The Seven Boxed Set

by Sarah M. Cradit

  “I’m sure he’ll realize what an ass he’s been and come crawling back in the morning.”

  “No,” she said, blowing her nose again. “Nope. I don’t care if he does. I’ll tell him to go waste some other girl’s time.”

  Charles wasn’t much of an authority on serious relationships, but he’d comforted enough heartbroken women to know that even the most serious words said in anger and hurt rarely meant much the next day. “Are you at home? Is your roommate there?”

  There was silence on her end, and then she said, very seriously, “Why? Do you want to come over?”

  His heartbeat dropped to the organ between his legs. Oh, God, did he ever want to come over. And for the first time in his life, he wasn’t looking to fuck, he wanted to try something else entirely, making love, whatever that was, he wanted to figure it out with Cat. To look into her eyes as he drove inside her, to see them roll back in her head as she cried out from her first orgasm.

  “Charles? You still there?”

  “Yeah.” He ran his tongue over his lips, which had gone dry as stone. “I’m here.”

  “Jeannie isn’t here. She’s at her parents’ in Baton Rouge for the weekend. It’s just me here.”

  Charles had no doubt of what awaited him at Cat’s apartment. He wouldn’t even have to work for it… she’d fall into his arms, and into her bed, and he could have everything he’d fantasized about since the day he’d first seen her smile at him. He could have all of it, and maybe she’d even date him for a while after, until she realized the rottenness seeping out from his core.

  But he loved Colin, the way he loved Augustus. Colin was his brother, through and through, no matter what. And though Colin hadn’t handled his breakup with Cat well, Colin loved her with all his heart. If Charles stayed away, they’d be back together in the morning; maybe even that night. But not if he went to see her.

  “I… Cat, I’d love to come see you.” He squinted and pounded his fist against his thigh, breathing his self-control out through his nose. “I really would.”

  “So, come,” she whispered. “For me.”

  Come. He was about to do exactly that if she kept cooing invitations in his ear. “I can’t,” he said after another deep breath. “It’s Lizzy… Mom asked me to look after her while she’s in town.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. I see.” She’d seen all right, directly through the lie to the truth of his deflection. He heard it in the slow withdrawal of her invitation. “It’s okay. I’ll call Theresa or Jamie, see if they want to see a flick or something. I think Deliverance just came out, and Colin would never have seen that with me in a million years.”

  “That sounds nice. You should do that.”

  “Yeah,” she replied, and he knew then, he’d failed her somehow. He’d lost her, though she’d never actually been his to begin with.

  “You’re gonna be okay, Cat? If you really need me…” His strength faltered.

  “No,” she said firmly, for both of them. “I’m good. Really.”

  “I’m always here for you,” he said, but the line was already dead.

  * * *

  Colleen straightened her skirt and took one last glance in the mirror. Her appearance had always been important to her, but only as it extended to her credibility. Neat hair, a simple face of makeup, clothes tidily pressed, these were the things that conveyed to the world that you had it all together. It made people think twice before questioning you.

  Now, though… after Ophelia’s declaration that one day Colleen would be magistrate, not Eugenia, but her, the third child of August Deschanel, she chanced extra looks, double-checking the neatness of her bun, and the soft kohl lines around her eyes. She doubted the others would accept her authority and knew this would be a long game she was playing, to earn their respect.

  Their summer meeting was this evening. Colleen puzzled over that, that there’d been no need to call one in between the quarterly schedule, especially with the concern of the Curse being renewed. Had Ophelia ruled that out as a possibility? Had they moved on?

  Elizabeth appeared in the doorway and smiled. Colleen smiled back. She’d seen such positive changes in her baby sister, who’d thrived at Ophélie, away from the city and all her demons. Colleen hadn’t initially supported her mother’s idea to uproot the family, but maybe the idea had merit, after all.

  “You have a meeting tonight?”

  Colleen nodded. “I do. Why, did you wanna come? Tonight is Council only. There’s one for the full Collective in two weeks, and you’re old enough now.”

