Lead Heart (Seraph Black Book 3) (8 page)

You’re the one that I want
, the song taunted me, as I started to stir the paint, fetching a black and a white tin to blend different shades.
The one that I want, the one that I need…

The paint dripped off me like a liquid coat and I inhaled the toxic fumes, sucking the undiluted scent into my lungs. My pupils dilated as I sank into the vision of a pain so absolute, it went beyond pain. It should have rendered me unconscious, it should have affected my ability, it
felt
like it should have killed me. As it was, the pain distracted me so badly that I was unable to focus on any other details. I painted turquoise wounds that wept turquoise blood onto the paper floor, and when I was finished, I painted more. I painted the walls, the floor, the back of the door and the boarded-up windows. I covered the room in wounds and fumes, and then I curled up in the middle of the mess, weeping my heart into my paint-covered hands.

The phone still sang to me, wrapping my throat in pleas born from the words it had planted in my brain, and when the noise of a door opening cut through the song, I barely even noticed. Arms wrapped around my shuddering body and I flinched back from the feel of clothing being pressed against my wounds… until I remembered that I didn’t really have any wounds, and then I collapsed against the familliar chest, the scent of Quillan replacing the scent of wet paint. He whispered something against my hair, his hands turning my face up to his.

“Seph, focus. You’re fine, I’m right here.”

His thumbs swiped over my closed eyelids, mixing my tears with the paint that I could feel sticking to my cheeks. I forced my eyes open and twisted my hands so violently into his shirt that I could hear the sound of material tearing.

“What on earth…” a breathless Cabe spoke from somewhere behind me.

Quillan’s attention switched to something over my head for a moment, his eyes narrowed in warning. “We’re not done here. Cover it all up. Fresh paper. Now.”

As soon as he was finished giving orders, his eyes fell back to me, and he drew me up, hooking an arm beneath my legs and bundling me against his chest. He began to walk out of the room and I turned away from the two people that stood just inside the doorway, their expressions alarmed.

I didn’t know why Quillan had brought Noah and Cabe to witness this, but I had no choice but to trust him. I had no choice, because there was nothing left inside me but drowning, clawing, screaming pain.

“Is he still… does he…” Quillan’s confused words buffered warmly against my temple. I knew what he was trying to ask.
Was Silas hurt too badly? Was he still sane? Whole?

The answer was that he hadn’t been sane, or whole, for a long time.

I turned to see Quillan’s face, to witness the sorrow that was etched into his expression. It softened my heart toward him, and I realised with a cringe that I had allowed the bond to flow open, sharing everything that I was feeling with him. I reached for him, my hand shaping to the side of his face, feeling the rough texture of the stubble that he never quite seemed to be able to rid himself of. Something had changed with me and him, and I had been too busy to properly examine it. Maybe it was because Cabe and Noah had been wrenched from their familiar roles as my pair, or maybe it was because Silas wasn’t there… but Quillan was occupying more of my time, more of my head, and in some strange manner… more of
me
.

“He’s holding on,” I confirmed, my voice shaky.

Concentration was etched into the slant of his dark eyes, and I realised that he wasn’t just looking at me, he was looking
past
me,
into
me. He was sharing in my realisation that things had changed.

It was unsettling.

“It’s natural,” he murmured, sounding as though he was trying to convince himself, apparently unshaken by the fact that he was responding to feelings that I hadn’t yet formed into words. “You have no one else to lean on… not in the way you need it. Not in the way your bond needs it.”

His voice was low, but I still shifted in his arms to look over his shoulder. Noah and Cabe weren’t close enough to have heard him, but they were sneaking glances at us as they slowly covered the paintings I had done with fresh paper. I tore my eyes from them because just the sight of the walls had sent a renewed rush of pain vibrating through my body.

Quillan winced, feeling it too. He sank into one of the chairs facing the front of the lecture hall and I made to move from his lap, but he jostled me absently, bundling me tighter to his chest, his eyes fixed blindly to the front of the room. He had lifted me higher, not even realising what he was doing, but it put my face closer to his, and I found myself staring at his mouth, remembering the day before. He had kissed me. He
never
kissed me.

“Is the bond really that powerful?” I asked, my voice barely there. “Can it really make us feel things that we don’t actually feel?”

He leaned his head back, closing his eyes. He was breathing deeply, evenly, but the rapid thudding of his heart gave him away. “I wouldn’t say that I don’t feel that way about you, Seph.” His throat worked as he spoke. He didn’t want to release the words, but was forcing them out regardless. “I just don’t… want… to feel that way. It’s powerful enough to force me to act on it, and I don’t want to do that either.”

His eyes opened halfway, and I realised that I had been leaning toward him, because there was suddenly only a breath of air separating us. He lowered me a little, settling me back onto his lap, but then suddenly hissed out a breath and stood, dropping me to my feet. He walked back to the paper room, speaking lowly with Noah and Cabe. I turned my back on them all, wishing that someone would stop the song that was still looping on repeat, because the words were eating away a hole inside my chest.

I’ve got chills,

They’re multiplying.

And I’m losing control…

I slapped my hands over my ears, bundling myself into a tight ball as I rocked slightly on the chair, trying to imagine myself away from the situation, aided by the darkness behind my closed lids.
The song itself was so absurd to me: the memory of the upbeat, Broadway-style original warring with the slow and haunting rendition that was currently playing. I couldn’t consolidate the two sounds in my head, but that only made me turn to the lyrics again in search of meaning.

