The front door opened with a gust of air and heavy rain that indicated the wind had picked up since I arrived. The weather did change quickly on the West Coast. I lowered my five-page plastic menu and looked toward the door, expecting to greet Beau with a big smile.
He’d be wet from the rain, like he had been the first time I laid eyes on him …
It wasn’t Beau.
A dark-haired, dark-suited man walked through the entrance with not a drop of rain on him. He scanned the room, then looked directly at me. He was carrying a black leather art portfolio that was a twin to mine in size, but of more expensive quality.
My heart stopped — literally.
I couldn’t breathe.
Then, my pulse started hammering frantically in my chest, making up for the lost beats and then some.
The wind from before inexplicably rushed through the room, blowing my hair back, tingling across the exposed skin of my face and hands, and plugging my ears, as if the altitude had suddenly changed. Then the gust subsided as quickly as it had come.
“Can I help you?” the host asked. But she wasn’t speaking to the dark-suited man, who strode by her as if she didn’t exist, his gaze still locked to mine.
“Yeah,” a man answered. “A seat at the bar there and a beer would do.”
I tore my gaze away from the dark figure walking toward me to see Hoyt grinning at me as he moved toward the bar.
Hoyt from Vancouver. Hoyt who’d spoken to me in the alley behind the Residence. Hoyt who I’d seen in Long Beach.
Hoyt was here with the dark-suited man from my hallucinations.
“No headache,” I whispered. “No white light. No warning.”
Oh, God. I was hallucinating in the middle of the restaurant and … and … my hallucinations could see me, could move toward me as if to start a conversation. That was not good. That was a terrifying progression of my condition.
Desperate and trying to hide it — I had years of experience hiding the hallucinations — I reached for my bag. I’d grabbed it from the Brave because Beau had reminded me of the cell phone, but it also held my sketchbook.
The dark-suited man stopped beside my table. “Lovely view, even on a cloudy evening,” he said as he gazed out at the pounding surf beyond the window. “Quaint town. Though it doesn’t suit you at all.” He had an accent. Not British but something close.
I ignored him as I placed my sketchbook on the table. I flipped it open to a blank page as I dug deeper into my bag for charcoal.
“Ah, you’re going to sketch. Perfect,” he said. “May I join you?”
I shook my head, too frantically for my own slipping sanity. I was letting him in. I was acknowledging him. I shouldn’t acknowledge him, right?
Right?
I didn’t know anything about my own brain anymore.
My hand closed around a bottle of my pills instead of the charcoal I was seeking. Brilliant. I was still riding the fumes of the last two I’d taken, but I would willingly overdose to get him out of my head.
I pulled the bottle out of my bag.
“Don’t,” he hissed, sliding into the booth seat across from me.
I popped the lid off the bottle.
He snatched it from me.
The pills flew into the air, scattering over the table, seat, and floor.
Oh, God, oh, God. How could he touch me? This was not happening. This couldn’t be happening.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he swept the pills on the table toward him. “I need you sharp. From Hoyt’s recounting, these pills dampen your sight.”
He lifted the portfolio he’d been carrying onto the table and unzipped it.
Just get up and leave. Just leave.
Hoyt might be part of the delusion, but Beau had chosen the restaurant.
And Beau was real.
So just get up and leave.
The dark-suited man opened the portfolio. It contained easily a dozen of my original sketches. Sketches that I’d sold through my Etsy shop. Sketches ranging back years that featured him or his amulet. It was odd to see how my style had refined and sharpened from the first few to the newer drawings of him and the golden-haired woman in the castle. These were from my hallucinations last fall.
“I had a difficult time acquiring some of these. Your fans are ardent,” he said. “But I’m a collector. I’m rather good at it. Money always motivates, and money means nothing to me.”
He paused to let me speak, to let me react.
I didn’t.
“North America is not the best place for me to set foot these days,” he continued. “But for you, Rochelle Hawthorne, I would risk more than this.”
