We kept walking, ignoring it, but the feeling of a nail dragging down my spine could not be denied. My mouth went dry and I shivered.
The car crept forward and stopped beside us again.
We walked faster.
The car kept pace, and another glance in that direction still told me nothing. There was no interior light, and the damn streetlights were blown out for the next few hundred yards, making it impossible to discern any details.
Aidan’s fingers flexed at his sides. Shit, we weren’t going to fight someone with magic, were we?
My beast rumbled, low and deep inside me, as if to say, do you need me?
I swallowed it back down. Not yet. But stay close...
Yessss.
Look at me. So scared I was talking to myself.
The car pulled ahead and bumped up onto the sidewalk, cutting us off.
“Run,” I hissed, pivoting on my heel. But I came to a full stop when a voice called out.
“Hey, you guys. Get in.”
I spun. “Dad?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cece
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. We all stood in the rain and gawked at my father’s serious face, highlighted by the blue glow of the dash.
“Come on,” he said, his irritation growing. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Oh, I think we do,” I countered as I folded my arms across my chest. Just like when we were younger and our dad decided to pull rank, I glanced at Maddy to see how she was dealing. If she had a kryptonite equivalent, it was him, and I worried that not even her short stint in Wadsworth and everything that had happened there had been enough to rewire her triggers when it came to Dad.
She stared at him in silence, which was far from an ideal response.
“Celine, just get in—”
“I’ll get in when I know why you’re here, or better yet, how. Because while I believe in coincidences, Darren, this seems a bit too convenient to be one.”
“I’ll explain once we’re far from here,” he said, casting a nervous glance at the rearview mirror. “You’re in trouble—”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
His expression tightened as he glared back at me. “Did you know that an APB of sorts just went out from the Council regarding disturbing events at Wadsworth and the possible escape of some of its most violent and dangerous students?”
No. No, I didn't.
The rest of the group was silent, and I could only imagine what was going through their minds. I dared a glance at Aidan, but the cut of his sharp profile gave nothing away. Whatever he was thinking, he planned to keep it to himself.
I guessed it was my call to make.
“Get in,” I said, jerking my head at Dad’s car. I yanked open the passenger door, while the other four crammed into the back. Rhys scooped Maddy onto his lap to help make room, and his arms wrapped around her protectively, as though he knew what our father meant to her—what an absolute waste of space he’d been to her for her entire existence.
I liked him all the more for it.
My father put the car into drive and headed into the relative darkness of the narrow road ahead.
“So,” he said after a solid minute of silence, “you want to tell me what the hell is going on, or should I fill in the blanks for myself?”
“Go nuts. You’ve always been pretty solid at jumping to conclusions—”
“Dammit, Celine!” he shouted as he slammed his fist on the wheel. Fear flashed through me for a moment, but it was quickly eclipsed by anger wafting toward me from the back seat. I turned to find Maddy still staring ahead blankly, but Aidan had shifted closer behind my seat, his hand pressed against the back.
“I think what’s going on is pretty fucking obvious, Dad, but if you need me to spell it out, here goes nothing: we escaped Wadsworth because that place is sketchier than all hell and up to some seriously twisted shit.” Darren cursed under his breath. “So, this APB. Did it mention who to look for, or did you just assume it would be us?”
He cast me a dubious look across the darkened interior. “I know damn well that you got yourself thrown into that place just to get your sister out, Celine. It wasn’t a big leap to suspect that you would be involved in a breakout.” He looked over his shoulder. “I just didn’t expect you to have an entourage with you.”
“Oh, we’re not friends,” Sarah chimed in from the middle of the back seat. “I just used them to get out of that hellhole so I could portal my way back to Faerie. I’ll be headed there as soon as the rain clears. Portal magic doesn’t love inclement weather conditions...makes them a bit unpredictable, right, Aidan?”
Once again, Aidan remained eerily quiet.
“What about you boys?”
