Ravenswood (Ravenswood Series Book 1)

by Christine Zolendz

  “Grandmother?” The king smirked. “Who is her grandmother?”

  “Apparently, Addy had her living as her granddaughter.” Rose pushed her way between Mathias and Liam, her huge frame filling up the room. “This is Raine, Your Majesty.”

  “Rainey,” I corrected.

  “Mary’s daughter?” the king whispered.

  “Yes, sire.”

  Mary was my mother’s name. Then it clicked. I was the baby in the book, wasn’t I? I was the unborn child here. Addy tried to save me by stealing me away.

  “Who killed Addy?” The words exploded out of me.

  “Me.” The king laughed. “I had her found and extinguished for her crimes. She stole something from me.” He stared at me for a while, his eyes trailing slowly over me, and suddenly I was aware of every inch of my skin, of the heaviness of my breasts and the curve of my waist and hips. I felt the stones under the balls of my shoes and the coldness that drifted up from them. My cheeks heated to near boiling under his scrutiny. “You look nothing like her. Pity, that.”

  The comment stunned me, catching me so off guard, I was blind to his next move. It happened so fast, I almost laughed in disbelief. With the mere flick of his wrist, my shirt was torn from my chest and arms, my bra sliced in half with a fast slice of a blade.

  “Put her on her knees. She’ll learn to service me just like her mother did.”

  I stood frozen, bared to the waist. My stomach lurched in humiliation. Then came fear. I looked up to Mathias, who could not seem to bring himself to meet my gaze. In that moment, my hate and rage became a substantial thing. It crawled over my skin like a hard shell of armor. It was as if time had stopped and the only thing that was true and real and alive was my fury and they all were witness to it.

  “Mathias?” I growled, not bothering to cover myself. Let him see me. Let them all see me. But they’d fucking die if they tried to touch me.

  His head tilted up. Calm fire and rage. “You need to slay your own monsters. Princess.” Once more, his eyes spoke of secrets his mouth couldn't tell me, and again I couldn't understand, again I was too lost to figure it out.

  “Enough,” the king seethed, walking between us, severing our overwhelming glares of each other. “Mathias, you kept this from me?”

  I shifted over to watch Mathias answer his father. I wished I could get the sword out of one of their belts. I never wanted to kill something before—the desire overpowering me—I found my fingers tingling to yank at the hilt of the king’s sword.

  “Yes, Father. I did.” Something in Mathias’s voice made me glance up at him. His eyes were on me as though he were waiting for me to say something. The look was so full of depth and intensity, I felt dizzy from it.

  “Why?” Hemlock asked, folding his great arms across his chest. “Do you not believe that we deserve to feel again, taste, smell—”

  “No. You don’t,” I said, stepping forward. One more step, and I'd be able to reach the sword and slit his stupid throat. “You have no right to hurt these girls. Or me.”

  A dagger was under my chin instantly, pulled from the hem of his sleeve so quickly, all I saw was a flash of metal, then the burn of the blade was nicking at my skin. “I deserve it all, you insolent child.” He slid the knife along my jaw line, trailing a line of fire along my skin. Warm blood beaded up to the surface, just enough to collect and drip along my collarbone. “Emptiness and pain is a constant companion here in death. I wish this of the living, and certainly the ones who find better places than this.” He lowered his head to mine, the sharp point of the knife pushing into the soft flesh beneath my ear. “I want everyone to feel my pain.”

  My body trembled, not with terror though, but with undeniable rage. I knew I should be scared, but I was too angry, too furious. I looked up into his eyes, into the spreading blackness that covered his sclera. So dark and deep, I could see nothing but the evil he was made from.

  The fingers that held the knife began to blacken and elongate, deforming themselves into talons with sharp needle-like points. I thought I might scream, suddenly unsure if I could hold on to my anger. I didn’t want to show him or any of them my fear. I bit into my cheeks, sucking back the sheer terror that was taking over my body.

  “That hope you’re holding on to, my child? I’ll squeeze it out of you just like I did your mother.”

  “She’s innocent, Father,” Mathias pleaded.

