Severed (17 page)

‘Do you want to eat?’

She turned her head. Cyrus was hovering in the doorway, arms casually folded.

‘No,’ she answered, turning back to stare at the bedpost, hoping he’d take the hint and leave.

He didn’t. He strolled into the room and over to the bed, resting his hands on the bunk above and leaning so he was looking down on her. ‘OK, so you don’t want to eat. How about fight? Do you want to fight?’

‘With you?’

He fought a smile. ‘I was thinking we could go and find ourselves some nice unsuspecting unhumans for you to vent some of that frustration out on. Or,’ he said with a grin, ‘you can work it out on me. I could help you relax a little. You know, maybe a nice massage – a bath, some candles – fill the gaps that Lucas left behind.’ His eyes trailed down her body as he spoke, landing on the notches on the bedpost. She watched the grin fade and a frown take its place as he noticed the crack she’d made.

She sat up quickly. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit dumb?’

‘What?’ he asked, his attention flying back to her. ‘Getting you to relax? No, I think you could really use it.’

‘No, I mean going out looking for trouble right now, when half the universe is searching for me.’

‘Don’t over-dramatise. It’s not half the universe. Just seven realms. Six really, because the Sybll won’t be looking for you. They’ll already have seen you and generally speaking they stay out of things. ‘And,’ he sighed, ‘what else are we going to do? You won’t eat. You don’t want me to take you to bed and show you what you’re missing. So the alternative is just sitting here twiddling our thumbs waiting for lover boy to come back and, you know,’ he shook his head grimly, ‘the odds of that happening are rapidly dwindling.’

Evie swung her legs over the side of the bed and shoved Cyrus aside as she stood.

He took two laughing steps backwards, holding up his hands. ‘Hey – I’m just saying. So, given the lack of other options I think we should do some of our own investigating. Find out what’s happening in the realms. Maybe we can catch ourselves a newbie virgin to this realm and help him pop his cherry. What do you say? Come on,’ he wheedled. ‘What was all that crap you were spouting about the prophecy being marked? That means it’s definitely going to come true, right? Which means you’re invincible. You said it yourself. So what’s the problem?’ Evie heard him approaching softly, then felt his breath against her neck. ‘Scared I’ll show you up in a fight?’ he whispered in her ear.

She whipped around, reeling from his closeness. ‘OK, I’ll get dressed,’ she said, feeling both mad and flustered.

She watched him as he left the room, wearing a smug smile, and then she went over to the door and slammed it shut, pushing a chair in front of it, pre-empting his undoubted return in a few seconds’ time with the excuse that he’d got lost on the way to the bathroom.

Lucas had stashed the bag with the clothes that Issa had brought inside the closet. Evie pulled out the selection and started sorting through the pile. She hated to admit it, but Issa had actually done a really good job. The clothes both fitted her and were things she’d buy herself – as opposed to jeans that should come with a thrombosis warning and underwear worn as outerwear. Gone, she realised, were the days of freebie designer handouts. Still, what was the point of wearing thousand-dollar couture to go out hunting in when what was needed was utilitarian black to hide the bloodstains? And, voilà, in the bag she found a pair of black jeans and a long-sleeved dark-grey T-shirt. Even the underwear came in her size and was black. She slipped on the grey Converse Issa had provided. They worked better than heels too. At least she could run in them.

‘Thank you, Issa,’ she whispered.

Frankly, she was more than a little freaked out by the fact Lucas had dated a Sybll, but even more freaked out that that same Sybll had foreseen her need for a toothbrush and black underwear. What else had Issa seen? That was what was really bugging her. She knew that Issa hadn’t just come around to drop off some clothes and toiletries. She’d come to tell Lucas something. And the fact he hadn’t told her what, meant that it was something bad.

The door rattled, catching on the chair she’d put in front of it. She heard Cyrus grunt.

‘I’m getting dressed,’ she yelled.

‘Just thought I’d hurry you up,’ he called from behind the door.

She didn’t answer. She was glancing in the mirror hanging on the back of the door. With her amped-up eyesight she could see the pulse of an artery in her neck fluttering and each tiny crack in her lips, which were bruised dark-red and chapped.

She squashed the bag up with a sigh and rammed it back into the closet, then she pulled the chair out of the way and left the room to go start a fight with some unhumans. And maybe with Cyrus too, just for the hell of it.

