Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (11 page)

I slipped out of the room without answering him, a tremble in my step as I fled to Quillan’s room. Quillan barely stirred as I slipped into his bed, but he turned onto his back and allowed me to curl into a ball against his side. It wasn’t until my tears began to wet his skin that he spoke, his usually hypnotising voice roughened by sleep.

“Seph.”

He didn’t ask what had happened, only uttered my name, his hand slipping beneath me. It was ridiculous that he could lift me with one hand, but apparently he could, because he repositioned me atop him, my entire body curling around his torso with my legs tucked up against his side. He pulled the blankets more securely around me, brushing his fingers through my hair until the movement lulled my sobs into sniffles, and my sniffles into nothing. I drifted off to sleep as he pulled the muck from my head as easily as he tugged the tangles from my hair.

I was grateful that he could put everything aside, even if only for a night. He wasn’t going to get angry at me for the stunt I had pulled in the lecture hall and he wasn’t going to question me on my visions of Silas or my interactions with Noah and Cabe. He wasn’t my solid, steadfast mentor anymore—no, that foundation had been ripped away at some point. But we could pretend. We could pretend that there was nothing more between us than comfort and understanding and support. We could pretend that the kiss hadn’t happened, and that the future didn’t seem so dark and full of agony.

We could pretend… for now.

I wasn’t surprised to find the bed empty when I woke up in the morning, and I braced myself for an awkward exchange with Quillan over breakfast, only to find that he had gone to work early, along with Noah and Cabe. Since it was so rare for me to only have the two men—Jayden’s men—following me around instead of the usual five, I took full advantage of the morning to spend some time with Tariq that didn’t revolve around me and my problems. We played his favourite videogames over breakfast, and he attempted to show me a plethora of clips on his phone while I tried to drive him to school without getting distracted and killing the both of us. It lifted my heart a little to see him smiling as he exited the car, and I resolved myself to spend more time with him. I had thought that things would change between us drastically, especially after it was revealed that he had known about the Zevghéri long before I had, along with my fake parentage. But it hadn’t. He was as steadfast in his role as my brother and my friend as he had ever been. He refused to act any differently, and that prevented me from feeling the awkwardness and the betrayal that I
should
have felt.

Did I trust him as I once did?
No
. No, I didn’t.

Was he still my family?
Yes
. Yes, he was.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been as simple as that, but it was. He had kept secrets from me, but that didn’t overshadow all the years that he had spent struggling through life stuck to my side. He had taken things into his own hands to try and protect me, and it hadn’t been the right thing to do, but that didn’t overshadow the fact that he had done it out of love. Out of love for me, and our dead mother. He had hidden the existence of my own people from me, but that was only because he considered me one of
his
people, instead of one of them. I was strangely grateful for that.

An old pickup was pulled over on the side of the road as I began the drive from the high school to the college, and I could see the driver hunched below the raised hood, his body-language stiff with frustration, trying to lean away from the slight misting of rain that was floating in diagonally behind him. There wasn’t any phone signal for me on the drive to Mount Baker, so I assumed that he didn’t have any either. The least I could do was offer him a lift out of the rain. I pulled over behind the pickup and jumped out of Quillan’s Porsche, tugging the arms of my jacket over my hands to ward off the chill as I hurried to where the man was now hidden behind his raised hood. The dewy grass brushed against my sneakers, seeping into the worn fabric to numb my feet as chills burst out all over my skin.

“Hey!” I called, my speech manifesting in an icy fog before my mouth. “Do you need a lift or any—”

He suddenly appeared in front of me and I reared back a step at the sight of him—bundled into a too-big jacket, with the padded hood pulled so far around his face that I couldn’t actually
see
any of his face. A nervous laugh misted from my lips. I was still feeling embarrassed about my jumpy reaction when he surged forward in two long strides and grabbed my head, smothering the lower half of my face with a cloth.

“Sleep,” he whispered, the ghost-like quality of his voice stemming from the fact that I was rapidly losing consciousness.

I obeyed his command.

In the forced trap of unconsciousness, I began to slip into a state of quasi-reality where I knew that I should have been awake, but the dreamland of sleep clutched at me anyway. I slid into a nightmare—and I
knew
that it was a nightmare, because suddenly, I was the Voda.

The Zevghéri people wanted me to help them, but I didn’t know anything about them or about their troubles. I fumbled my way through meetings and fought with my Director—who looked an awful lot like Dominic Kingsling. I tore down everything that Weston’s family had spent generations building up, because I simply wasn’t willing to torture and manipulate people the way Weston did. I fought and fumbled my way into an early grave: early, because my Klovoda knifed me to death like I was Julius Caesar.

I awoke clutching my torso, still feeling the blades stabbing into me. I was in the faculty parking lot, in the exact same spot where I had parked the day before, and for a panicked moment, I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there. I glanced up into the rear-view mirror, but it was covered in paper. With dread roiling sickeningly in the pit of my stomach, I pulled down the paper to reveal the writing on the inside as a photograph slipped out, landing in my lap. It was a photo of me and Cabe from the night before, clearly taken from the street, looking in through the window. I flicked the photo to the passenger seat and pulled the paper from the mirror, distracted from the writing by my own reflection.