  “No one is innocent, Mathias. No soul is pure.”

  “Father, no. You don’t understand. My soul, it called to hers. I—”

  “Enough. That’s impossible!” he shouted.

  “Impossible she’s my other half?”

  “I won’t allow it!” His voice thundered through the room, making the others flinch back in fear—except for Mathias, who stood watching me. “There’s no more to talk about. She stays with us. Imprison her. Bain? Put Mathias in the cell until I figure out his punishment.”

  Mathias didn’t even put up a fight. Bain just opened a cage that materialized out of the darkness, and he walked right inside. My own cell manifested around me, made of rusty thick bars that stood from floor to ceiling.

  I was left stunned.

  And trapped like an animal.

  Chapter 22

  Mathias and I looked at each other for a long while, both of us leaning our shoulders against the rough surface of the wall, facing one another. I stayed silent, trying to choose my words carefully before I brought them to life.

  “I read through your books, while you were—” I hesitated, not knowing what happened when everyone disappeared, “wherever you go.”

  “I know.” His whispered words hung in the dead static air between us for a long time.

  “Your mother, something happened to her here?”

  Mathias remained quiet for a long moment, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t even bother trying, maybe I would never find the truth.

  Maybe I would just die here.

  “None of it matters,” he murmured, looking away.

  I shifted closer to the bars that separated us, fisting them in my hands. We had been sitting on the cold floor, and now I was up on my knees, almost kneeling in front of him. The second I noticed my position, I plopped my bottom back down flat and crisscrossed my legs.

  “It matters to me, Mathias. Help me understand why I’m here and what’s happened to my family. Start with your mother.”

  When he looked up and locked eyes with me again, his gaze was relentless and unwavering. “You’re asking me to go against everything my father—“

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “Yes, go against the man who put you in a cage. Tell me, Mathias, please. I think I get the basics, but I need you to fill in the holes for me.” I ran my hands over my face in frustration. “Was she killed? Taken? Did she just—”

  “Murdered,” he whispered.

  Damn it. That sucked. I didn’t want to feel bad for Hemlock—but no one deserved to live through that kind of death of a loved one; that’s one thing I knew for certain.

  “He loved her so much, he gave up everything he was for her.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked, ignoring his cheesy bullshit.

  He leaned closer to my cell, and suddenly it was as if there were no bars between us. No rusty poles blocking our view, no opposing confinement pressing around us. Just me and Mathias, close enough to reach out and touch each other.

  “She destroyed her own soul,” he said in a hoarse voice. “She took it in her own hands and crushed it. His eyes glistened as if they held tears.

  Was he capable of crying? Was he capable of telling me the truth at all?

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he said, furrowing his brow. “Watch, then,” he said, and once again the room became full of images. Life-sized holograms of a time long ago. I watched the king and queen rule over a land, not much different than it was now, yet somehow more full and alive. A young Liam and Mathias ran through their mother’s legs, grand feasts, and celebrations fit for mythical
gods. Then the room turned darker and a swirling storm washed over their world and the image of his mother steeling into the room filled with those pretty jars flickered in front of me. And I watched as she held the tiny flame in her hand and extinguished it without hesitation.

  My heart hammered wildly. It was more than I could bear—all of it so real—right in front of me. “Stop, please,” I said.

  “My father was never the same. She was the brightest part of him, and his darkness overcame him.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shifted his eyes away. “Until he saw your mother.”

  My back straightened. “My mother?” I began to feel frantic. So close to all the answers I wanted. But what happens when I get them? What changes? I’m still stuck in a freaking cage.

  “He took her right off a New York City street. At first she was enamored with him, dazzled by him. She dreamt of him, even painted pictures of him, wrote poetry and songs about him.”

  Seriously? I didn’t dare make a sound; I didn’t want him to stop speaking.

  “She was lonely. Your father left her pregnant and afraid. She was only sixteen.”

  Tears slid down my cheeks.

  “But she was never happy here, and she could never love the darkness my father had inside him. She tried so desperately to change him.”