“Do you really need to play the role of concerned father right now?” I asked.
“I have a right to know who I’m aiding and abetting, Celine.”
I let out a harsh breath. “Fine. Rhys is Maddy’s boyfriend.”
Dad rolled his eyes as if to say, ‘of course she found a criminal to date’, then looked in the rearview at Aidan. “And the other one?”
“Oh, that’s Aidan. I punched him in the face the day we met, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”
“Of course you have,” he muttered under his breath.
“You know me, Dad. If there’s a bad boy within a ten-mile radius, I’ll find him and date him.”
Darren gripped the wheel tighter as he pulled up to a three-way intersection, one I recognized. But when he turned left rather than right, my hackles went up in an instant. In all my passive aggression and interrogation, I hadn't thought to ask where we were going.
And judging by the turn he’d made, it sure as hell wasn’t home.
“Where are we going?” Maddy asked from the back seat, her mind landing on the same disconcerting conclusion mine had.
“I can’t exactly take you home if the Council suspects you escaped the reformatory,” he said, as though that fact were plain. In fairness, I probably should have thought of that. “Before I left, I threw some provisions for the cabin into the trunk just in case you were on the run and I managed to find you—”
“How’d you happen to come by at the right time?” Rhys asked. Though his tone had been innocuous enough, I knew it was a cover. He was using his boy-next-door charm to get answers. I wondered if that was part of his magical skill set.
“Yeah, Dad ,” Maddy echoed. The note of hostility in her tone, combined with the friction of her angry energy against my skin, was oddly reassuring. Her muteness had been disconcerting, to say the least. I hoped to see a bit of the brave new beast she’d become emerge and address the elephant in the room—the father-sized one sitting directly in front of her. “It’s not like we live around the corner...”
I turned my body to face him and folded my arms over my chest. “I’d like to hear this story, too.”
“I wouldn’t,” Sarah groaned.
My father’s lips pressed to a thin line as he weathered our collective hostility, mine being shoved at him with all the force I could muster. Let him be uncomfortable, I thought. I didn’t give a shit. The question was more than legit, and as the hum of the tires on the two-lane road filled the silence, my suspicion increased. I had no doubt Rhys’s, Maddy’s, and Aidan’s did as well.
Sarah didn’t really seem to give a shit.
“Wadsworth is relatively remote, Celine,” he began, irritation dripping from his tone. “There is only one road that leads to it, and I couldn’t imagine that you, or anyone else, would brave the woods to the north of the property without provisions of any sort, and especially not in the rain. As soon as the APB went out, I threw together what I could and drove here.”
“When was the APB issued?” I asked.
His brow furrowed with thought. “Maybe a couple of hours ago?”
I dared a look back at Maddy. “That’s about the time the dance ended,” I said, careful not to disclose any details.
&nb
sp; “Dance?”
“Yeah, we had a party,” Maddy replied cautiously. “The headmaster threw it in honor of the Council’s visit. Hence the formal attire.”
When nobody offered more detail, my father began a parental interrogation.
“What happened? Something clearly went wrong. The bulletin mentioned murder, for Pete’s sake!”
“A Council member died. Things got crazy. We bailed in the chaos,” I said, as though it weren’t a big deal.
Darren’s incredulous expression said it most definitely was. “My God, Celine…what did you do?”
“Why do you assume it was me?” I cried, feigning affront. “A body drops, so your wild-child daughter, who doesn’t have offensive magic”— that you know of — “ must have done it? Thanks, Dad. And you wonder why I’d rather be put in Wadsworth than stay with you—”
“I did it,” Maddy said quietly from the back seat. My head whipped around to look at her, and our father’s did the same. Instead of keeping his eyes on the road, he glared at his youngest daughter he barely acknowledged. The car careened to the right, and I lunged for the wheel to steady it.
