A Portrait of Pain

by Jane Washington

  “Shit,” Miro growled, the first to turn and grab at the door.

  He took the lead, stepping over inert bodies as we rushed in the opposite direction to the classroom, toward the side of the main campus. I chose not to look too closely at the fallen men. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t killed anyone, but I had intention on my side, and I had only intended to get them out of the way.

  Still … I didn’t want to confirm it one way or another.

  There were several ways to the sporting campus—one was to circle around the outside perimeter of the school, where the emergency personnel had amassed, and the other was through a network of covered walkways that bridged between buildings. We chose the second route, though we had to move slowly, checking around every corner before we ran and listening at every closed door before we barged through. We didn’t encounter any more people, and by the time we reached the pool room, my panic was almost choking me.

  Silas kicked the doors in, raining the entrance in shattered glass as the lock popped and one of the broken doors swung inwards.

  The pool was full.

  I ran toward it so fast that my feet slipped out from beneath me, losing traction against the wet tiles. Silas grabbed my hand before I flipped backwards, righting me again. I made it to the poolside, my eyes on the blond hair that matted against the surface of the water, moving gently. I dove in without even taking a proper breath, swimming over to her floating body. Her eyes were open, staring into mine, and I could still feel the echoes of her pain.

  We floated for a fraction of a moment, suspended in reality, dread clawing viciously through me, ripping out a hole in my chest.

  And then she blinked; once, slowly.

  The spell broken, I jerked forward, fusing my lips to hers. I held my hand over her nose, blowing air into her lungs. The body in my arms jerked, tugged downwards a little. I pulled back, my other hand covering her mouth, keeping the water from her lungs. Noah and Silas were beneath us, both gripping the rope that held Poison beneath the water, their feet planted on the tiles at the bottom of the pool. The rope was tied to some kind of weight. It took both men to lift it. When they pulled it up to waist-height, I was able to drag Poison’s head above the water.

  “Here!” Miro shouted, standing by the side of the pool, his arm outstretched.

  We needed to walk the weight over there before the guys ran out of breath. I pulled Poison’s head onto my shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that she was slumped and unmoving, and that I couldn’t tell whether she was breathing or not. Gradually, the weight beneath us began to move, and I swam with Poison above the surface. Cabe was looking from us, to the bottom of the pool, the uneasiness overtaking his face.

  “We need to untie her,” he eventually declared, diving into the water. He reached my side, and started tugging at her bound arms behind her back. “Do you have a knife?” he asked Miro, who didn’t seem to be getting closer fast enough.

  “Catch,” Miro answered, pulling a blade from some hidden pocket of his pants and tossing it, hilt-first, to Cabe.

  I winced as Cabe caught it, sure that he would accidently catch it on the wrong end, even though he didn’t. He started sawing at the rope, and I felt Poison’s body pull down a little bit. The weight was getting too much for them.

  “Hurry,” I urged Cabe, struggling to hold Poison up now against the weight pulling her back down.

  He managed to cut through the rope just before the weight pulled her below again, and Miro reached out at the same time, his fingers catching against the back of my shirt. He hauled me to the side of the pool as I kept my grip on Poison, and then he pulled us both out. We gathered around Poison as Noah and Silas broke the surface of the pool, cursing and struggling for breath.

  Her eyes were closed, her chest unmoving. She had never looked so vulnerable before in her life, the make-up washed from her face, her sleek hair matted around her head. She had fought against Danny—or whoever had put her in the pool. I could see the signs of it everywhere. Bruises and scratches and patches of missing hair.

  I was just about to ask the others if they knew how to perform CPR when her body jolted in a spasm, water leaking from her mouth.

  I quickly turned her on her side, allowing her to cough out the water, and then I pulled her into my arms.

  “If you almost die on me ever again I’m telling everyone your real name,” I threatened quietly, my voice trembling.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she croaked back.

  “He’s never going to touch you again.” Some of the fear broke out of me as I clutched her tighter.

  “No shit,” she grunted, half laughing, though the sound was pained. “I told him as much. Told him I was going to bond to you as well, just to piss him off. That’s probably why he tried to drown me, come to think of it.”

  I choked on a laugh, finally releasing her. She glanced from me to the guys, a sly smirk pulling up her bluish lips. “You know they’re never going to leave us alone again. You kissed me, in the pool. Consider us engaged. There’s no antidote for this poison.”

  “Why does she have to make our lives hell, even now?” Cabe asked, astounded.

  “Thanks, cousins,” she returned, her hand reaching out to his, her eyes flicking to the others. “Thanks for saving my life.”

  “Anytime.” Miro tried to look serious, but I could tell that he was torn between rolling his eyes and complaining along with Cabe.

  “It’s not over yet,” I quickly cut in. “You were only the first.”

  “Please don’t tell me.” Poison hung her head, the strain finally showing as she closed her eyes and winced against her indrawn breath. She suddenly looked like she was on the edge of fainting. “Who else did he take?”

  “Jayden. And … the college is rigged with explosives.”

  “Doesn’t he have any new tricks?” she complained. “Bad guys are supposed to be interesting at least.”