  “And I was the baby? The one written about in the book?” I asked.

  “The child born in death.”

  “What happened to my mother?”

  He turned his head toward the still bodies of the girls. “It was the first time someone living came here. He didn’t know what would happen.”

  I darted my eyes over to the girls, heart pounding, finger pointing. “That’s what happened to my mother?”

  “No. I think Addy helped her. I think Addy set her soul free and she stole you, hiding you upside, where you belonged. In a world we could only be shadows in.”

  “But Addy wasn’t a shadow! She was my grandmother who lived and was murdered. Massacred and gutted like an animal, and I found her! That image of her, I will never unsee.”

  “She must have found a way to live again.”

  “Do you realize how incredible the story is? It’s beyond fictional, Mathias.” I tightened my grip on the bars in frustration. “If she took me to save me, she did an awful job of taking care of me. I think you people got the wrong family. My mother and father died in a car accident when I was an infant. And my grandmother wasn't some supernatural being that came back from the dead to hide, what did you call me? Oh right, an insignificant little girl.”

  “Raine.” Mathias sighed.

  “My name is Rainey, so stop making up cute little shortened nicknames for me. We’re not friends. You got the wrong girl.” I defiantly held my chin up. “Growing up with Addy was hard. You’re making her sound like some heroine. When I think back on my childhood, I remember loneliness and the constant ache of wanting to be enough and her telling me I never would be.” I dragged my eyes away and looked down, remembering. “Addy saved herself if this fantastical story is to be believed. I was just the baggage she took with her.”

  “And,” I continued, “all that bullshit about soul mates and the corny stories about gods and being one soul and then separated, come on.” I sat back, feeling throbs of pain in my palms where I held on to the metal cage too hard. I rubbed them down my legs to try to ease the ache. “That’s not real. People aren’t predestined to someone. It can’t be true. That someplace there’s another part of me? And trust me, asshole, it ain’t you.”

  “You really don’t feel it? You don’t remember?” His eyes squinted, and his mouth smirked like he was calling my bluff.

  “I don’t even like you. I think maybe—yeah, definitely, I sort of kind of hate you,” I answered flatly.

  “You immediately cast me as the villain of your story.” He barked out a laugh. “I’m dead, empty inside, so I’m some unlovable monster, but we’re all monsters, aren’t we, Raine? Monsters are nothing more than corrupted, broken humans.”

  “Stop calling me Raine. You are a villain. You’re a monster, a creeper, an asshole, a shithead. God, I could go on for days.”

  “How many great relationships have you been in?”

  Zilch. Zero. Nada. But I wasn’t telling him that. “That’s absolutely none of your business.” I didn’t like where this was headed.

  “Not one. Not one person upside made you feel whole.” He smiled at me like he somehow felt he got the upper hand, and he most certainly did not.

  “I’m only twenty-two. How many people actually meet someone special that young?”

  “I knew the day you were born.”

  I laughed at him. “This place shouldn’t be called Ravenswood. It should be called Crazy Town.” I clapped my hands near the bars to wake him from whatever dumb reality he was in. “Hey, listen up. Shut up about that crap. Just tell me how to get out of here.”

  “Hey Raine,” he said after a few beats. The idiot would just not stop calling me the wrong name. “Every time you ever cried in your life, remember that cool breeze that would dry your tears?”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear this.” I remembered. I always said to myself it was my guardian angel, my mother watching over me.

  “That was me, wiping your tears away.” He knelt up and wrapped his hands around the bars of the cell. They disintegrated to dust and ash, then flaked like feathery snow to the floor. Now there was nothing between us. My heart raced in my chest. “Every boyfriend you ever had, how clumsy were you around them? I’d spill your drinks on them, make your phone go silent if they called.”

  “Not true.” It was just me being a klutz. Just me and my bad luck.

  He crawled forward, over the pile of filth the bars had become, and I knew I should feel terrified for him to be this close, but somehow I wasn’t.