  Elizabeth chewed the inside of her lip. “I don’t know. Sounds stuffy.”

  Colleen watched her. Elizabeth wasn’t worried about a stuffy meeting. Here, she only saw her siblings, mother, and occasionally that strange but sweet Connor. In a room filled with Deschanels, her visions would skyrocket. “Think about it. Being a member of the Collective is your birthright, Lizzy. Sometimes it’s nice to remember the world—our world—is bigger than the seven.”

  “The six,” Elizabeth corrected. She shuffled her feet.

  “Lizzy…” Colleen looked off in thought. “Mama said something, when we moved here. She said you’d seen Maddy… well, that you’d seen what would happen to her.”

  Elizabeth stiffened from head to toe. She drew her lips into a tight line. “It wasn’t my fault, Leena.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I know that. I know.” Colleen dropped her lipstick and went to Elizabeth. She pressed her hair back off her face. It was always in her face. Unlike Evangeline, whose hair could be tamed by nothing, Elizabeth chose to let hers hang limp around her jaw, like a veil of mourning. “That’s not why I was asking.”

  “Why were you asking?’

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this if you’re not in the Collective…”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Colleen pressed her lips together, then rolled the bottom one through her teeth. “There’s talk that maybe the Deschanel Curse is back. It wasn’t only Maddy. We received word of a couple cousins, in France. And some are seeing that as a pattern that indicates something more sinister… something more Deschanel.”

  Elizabeth knitted her brows together. Her face scrunched hard, thinking. “That’s why you want me to come? So I can predict more deaths?”

  “No,” Colleen said quickly. “I don’t need you to come to the meetings, and I would never ask anything of you that you weren’t comfortable with, but, Lizzy, it’s of my belief that the Curse is perhaps not so supernatural. That there may be some deep, scientific link, something obscure maybe, like quantum physics. Hard to understand, but with the right minds…”

  “How would you study that? You’d need a mad scientist with a big old lab.”

  “We could cross that bridge if we got there,” Colleen replied. “But if I knew someone was going to die… there may be things I could watch for. Commonalities. Things we could compare to other deaths that are outside this family. You’ve predicted the deaths of classmates and families that aren’t ours, too, Lizzy. We could compare them.”

  “That sounds morbid,” Elizabeth said, crossing her arms. “Even for me.”

  “I… yes, I suppose.”

  “You’re going to find someone who’s about to die and ask them if you can study them until they kick the bucket? And they’re just going to smile and say thanks for letting me be the bunny in your lab in my last days on earth?”

  Colleen balked. She wasn’t as heartless as what Elizabeth described, even if it did sound that way. “Lizzy, I don’t just want to study them. I’m hoping to find a way to change the future. Don’t you understand? Everyone says that can’t be done, but how many times has it even been attempted? How many people in the world are like you that there’s even been enough evidence, or studies, or data that attempting to stop what is confirmed to happen works or doesn’t? Most men and women have nothing more than a bad feeling. They might call it a premonition, like someone walking over their grave, but it isn’t anywhere near what you can do. You hav
e never predicted anything wrong, Elizabeth. Not once. And it eats you up inside. You have to live with this for the rest of your life, so wouldn’t you want to even try to be a part of something that might take your ability and turn it into something positive?”

  “The future can’t be changed, Colleen. It just can’t.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “I know!”

  “Yes, but how?”

  Elizabeth recoiled from her touch. “The same way I know Maddy’s death wasn’t some Curse. She just died. They all just die! But you know what’s worse sometimes?”

  Colleen said nothing.

  “What’s worse is knowing what will happen to each of you while you’re still living.” Elizabeth’s eyes trembled in their sockets as she trained them on her older sister for several long seconds. Then she fled, footsteps following her down the hall. A door slammed.

  Colleen collapsed back onto her bed. She wanted to follow Elizabeth, to tell her she would go to medical school and prove her wrong, and maybe save her sanity in the process. That there must be some other reason they were given such gifts, other than causing harm to themselves and others.