I locked my gaze to his. He smiled at me, closed-lipped and full of satisfaction.
“What did you call me?”
“Your name, of course. I’m Mot Blackwell, sorcerer, of Blackness Castle, Scotland.”
“My name is Rochelle Saintpaul.”
He snorted. “That’s your human name. You’re a Hawthorne. By your looks and your power, you could be none other.”
I stared at him, mouth agape. All my fear was quashed for the moment by the information this man offered with utter confidence.
“I have questions for you.” He swept his hand over the sketches in his portfolio. “And with you out of Vancouver, away from the reach of the Godfrey witches and Jade’s magnificent senses and overblown righteousness, this seemed like the perfect time to ask them.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, of course you don’t.” His tone was smooth and cultured. “Please excuse me. Such things are not germane to our conversation.”
“I’m not talking to you,” I said. I glanced around the restaurant. No one was looking at us. The waitress hadn’t returned to the table with the water I’d asked for.
“Oh, them?” he asked. “They can’t see or hear us, Rochelle. Well, Hoyt can, but he’s done his job. Rather well. Thankfully, he’s as proficient at tracking spells as he is with his inspired curses. Though I understand you almost gave him the slip in your new home.”
He smiled again, baring his teeth this time, but his eyes were dark, joyless pits.
Fear curled in my belly. Jesus, my mind was wicked. Brilliant but wicked. To have conjured someone so complex, as compelling and terrifying as him … Blackwell. The name suited him perfectly. Mot Blackwell, the sorcerer of Blackness Castle, Scotland. It was as simple as a children’s story. I had no idea why I hadn’t named him until tonight. I’d been hallucinating him since I was thirteen, after all.
I started digging through my bag again. I knew I had a piece of charcoal. If I could just draw him, sitting like that across from me with the top button undone on his crisp white dress shirt. If I could capture his black hair and dark eyes, both darker than they’d ever seemed to me before. But then, he was usually accompanied by a wash of white light.
He sighed. “Your way then,” he said.
He closed and carefully lifted the portfolio off the table to place it to the side of his booth seat.
He pulled a golden disk out of his pocket.
It looked like a spinning top. A child’s toy, but cast in gold and dotted along the top edge with tiny stones that resembled the large stone on my mother’s necklace.
“I will have my questions answered,” he said. “You will tell me what you see. Why you draw what you draw. And what other futures lie within your mind.”
He set the top on the table and gave it a spin, turning it into a blur of gold.
Then, with a flick from his fingers, it shot across the table to spin directly before me.
I lifted my hands away from it.
A bundle of pain formed at the base of my skull, a malignant pulse sitting just at the tip of my very top vertebra.
Oh, God. No.
Having him sitting before me, talking to me, was bad enough. I didn’t need the pain or the headache retroactively as
well.
White mist edged my vision. I grabbed my bag and lunged away from the table as the hallucination hit me harder and quicker than it ever had before.
I screamed, arching backward and then convulsing with the pain of it.
Blackwell was touching me. He shouldn’t be touching me, but for a moment I couldn’t remember why.
He shouldn’t be able to touch me.
Electrical shocks ran up over my shoulders from where he grasped my upper arms. He settled me back onto the vinyl seat.
“What is it?” he hissed. “Are you in pain? There shouldn’t be pain.”
Unable to see with my own eyes, I scrambled away from him, pushing back into the booth. My spine dug into the low sill of the window frame — the window through which I’d just been gazing at the white surf crashing over the dark, sandy beach.
I tried to hang onto that image, and to the sharp pain of the wood grinding against my arched spine. The restaurant had to be real — even if Hoyt and Blackwell weren’t — because Beau was meeting me here.
Then I was drowning.
No … she was drowning. She just didn’t know it yet. She was surrounded in every direction by blue … crystal-clear sea-blue water … her curls were floating all around her head in a halo of gold. She looked as if she was sleeping. Except she shouldn’t be sleeping underwater.
She was drowning in my mind.
