With the strain that his control was taking etched on his face, he clasped his hands around her middle and guided her down over his length. A path of fire burned up inside her. She whimpered as he kissed her and swallowed her sounds. He didn’t stop, didn’t give her a reprieve until he was buried so deep their groins pressed together.
“Doing okay, sweet girl?” he asked, nipping her bottom lip.
Her breath caught when he rolled his hips. Nothing would ever be okay again. How did she go back to normal after this?
“Fuck me,” she whispered.
When he moved, some of the discomfort lifted. Nerve endings came to life, making her need climb again.
More of the haze cleared from his eyes. “You’re tight, sweetness. How long has it been?”
She clenched her knees on his thighs and lifted herself before forcing down past the burn. New pleasure surfaced through the pain.
When he pressed a thumb on her clit, she opened her legs wider. She didn’t care about the stones and grass blades hurting her knees even through the protection of his coat. Their rocking was messy and rough, their timing somehow synchronized, because when her inner muscles tightened, his body went rigid.
“Jesus,” he said, throwing his head back with a groan as warm jets bathed her inside.
They rode it out together with her panting in his neck and him kissing the top of her head. It felt right. It felt shameless and beautiful, but then he lifted her and his release ran down her thighs.
She stilled.
What had they done? The heat evaporated, leaving her cold. She wasn’t on birth control. What about diseases? How could she have been so careless? Joss was drunk. She dragged her hands over her clammy face. Shit, shit, shit. She’d taken advantage of him.
Staggering to her feet, she scrambled around for her clothes. She wasn’t going to fall pregnant. She couldn’t. She’d barely finished her period. Still, she should’ve thought about a condom, not that she owned any. Shit! She’d fucked a man who’d come back to town with a woman. What if she took what belonged to someone else?
Damn her lust. It made her a despicable human being.
“Do not regret this,” he said in a deep voice, the slur more pronounced again, only making her feel guiltier. “What happens in the dark doesn’t count.”
She froze. Her heart cracked. Instead of offering absolution, the words cut deep. She stepped into her underwear and shorts before summoning the courage to face him again. He was still propped up against the rock, but he’d adjusted his clothes.
“Hey,” he said, his voice gentle. “Don’t look like that. It came out wrong. What I meant to say is you have nothing to feel guilty about. The responsibility is mine. I knew what I was doing. You, on the other hand—”
“I should call someone to come get you,” she said.
“You think I’ll let you go now?”
She hadn’t felt threatened until that moment. Taking a step back, she said, “I dreamt about you.”
“A nightmare?” He laughed at his own joke.
“You could say that.” A breeze lifted from the sea, carrying salty fog and a smell of rain. She rubbed her arms. “Why did you come back?”
He gripped her ankle, making her lose her balance, but before she could hit the ground, he caught her under her arms and draped her over his lap. “You’re going nowhere.”
She struggled in his grip. “Let me go!”
“Too late for that.”
What was this? A trap? Adrenaline coursed through her veins. She slapped his hands away, straining for distance.
“Keep still,” he hissed, pushing to his feet and lifting her with one arm as if she weighed nothing. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She clawed for freedom when he dropped her to her feet, her hand catching on a chain around his neck. She pushed hard, making him stumble backward. The chain snapped. She stood with it in her hand, staring at the crystal pendant for a second as he regained his balance only to trip sideways.
Snatching up her backpack, she sprinted through the field. Thorns caught her toes and polls of wild grass cut the sides of her feet, but she didn’t stop until she reached the fence. Only after she’d clambered over the gate did she look back over her shoulder. Joss’s body was a dark shape on the ground, passed out where he’d dropped.
She covered her mouth with a hand, trying to catch her breath and her bearings. What had he been talking about? What had he meant when he’d said he wouldn’t let her go? Goosebumps raced over her body. Hugging herself, she clenched her hands so hard the sharp edges of the crystal pushed painfully against her skin.
She opened her fist. A quartz stone on a silver chain lay in her palm. She should return it, but she wasn’t going back there. Shame heated her face. She’d already committed two unspeakable sins tonight, taking advantage of a drunk man and not insisting he clarified his relationship with the woman he brought to town. What was stealing a keepsake?
Unsettled, she walked back to the tourist office and washed away the evidence of sex on her thighs under the tap. By now, the last bus was long gone. She had no choice but to make it home on foot.
The road was dark and quiet when she set out, but the dark and quiet didn’t scare her. The van with the cleaning service logo parked in front of Joss’s abandoned childhood house did.
Chapter 3
By the time Clelia got home, it was late. She anchored the boat and dragged herself up the veranda steps. She was tired from walking for miles and her feet hurt, but that was nothing compared to the sting between her legs. Worse yet were the guilt and fear that wouldn’t let her go.
She took a moment to school her features before going inside. Erwan sat by the kitchen table smoking his pipe. This made her stop in her tracks. The last time he smoked in the house was when Tella, her grandmother, had passed away.
“Erwan?” she said in an unsteady voice.