  But she was no longer so sure.

  Ten

  I Know What You Did

  Red and green ribbons of colors danced through the sky. There were other scientific phenomena that could cause this, but Evangeline tended to favor the theoretical principle of Occam’s razor, which said that, all things equal, the simplest solution, or the one with the fewest needed assumptions, was the correct one.

  This was Louisiana, in late summer. A storm was coming.

  Evangeline hadn’t been following the news, but her friend Cassidy had. Promptly on the heels of Evangeline’s own assessment of the coming storm, Cassidy bounced in, announcing that the tropical storm meteorologists had been monitoring in the Gulf had been upgraded to a Category 4 Hurricane. The eye would pass right over New Orleans. Evacuation orders were imminent.

  She watched in mild bemusement as all the kids, her friends, whipped themselves into a flurry of excitement and panic. They needed to call their parents! To get a sibling out of school! What would they pack? Where would they go?

  It wasn’t that Evangeline didn’t share their concerns. With her limited information, unless the trajectory of the storm shifted, damage was certain. The areas to the north and east of the city center would fare the worst, those rows of little matchstick shotgun cottages housing the poor and working class. The Quarter would need some cleanup, but it was built better, to withstand such things. The Garden District rarely saw any lasting damage. They were the literal and figurative higher ground, if being a few feet above sea level could be considered high ground.

  But the Deschanels had never evacuated. Evacuation, for them, was battening the hatches at Ophélie, and now they lived there full-time, so this was as simple, for Evangeline, as going home. Augustus was expecting her back at the office soon. He’d wait for her, and they’d drive home together. No use getting worked up about it when the answer was clear.

  One by one, the kids shuffled out of the empty warehouse, filtering off to their families, or homes, or wherever they went when they weren’t here. Cassidy hoisted her bag over her shoulder and hovered over where Evangeline lay sprawled on the dirty couch. “You need to beat it, too, Ivy. This place is gonna be a swamp by morning.”

  “It takes many years and massive ecological change to form a swamp,” Evangeline replied. She rested her open comic across her chest.

  “Ivy, you’re unreal sometimes, you know that?”

  Ivy. The name started by accident, when someone misheard her, and then stuck. She didn’t correct them. It was better to be more anonymous here than she’d been in her last group, where she was now an anathema. Or worse.

  She walked the long way back through the Quarter and into the CBD to avoid running into any of them, and steered at least four blocks clear of Dauphine. Who could say whether their threats were real or not. Evangeline had the odds at 70 percent, and that was higher than she liked.

  It had started when Ethan Summerland disappeared in the spring. Some of the kids thought he’d cut town, with the fuzz hot on his operation. No one would have doubted the potential of this, as he dealt to minors and certainly there were other suspect actions happening in his flat on Dauphine.

  Not everyone thought this, though. Others had a more sinister view of his absence, eyeing Evangeline with a suspicion she didn’t at all understand. Not at first, anyway. Not until Craig, who she’d avoided since the unfortunate loss of her virginity, was good enough to warn her what the whole thing was about.

  “You better split, bunny.”

  “Split? Why?”

  He leaned in. He reeked so strongly of pot that Evangeline nearly scored a contact high. “They think your brother did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything, or why everyone is treating me like I stole their grass.”

  Craig looked around, then returned to her, wide-eyed. “Ethan. They think he took care of Ethan the way he took care of that teacher.”

  Evangeline’s head shook. She couldn’t focus on all these strange, disconnected bombshells Craig seemed to be so certain about. “What? What teacher? What are you talking about?”

  He lowered his voice. “Everyone knows Charles whacked that teacher who was jumping your sister’s bones.”

  “That’s not true, and you need to stop repeating that shit,” Evangeline hissed. “That never happened.”

