by Scott, Helen
It made me sick to my stomach. The contents of which were rolling in a way that had me swallowing repeatedly so that I didn’t vomit all over the place, and show him any weakness. My need to punish him, not just for the way he had destroyed my life and tormented my mother, but for the way he tormented everyone in his path, the way he destroyed people who were only trying to do the right thing, took over and it was the only thing I could focus on.
I pulled back from his mind, wrenching out as quickly as I could to get away from his filth and the evil that had twisted into the very core of his being. The idea that I was related to him, that half my DNA came from him, was disgusting. It was like he saw himself as the hero of his own story. He was the white male protagonist that everyone else was there to assist. This wasn’t his story, though. It was my life, and I wasn’t about to become like him, even in the slightest.
The only way to break a man like this was to make them see how very low and uncared for they were, to show him that he was simply a side character, an asterisk in the history books.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I reached for his mind once more, wishing I had mental gloves or something so I didn’t really have to interact with him and pulled his mind into my own.
He went limp in front of me. Visually, I saw that his mind was elsewhere, which was exactly what I had wanted, although it was somewhat freaky to see him slump and lose his holier-than-thou posture and attitude. I could feel his confusion as his mind swirled within my own, and I pushed him into a cage of my own making. Somewhere he would be forced to sit and watch as I replayed memory after memory for him.
Each and every feeling I’d had in the memories would be shoved into him. He wouldn’t be able to look away or turn the emotions off because we were in my head now, and I made the rules. He was going to feel every shred of horror, every ounce of pain, and every blip of concern I’d ever felt where he was concerned, and he would have no choice but to endure.
I started with the first memory I had of him, coming over into the home I shared with my mother, wearing that freaky ass mask. It was the first time I had ever seen such violence up close, and my mind was horrified by the pain my mother was in, but she’d made me promise to stay hidden and quiet. She said that if I did, I would get a full meal, and since I hadn’t had anything to eat in the last two days, I followed her command, hoping to stop the gnawing hunger in my belly.
The next few memories were all similar. My perspective of watching him beat my mother, of him feeding from her flesh like some kind of starving animal, and then me trying to nurse her back to health as much as my childlike mind and body could do. I had even fetched the neighbors, who I knew were Vampires, on occasion, begging for their help, or for table scraps when my mother couldn’t handle getting any food for us.
I showed him the night I’d attacked him, let him feel my rage, my despair as my fight was short lived. The pain was the thing I remembered most from that night, and I channeled it all into him, each lash of his whip across my back, each terrifying moment I begged my mother to wake up, I shoved it all into his mind, forcing him to live it as though it was actually happening to him.
I wanted him to remember everything, feel it as though it had happened yesterday, and then?
I twisted the knife. Calling upon Keiran and Raven’s powers, I bent them to my will.
Instead of my mother being beaten by him, I morphed the memory. So that she beat him. That she subjugated him. Made him weak, vulnerable. Frail.
He was too much of a psychopath for my memories to do anything other than arouse him. Like any serial killer, this would be his version of a memento. But as with all bullies, he was inherently weak. And I played to those weaknesses. I pushed each of the memories so far into him that I knew they would be embedded in his subconscious for years, haunting him, not just as nightmares, but during his waking hours as well. Forcing him to think that she, his slut of a bloodwhore, was the one dominating him.
Making him submit.
Maker, I could think of no more glorious a punishment than that.
“Stop, please!” Sylvester’s voice echoed in my mind.
I couldn’t stop, though, not now, not when I’d come so far and shown him so much. “You mean nothing to me,” I stated as I began showing him memories of me with my mates. They were all G-rated, but they showed how little I thought of him, how he never crossed my mind, how happy my mates made me, and how they worshiped me, just like he should have done with my mother.
He so valued the life he had created for himself that he thought my mother and I would ruin it, then I’d just shown him everything it was lacking. I knew his marriage had been a political one, and one that had probably lacked true love, which was the opposite of me and my mates. We loved no matter what life threw at us.
He wouldn’t care, but that was for me. He’d done everything in his power to make me weak too. He’d thrust me in a school where I’d been loathed, had only been allowed to reach my potential because of a fluke. I wanted him to see that I wasn’t miserable. That I was strong. So much stronger than him.
“You’re a waste of a pursang, nothing but a drain on our society, an illness that needs to be cured,” I rasped, my voice flooded with a power I could only describe as other.
“I’ll do better,” he cried, but I knew it was a lie.
He was just trying to manipulate me all over again. It wouldn’t work this time though. I, nor anyone else, would fall for his bullshit again. He would never lie to his wife again, never abuse anyone again, because as soon as he did, I would be there front and center in his mind, making him relive the whipping he gave me in excruciating detail.
There was nothing he could do to me anymore that was worse than what I had done to him because I had given him the worst of my memories and made them his. Taken him to the center stage of a play where he had the main role, and he was the one being forced to take everything my mother doled out his way. I would make him bemoan the day he let his darkness, his self-centeredness, and his arrogance, loose on the world.