“Drowning,” I cried. “Wake up!”
“Drowning?” Blackwell asked. “Me? Where? When?”
His tone was eager and edged in darkness, like the junkies I’d seen every day on the streets of the Downtown Eastside after I’d moved into the Residence. The ones who refused food. Who sneered when I tried to help.
“Not you,” I said, not knowing why I was answering him. Just that I felt compelled to do so. “Blond, curls. Usually carries a green knife.”
In my mind, the blond opened her indigo eyes. They were a deeper blue than the ocean surrounding her. She looked frantically around, little bubbles forming at the edges of her nostrils. Then she started to panic.
My heart rate ramped up until I thought I’d pass out. I was gripping the top edge of the booth with one hand and clutching my bag to my chest with the other.
“Jade Godfrey,” Blackwell sneered. I could feel him lean closer across the table to whisper intently, “And what is the warrior’s daughter after now?”
“Jade Godfrey,” I whispered, accepting Blackwell’s offering of the name without question. “Jade Godfrey is going to die.”
Blackwell snorted. “Jade Godfrey is notoriously difficult to kill. Unless she has a thousand-pound weight tied to her leg, I doubt she’ll be drowning anytime soon. Now, what is she holding? Besides the knife, the necklace, and the sword? What treasure has Jade risked drowning to collect?”
The necklace. How had I never noticed the necklace the blond — Jade — wore? It was a gold chain with what appeared to be at least a dozen wedding rings attached to it. She wore it wound three times around her neck.
I had a necklace too.
Instead of answering Blackwell, I thrust my hand into my bag and yanked out my mother’s necklace. The pain in my head eased.
“What is this pretty thing?” Blackwell murmured. “Its magic doesn’t belong to you.”
I clutched the necklace against my chest and curled away from him.
Then the door to the restaurant crashed open. But it wasn’t the wind that threw it.
I felt, rather than saw, Blackwell turn to look back over his shoulder.
“Not your business, man.” It was Hoyt speaking, still somewhere off to the left.
“What are you doing?” a deep voice growled. I’d never heard anyone sound so fierce.
I opened my eyes, not realizing I’d had them screwed shut. The top was still spinning before me. Blackwell had turned to face the front door.
“Beau …” I cried.
He was striding through the restaurant. His voice had pulled me out of the hallucination, though the headache was still shredding my brain.
Relief flooded across my chest and out through my limbs, freeing them, allowing me to move.
Then I saw Hoyt dogging Beau’s heels.
“Back off, big guy,” the skinny stalker said. He grabbed for Beau’s arm.
Hoyt — who was a figment of my imagination — could touch Beau.
My stomach bottomed out.
Beau shook him off with no apparent effort, but Hoyt went flying as if he’d been thrown. He crashed against the empty table one back and to the left of mine.
“Hoyt,” Blackwell called sharply. “We don’t want any trouble.”
Beau stepped up to the booth, and then swayed back as if buffeted by a wind that I couldn’t feel. His eyes were fixed to the spinning top on the table, his beautiful face marred with a fierce frown. He reached for me and I flinched away from him, then he turned on Blackwell with a snarl.
“Who are you?” he asked. “And what is that?” He jabbed a finger toward the spinning top.
“Nothing,” Blackwell answered, smoothly and completely in control. “A helping hand. Rochelle and I are just having a chat.”
Beau lifted his gaze to me. His eyes were brilliantly green. Glowing, actually. He looked wild, feral. “Are you okay?” His voice was throaty, edged with a growl.
“You can see him?” I could hear the panic in my voice. If Beau could see what I could see then … then … he was part of the hallucination.
“Are you okay?” he asked again.
I shook my head. “No,” I answered, again feeling strangely compelled to respond.
Beau frowned, and looked down at his hand. It was covered in orange-black fur, and clawed. He shook it, as if this motion would cause it to revert to its normal state. It didn’t.
I moaned. What fresh hell was this? I couldn’t handle anymore.