  “The tingle in the back of your neck when you read alone in your room? That was my lips against your skin, reading you my own poetry. When you played your piano, the soft tightness in your shoulders was me at your back.” He came closer still. “I’m your story, Raine, if are you brave enough to turn the page.”

  “No,” I whispered. It couldn’t be true.

  “The scars you have deep inside you? The ones you feel in your heart? Those are my claw marks, trying to keep you near me.”

  “Liar. None of this is true. You don’t know me. You didn’t know me, and you certainly don’t love me.”

  “You think it’s skin you fall in love with? Hair, flesh, tissue, muscles, organs, bones? That’s not love. That’s lust, a fleeting, natural urge. Like having to shit.” He raked his hand through his hair in irritation and shook his head angrily. “You fall in love with someone’s soul. The half of you that’s always felt missing. When you meet that soul, mountains could be moved,” he whispered.

  “You believe that?” I nervously laughed. “You? The cruelest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on? The asshole who called me a stupid girl?” I leaned forward, shoving my face close to his. I wasn’t scared of him, and I wasn’t going to back down. “And besides,” I laughed, remembering what Madame Evangeline, the fortune teller had said the night before my birthday, “I have no soul. I’m empty.”

  “I know,” he smiled, “I’m the one who kept it safe here.” He was no more than an inch away from me now, too close, yet I didn’t pull away. “We’re not strangers,” he said, his voice hoarse and low. “You try to pretend this isn’t real, that we aren’t real, but your eyes speak differently.”

  In the small space between our bodies, a sensation began to stir, like the silent crescendo between a flash of lightning and the explosion of thunder. The swell of a sudden storm there was no running away from. His eyes were fixed on mine, and mine on his, both of us breathing in the swelling winds of the hurricane between us.

  Mathias bent down, his lips passing over my cheek, brushing it lightly—so gentle, the touch it sent shivers through my entire body. “You were all the beautiful parts of me,” he whispered. “Tell m
e you don’t want this. Tell me you don’t feel this.” He raised his hand and touched his bare fingertips to my throat. I waited for the pain, for the burn, for my merciless death—yet, all I felt was the soft fall of need against my skin and swell of the storm before the lightning meets the ground.

  “Tell me what a monster I am,” he whispered, tracing the line of my jaw. When I didn’t speak, he brushed his mouth on the shell of my ear. “Tell me to stop touching you.” His lips pressed against my cheek, like the warm drizzle of rain, trailing down, his breath fanning out across my skin. I didn’t say the words. I couldn’t. I didn’t want him to stop. Was I under a spell? I closed my eyes and savored his touch.

  What would it feel like to kiss him? What would it feel like to be loved the way he was speaking about? The way I’ve read about in stories?

  Then I felt the coolness of his lips, so close, hovering over mine. “Raine,” he whispered, and for a moment he came no closer; he just repeated my name like a prayer before my skin, breathing me in.

  His other hand gently fell against my neck. “Tell me now. Tell me you hate me. Take any hope I have away.” My body flooded with heat, butterflies with fluttering wings split open my chest and overwhelmed my senses. My breaths came faster, my skin ached for his hands, his mouth, his everything.

  “Raine, I—” he begged, then his lips were against mine and my world spun off its axis, the rest of his words lost against my mouth.

  I reached up and pulled him closer, knotting my fists into the soft collar of his shirt. A low groan rumbled deep in his throat, and his fingers dug against my skin. His tongue slipped past my lips, demanding and hot, and every inch of my body seemed to melt into his. My fingers reached up, gripping his silky hair, my heart pounding so hard, I feared it might explode, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything but his lips, his touch, his skin. Heat surged through my veins, curling my toes and puckering every part of my skin.

  We fell backward until the weight of his body was on top of mine—all of him pressing against me—his hands everywhere, the kind of touch that breaks open the night sky in an explosion of stars and dust. My blood pulsed and throbbed, I felt it like another entity deep inside my veins—some overpowering hunger, and Mathias was the only one who could quench my appetite. The only one who could ever make me feel this. With one small kiss, I understood, I knew unequivocally every other kiss in my life was nothing compared to this. Every boy—every man—nothing compared to him.