Cyrus was in the kitchen, standing against the counter with a butcher’s knife in his hand. He was running it up and down a stone block, causing blue sparks to rain down on him. He looked up when she walked in and flashed her a smile which she knew was meant to have some kind of dazzling effect over her. But all it managed to induce in her was annoyance.

She glanced around, looking for Vero and Ash. She hadn’t seen them or heard anything all day. Was it just going to be her and Cyrus out on the prowl tonight? She kind of hoped not. Though being in close proximity to Vero and Ash wasn’t high on her list of priorities either.

Finally, Cyrus finished sharpening and pushed the blade into a sheath, the shining eyes and unstoppable grin giving away the excitement he was feeling.

‘You like it, don’t you?’ Evie asked, frowning at him. ‘I mean, going out killing them? Why else would you do it?’

He gave her a confused, faintly amused smile. ‘I do it because
a
– it’s fun, and
b
– err …’ He blew air out of his mouth and shook his head. ‘No, that’s it.’

‘Why’s everything a joke to you?’

‘Why’s everything so serious to you?’

She could feel her nostrils flaring. Together with the rolling eyeballs, she was starting to feel like a hostile horse whenever she was around him. So unattractive. She tried to wrestle back some control of her facial expressions.

‘Listen, Evie,’ Cyrus said, ‘people would be thanking me if they knew I’ve been keeping the streets clear of bloodsucking Thirsters and things that go burn in the night. I think they’d be thanking me profusely.’ He walked over to a hook on the wall by the door and pulled off a leather belt with pouches and straps attached to it, then looped it over his head. Very guerrilla Boy Scout, Evie thought as she watched him attach the knife to it.

‘Well, I’m surprised you aren’t going around advertising the fact,’ she said. ‘Your ego sure could use a boost.’

He laughed off the comment. ‘None of them belong here. But there’s too many of them for us to kill. So we focus on the worst ones – the ones who go around killing people or, you know, just sucking their blood for a good time: the Mixen, Scorpio, Thirsters and Shadow Warriors. We tend to let the Shifters go. And the Sybll.’

‘Because you couldn’t catch one if you tried.’

Cyrus stepped closer, his eyes a bright aquamarine colour under the spotlights in the kitchen. She couldn’t help but stare at the brown slash in his iris. It was interesting, like a crack in a stone revealing quartz or diamonds inside, though she wasn’t sure that what lay beneath Cyrus’s shallow exterior was quite so dazzling or priceless.

‘It’s the final reckoning that counts,’ Cyrus said, distracting her from his eyes. ‘When you die – did you do more harm than good? Did you die with honour?’

She swallowed and he turned on his heel. He went over to the kitchen counter again and started rummaging through the drawers.

‘How did you and Lucas get together anyway?’ he asked, looking up at her. ‘Match dot com? No, let me guess – unhuman hook-up dot com?’

‘Ha ha,’ she answered. ‘No. He was sent to spy on me, then to kill me.’

Cyrus snorted through his nose. ‘Wow, what a cliché. He came to kill you and fell in love with you instead.’ He threw her a cringe face. ‘This could be a film script for a movie with one of those sparkly vampires in.’ He kept shaking his head and laughing and she felt her teeth grinding in response. ‘How romantic,’ he went on. ‘Stupid, but romantic. I’ll give him that. So you fell for the Shadow Warrior?’

Evie didn’t answer. She just continued to glare.

Cyrus carried on undaunted. ‘OK, I’ll grant you he’s not bad-looking – not that I swing that way mind. He has the whole haunted-angst face that you girls seem to dig so much, but how’d you fall in love with him?’ He paused, resting his hands on the counter. ‘Are you sure you are in love? Because, you know, sometimes the feeling we get around unhumans – that whole palpitation, faster heartbeat, clammy hands – that has been known to be confused with feelings of lust and, er, love. It happened to me once. I thought I liked this Shapeshifter chick.’ He shrugged. ‘Turns out I just wanted to kill her.’

Evie exhaled loudly, trying to keep hold of the small piece of calm still left inside her. ‘No, it’s not just my instincts firing whenever he’s around.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Trust me, I didn’t feel this way about the Scorpio I put a knife through.’

Cyrus pulled a face, ‘OK. But I really want to know what you see in him because, between you and me, I’m not seeing a whole lot of sparkling personality.’

‘You haven’t even spoken to him.’

