“What are you doing here?” she whispered. Whether she was asking herself or the bottle in her hand, she wasn’t sure, and so she just let the question hang there in the air—unanswered and unanswerable.
She twisted off the cap and brought the bottle to her lips. The liquor burned as it went down, making her grimace, but her shoulders relaxed as the familiar warmth filled her belly. That was better.
“You’ve got to stop, Case,” Emily’s voice piped up in her head, but it sounded weary and defeated.
“Fuck off, Em,” she murmured with her lips still pressed to the opening of the bottle. “Just fuck the hell off.”
She heard the crunch of gravel behind her, making her heart leap. She turned awkwardly on the wall, lost her balance for the briefest of seconds, and the bottle slipped from her fingers.
She tried to catch it, but it bounced off the top of the wall and broke, expelling the last of its contents onto her feet before smashing into more fragments on the ground beside her.
“Shit!”
“Very graceful.” Jeff’s voice floated to her out of the darkness, and she made out his dim shape against the black backdrop of the motel.
She didn’t say anything; she didn’t know what to say. She’d come out here because she hadn’t wanted to talk to Jeff, hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone.
She turned around again, dangling her feet over the embankment and looking out into the night. Somewhere nearby, a cricket began to chirp.
Jeff didn’t take the hint. Casey listened to the crunch of the gravel as he came up beside her and swung a leg over the wall. He straddled it with the same fluidity with which he seemed to do everything, and faced her. She went on pointedly ignoring him. Far away in the darkness, a voice, thick with the South, swore, and a cat yowled a feline obscenity back.
“What is wrong?” Jeff asked, breaking the silence at last. There was no accusation in his voice—no hint of anything save genuine concern. Casey felt her eyes start to burn, not unlike the vodka had a moment before, and her shoulders hunched. She thought about ignoring this, too, but in the end, she couldn’t ignore his tone.
“Nothing,” she said flatly.
“You, Casey, are a terrible liar.” The rebuke was said with such warm affection that it surprised Casey into looking over at him fully for the first time. The moonlight made his golden eyes seem to glow and turned the green t-shirt with the fucking Lucky Charms leprechaun on it an inky black. She could just make out the words written in a fanciful script beneath Lucky’s feet: “Magically delicious”.
She stared at him for a long moment, and he just watched her, waiting patiently.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Not nothing. A lot, actually. But it’s nothing I can talk about.”
“But I think you want to talk about it.” He reached out and took her hand. She let him, not sure if she should but not wanting to pull away.
“Who are you, Casey?” he asked.
“Who am I?”
“I know there are people looking for you. I know you don’t want them to find you. What I can’t quite figure out is why you don’t want to be found. You don’t seem like someone from a troubled home, and you don’t seem like a killer with a guilty conscience.” He laughed, but his eyes, still serious, never left hers. “I suppose you could be a killer without a guilty conscience, but I don’t think so.”
He waited, but Casey said nothing. What could she say? It was too complicated to explain about Emily—about the way she still heard her friend’s voice in her head, the way that no one seemed to understand.
“Do you want to know what I think?” Jeff said, his voice taking on a reflective quality, as if he was talking to himself more than to her. “I think it has something to do with your friend. Emily, wasn’t it? Emily Haven.”
Casey snatched her hand away as though she’d been burned.
“How do you know about that?” she hissed, looking away from him again. Hearing Emily’s name—hearing it so unexpectedly—was like a knife to her heart. She wanted to be angry, but the pain was too great to allow anything else.
Jeff waited for a moment to see if she’d look back at him, she suspected. When she didn’t, he sighed. “The whole story is on the news, Casey,” he said gently. “Two girls go missing, months apart, from the same city. Two girls who just happen to be best friends. They disappear without a trace. In your case, they did find your car but…” He shrugged again. “I can see how they think these are related, can’t you?”
“They’re not,” Casey said. There was a lump in her throat that was making it hard to talk. She swallowed hard. “Well…they are, but not in the way you mean.” She turned and stood up. “I’m going to bed. Lisa will be wondering where I am.”
Jeff caught her arm and gently pulled her back down onto the wall again.
“No, she won’t. She knows I went after you. Please, stay and talk to me. I want to help you, but you’re not making it easy.”
She could feel his hand on her arm, warm on her skin despite the already warm evening air. She looked down at her own hands, twisting together between her knees.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she whispered. “And you can’t help me. No one can.”
They sat in silence for a long moment, and Casey thought—hoped?—that would be the end of it.
“Well, if you won’t talk about why you’re on the run, we should at least talk about the concert tonight,” he said easily.
“No point,” she snapped, meeting his eyes again. “We both know I won’t be trying that again.”
He blinked in surprise. “You didn’t like it?” He actually had the nerve to sound disappointed!
“Of course not! I was terrible!”
Jeff only stared at her with a bemused expression for a few seconds, then he shook his head.
“Casey,” he said slowly, “you were not terrible. What? Do you think you can just walk out onto a stage for the first time in your life and suddenly be the next…” He floundered, trying to find a name. “…The next, Beyoncé?” He smiled at her. “I won’t tell you that you were brilliant, because no one is the first time, but you were a damn sight better than most.”