Tripod looked up from his cushion by the stove and wagged his tail. From far away, Snow howled. In a distant corner of her mind, she registered how strange it was that Snow wasn’t by the door to greet her.
“We need to talk,” Erwan said, not meeting her eyes.
She rounded the table. “What’s going on?”
“What happened to you?” he asked when his gaze fell on her scraped knees.
“I tripped over a rock.” She waved the incident away, burying it deep down to mull over later. “Erwan, what’s the matter?”
“Do you remember the story I told you about your mother?”
Frowning, she sat down in the chair opposite him. “Yes.”
There was only one story he told about her mother, and that was how a Japanese fishing boat had docked in the harbor thirty-seven years ago and left a little girl behind, the girl Erwan and Tella had adopted and called Katik, her mother.
He looked at his hands. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
A part of her had always known there was more to the story, yet she didn’t want to hear what was coming.
“When the Japanese trawler docked in the Gulf, your mother must’ve been about six years old. There was no way of telling, since she didn’t speak. Obviously, she didn’t understand our language, but she didn’t say a word in any language.”
She sat quietly, afraid to make a sound.
“They found her alone on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and had to assume her parents, and whoever else she’d been with, had drowned in some accident. There were signs of a fire on board, and it was a wonder that she was still alive. There was no clue as to her identity, no papers, no evidence of another soul on that vessel. What happened was a mystery they never solved. They took her aboard and sailed with her as far as Brittany.”
When he didn’t continue for a while, Clelia said, “You saw her at the harbor and brought her home. You and Tella adopted her because you couldn’t have children.”
Erwan glanced at her. “It didn’t exactly happen like that.”
Her chest tightened. “How did it
happen?”
He cleared his throat. “The men wanted to get rid of your mother because she’d brought a curse onto the ship.”
“What curse?” she asked through dry lips.
“They said that since they’d rescued her, they didn’t catch a single fish. Overnight, their nets ran dry.”
“They wanted to leave her behind for that?”
“An empty net is a very powerful omen to a fisherman.”
It couldn’t have been only that. “There was something else, wasn’t there?”
He lifted his pipe and took a puff. After blowing out the smoke, he said, “They suddenly had a lot of inexplicable fires onboard.”
She gaped at him. “What?”
“Of course, the mayor at the time didn’t want to hear anything about a child being left behind with no passport and identity. Folks didn’t like the fishermen’s tales, but by sunrise the boat was gone, and the girl was found on the jetty in the harbor, alone. I took pity on her and brought her home where Tella fretted over the scrawny scrap of a person. She bathed her, fed her, and bundled her into bed.
“I immediately realized my mistake. By bringing the child here, I’d given Tella a taste of what she wanted most but didn’t have, and I knew it would be impossible for Tella to let the child go.”
He took a deep breath. “While the town council was trying to sort out the legal and administrative red tape of her fate, someone had to take care of her. Tella did it gladly, seeing that the other women were too superstitious and the only other appropriate candidate would’ve been the priest, but he was almost seventy years old and living alone, barely able to take care of himself.
“At first we thought she was deaf or mute because she didn’t react to anything we said. Tella was a clever woman though.” He smiled. “She persevered by talking to your mother and reading books to her in French and Breton. It took nine months, but one day Katik just opened her mouth and spoke a whole phrase in perfect French. For nearly a year, she’d only listened and observed, and when she finally spoke to us in our language, she didn’t even have an accent.
“By then, she’d gotten used to us and us to her, and God knows how, but we managed to get the legal paperwork done to adopt her. Tella’s family pulled some strings. Your grandmother’s father was, at the time, still very influential in government. Wasn’t easy, but we got it done. Tella was beside herself with joy, calling your mother a gift from God.” He kept quiet for a while.
“You say that as if it weren’t the case.”
“Things happened when Katik was around.”
“Such as?” Clelia asked when he fell silent again.
“Accidents. Bad harvests. Dry fishing seasons. Dead animals. Stillbirths with the sheep and cows.”
Clelia blinked. “Surely you weren’t superstitious enough to blame these things on a little girl?”
“We didn’t. Not at first.”
“What do you mean not at first?”
“There was something else.”
“Erwan, what was it?”
“There were fires.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. “The stories the fishermen told were true? She could spontaneously start fires?”
Even as she said it and saw the pieces coming together, she didn’t want to believe it. The fires she’d started when she was a child now made sense.
“Things combusted around her when she was angry or sad. Tella and I managed to keep it quiet, hide it from the people, and Tella taught her how to control her emotions until it stopped. It was never an easy road. The villagers don’t forget easily, and they didn’t forget what the Japanese men had said. Integrating her into the community was already tough. We didn’t need for everyone to learn their worst fears were true.
“Besides, Katik didn’t do it maliciously. The firestarting was an involuntary response triggered by a strong emotional reaction. For four years, we practically lived in isolation. Luckily, when she turned ten, the fires disappeared, and we never spoke of it again. The bad omens ceased. Everything went back to normal. We never told a soul.”
