Dangerous Lovers (62 page)

I wasn’t going to argue with her about what I would or would not do. I knew she had something to do with Phoenix and Guardian later, that if I really wanted to, I would go then.

Before I went to the playroom, I wanted to go downstairs, look at that old clock, maybe see if I could find Ben or my other brothers and sisters down there. I needed to know for sure how much time I had left, and I could figure that out by listening to them. I hoped Ben had gotten his way, that a machine was giving my body life right now.

Right as I went to go down the stairs, I felt a bolt of energy stab me. It felt like razor blades were on the inside of my body, turning in place. I screamed in agony just as Skylynn pulled me back.

“What the hell!” I shrieked. As soon as I was away from the stairs, the pain stopped.

Skylynn stepped down one step. Along the creases where the next step began, she picked up a handful of white powder. “Salt.”

“That much salt hurt me?”

“No. It’s lined all the way across. Someone didn’t want you mingling with the others downstairs.”

“Salt? How worried should I be about pepper?” I asked dryly.

“Very funny. Salt and iron
keep
away. I don’t like the fact that you’re being corralled,” Skylynn said with disgust laced in her tone as she glared down the stairs. She must have decided that staying with me was more important than figuring out why I was being forced to stay up here. The ‘who’ was not a question. It was Rasure, no doubt about it.

“You don’t like the fact that someone else is corralling me?” I said with a snap.

She ignored me, instead scooping up what was on the floor, breaking the line of it, and causing it to vanish into thin air. “Let’s save those floors for later, when the living are sleeping.”

“Give in to Rasure, who obviously put that there? Is that what you mean?” Going down there after my brothers and sisters had left defeated the purpose.

“When someone strikes you, they expect you to strike back. You can’t be predictable right now because she’s counting on that to undermine and ultimately defeat you.”

“Fine. Then I’m going to go and figure out when she moved those clocks. You can’t come. Cadence will know something is off if my imaginary friend comes to life. I want her to pass on.”

“She won’t see me. That is why I’m here instead of Phoenix. I can hide myself. Side effect of having a shadowed soul.”

I could see the pain in her eyes. Any fool could see that she hated how invisible she was to most. If I made it out of the mess I was in, I was going to make it a personal goal to set her free from whatever this was that she was fighting. “I’m sure whatever time and reason your soul needs to come back is close.”

“We’ll see,” she said with a fake smile.

I looked down as I made my way to the playroom on this floor. It was the room that all of my sisters and I would hang out in. It had a massive flat screen TV that took up nearly an entire wall, oversized couches and chairs, tables for us to do our homework, and every gadget or electronic device known to exist. The décor in the room held relics from across time like street signs and old radios. It reminded me of a really trendy restaurant, and that could have been because of the bar stretching the length of the back wall. It never once held alcohol, but it did hold its fair share of ice cream and late night snacks in the refrigerators under it.

I didn’t spend nearly as much time in there as Cadence did. I only really went in when the guys wanted to play video games or I needed the space to lay out my work for school.

When I got there, Cadence had five white boxes beside the bar and was laying out the shots I’d taken—that wasn’t even half of the images I’d captured.

She glanced up at me when I walked in. Even though Skylynn was right next to me, she acted like she didn’t see her, which wasn’t odd. Skylynn had been by me most of my life, but a ghost to the others.

“Where are the rest?” I said, noticing these were from the last six months.

“This is everything you took for your project,” she said, straightening the piles out. Cadence was a bit neurotic about organization, everything having its place.

“I’m not working on my project. I’m trying to take an inventory of the things in the house so I know what’s mine.”

“Indie, do your project. Worry about that when your case is settled. Aggravating Rasure is not going to do anything but give her more leverage over you.”

“That woman has nothing to hold over me, she never has,” I said as I went into the enormous closet that was in the back corner of the room. I found the box from my sixteenth year, the year that the addition was finished. I had the foresight then to photograph this entire manor. I wanted proof if anything was missing after she ‘moved in’ to her own wing.

When I started to lay out the images, I quickly discovered they were the wrong ones. These were from when my family was alive: Christmas, birthdays, every special and ordinary event in our lives.

“What the hell? Where are my images?”

“I—I don’t know...maybe Rasure switched them out,” Cadence said as she focused on my painful expression. “You want to talk about this? How do those images make you feel?”

“They make me feel like someone is trying to screw with me. And they’re cold-hearted.”

“Because they are digging up these emotions?” she pressed.

“No, because all of these were cataloged into a story, books I was going to give our family—it took me years to build them—and someone just ripped them apart and stuck them in a box. For what? To hide that Rasure has taken heirlooms from this house, heirlooms that are priceless to her because the energy in them doesn’t belong to her.”

My response seemed to leave her baffled. I figured she would be angry, too. I guess it was a good thing she wasn’t.

“Is that all, Indie? You’re not upset about looking into those moments?” she asked, once more glancing to the image in my hand. It was of me when I was five, sitting on my father’s lap as my mother stood behind him.

“Why would I be upset? I feel bliss when I look at these shots. That is the glory of film. It captures the emotion,” I said with a weak smile as I remembered every moment of that day and felt warm bliss ease through my soul.

“And the glory of theater is becoming someone else. You’re on stage right now, Indie, and playing the part rather poorly. You’re upset. I know you are. You were robbed. Life was cruel to you long before they left. You were cursed with nearly killing everything you touched. For God’s sake, you were born in a graveyard—no one even bothered to claim your mother’s body. You need to face this.”