There was something around my neck that both hadn’t been there in the morning, and definitely wasn’t mine. It looked for all intents and purposes like a dog collar: a thin leather strap with a little black bow in the middle. It was simple and understated enough to pass for an accessory, but it was uncomfortably tight and heavy on my skin. I raised shaky fingers to touch it, and could feel the give of wires and other hard objects beneath the material. As soon as my fingers made contact with the collar, little red LED lights lit up from within the material, spelling out a word over the front of the collar.

MINE.

I curled my fingers around it immediately, intending to rip the thing away from my body, but I glanced back to the note a moment before I acted, something pulling me up short. Maybe it was the fact that the messenger rarely ever did anything harmless, or maybe it was the fact that the collar felt
alive
against my skin… whatever the reason, I was immediately glad for it as my eyes scrolled the words.

Five little monkeys walked along the shore,

One went a-sailing,

Then there were four…

The two parts of the note were separated by a sloppy red smiley face, comically added in crayon.

I made you a collar, little pet. Do you like it? It’s rude to refuse a gift, so I’ve rigged it to blow if you try to take it off.

If you’re still in Maple Falls by midnight tomorrow night… your head goes boom.

I resisted tearing the note into a million pieces, but there was no preventing me from spilling out of the car and smashing my fist against the car window. Zevghéri people were supposed to be stronger than regular humans, but apparently we were no match for a Porsche. My knuckles busted open against the glass, spilling blood over the window and shooting pain down my arm. I was suddenly very thankful that my valcrick wasn’t working anymore, because if I had accidently sparked up in anger… well… my head might have gone
boom
.

I wrapped my scarf around my hand and gathered my books, running off toward my first class. I was on auto-pilot, going about my day while I tried to decide what to do, unable to simply stand numbly in one place. Art History thankfully wasn’t a practical subject, so Quillan wasn’t there to boycott my college experience as I arrived late to the lecture hall. I skipped down the rows of seats with my head lowered, trying to pay no mind to the sudden silence of the professor, or the stares of the other students. I slipped into the first empty seat that I saw, dropping my bag at my feet and making no move to pull out any of my books, instead cradling my bloodied, scarf-covered hand in my lap.

“What happened there?” someone whispered, leaning over the back of my chair.

I spun around, regarding the familiar face with a forced smile. Danny’s hair had grown since the last time I had seen him; it now spilled a little over his face, brushing against the dark sweep of his eyebrows. His eyes sparkled as they passed over me, flicking right past the collar around my neck with so much carelessness that it made the anger rise within me yet again. I forced it down, because it wasn’t Danny’s fault that he hadn’t gasped and recoiled immediately at the sight of the collar. Why
would
he recognise it?

“I had a disagreement with a car,” I said, as Danny’s eyes settled on my hand, still cradled in my lap. “And the car won.”

He smirked and leaned back in his seat, his attention switching back to the front of the room as the professor resumed her lecture. I watched him for a few more moments, guilt mixing with the dread that was slowly eating away at me from the inside.

“Hey Danny… I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t worry about it.” He leaned forward again and patted my shoulder. “If you’re talking about disappearing on me an hour into our not-really-a-date… you were pretty high. I figured you hitched a ride home with your friends and forgot all about me. You really don’t need to keep rejecting me for me to get the picture. It’s all in the past, yeah?”

I wanted to argue, to insist that I hadn’t gotten high and forgotten about him because Danny really did seem like a nice guy. Unfortunately, there was no way that I could possibly tell the truth. Amber had been right: I was a liar and a murderer. The excuse on the tip of my tongue sounded like more of a brush-off than the fake brush-off that Danny was providing me.
I’m sorry I bailed on our date, it was only because I was drugged and dragged out of the nightclub by a bunch of high school girls at the bidding of Dominic Kingsling, after which I accidentally or deliberately blew up the car and everyone inside it. Including myself.

Yeah… I was better off simply nodding my head and never speaking about it again.

So that’s what I did.

I hid out in the college medical centre for the rest of the day, even though it hadn’t taken more than an hour for the nurse to dress my hand. I needed a game plan, because I was more than a little certain that I was wearing some kind of a bomb around my neck, which meant that the messenger was announcing another of his one-man shows. Cabe had almost kissed me last night, which meant—in the messenger’s eyes—that we had almost formed the bond
despite
Cabe’s manipulated memory. If I were the messenger, I’d be angry too.

Now his show was beginning, and I needed to stop it before our ‘four’ became a ‘three’, and the ‘three’ became a ‘two’… until nothing was left but me and the messenger.

I checked the time on my phone before heading to the parking lot where I had asked Poison and Clarin to meet me after they were done with their classes. Quillan hadn’t said anything to me about coordinating a ride home, so I assumed that he was going back with Noah and Cabe the same way they had all come in. That was fine with me. The last thing I needed was any one of them hanging around to hear my plan, because they wouldn’t simply hate it. They would go out of their way to sabotage it.

There was a tap against the passenger window. I whipped my head around, but relaxed when I saw Poison.

“So you went to
one
class, I’ve heard.” She spoke as she pulled open the passenger door and jumped into the seat, turning to give me an inquisitive look.

Clarin slipped into the back quietly, watching us with concern in his eyes. “One class in
two
days,” he reiterated. “What’s the deal, mouse? And why in the hell are you wearing a bandage?”

“The time to win back Noah and Cabe has passed,” I told them both, not commenting on my lack of attendance or my hand. “I need them on our side
now
.”

Clarin suddenly leaned forward, his head thrust between the two front seats so that he was staring straight into my face, his eyes wide. “You’re going to form the bond?”