“Why didn’t you try to find out what was wrong with her? Why didn’t you try to get help?”
“Tella was worried they’d take Katik away from us. She loved her more than any biological mother could ever love her daughter.”
She covered her face with her hands. For years, she’d managed to ignore the facts even as people reminded her every time they called her a witch, but she couldn’t hide from the truth.
Taking a shaky breath, she asked, “Why are you telling me this after all this time?”
“Joss’s woman is going around the village asking questions about your mother. I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else.”
Joss’s woman. She went cold. Shit, she was a cheater. She was a horrible person. The guilt mixing with her anxiety about what Erwan had just told her made her feel sick.
“Why would she want to know about my mother?” Wait. “She thinks there’s a connection between me and the fires.” She stopped breathing. “What does Joss’s girlfriend have to do with it?”
“I don’t know, but if we stay here, we’ll soon find out. She came to the house tonight.”
Her heart jolted. “She spoke to you?”
He shook his head. “I was on the water. I saw her from the boat coming in and anchored in the cove behind the trees.”
“Did she see you?”
“Nay. The dogs made quite a show of protecting the property. She was preoccupied with not getting her throat ripped out.”
She looked around. “Where’s Snow? She didn’t hurt them, did she?”
“Nay.”
“Why did she come?”
“I don’t know. Maybe to ask more questions.”
“You think she’ll come back?”
“I know she will. She left a message on the phone, saying she’ll be back in the morning. From the look of her, I can tell you she’s not someone who’s going to back off.”
She neither wanted to face Joss’s girlfriend, nor talk about her mother. She also didn’t want to go to the police, but there was no other way.
“I have to turn myself in,” she said. “It’s the only way to get to the bottom of this. They can do tests or something, monitor my brain or whatever it is they do to determine if I did it, if I’m capable of doing it.”
“No!” He got to his feet so fast that his chair tipped back and hit the floor with a bang. “If you say anything about what I told you about your mother or what happened when you were just a toddler, you’re signing your death warrant. You didn’t start these fires. Turning yourself in isn’t going to help anything. People fear what they don’t understand. The police don’t know you. They don’t know you’re incapable of hurting a fly. You’ll be blamed, no matter how innocent you are. They’ll take you away. You’ll spend your life in jail or worse, an asylum. They’ll probe your brain and study you like a guinea pig. You don’t deserve that.”
“My mother did it. She started fires. I got it from her. Erwan, it could’ve been me. Without even knowing, I could’ve done it in my sleep. All of those fires were started at night, and we both know we can’t account for me having been in my bed, because I woke up all over the island.”
“I want you to go to Larmor-Baden tomorrow first thing. Take my boat and go to Île aux Moines. Under the big tree by the ruins, there’s a box with money and things you’ll need. I buried it by the protruding roots. You have to disappear for a while. You’ll know what to do when you get the box. You can’t speak to anyone about this. Don’t pack. Don’t take a suitcase that will attract attention and look suspicious. If someone sees you take the boat and asks where you’re going, say I’ve sent you to Port-Blanc for oysters.”
“You’re scaring me.” She jumped up and started pacing the room. “If I go, you go too. I won’t leave without you.”
“I can’t go with you. No matter what happens, I want you to get to that island.”
“
What will become of you?” she exclaimed. “I can’t run like a coward and leave you to fend for yourself. We have to go to the police. Surely they’ll see reason. We’ll handle this together. We’ll get a lawyer.”
Erwan rested his hands on the table, his shoulders hunched. “It’s not just them I’m worried about.”
Dread made her feel heavy. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s another part of the story about your mother that I haven’t told you.” He searched her eyes. “It’s about your father.”
“You said my mother had a holiday romance with an Italian tourist and fell pregnant, but he left her when the summer was over.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “but that isn’t entirely true. He was a tourist, and he was Italian, but they didn’t have a holiday romance.”
“What then? A one-night stand?”
“He violated her.”
“What?” She sat down again as the strength left her legs.
“Katik went for a swim at the cove and spent the afternoon on the deserted beach. When she walked home early that evening, she was assaulted in the woods. The man waited for her and surprised her.”
It took her a few seconds to find her voice again. “Did the police catch him?”
Erwan picked his chair up from the floor and sat down with a groan. “We didn’t know. She didn’t tell us. Not at first. She only confessed what happened when she found out she was pregnant.”
She felt nauseous. She was the product of rape, an unwanted baby, and the cause of her mother’s death. “How could you not tell me this before?”
“I didn’t want you to grow up feeling unwanted. I wanted you to know you were loved. Are loved.” He looked at her with a new intensity burning in his tired eyes. “When Katik was three months pregnant, I came home one afternoon and found a man standing on the beach. I’d never seen him before, so I thought he was just another foreigner, a holidaymaker. But he watched me as I anchored my boat, and by the time I had my nets on land, I knew he wasn’t an accidental traveler. He was waiting for me.
Pyromancist SECOND EDITION: Art of Fire (7 Forbidden Arts Book 1) Page 4