He laughed. ‘And you spend your time together speaking, do you? Not locking lips and other demon body parts? What are those like by the way?’

The nostril flare again. She couldn’t control it. ‘I am not about to explain our relationship. Least of all to someone as shallow and obsessed with sex as you.’

‘Hey, I’m not shallow,’ Cyrus answered, scowling.

‘He saved me.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘As in bibles and dunking in the river?’

‘No. He saved my life. More than once.’

Cyrus walked around the counter, his head nodding knowledgeably. ‘Oh, so it’s some sort of survivor guilt thing you have going on. I get it. Adulate your rescuer. Knight-in-shining-armour syndrome. It all makes sense now. You know, I think there’s psych treatment you can get for that.’

Evie closed her eyes and breathed out slowly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean it that way. He saved my life, yes, but only when I didn’t want it saving. He brought me back. And I think he was the only person who could have brought me back – made me want to carry on.’

Cyrus had actually stopped talking. And stopped mocking. He was staring at her with a serious expression on his face, the half-smug, half-droll smile gone.

‘I hate fate,’ she continued. ‘I hate what it’s doing to me. I hate the fact I feel like I have no choice in any of this. Everything just seems to happen to me, whereas everyone else gets to choose. But I accept it because that same fate brought me Lucas.’ She drew in a breath. ‘Maybe that was the trade. And if I did have the choice – to go through all this again or just carry on being Evie Tremain – if I could choose to be or not be this thing in the prophecy – I think I’d choose it all again, just to get the chance to know him.’

Cyrus still didn’t say anything. His eyebrows were raised so high they were almost meeting his hairline. No doubt he was struggling to get his head around the concept of love. It must have confused his brain cell.

‘Does that explain it?’ she asked.

He took a moment to answer. ‘I guess. But love as you call it is just an infatuation. It doesn’t last.’ The mocking smile reappeared. ‘Also, not clever to be infatuated with someone who’s probably going to die.’ He checked his watch. ‘Is probably already dead, in fact.’

The anger lashed through her body. ‘Are we done here?’ she asked, turning on her heel and heading for the door.

She heard his footsteps follow after her. ‘Yeah, sure. Who wants to talk about love anyway when we have demons to kill?’ He brushed past her and reached to open a locked closet by the side of the door. ‘Weapon up,’ he announced, throwing the doors wide.

The air emptied from Evie’s lungs in one long exclamation. The view in front of her made Victor’s collection of weapons seem like a kitchen utensil display for Barbie’s dream house.

‘What’s your slaying item of choice?’ Cyrus asked, indicating the rows of weapons with a flourish of his arm. ‘Flamethrower? Grenade? Gun? Arrow? Saw blades?’ He picked up a pair of hardwood sticks linked by a chain, ‘Nunchuckers?’

Evie was struck dumb by the rows of weapons – some she didn’t even know the names of.

‘Or do you prefer to just beat them to death?’ Cyrus asked. He reached inside and took hold of two Zippo lighters, shoving one into his back pocket and throwing her the second. Next he grabbed hold of a small bottle of lighter fluid and pushed it into one of the pockets on his utility belt. Finally, his fingers wavered over the nunchuckers and something that looked like a club with spikes in it, which had probably last seen action during a Viking invasion over a thousand years ago.

‘Want to try this?’ he asked, handing it to her.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t need a weapon.’

He nodded with respect. ‘Oh, so I was right about the beating to death? Nice.’ He put the club thing back in the closet.

‘I’m already armed,’ she said in answer, holding Lucas’s blade up.

‘Can I see it?’ Cyrus asked, reaching a greedy hand towards it.

She passed it to him slowly. Cyrus took it, weighing it carefully in his palms. His face was childlike, filled with Christmas-morning-sized awe. He was practically cradling the thing like a premature baby.

‘Cuts through Thirster skin like it’s paper. Hell, this could cut through diamonds, never mind Thirster hide,’ he said in reverentially lowered tones. Then he looked up sharply at her. ‘This blade – this is a very special thing. It comes from the realms. You know that?’

She gave him a look. Of course she knew that. ‘It belonged to Lucas’s father,’ she said, holding out her hand for it. ‘He gave it to him, just before he died.’

Cyrus took one last, loving look at it, running his thumb along the flat, knowing that if he did the same along the edge he’d lose the whole digit. Evie took it carefully, sheathing it in the case that Lucas had left behind.