Phantom Eyes

by Scott Tracey

  Matthias crouched down to where the barghest had Ben pinned and casually tucked a strand of his hair out of his face. “You’re going to forget this little vengeance quest of yours. The boy is off-limits. Besides, we both know that you’ve got another weakness.”

  The rage on Ben’s face only magnified. “You wouldn’t touch him.”

  Matthias raised a shoulder in a half shrug. “Wouldn’t I? I care very little either way. So unpredictable, you boys with your mercurial minds. Wouldn’t the city be safer without such a threat?”

  “I’ll back off,” Ben said quickly. “Just leave him out of this.”

  “Crawl back in your grave,” Matthias said, his voice growing harsh. “Or go beg a witch to return you to your repose. Catherine’s always willing to do you a favor, isn’t she?”

  Ben’s rage surged again and he tried to push himself back up, but the barghest was like a lead weight on his chest. As Matthias stood and turned, the boy’s eyes shot to me again. It was clear that no matter what Ben said, this wasn’t over. He’d come back. It was only a matter of time.

  I started shivering, crawling in on myself as much as I could. It caused Matthias to look up, his expression annoyed. “You’re going into shock,” he announced, coming back to where I lay on the ground. “I suppose you want me to burp you, too? Tell you a bedtime story, perhaps?”

  “I wouldn’t mind if you went and fucked right off,” I said, as my teeth started chattering. I hadn’t noticed the temperature before, but suddenly November in Belle Dam was seeping into my bones like a toxin.

  “I’m still in play,” I said, repeating his words back to him. “If I die, you get nothing.”

  “Spare me the histrionics,” Matthias replied, striding towards us. “When you have to choose, simply choose to live. Simple.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “It doesn’t?” Matthias looked positively dumbstruck. “I suppose that explains a bit. I never understood why people would choose to die, especially not when they look so ravaged and sagging.” The demon glanced down at me, and he took a deep breath. He looked uncertain. Maybe even a little nervous. “Some lesser minds might choose to blame me for what happened to your family. I bore you no malice.” It was hard to say if Matthias looked uncomfortable or if his grimace was about having to talk about it. Feelings, eww. “I would not be punished for the actions of another. Let the blame hang solely around his neck so that he might choke on it.”

  He wanted forgiveness? Matthias was the reason Lucien had found those girls to hurt in the first place. He’d practically braided Lucien’s hair while he set about trying to pull himself back together. But no, that wasn’t right. Even as cloudy as my mind was, and despite all the pain I was in, Belle Dam had sharpened my mind too much to ignore what had happened here tonight. Grace had pulled me away for a pleasant conversation. Matthias thought I was still a game piece to be played. The city wasn’t done with me yet. But without my power, I wasn’t capable of doing anything. Unless that meant …

  The hole in my chest where my magic had been was suddenly an aviary, a thousand flapping wings brushing up against the sides of the void. It was like a rush of excitement, but muted. Something’s happening. I didn’t know where, and I didn’t know what, but something on the other side of the city was in flux, and it had to do with me.

  A crown of sorrows milky white weddings ravish and spinning the beginning of the world sisters till the end her empty eyes shocked brown like ground underneath the strikes of lightning. And then Grace’s face. Grace’s voice. Grace’s magic. “Find a way to make it work. Or I’ll feed you to the Rider next.”

  As the feeling faded and I dropped back into awareness of my ravaged body, I shook my head as best I could. The pain wasn’t so bad now. For a moment. “No,” I moaned, “No chance.” Matthias was indirectly responsible for John’s death. He’d helped Lucien, and Lucien had killed my uncle. None of that would have happened if Matthias had stayed out of it. But there was more to it than that. I wouldn’t let him dictate the terms.

  “You’re dying,” the demon said, leaning into my field of vision. “Now is not the time for misplaced pride. This isn’t like the times before, where the same power that was killing you was also keeping you alive. You’re an empty vessel now. Fate has washed its hands of you.” And then he smiled, and it was terrifying. “What better time for a resurrection?”

  “Immunity,” I agreed. “But you’ll … owe me a favor,” I managed to say between heaving breaths that didn’t do any good.