“Eyes up front!” I shouted. My father spun back and regained control of the car, but his gaze kept flickering to the rearview mirror and the girl straightening her spine to meet his judgment.
“I killed the councilman,” she continued, undaunted by our near-off-road extravaganza. “He tried to kill my friend—tortured him to get to me—so I shifted and took him out like he wasn’t even a challenge.”
I shot her a warning glance, and she nodded at the implications. Scaring Dad had its advantages, but oversharing was a bad idea. That said, it was hard to blame her for wanting to fuck with his head a bit. He deserved that and more.
I’d watch the Maddy payback show all day long, popcorn and soda in hand.
“You shifted—”
“You want to know the best part?” she asked, leaning forward to clutch the side of his seat. He stiffened. “I didn’t even hesitate. He threatened someone I cared about, and I just snapped. His life meant nothing to me at all.”
“Looks like you’ve raised yourself a cold-blooded killer, Darren,” Sarah mused from the middle seat. “You must be super proud.”
Dad remained silent as he turned onto a dirt road that I finally recognized, thanks to the fading storm. Then he cleared his throat and lifted his chin.
“We’ll deal with what happened at Wadsworth once you’re secure in the cabin. Until then, I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Like about the death room that nearly drained my life away when I ‘accidentally’ ended up in there due to a supposed clerical error?” I asked. “Or the kids sent there that never left because they, and their magic, were sacrificed to feed the wards—and something far worse?”
“We can talk about this when we get—”
“Something is totally fucked up with that place, Dad,” I shouted, leaning in closer, “and you still don’t care, do you? You let the Council take Maddy there! Did you know? Did you know what that place was like before you handed her over?”
“That’s enough, Celine.”
“I want to know—”
“I said, that’s enough!” he boomed, and a flash of magic illuminated the vehicle. He slammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to a halt. We all surged forward, our bodies jerking wildly. An aura of angry orange surrounded my father as he turned to me with embers burning in his eyes. I shrank back in my seat, a level of terror I’d never felt in his presence making its way to the surface. My father had never shown his true level of power to me in my life.
It didn’t look as though it would end well.
But before he could touch me, a tendril of black shot between the seats and pressed him back against the driver’s side door.
“Don’t. Touch. Her,” Aidan growled as he pushed Sarah into Maddy and Rhys. He inched slowly between the seats, his shoulder brushing mine. My father’s fire seemed all but snuffed out by the fey boy’s malum scariness, which made sense. Darren knew he had one malum in the car—one he thought he could cow—but he hadn’t banked on another.
One who didn’t seem super keen on my dad harming me.
“Release me—”
“ No .” My father fell silent at the word. Then another inky black appendage reached past and opened the car door. My father fell backward, arms scrambling for purchase until he crashed to the ground. Aidan climbed lithely through the narrow space into the driver’s seat, his magic still holding my father down. “Your ‘help’ stops here.”
My father’s murderous gaze snapped to the dark beyond the reach of the headlights, and he scampered to his feet, hands up in a defensive position.
“What the—”
“He thinks a kraken is coming for him,” Aidan explained once he’d slammed the door shut and thrown the car into reverse. Then he turned and winked at me. “Never underestimate the power of strong glamour.”
He hammered the gas, and dirt and dust kicked up in our wake as we hurtled backward to a place wide enough to turn the car around. Once he did, it was pedal-to-the-floor style driving by the fairy, who clearly had better eyesight and hand/eye coordination than I did.
“Dude,” Rhys called from the back seat, “wanna slow down a bit?”
“Do you want the Council to find us?” Aidan countered. “Because I have a sneaking suspicion that this cabin we were headed to likely wasn’t empty.”
“Too many coincidences,” I mused. Aidan looked over at me, his blue eyes still black as night, and nodded.
“Exactly. I was watching him the whole time, and something just seemed off. He was too calm. Too collected.”
“And a complete dick,” Maddy added. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Always.”
“Rhys, do you know how to navigate to your place from here?”