  “How about being buried alive?” I returned, helping her to her feet. She was hunched over, clutching her chest. Cabe hauled her other arm over his shoulder and we walked her out of the pool room.

  “He already did that,” she reminded me. “He buried Aiden.”

  “Not in a coffin, and not beside his sister’s dead body.”

  Everyone winced at once, but Poison looked like she wanted to throw up. “Okay, that’s new. Do you have any idea where they are?”

  “I’m going to have to figure it out,” I said, as we eased her onto a bench in the gym. “But first we should call Jack. I don’t know if we’ll get to the explosives in time.”

  I spotted the book Danny had given me as I sat next to Poison. It was lying amid the broken glass at the entrance to the pool room. There had probably been a rhyme scrawled across the page that examined the architecture of the college’s sporting center, or maybe even the pool-room itself.

  “It’ll be in there,” I said, pointing to the book.

  Noah stepped across the glass and picked it up, slapping it against the broken frame of the door to dislodge the glass from the cover. “What’ll be in here?” he asked. “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “Danny might not realise he has a pattern, but he isn’t your average, urge-driven serial killer. He’s killing for emotional reasons. Tying Poison up in the pool? It’s exactly what he did to Eva. And when we were younger, he killed all those people in the institute after Eva flooded the room with water. He was making an association without even realising it. So Jayden’s somewhere here. Somewhere on these grounds … but somewhere that means something to Danny.”

  “So what does he associate with burying people?” Cabe asked.

  I frowned, thinking back to the plaguing sensation of fighting for air, little by little, and Danny’s words from the library came back to me, chilling with clarity.

  I can cut off the air to their lungs, feeding them only a little …

  “It’s not about being buried,” I heard myself say. “It’s about being trapped. Being suffocated. He used
to feel that way when he got in his moods when we were little. It was like a switch. He would black out, and something would die. It was just animals, at first, but he started injuring people too. It was like something else took control of his body, and he could only watch it all happening, trapped in this little box inside of himself.”

  “So he likes to trap people. Confine them,” Miro surmised. “If he’s buried Jayden alive …”

  “Here,” Noah interrupted, dropping the book down on the bench next to Poison. We all turned to the page that he had found. I stared at the image of trees climbing up the mountainside, concealing the buildings of Hollow Valley University—the colours were all blending in together, making it almost impossible to discern what was man-made, and what was landscape.

  Using the Natural Surrounds: Acts of Illusion, the title read.

  We all swore at once.

  “He couldn’t have just made it simple?” Silas growled.

  “The other page was simple,” Noah said, flipping a few pages back, to an illustration of the pool room.

  The rhyme scribbled across the bottom of the page was: All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put her together again …

  “Wrong again, asshole,” Poison muttered. “They put me together again just fine.”

  I shook my head at her, flicking back to the page on illusion. The message was clear: it was a giant slap in the face.

  I thought that he would hide both Poison and Jayden at the school, but that just proved how willing I was to underestimate Danny. I could just imagine his cruel smile as he laughed at me, those dead eyes looking at me with the knowledge of someone’s imminent death.

  I glanced at the rhyme along the bottom of the ‘illusion’ page.

  Five little monkeys walked along a whore.

  “Walked along a whore?” I asked, making sure that I was reading it right. “That should say shore.”

  “Well it says whore,” Poison muttered.

  I turned the pages back to the first scribble, tapping the word ‘her.’ “This is wrong, too. It’s supposed to say Humpty here.”

  “Should we really be nit-picking his choice of words right now?” Poison asked, as Miro took the book off the bench, switching his attention between the two different pages. I could see his lips forming the words as he read them over and over again.

  “We need to figure out where he has Jayden,” Cabe answered her. “And so far, the only clue we have is this stupid book.”

  “That was his favourite,” I heard myself whispering, my head falling into my hands, the weight of our task settling over my shoulders. I could still feel Jayden’s horrible death. Five hours of slow, agonising suffering, his only companion the corpse of his sister. “Five little monkeys walked along a shore …”

  “Tell me a story,” he demanded, his face looming closer to mine.

  The memory hit me with a sharp slap to the face, and I dug my fingers into my skull, fighting it off … but I was weak. I had overused my power, and lived through so much torture, so many deaths. In the end, the memory won.

  “Five little monkeys walked along a shore,” I started, my voice shaking with the tears that threatened. “One went a-sailing, then there were four. Four little monkeys climbed up a tree; one of them tumbled down and then there were three.”

  He stared as I recited, but the rhyme didn’t seem to calm him as much as it used to. He was fixated on the trail of blood, and the more I spoke, the closer he loomed. I wavered, and he smashed his palm into the other side of my face, grinding dirt and rocks and grass into my other cheek. I whimpered in pain, begging him to stop, but he was too far gone.

  “More,” he demanded.

  “Three little monkeys found a pot of glue; one got stuck in it, then there were two. Two little monkeys found a currant bun; one ran away with it, then there was—”

  “No,” he suddenly interrupted, pulling away from me. “No, Lela, you’ll never be alone.” He wiped at the frantic tears that slid down my cheeks, smudging dirt and blood everywhere, and then his head was in my lap and the heaving sobs were tearing through him.