  Matthias looked down at me, and I got the distinct impression that he was passing judgment on me even now. Weighing my life against his potential gains. He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I’m not that foolish. Owing you a favor would make my life … complicated. I prefer simplicity. You will owe me a favor.”

  “Fine.” I wiped away the blood that was trailing down my forehead, only managing to smear it into my hair. “We’ll shake on it.”

  “You’re a devious little biped, aren’t you?” Matthias said slowly, a smile curling around the corners of his mouth. I knew I had him then, and collapsed back onto the ground. He crouched down over top of me, hand poised over my chest. “I can’t promise this won’t hurt.”

  One moment I was dying, and the next moment I was dying. Black lightning poured into my veins and tore each one of them to shreds. I collapsed into a hundred thousand pieces, and each piece was an unbearable agony. My body getting charred and splintered apart, and the liquid fire I was drowning in, was nowhere near as painful as the bubbling green acid flowing through my veins.

  I screamed. And screamed. And somewhere in the midst of the pain, somewhere far beyond my mind and sanity, there was a moment. A single, crystallized moment buried underneath layers of loathing, rage, and desperation.

  I was going to live. And if I was going to live, I damn well was going to take back everything that was mine and take them all down. I was done being the victim. I was done letting everyone else pull my strings.

  They wanted a weapon?

  I’d give them a war.

  four

  I woke up sometime just after dawn on a lounge chair behind the house. A giant blue tarp lay discarded at my feet, emphasizing the line of flattened grass and groove lines in the dirt that suggested something—most likely me—had been dragged out of the woods.

  Nice to see that I still rated so highly in Matthias’s affections.

  I stretched out, feeling muscles popping in relief and not in agony. All at once, I remembered what had happened last night and what Ben had done to me. I looked down at my wrist, but there was no trace of the damage from last night. The more I concentrated, the more I noticed how good I felt. Certainly not like I’d taken a beating the night before. Certainly not like that beating had been bad enough to get me admitted to the hospital.

  But then I remembered everything else that had happened. Grace, and then Ben. Matthias. Grace had opened up the lines of communication for a reason, and it had something to do with the weird feeling in my chest. And Matthias had maintained that I was still useful.

  And lastly, I remembered finding my center just before I must have blacked out. I was done being a pawn. I was done being a victim. And I sure as hell was done with being everyone’s punching bag.

  I needed to figure out a plan. But first, I needed to take a shower and dig out a suit. Because we were still burying my uncle this morning.

  In Belle Dam, when a Thorpe died, there were two services. A service for the public, giving people who’d spent their lives hating and fearing my uncle a chance to relax and put those old feelings to rest. Where people who’d never known or spoken to John while he was alive could grieve his death as publicly and obnoxiously as they could. It would be standing room only, with an eager town pressed in tight like cattle, falling over themselves for one last look.

  Death makes us targets, Jason had told me several days ago. When we’re dead, we can’t collect on old debts or make new
threats. There’s no reason to fear us. And so they try to forget us.

  But those feelings also make some people cocky, and the last thing either side of the feud needed was for someone to explode at the wrong moment. So Jason and I had a private service with a priest who’d apparently known the family since my great-grandfather’s days. I’d never been to a funeral before, but it wasn’t nearly what I expected. There were prayers, but they were strangely formal and formulaic. No mentions of God, no talk about souls. It was a lot about “committing him to the earth” and talk about duty.

  “I thought he’d never stop talking,” I said, shoving my hands into the black leather gloves Jason handed me.

  “Father Patrick knew Jonathan as well as anyone, Braden,” Jason said wearily. Everything he did lately was with an air of fatigue. If I were a nicer person, I would say that his brother’s death was weighing heavily on him. But I wasn’t a nicer person, I knew that had very little to do with it. Jason hated to lose, and right now he was coming up, forgive the pun, dead last.

  “If you knew him at all, you’d know he hated being called Jonathan,” I muttered. I was just happy to get away from the chapel, with its stale stench of pretentious decay, and the priest, who looked like he’d be more at home with a knife and a butcher’s block.