There was another very long, very awkward pause.
“I was?”
“Of course you were. Let me ask you something. The first time you went out on the ice, were you like…like Joe DiMaggio?”
Casey couldn’t help herself—she let out a snort of laughter.
“Joe DiMaggio played baseball,” she said. “Try Mario Lemieux.”
Jeff grinned at her. “I don’t know sports so well. It was the only name I could think of. But you get my point, don’t you?”
Casey sighed. “I guess I do. And the answer is no—I was never a Mario Lemieux, even after years of playing.” She paused, closed her eyes, and swallowed hard. “That was Emily.”
***
Later, Casey lay awake, staring into the darkness and listening to the steady rhythm of Jeff’s breathing beside her and relishing the warmth of his skin against hers. In one corner, an air conditioner that probably belonged in a museum wheezed on, cooling the room just enough to allow for the thin sheet they’d pulled up over themselves.
Her head was a jumble of thoughts, but for once, Emily’s voice was not intruding on them, and she wasn’t craving a bottle. The pain was still there—still a sharp ache in her heart, but for the first time she was starting to think that maybe she could live with it.
It had been the memory of Emily as she was on the ice that had broken through her defenses when all the rest had been too painful. She’d spilled it all out to Jeff, sitting on that cold concrete wall in the dark—even the crazier parts, like about what she, Casey, had called Emily’s groove, what Emily had called her knowing. She explained how Emily had vanished one day, after asking her about some college boy who had turned up in a photo on Emily’s phone, and how she’d started to unravel.
Jeff had listened silently, only asking questions when Casey’s
story had become muddled as she fought to keep from crying. He’d let her talk it all out, and when she was done, she’d found his arm around her shoulders and had felt no wish to move away.
“You probably think I’m crazy,” she’d said, laughing a little shakily.
“Not at all. I’ve seen stranger things than a psychic hockey player.”
They’d sat there for what had seemed a long time, and somehow—some time between then and now—they’d wound up here, in Jeff’s bed.
Chills ran down her body, and she turned toward him, nestling herself against his side as he lay on his stomach. She pillowed the side of her face on his shoulder and wrapped one arm over his back, hugging him to her. His breathing paused for a moment.
“You okay?” he mumbled sleepily.
She ran her hand up his back, relishing the feel of him. She felt his muscles tense for a moment, and then her fingers found something; it felt like a long line that ran parallel with his shoulder blade. It was hard and cooler than the rest of his skin.
Curious, she propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him, straining to see in the meager light from the antique clock radio that glowed on the nightstand beside the bed.
There were two diagonal scars on his back, ghostly pale against his dark skin. Each followed the curve of his shoulder blades, perfectly aligned, until they met, forming an inverted V at the top of his spine.
Casey ran a finger along first one and then the other, brushing some of his long hair aside as she did.
“What happened to you?” she asked softly, her fingers pausing where the scars converged.
There was a long silence, and she was suddenly afraid that she’d tread into dangerous territory. Still, she wouldn’t back down. She’d spilled her secrets; it was time for him to spill some of his.
“Like I said,” Jeff said at last, his voice very low but without any sleepiness now, “there are stranger things than psychics.”
He stopped, rolling onto his side to face her. His eyes seemed to gleam in the dark.
“I was born just a little too soon,” he said. “It wasn’t time yet…and I needed to be safe in a world that wouldn’t understand—that wasn’t ready for someone like me.”
The Others
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Paige’s wings twitched involuntarily, causing the fabric of her gown to flutter around her, but she didn’t notice. The boards were cold beneath her feet, and her head throbbed dully with the headache she’d been fighting for days, but these were nothing more than distant communiqués from far off infantry commanders; she paid them no mind.
She’d known, of course, when the Wraith had roused her from her bed, and so she’d allowed herself to be led to the house’s front door without protest or question. Garrett had returned to them, as she’d always known he would.
…Because he told you…
…or someone did, anyway.
In her heart of hearts, she’d hoped he’d be alone, but she was not surprised to see Mona and the baby with him. Freakish little monster, she thought without irony. She was taken aback by the babe’s size, if not by his presence in the first place; she’d known that Karikis children grew more rapidly than human or flyer ones, but this was the first time she’d seen the reality of it up close. She found it unsettling at best, repulsive at worst. She bore no ill will toward human, Karikis, or any of the other races, but halfbreeds were an afront to nature.
Irrelevant, she told herself sternly. Focus.
It was the other two before her now who had been the surprise—the wizard and his accursed boy. What a fool she’d been to have ever listened to the old man. And, yes, perhaps she was a fool now as well, prepared to welcome Garrett back into the fold, even if that meant she had to take Mona and the kid along with him. She’d be damned if she’d let the wizard take her in again, though.
“It is good to see you,” she said softly, letting her gaze flick to Mona and then back to meet Garrett’s. Let them take that to mean both of them; if they would—or not—made little difference to her.
She turned to face the wizard and his charge.