“I asked you what that device was!” Beau shouted. He turned toward Blackwell, then hunched over as if in pain.
“Control yourself, shifter,” Blackwell said. “We don’t need an incident here. I’ve laid distraction and barrier spells, but —”
“No sorcerer tells me what to do,” Beau spat.
“I was unaware that Rochelle was under the protection of the pack,” Blackwell said. “I meant no disrespect. I would have gone through proper channels —”
Beau smashed his clawed hand down on the spinning top, crushing it and cracking the table in two.
I screamed and scrambled up, going over the booth seat and onto the table behind me.
None of the other customers or the staff in the restaurant seemed to notice that anything unusual was going on.
Blackwell was standing three feet behind Beau, closer to the exit. I hadn’t seen him move.
Beau reached down for the broken table and grabbed its edges. Then he wrenched it — steel bolted center leg and all — out of the floor. His face didn’t look right. It was stretched and too angular.
“It’s all in my head,” I murmured. “All in my head.”
Beau twisted as if to throw the table at Blackwell.
But Hoyt, who was now standing to the left of Beau — in front of the bar and between the row of booths across from the window — threw one of his ball bearings.
The silver sphere flashed, streaking the air between him and Beau in a low, arcing line.
I tried to scream, but couldn’t form words. My broken brain was controlling the scene before me, but I obviously wasn’t allowed to alter the events as they were unfolding.
The silver ball struck Beau.
He cried out and dropped the table. Stumbling back, he fell to one knee beside the table on which I was still standing.
“Stop it!” I screamed, wresting control of my throat and vocal cords from my malignant mind.
Blackwell stepped forward, but whether he was attacking Beau or trying to help, I had no idea.
Putting all my weight into the bl
ow, I slapped him across the face. I nearly toppled off the table in order to do so.
The sorcerer flinched away, pressing his hand to his cheek.
All the bones in my left hand ached as I solidified my footing and pulled my arm back to hit him again.
Blackwell shook his head as if he was trying to clear it. Then, he looked at me, utterly shocked but not at all physically hurt. A wicked smile spread across his face. It was the most genuine emotion I’d seen from him yet.
“I’d listen to her, Hoyt. She packs quite a psychic punch,” he said. “I don’t think you would like it.” He backed off another few feet, standing beside diners who continued to obliviously consume their desserts. He held his hands up, palms toward Beau and me.
Beau was hunched over, holding his chest and panting in pain beside me.
“The shifter is young,” Blackwell said. “He simply got caught in the spell of the amplifier. I’m sure he will get himself under control. The pack frowns upon public displays.” That last part was directed to Beau, not Hoyt, as if in some sort of warning.
Keeping his gaze locked on Beau, the self-proclaimed sorcerer stepped forward again and picked up the crushed golden top where it had fallen to the floor. He didn’t look pleased as he tucked the ruined ‘amplifier,’ as he’d called it, into his pocket. At least I think that was what he’d been referring to.
Beau straightened with some effort. The front of his black T-shirt looked melted. The skin underneath was burned, dark reddish-pink and oozing.
I cried out.
He turned and looked at me. His face wasn’t his own anymore. It was a fearsome blend of man and beast. His cheekbones were too broad. His forehead rounded into his nose. And his teeth … he was double fanged, like a cat. A cat with three-inch incisors.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the fangs hampering his speech. “I should have told you sooner.” Then he turned his fiercely glowing green eyes on Hoyt. “Spellcurser,” he spat.
Hoyt, still between the bar and the first row of tables, was rolling a couple more of his silver ball bearings in both hands. He grinned at Beau. “Sorry, cat,” he said. “Didn’t mean to hit you so hard.”
Beau charged him, leaping up and over the booth in front of him. He moved so quickly that Hoyt barely had time to hit him with two more of the silver balls. Beau shrieked in pain, the sound completely inhuman to my ears. He landed half off his feet but managed to backhand Hoyt into and over the bar as he collapsed.
I See Me (Oracle Book 1) Page 11