“On stage? Really? Call me crazy, but being adopted by the Falcons is hardly a bad break, and neither is having a birth mother with the foresight to deliver me into their arms. And the cold…I don’t think that was a curse anymore.”

A look of disgust came over her innocent image. “It’s isolated you.”

“No,” I said, nonchalantly glancing to where Skylynn was standing. “It shielded me, and it pointed to the one person that would give me warmth.”

“Is this about Wilder? Has he reignited an old flame in you? If so, you need to know that that is an illusion and it will fade just like it did last time. He’s been less than faithful to the memory of the two of you.”

“It’s not Wilder,” I said under my breath as flashes of Phoenix—new and old—exploded in my mind.

“You’ve been seeing someone else? That guy that was in the darkroom? Why would you not tell me?” There was an accusing pain in her tone.

“I’m not the only one keeping secrets around here,” I said as I glanced over Cadence, trying to see this different person Mason had said she was when she wasn’t around me.

“So now you’re deflecting, too. You need to face this,” Cadence said again as she crossed her arms.

“I have faced it! What is your problem? Why are you trying to get all of us to go back to our darkest days?”

“Because it’s healthy.”

“OK then, where are your pictures? Where are the images of the underfed, terrified girl my parents brought home? Where are the files that outline the abuse you went through before then?”

“Don’t go there,” she said with a glare.

“Doesn’t feel good, does it? If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.”

“You’re mad about Mason and Wilder, and you’re taking it out on me.”

“If I was mad about that, then you would be the only person who deserved to have that anger directed at. Why would you do that to Gavin? You know how he feels about ‘all or none.’ And why would you set Wilder up with some girl and not tell me about it?”

“So you’re not over him.”

“I was never into him, not in that way,” I said, slamming the images down onto the bar. The room began to freeze over, simply because I was beyond frustrated with her. I was ready to tell her she was dead and that she needed to get over it and move on.

“You could have fooled me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you play that ‘I’m-broken-and-can’t-be-adored’ card to a T—quick to tell your darling interests that you’re cursed just so they will fight harder for the girl they can’t have.”

“‘Quick’ my ass. They figured it out.”

“Yeah? How’d they do that again?”

I was so furious that I violently shoved the box with my family’s images causing the pictures to fly across the room and rain down around us.

“Three boys in six years...that hardly makes me out to be what you are insinuating. How many boys have dared to get close to you? Double my number and that is just the ones I know about. I was glad when you started dating Gavin because I knew he would calm you down, allow you to see that love is not a physical act.”

“How would you know if it was, Miss ‘you-can’t-touch-me-or-I’ll-freeze-you-to-death’?”

That was the coldest blow she had ever thrown at me. At first, all I could do was stare at her as if she were nothing more than a stranger. “I’m not fighting with you anymore. Life is too short. We have different ways of seeing the world around us, and that’s fine. You were by my side through my darkest years. You were the sister God spared me. I’m grateful for that. Grateful for you. I love you.”

“Why does it feel like you are telling me goodbye? Stop trying to weasel your way out of this argument. Let’s get it all out now.”

“I told you life is short. We all have to go our own ways at certain points.”

“I see. So Rasure was right, you’re going to kick me out, too. The money and power have gone to your head, and because I’m not the sister you want me to be, because I made a few mistakes, hurt one of your ‘almosts,’ I’m not worthy enough to live in your kingdom.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not kicking you out, and if you believe anything Rasure says, then you need a reality check.”

Guilt washed over her face. “Sorry.”

I looked away, fighting tears, then nodded once to tell her I wasn’t mad. She walked over to me and hugged me as tight as she could. “Let’s just go to the coffee bar. This is too hard on you right now. You’re freezing.”

“Go ahead, I’m right behind you. I want to clean up this mess first.”

“I’ll help.”

“No, I got it. I really just need a second to breathe. We’ll clean it up later,” I assured her.

She nodded once and looked down before walking away. I reached to grab her arm. As I stared forward, I said, “I really do love you. I’m grateful to have always had you.”

“The feeling is mutual. I’ll get my purse and meet you downstairs.”

I smirked, knowing she could never say the word ‘love.’ She told me once that she feared if she did, the world would have an excuse to take that person away from her. What she didn’t realize was that she had already lost us all, and I just wanted to hear that word once from her lips. If my own sister could not tell me how she felt about me, how could I expect or believe anyone else who did?

Cadence was eager to leave this room. I knew the mess was making her insane.

Just as she went to cross the threshold, she stopped. “What is this?” she said, waving her jacket over the white line that was now there. “Snow?”

I didn’t even bother to answer. She was out of danger. The wind from the waving of her jacket had broken the line. I knew she wouldn’t be shocked the way I was when I tried going down the stairs.

Within the next beat of my heart, the room was put back together and Skylynn was standing in front of me, holding a stack of photos.

“Who tried to trap us in here? Who took my pictures? Is Rasure walking by me and I can’t see her? Is that what is happening?”

“I put the salt there.”

“Why?”

“Call me cautious,” Skylynn said, raising one eyebrow.

“You think I’m going to run away from you. That I could if I wanted to.”

“Nope, not at all. You were looking for these,” she said, handing me the images.

“Did you switch out the images?”

“I have better things to do with my time, but they were easy to find.”

“How were they easy to find?”

“When you want something, your energy reaches out for it, calls it to you. I saw the path, found them in the back of the closet in a box labeled ‘scuba diving.’”