“You, on the other hand, are not welcome here, wizard,” she said, letting the contempt she felt drip like blood from the sharp edge of every word. The twang of her drawl thickened as her temper smoldered. “Take the boy and get the hell out of here.”
“Paige,” Garrett said quietly, drawing her attention back to him. “Don’t you want to know what’s happened? Don’t you want to know why we’re here? Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“That’s no mystery,” she snapped. “Everything fell apart for you, didn’t it? Half your party is gone, and you’ve come crawling back to the Brood. If we weren’t in such desperate need of able bodies, I might just throw you back to the wolves. But we are, so I welcome you back and hope to God that you’ve learned something from your foolishness.”
She turned back toward the house. “Come in. We’ll get you cleaned up and fed.”
She took a few steps forward, then stopped at the threshold. The Wraith had not moved to follow her, and neither, she suspected, had anyone else. She wheeled around to face the group again, steadfastly refusing to look at the wizard and the boy. She was suddenly very aware of her tousled hair, bare feet, and the flimsy nightgown she was wearing. Not exactly the most authoritative of appearances. In the east, the sun was heaving itself laboriously into the sky, casting their shadows, huge and monstrous, across the piles of dry and colored leaves around them.
First we make a ghost…
The idiot boy stepped forward to stand directly before her, and for the first time, she saw the awareness in his eyes. His gaze locked on hers, and she found, for a moment, that she could not look away, despite her resolve to ignore him. There was steel in his look—steel that pierced her to the bone. The throbbing in her head intensified, becoming a stake that was driving into her brain in time with her heart.
“You’ll have us all,” the boy said quietly. Behind her, she heard the dry cough of the Wraith’s sardonic laughter.
“I don’t take orders from children,” Paige spat. “You and the wizard led us on a wild goose chase that got several of my charges killed. I want no part of either one of you.”
“You put all your faith in the wizard before,” Garrett said, stepping forward to stand beside the boy. He placed a hand on his shoulder, forestalling the sharp retort that Paige could see rising to the idiot’s lips.
“Yes, I did,” she growled. She realized she was rubbing her temple without any memory of having even raised her hand to the side of her face. She lowered it slowly, her gaze moving between the two who stood at the foot of the steps before her. “And it cost me my best general.” She wouldn’t say that it had also cost her the best friend—the only family—she’d had left. That would seem weak, but Garrett would understand.
“Aren’t you curious how it all turned out?”
“No, I’m not. I have no—”
But all at once, the boy mounted the steps and pushed past her. He was not rough; if anything, he seemed only weary. He slowly crossed the porch and stepped through the door behind her like a relentless force of nature.
“Come,” he called to the others behind him.
She watched in stunned disbelief as Garrett and Mona exchanged a quick glance, and then the rest of them climbed the steps and filed past her, none of them meeting her gaze, until she was standing alone on the porch beside the Wraith.
“My, my,” the Wraith hissed, a definite note of amusement in its voice, “I dare say you could’ve handled that better, Paige.”
***
Paige watched Garrett’s expression as the big man took in the enormous room. Even after all these years, it was still tricky to read the emotions that flitted across his reptilian face, but she had little trouble in seeing the surprise that registered in the tightening around his eyes and the set of his shoulders. They’d known one another far too long to be able to hide their thoughts.
&nbs
p; The house’s original basement had been expanded long ago by the Brood. Large oak beams were set up at angles to provide extra support to the earthen walls and, farther out, ceiling. Dozens of people, mostly men and women, were clustered in groups throughout the cavernous space. Dotted here and there were a handful of teens and older children as well. They represented many races—an endless sea of winged, furred, horned, and scaled features.
More impressive than the bodies, in Paige’s opinion, were the racks of weaponry and armament that lined the walls on every side. Swords, crossbows, and innumerable implements for dealing death gleamed beneath the candles, torches, and lanterns that burned above them in haphazard clusters.
“Paige…” Garrett began, then he stopped. Paige smiled.
“There are over two hundred Broodsmen in Coalhaven now, and more on the way. As you can see, we’ve got a fair number here, but there are other groups in hiding throughout the city. I’ve gathered every man and woman I could find from the other branches of the Brood—what was left of them, anyway.”
Garrett turned to face her.
“It looks like you’re preparing for war.”
“We are.”
They stood looking at one another for a long moment. Around them, the cheerful babble of conversation went on, a deceptive backdrop to the scrape of blades, the twang of bowstrings, the swoosh of daggers, the clink of armor…
“The Brood has always stood for undermining Marianne’s power without innocent casualties,” Garrett said slowly, “not murder en masse.”
“The situation has changed,” Paige said, and though her voice betrayed nothing, her heart sank a little. She’d thought that Garrett would understand without her explaining, the way he always had while they’d been growing up. It wasn’t fair, of course, he didn’t know what she knew. He didn’t know that Marianne was killing her own people to garner favor for her war against them. How could he? But she couldn’t shake off the sense that he should have.
Another spike of pain shot through her head, making her grimace. She raised her hands to her face, massaging her temples with her fingers. She was suddenly very tired. The antennae at the back of her neck twitched.
Haven Divided Page 24