You better shape up,

Because you need a man,

And my heart is set on you.

You better shape up,

You better understand,

To my heart I must be true.

You’re the one that I want…

It was going to send me spiraling into a dark trap of insanity if I didn’t put a stop to it soon. I stalked back into the room, squaring my shoulders. They all looked up as I entered, but the fervor had taken a hold of me again, and I couldn’t care less who was there to witness it. My vision of the room became blurred as I stumbled toward the pile of supplies. My hands sifted blindly through, my fingers sensing what I needed as I kept my head up, fixed on a blank spot on the wall, seeing but not really seeing.

“She’ll come. She’ll come to save
you
, won’t she
?” None of the occupants of the room had spoken the words, but they sounded eerily inside my head anyway.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“Who’s where?” Cabe answered.

I flinched, because the reply had sounded too close, too
real
, when I had been expecting the ghost in my head to speak instead.

“Don’t make a sound,” I heard Quillan murmur, as I tried to block out their voices.

“Who’s there?” I repeated, desperately grasping for the now-fading voice.

I fumbled with whatever instruments were beneath my fingers, finding purchase in something resembling a paintbrush and something resembling a wooden palate. I began to spill colours onto the palate, a frown pulling heavily at my mouth as I chased the vision.

“
…you don’t know her like I do. She’ll find a way around them, even if she has to betray them…”

I reared back from the wall, the palate clattering to the ground and the brush falling numbly from my fingers. The echo of a voice was chillingly familiar, but faded away even as I grappled to hear it again, to force it into clarity.

I crouched to retrieve my implements but ended up scrambling to form a scene on the floor instead, forcing the splattered paint to merge into comprehensible images before the vision could fade away from me completely. I brushed my fingers through a glob, spreading it down to form the neck of a man, broad shoulders, and hands that hung limply, secured by blocky shackles. I continued down further, shuffling back on my knees as I formed a naked torso. It was littered with wounds and hunched over as the person sat on a slab of bench, legs extended to a box on the ground. I jerked away from the box as the pain began to numb my arms; I reached back up to the man’s head. My fingers carefully formed an impression of his face.

“
Paraponera clavata
,
they’re called
,” a voice whispered ominously. “
The bullet ant…”
The words became garbled as I wrangled with the vision, the speaker sounding as though he was speaking from underwater. Eventually, the words became clear enough for me to understand again, but by then… I was already wishing that I couldn’t hear the conversation at all. “
A single bite can be as painful as a bullet punching through your skin,
” the garbled voice warned.
“And you’ve got a whole box of them there
…” The speaker’s voice faded away again, and this time I didn’t scramble to bring it back.

I finished painting the man slumped over the bench, my heart throbbing painfully. I felt the reverberation of a steel door slamming shut more than I heard it, but my hands didn’t attempt to paint the door or chase after the person who had exited it. Instead, I was pulled away from the outline of the man I knew to be Silas. My fingers escaped to another spill of paint, which spread into the base of a structure, arching upward with the coaxing of my fingers to form the bars of a cage. I was blind to whatever colours my fingers had reached for, but my mind was picking up on details that remained hidden from the paint: the stench of blood, the graininess of an unclean floor, the dankness that came from being hidden below the earth.

I sensed death nearby, and a chill raced down my spine.

My hands began reaching for the box at Silas’s feet, unable to part from the vision until it was complete. I tried to pull away again, to draw on some other detail, but the person who had spoken earlier in the vision was now gone.

Only the box was left.

My hands shook uncontrollably, a sob tearing at my throat.

“Stop her…” someone pleaded—someone
outside
of the vision—but it was too late.

I screamed, my body hunching over as shock after vicious shock of pain bolted up my legs.

“
Angel…”
I could feel Silas slipping away from me but I didn’t have enough control over my forecasting ability to hold onto him for any longer.
“If you’re there… if you’re seeing this. Don’t come. Don’t try to save me. You have to stay away…”

My hand slipped from the painting, marring it in a way that had never happened before as I slumped over, catching myself against the ground, my cheek stuck to something red.

I had drawn the box in red.

Everything else was grey.

“That’s enough,” Noah spoke up, seemingly for the first time since entering the room, though he might have been speaking the whole time and I simply hadn’t noticed. “Why are you showing us this, Miro? What the hell is going on?”

I pushed up on weak arms, unsurprised when they buckled inward and I hit the ground with a jarring
smack
. Quillan was there in a second, pulling me gently upright.

“You needed to see,” he answered Noah tightly. “What was in the box, Seph?”

“Hurts…” I muttered. “Can’t feel my legs…”

He passed a hand over my thigh. “You’re fine, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with your legs. You’re not injured anywhere.”

I slowly focussed on his face, blinking away my tears as the comprehension slammed into me.

“Shut that off,” I groaned, slapping my hands over my ears.

Cabe walked over to the phone in the corner of the room and pressed a button on it to stop the song looping before slipping the phone into his pocket with a frown. He must have recognised that it was Silas’s. I pulled my hands from my ears hesitantly, scared that I might accidently hear the song again.

“He knew I would paint him eventually.” My throat was dry enough that my voice rasped. “He must say it whenever he’s alone.”

“Say what?” Quillan prodded, his eyes digging into me.

“
You have to stay away
,” I repeated angrily, pushing out of Quillan’s arms and rising unsteadily to my feet. I pitched sideways and he caught me, but just as quickly stepped back to give me space. “He knew the song would make me want to reach out to him. He knew I would see him eventually.”