“I think so,” he said. He patted Maddy on the hip, and she scooted off him, shoving Sarah over behind me. Rhys leaned forward to look over Aidan’s shoulder. “If you can get me back to the vicinity of the main road to Wadsworth, I'll be good.”
“Or you could pull over and let Rhys handle his own shit while we go back to Faerie.” Sarah’s mood was starting to devolve, and I half expected her to start choking people sooner than later if she didn’t get her way.
Aidan gripped the wheel so tightly that it groaned under the pressure.
“It’s okay,” I said softly. “If...if you need to go, you should go.”
“See! Even the witch agrees.”
“We should stop and see what provisions your dad put in the back,” Rhys argued.
“Provided that wasn’t a total lie,” Maddy said. Her words made sense, if Aidan’s suspicions proved true.
Aidan pulled the car over into an overgrown logging road that hadn’t been used in forever and climbed out. The rest of us followed until we all stood behind the trunk.
“It’s not safe for you to come with me,” Aidan said, his eyes on the back of the car. “You can’t come with me...”
“As much as I would love to ditch the witch,” Sarah said, “I think you’re forgetting something.” She snatched my hand with the marking and held it up in front of Aidan as he popped the trunk. “You gave her a part of you with this, and you can’t return to Faerie unless all of you returns.” Realization dawned on Aidan’s face. “So the three of us are going,” she continued as the trunk opened, “like one big happy—” Her words cut short and her jaw dropped open as she stared into the dimly lit trunk. “Holy shit…is that...?”
Our collective gaze snapped to a blue tarp spattered with dark spots. It was wrapped haphazardly around an object that had been shoved in there—a rather large and lumpy object—about the size of a human body.
CHAPTER NINE
Maddy
I cringed, backing into Rhys. His arm went around me, and I didn’t miss how ragged his breathing was.
Cece’s pinched face must have been a reflection of mine.
Sarah scowled. “Well, this can’t be good…”
No. It wasn’t.
Sarah strode forward and ripped the blue tarp off, and... shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
Cece gasped and stumbled away. She pressed her fingers against her mouth, but the word still slipped out. “Dad...”
“It…” My gaze darted to the main road we’d turned off of. “But we were just in the car with Dad.” My belly hollowed out, creating a deep, black cavern. “This can’t be him! It has to be a trick, some kind of glamour.”
“But I don’t sense any glamour...” Aidan’s sad gaze met mine. He stepped forward and touched Dad—the corpse—feeling for a pulse for longer than most would. Shaking his head, he moved away.
“The guy driving the car wasn’t Dad,” Cece said, sounding strangely calm. “It felt like him...I didn’t even question it when I got in the car. But—”
“But what?” I asked.
She shook her head as she tried to process her thoughts. “I sensed things in the car...I couldn’t quite pin the feeling down. Something just felt off.” While her posture remained tight, her words stuttered out of her, and her chin trembled. Her eyes glistened in the low light from the trunk. “I can’t believe it wasn’t him.” Her voice rose to a shout. “It wasn’t him! Which means this,” her finger stabbed toward the body, “holy shit...this really is Dad.” When her knees started to give way, Aidan was there, grabbing her to hold her and add his strength to hers. “Dad’s dead, Maddy...” Her voice rose to that of the girl I’d grown up with. The child who’d once idolized her daddy. The girl who’d shone in his eyes more than anyone else in his world. Not the teen who’d learned to doubt him.
Gutted, I couldn’t say a thing. I wanted to scream, cry, or even run away. If I ran far enough, could I forget?
I’d never forget .
One thought kept hammering my mind. I’ve lost my chance …I’d known from the time I was ten that Dad would never look at me like he did my older sister, but he’d made the effort sometimes. He’d chipped out a tiny slice of his stone heart to give to me.
Rogue Reformatory: Breakout (Supernatural Misfits Academy Book 3) Page 6