  “Kingsling,” Miro suddenly announced, breaking me out of my thoughts. We all glanced up at him, and he shoved the book outward, flipping to the first rhyme and tapping on it. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put her together again,” he read out, before turning to the second rhyme and reciting, “Five little monkeys walked along a whore.”

  “And you got Kingsling from that how?” I managed.

  “There was another death,” he answered, closing the book. “Another step in the puzzle. Maybe this was his backup plan, or maybe he knew that it would come to this. That you would run when the news broke out, and that he would need to draw you back here.”

  “Who is the other death?” Poison asked, as my brow pulled together in confusion.

  “Amber Kingsling,” Silas muttered. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put her back together again … because she died weeks ago. And ‘five little monkeys walked along a whore’ is us …”

  “Walking over her gravestone,” I finished, jumping up from the bench. “Because her and Eva must be buried in the same cemetery.”

  “Holy crap, that is messed up,” Poison moaned, looking nauseous again.

  I paused, exactly what he had said finally catching up to me. I glanced at each of their faces. Poison was the only one who seemed shocked. Silas and Miro weren’t the only ones who knew about Amber’s death. The others had known about it too.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I questioned, crossing my arms over my chest. Somewhere deep inside, I felt a pang of fresh pain.

  Cabe and Noah winced, while Miro rubbed a spot over his heart. Silas was suddenly before me, crowding me. His hand laced around the back of my neck, his eyes pulling me in.

  “He had cut a rhyme into her corpse. He wanted us to tell you about it. That’s why he did it—that’s why he does everything—for the simple pleasure of causing you pain. You didn’t need the extra complication right at that time. We would have told you eventually, but there’s only so much you can deal with and you were already acting strange.”

  “I was pretending to be happy.” I heard the words as they came out of my mouth, but it felt like someone else had said them.

  I blinked, surprised, and Silas tightened his grip on my neck, drawing me up and stepping into the front of my body. His other hand gripped my hip, our wet clothes sticking together.

  “You’re going to be happy again,” he whispered against my ear. He sounded … sure.

  I quickly hugged my arms around his shoulders, burying my face into his neck. I was trembling suddenly, the shock deciding to use that moment to release its repercussions on my body.

  Both of his hands dropped to my legs, pulling them around his waist. He jostled me up, angling one arm beneath my thighs as he held me there.

  “Let’s go,” he announced. “As soon as we find Amber’s gravesite, we find Jayden.”

  “I’m going to talk to Andre,” I said.

  “Like hell you are,” Noah returned, speaking over my shoulder.

  We had paused at the edge of the forest stepping back down the mountainside. I wasn’t sure why we all paused. Maybe we each had a different reason. Poison was staring at a small group of people huddled by an ambulance. I recognised Charles, his head in his hands, his strangely blank eyes hidden. Miro and Silas were both staring down Andre, who stood only a few feet away from the ambulance. There was an armoured vehicle parked in the middle of the road leading down the hill. It was all black, with no logos or anything identifiable to mark it. There were two drivers in the front, almost invisible behind windows tinted dark enough to blank out their features. There were at least six other men standing around the vehicle, all dressed similarly to Andre and armed to the teeth. Andre must have been in some kind of special forces unit—but that wasn’t surprising, given that the officers and other officials that we had encount
ered had all deferred to him for some kind of leadership.

  Noah and Cabe had only turned to stare back toward the college because I had, but now that they were realising my intentions, both had a firm grip on my arms.

  Andre glanced up from his conversation, his ice-blue eyes focusing on us. His expression didn’t change, but he kept his stare on us even as he carried on his conversation.

  “I’m going,” I announced, my mind made up.

  I broke free of Noah and Cabe, grabbing Poison’s hand as I passed her and dragging her clear out of the trees. Behind me, a slew of curses beat against my back, but they followed. They would never let me go on my own. Andre watched as we drew closer, before finally cutting off the man he had been speaking to, walking around him to meet us right before the armoured vehicle. Poison—silent, so far—suddenly pulled away, marching over to the group of students. I watched as she slammed her open palm against Charles’s shoulder, shocking his head up with a snap.

  “You idiot!” she yelled into his face.

  “Whoa,” Cabe muttered, as we all were momentarily distracted by the scene. “That’s kind of harsh.”

  Charles blinked once, and then surged to his feet, pulling Poison into his arms. She struggled almost violently, but he was surprisingly strong, and eventually she sagged against him, her arms slipping around his waist. She started sobbing, and my mouth fell open. He threaded his hand into her hair, holding her against his chest, and I watched as he whispered something against her temple.

  “You’re an idiot,” she reiterated, her voice loud enough to carry to us.

  “I take it you want me to look after her,” Andre finally spoke, turning away from them.

  “Yes,” Miro announced, stepping in front of me. It was rare for him to silence me in any way, so I assumed it was for a good reason.

  Noah and Cabe recaptured me, and I found myself in the center of a very tight circle of bodies, with Noah and Cabe partly behind me and Silas and Miro in front of me. I could now only see half of Andre’s face, between Miro and Silas’s shoulders. He seemed to be locked into some kind of glaring contest with Miro.