  Craig shrugged and she wanted to beat the grin from his scruffy face. “It’s copacetic, sister. All I’m saying is, my buddy Jared is the one who gave him the info about that English teacher boning your little sis.” He snapped his fingers. “Shit, I know his name. It was all over the papers… you know, the dude who taught Shakespeare… Anders… Avery… Elway… damn it, it’s right on the tip of my tongue…”

  Evers. The blood drained away from Evangeline’s face, and she was suddenly hot, just absolutely on fire. How many times had the police been over to the house to question Maureen? And every time, Colleen and Augustus hovered around her, watching her closely. Evangeline had thought they were protecting her, but had they been coaching her?

  No. Charles would never.

  “Craig, mind your business. Gossip is for old women in sewing circles,” she snapped, but her mind was working, working around this new development, this new hitch in the plot. “Besides, Charles has bought coke from Ethan. He wouldn’t ruin a good thing.”

  “Unless he thought that good thing was ruining his little sister,” Craig said wisely, and she walked completely away from him then, without another word.

  Could it be true? Could Charles really be playing God behind the scenes, flexing his muscles to keep his sisters safe? She’d studied enough of the true crime sections in the newspaper to know that trouble often started at home. Occam’s razor worked especially well in solving murders.

  But how could Craig, whose last name she didn’t even know, be so sure of something that Evangeline had never even considered? How had she never heard any of this?

  She should have heeded his warning sooner. The threats started as whispers as people passed by her, but then one of the girls, one of Ethan’s favorites, cornered her late at night on a side street, with a switchblade. Serenity, she was called, but that wasn’t her real name. Evangeline never learned it.

  “We know what your brother did to Ethan.” Serenity’s hot breath burned her ears. Spittle dotted her flesh. “Bring a thousand dollars tomorrow or we’ll slit you tits to ass.”

  It was then Evangeline realized there were others, hovering in the shadows. Evangeline wasn’t afraid of one girl, switchblade or no, but she had no bravado about the odds of winning a fight against multiple assailants.

  Evangeline avoided going the next day, but they found her instead. She’d been fetching lunch for herself and Augustus down on Canal when Serenity
popped up behind her.

  “We haven’t forgotten, and you’re a day late. We know who your family is, and where to find them. Now, it’s two thousand. Tomorrow night.”

  Evangeline knew where to find the cash. Her mother socked it away in lumps throughout the house, and Evangeline had simply narrowed down the odds of where those places might be by assessing the known variables. The compartment holding the money must be small, but the place of hiding bigger, to avoid suspicion. She would not put it anywhere the kids would find it, but it also could not be anywhere as obvious as her underwear drawer.

  The stash had been peppered into canisters of the food that no one in the house dared eat. Oats, Tang, Spam. Evangeline found over twenty thousand dollars stashed away in forgotten food, so she knew exactly where to go, to pay off Serenity’s extortion.

  What other choice did she have? She ticked down the list of options as the two thousand dollars burned a hole in her jeans pocket.

  She could let Serenity murder her. Selfless, but not ideal.

  She could not go into town anymore, until everything died down. Not practical, and Serenity had inferred a threat against Evangeline’s siblings as an alternative.

  She could tell Charles and let the chips fall where they may. But she couldn’t even fathom that Charles might have already killed for them, and she might never sleep again if she confirmed it with her own request for help.

  Or she could pay Serenity and hope this went away.

  Even Evangeline knew that was unlikely, but she wouldn’t put her family in danger, and she wasn’t really cool about being murdered herself.

  Serenity took the money from Evangeline’s shaking hands with a nasty grin. “Smashing.” Her eyes glittered with excitement as she flipped through the stack of bills. “Now we want four.”

  “Four thousand?” Evangeline repeated. “Come on, I gave you what you wanted.”

  Serenity ran the cold steel blade, which was half-rusted now that Evangeline could see it closer, a fact that made the situation worse, for she calculated the increase in pain that would result in a faulty knife. They couldn’t even confront her with a proper weapon. “And you’ll keep doing it until we say otherwise.”