,' she said, almost to herself.

'For the moment,' Victor said.

'Well, you're wrong about one thing,' Evie said finally. 'The score isn't settled.'

9

He didn't lie. He didn't lie. He didn't lie.

The words played in an endless loop in her head. She was mired in guilt, sinking in it fast, barely able to keep from veering off the road every time she thought about yet another incident when she'd told Tom to go to hell. God, just remembering the look in his eyes when he'd left the store this afternoon forced the guilt deep into her lungs, making her choke. She hit the steering wheel with the flat of her hand and tried to tell herself that he'd still been cheating on her, with her best friend too, but somehow that didn't matter any more.

By the time she had driven the two miles out of town to her house she felt exhausted, her body aching all of a sudden from yesterday's fight. She'd been ignoring it all day but the burn on her arm was stinging and her shoulder, where she'd been pushed or pulled - she couldn't remember which - felt like it had been dislocated and slammed back into its socket with a sledgehammer.

Evie pulled up into the driveway and killed the ignition. The house was dark, the white clapboards glowing like bones in the purple dusk. Her mother would still be at the store. The house was on its own plot, the nearest neighbour half a mile down the road. The river bordered the back of the house, just beyond the orchard her grandfather had planted. It had been a hot summer and the peaches were dropping to the ground and rotting, unpicked for the first time in years.

A tyre swung from the oak tree out front and every time Evie looked at it she was reminded of her dad swinging her, her hair trailing the ground, her screams echoing all the way to the river, scaring the birds better than a scarecrow.

She noticed she was crying and swiped at her eyes. No more tears. That was the vow she'd made. Damn memories and damn Victor and damn her dad for dying and damn Tom for not lying and damn the whole goddamn world for not being the world any more. She looked up at the house standing quietly, the first leaves of fall starting to chase each other around the driveway. The grass was scorched a golden brown. She sighed loudly and then opened the car door, but made no move to get out. She was trying to test her instincts, to see if she could sense anything in the vicinity. She couldn't hear anything except the wind in the oak tree and the rattling of the whirligig she'd made in third grade, which still lived in the pot by the front door. She jumped out the car and made a dash for it.

She tried telling herself that she was safe, that the Hunters - whoever they were - had her back, but her heart was pounding in her ears louder than the sound of her feet on the gravel and only when she was inside the house, with the door locked behind her, did she let out the breath she'd been holding. Lobo was scratching against the kitchen door so she let him out, flipping on all the lights as she went.

She dropped to her knees and let the husky nuzzle her for a minute. He kept knocking his head into her jaw until she scratched him under his chin. 'What's up, boy?' she asked.

He uttered a howl in response.

'OK, I'll feed you in a minute, I just need to shower,' Evie said, getting up and heading up the stairs.

Lobo sat at the bottom watching her, a low whine settling in his throat. Evie paused halfway, her senses suddenly alert, her gut tightening. Was this the instinct thing Victor kept going on about? She put her finger to her lips and Lobo stopped howling and began pacing instead. Evie took the next few steps soundlessly, creeping down the corridor to her room.

The door was slightly ajar and she felt the first shiver of fear run up her spine. She nudged it with her foot. It fell open. The room was empty. Of course it was. She was under protection. There were Hunters all over town making sure she was safe. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. She turned on the light and threw her bag on the bed, shaking her head. She needed to work on her instincts - they were about as accurate as the weather channel.

First she was going to take a shower to ease some of the aching in her body, then she was going to finish reading that book. She reached across the bed for her bag and took it out, feeling the weight of it in her hands.

She pushed the book under her pillow and pulled off her T-shirt, loosening her denim shorts and stepping out of them so she was standing in her underwear.

As she bent to pick them up, a sudden rush of warm air ran over her, leaving a trail of goosebumps. She shivered and crossed to the window, ramming it down and drawing the curtains.

A creak.

Her head spun towards the door, her breath catching in her throat. There it was again. Another creak. Someone was in the house. Evie's senses seemed to magnify in that same instant, her hearing pinpointing the sound and her head clearing instantly. A low energy started buzzing at the base of her spine, travelling in rushes up and down her limbs. She noticed her legs and arms were tingling, the aching completely gone. She glanced around her room for a robe or something to throw on over her underwear. She wasn't about to tackle a demon in her bra. She didn't want her mother finding her unclothed body and figuring the worst.

She unhooked her robe from the back of her door, slipped it on and picked up the baseball bat, then tiptoed barefoot down the hall.

The creaking stopped instantly, it sounded just like footsteps hesitating. Evie thought she could hear breathing but that surely wasn't possible. She stopped outside Mrs Lewington's room. There was a light shining under the door. Maybe their lodger hadn't left after all. Maybe her sister was fine and she'd decided to stay on in Riverview.

Evie weighed it up for one second. She was certainly going to look crazed and was risking giving the old lady a heart attack by bursting in half-naked and brandishing a baseball bat, but what the hell, Evie thought, smashing back the door and rushing into the room with a yell.

She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting but he definitely wasn't it.

Evie froze, almost dropping the bat, coming to her senses just in time to make a grab for it. She swung it up high behind her head, ignoring her gaping robe because she needed both hands to hold the bat.

'Who are you?' she yelled at the boy standing in front of her.

His graphite eyes were focused on the baseball bat. When he shifted them to look at her she felt the adrenaline score through her body. He had a thick shock of dark hair falling over his forehead, straight black eyebrows and cheekbones so sharp they cast shadows over the rest of his face. Her eyes flashed to his butt checking for a tail, then to his mouth for any sign of fangs. No tail. No pointy teeth.