Everything about him would be altered by what I had shown him, but it would never change him enough. Not when his very core was rotten like a piece of bad fruit. I pushed him back into his own body and watched it jerk as his consciousness filled it once more. I made sure that he still had my worst memories with him before I even thought about pulling back. My mind was so connected with his, and my use of Raven and Keiran’s powers so unusual, that I knew I’d scarred his mind. Figuratively and literally, and I was so fucking happy about that, I could have burst into song.
* * *
Keiran
The first time Marcella had called on my power it had been a caress, a brush of my love’s hand against my very soul.
This time was different.
It wasn’t painful per se, but it was like she was holding me too tightly and I was struggling to breathe. I was white-knuckling it as I gripped the edge of the table to prevent myself from charging into the spare room where she and her biological father were having a little tête-à-tête.
When I felt her pull on my power again, it was like she was trying to take sandpaper to my soul. I jerked involuntarily and barely remained in the chair I was sitting on. Whatever she was doing hurt like hell, like she was trying to twist me into an unnatural shape and my body and spirit, my powers, were resisting her, until they weren’t anymore. If a barrier had been there, and it felt like one had, it wasn’t there any longer.
I knew that if she was aware of what she was doing, she would stop, but the only way to make her aware was to interrupt her, which I didn’t want to, not when she’d worked herself up so much to face her father.
Marcella thought we hadn’t seen it, hadn’t noticed the silent pep-talk she was giving herself about confronting him, but we all had, even Cade, and he wasn’t exactly in tune with those kinds of things.
My gaze spanned the room, taking in my brothers in their various activities. We were all trying to look nonchalan
t about what was happening in the room next door, as though we weren’t listening with every fiber in our being for any sounds that signaled distress. Raven was the only one who seemed to be struggling like me—he was usually chill as fuck, but his hands were tearing into the armrests, his nails digging deep as though he wanted to pull out the stuffing to appease the soul-deep wrongness of what Marcella was doing with our powers.
We had seen our mate do some incredible things, like healing using Gid’s runes, try to bend time using an illusion, and stand up to monsters like her father. I had no doubt she was doing something unusual with mine and Raven’s powers. The question was, what exactly?
It reminded me of our time at Eastbrook. Raven and I had been one of the few sets of boys who always seemed to wind up together, and eventually, the others were added in as well. It perpetually felt like we were being tested more than the others, and now, thanks to what Darius had told Cade, we knew that we hadn’t been imagining things.
Raven and I had tried to work together on more than one occasion to teach our peers a lesson, but it had never worked in our favor, not in the long-term anyway. We would try to get them to see us as equals, true peers, instead of looking down on us like so many did to any who weren’t as much of a pursang as the others. The more pursang one was at Eastbrook—something that was measured by the ranking of our pursang parents in the world—the more respect they got. Not only from their peers but their professors as well, although I used the term professor loosely.
Gid had been one of the exceptions to the rule since he had strong pursang blood thanks to a parent who worked for the council, but that was aided by his other half—druids freaked a lot of people out. And Barclay, well, it was different for shifters. They clung to each other, their animal sides calling rank over their Vampire half.
Raven and I were mostly salsang though—whoever the pursang parent was for each of us, their blood and position in the hierarchy that only pursangs understood, hadn’t been strong enough to give us the respect of our peers, let alone our professors. If Cade had been any less of an asshole, then I was sure he would have faced the discrimination and bullying as well, but he worked his strength like any skill, and for anyone who disrespected him, well, they usually got what he thought was a just punishment.
One time the group we were training with let us think it worked. For two days, they treated us like we were their best friends, and Raven and I couldn’t believe that it had finally happened. We were actually part of the ‘unofficial’ pursang club.
Our professors didn’t treat us any differently, but our peers did, and that seemed to make all the difference in the world to us, at least at the time. The third day was when everything changed, though, everything slipped backward and became worse than it was before. They mocked us mercilessly for trying to use our powers to make them our friends. We should have just ignored them, but we didn’t.
Raven snapped first, weaving his most intricate web, for his skill level at the time, making them think they had all been kicked out of Eastbrook, that the only way to get back in was to destroy one another. We had talked about it afterward, and I knew he had never meant for it to go down the way it did, but that didn’t change what happened.
Unfortunately, our so-called friends had taken his weaving literally and had started viciously murdering each other. Before I actually realized what was going on, I had used the events to weave nightmares that they would have for the rest of their lives. There was nothing I regretted more. By the time there was just one student left, we had figured out what was going on, but it was too late to save him from the madness that consumed him after that. He had killed his friends and had nightmares that would haunt him forever because of it.
We had been punished, of course, beaten to within an inch of our lives in front of the rest of the school, but it was nothing compared to what we had done to the others. I knew Raven still dreamed about them sometimes, because when he did, it would inevitably spill over into my own dreams. We both dealt with it in our own way, but that wasn’t what I wanted for Marcella.
I didn’t want her to be haunted by nightmares of what she did to Sylvester. Maybe it was selfish of me, trying to change how she got her revenge for what he’d done to her, but I would never wish those kinds of memories on someone I loved.
When my powers twisted again, it felt as though my insides were being grated, but it came with a welter of relief because she had released them. I knew she was coming out of the room soon, so I tried to get myself together. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel guilty about accidentally hurting me. When I glanced over at Raven, I saw him doing the same thing—sucking down deep breaths and trying not to freak the hell out.
I felt eyes on me and looked in that direction, only to see Cade staring at me, with a sneer pasted on his face. It couldn’t have been directed at me since I knew I hadn’t done anything to anger the other man, but he kept staring as though he could whittle my very soul down to nothing with just his gaze. Darkness seemed to bleed out from him, not literally, but it was like a storm cloud was hanging over him, as though anyone that stepped too close would get caught in the same cloud as well.
Looking away didn’t seem to help, at least I thought it hadn’t when I saw my time walker brother stand and begin walking toward me out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t stop by me as I expected though, he went straight past me and went into the room with Marcella. His sneer must have had something to do with whatever he’d picked up on from our mate.
I glanced around the room once again, and saw puzzled looks on everyone’s faces, although Raven’s expression was more drawn than the others, and I had a feeling mine was as well.
All the bad memories that had surfaced while Marcella was out of my sight seemed to disappear when she came out of the room. She was tucked into Cade’s arms and appeared to be asleep already, as though whatever had happened had taken the wind out of her sails.
How had I not picked up on that? Why was Cade the only one who seemed to know she was about to run out of steam?
The questions swirled in my mind, and I tried to prevent them from taking a negative turn, but it was too much. Jealousy reared its ugly head, and I had to fight, harder than ever before to push it away.
A banging sounded on the front door just as Cade was about to pass in front of it with Marcella, and we all jumped to our feet. No one knew where we were except the owner of the house, so who the fuck was this?
The banging sounded again, seeming more urgent this time from the frequency of the hammering fists.
Cade set Marcella down, her eyes were now open and alert, and tucking her behind him, he answered the door. The person standing there was the last individual I had expected to see.
Lily Addams of all fucking people squirmed past him into the cabin.
Marcella hissed, her pursang coming out to defend her mates, especially since whatever she had done to her father had made her weak.
“They’re coming!” Lily said, barely having the chance to catch her breath, as though she’d run here from the academy itself.
6
Darius
“Lily Addams? What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, storming forward to grab hold of her. When she gaped up at me, I shook her slightly and demanded again, “What are you doing here?”
There was genuine fear in her eyes. As Enforcer for the council, it wasn’t something I was unaccustomed to seeing, but she was frigid with it. Positively frozen with her terror.
Knowing she was LeFauvre, and the depths of depravity that were common in that line, I had to wonder what had this girl scared.
“Reapers.”
One whispered word, and I understood her fear.
“When?”
“Soon.”
Barclay stormed over to us, and he grabbed a firm hold of Lily’s arm. “This is bullshit. You can’t trust her as far as you can throw her. The shit she pulled on Marcella? She deserves to be locked up with Sylvester.”
&n
bsp; Lily gasped, her skin turning impossibly paler. “Sylvester McCray is here?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “And how would you know who that is?”
“I’m my brother’s sister.” She gulped, and words that, until yesterday perhaps, would have been said cockily were whispered.
“Meaning you eavesdrop?”
“And do as I’m told.” She shuddered, and her body rattled with the tremor. “Sylvester is why the Reapers are coming, isn’t he?”
My nostrils flared. “Yes. I think he may be.” I relinquished my tight hold on her and moved away from her trembling form. There was no need to add to her fear. Not when the Reapers were doing all the work for me.
When I did though, I caught a glimpse of Marcella’s face, and felt like I’d just kicked a puppy. There was devastation in her eyes, and even though I hadn’t betrayed her, I felt like I had.
It wasn’t like I could walk over to her and comfort her, but I wanted to. I wished I could have just caught her eye, but that was denied to me too because she kept her gaze fixed firmly on the floor.
Lily Addams was a bitch. Her entire family were evil cunts. So it didn’t take a mind walker to figure out that she’d been one of Marcella’s terrorizers. As much as I wanted to decimate the girl, I wanted answers more.
“You followed us.” I made it a statement, not a question.
Behind her, Barclay peered out onto the veranda, checking the yard before closing the door behind Lily. The second it shut, she jolted like a gun had just gone off in her face, then when he growled at her, she dashed over toward me, like I was the one who’d keep her safe.
My narrowed eyes and curled top lip seemed to have her hovering in front of the fireplace for a handful of seconds before she collapsed on the armchair beside the fire.
The way she’d come to me had me questioning her fear.
Was her brother, Julian Addams, the LeFauvre Enforcer, trying to attack me?