  We went out of the chapel and through the Thorpe cemetery, and Jason left his attempt at parenting at the chapel doors. That there was a family plot surprised me only a little. My mother was buried in the city, as was the empty grave that should have held me. But John was a true Thorpe, with Thorpe blood in his veins. He wasn’t a token offering for the town. As much as the Thorpes and Lansings pretended they were a part of the city, they always held something back, keeping their blood to themselves.

  A cemetery full of Thorpes. I’ll be buried here someday. Jason was pragmatic enough to have already picked out my final resting place, I was sure. I could ask him to show me it while we were here. Especially since I might be coming back sooner than anyone expects.

  There was a code to the headstone engravings, Jason had pointed out on our way in. Augustus Thorpe, Taken By the Water was right next to his brother James, Lost Before His Time. Every Thorpe, back to the very first to settle in Washington, was either Taken or Lost. Taken through the never-ending feud with the Lansing family, or Lost to anything that didn’t fall to an act of war. It was sobering to see how few were Lost.

  “You don’t need those,” Jason commented, looking at the sunglasses covering my eyes. It was as close as he ever came to asking me what had happened. One of his mysterious business trips had taken him out of town when everything had happened with John’s death and the lighthouse. When he came home, it was to find his seventeen-year-old son, his weapon, staring back at him with ordinary, human eyes and not even a drop of magical power left to his name.

  “I have a headache,” I said, my words terse. Jason wouldn’t tell me where he’d been or what had been so important that he’d left when I could have used his help. So a stalemate developed—I kept my secrets, and Jason kept his.

  That was only part of the truth, though. What had happened in the lighthouse—hell, everything that had happened that night—was a wound that wouldn’t close. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, least of all Jason.

  “We’ll be expected at the repast,” Jason explained, for the thousandth time. After the funeral, there was a gathering. Normal people had a wake, but not Jason. It was always a repast, and it had the sound of a particular Belle Dam kind of tradition.

  “I’m aware.”

  He looked down at his watch. “It’s nearly ten. The funeral will be letting out soon.” His pace quickened, legs longer than mine. He was taller than me. I’d never really noticed that before. Taller than John had been.

  John had been taller than me, too.

  Had been.

  I struggled to keep up, made all the more difficult by the sudden shifting of gravity around me. The dizzy spells came without warning, as blood suddenly ran to my head and things looked out of focus. It was one of the many changes I’d had to get used to. Everything inside of me was jumbled and wrong.

  “Was Braden even supposed to be my name?” I asked suddenly. The footpath through the woods was a short walk to where Jason had left the car. I’d always thought that the access roads on the back half of the Thorpe property were for something official, like power lines or telephone lines or something. But it seemed like they served a more obvious function—ease of circumventing the house to one of the several buildings tucked away in the woods.

  Jason looked up, startled out of his own thoughts. “What?”

  “My name,” I reiterated. “Did Uncle John pick?” I shrugged, reaching into my pocket for a cell phone that wasn’t even there. “I’m just wondering what they’ll put on my headstone.” Then again, I already had a headstone in town. Maybe they’d just toss me in the empty box.

  Actual emotions crossed Jason’s face, whipping by so fast they forced him into a halt. Of the few things I knew about the man who was supposed to be my father, one of the most important was that he never showed emotion. But just for a moment, a brief flash of seconds, I caught shifts in his face and truly, honestly saw the family resemblance. I could always read Uncle John’s face like it was an open book: I knew every single scowl, frown line, smirk, and twitch. And just for a second, I could do the same for Jason.

  Rage, and frustration, and an anger that was made up more of despair than hatred. All replaced by the weary look I’d come to recognize. A look that had my name all over it. “Your mother picked your name,” he said, each word sharp like axes. “Braden Michael Thorpe.”

  Braden Michael Thorpe. I’d been raised as Braden Michaels. It made sense. Not the most ingenious of secret identities, though. Then again, it didn’t seem like I’d been in hiding so much as just being kept away from Belle Dam. We’d only moved once during my childhood, from the desert up to Montana.

  Those eight words looked like they’d cost Jason something precious. Does he really need to be reminded of this right now? Jason and I might not get along, but I didn’t need to torture the guy.

  “I was just curious,” I said quietly, trying to absolve at least some of the guilt I was feeling. My skin flushed, and at first I thought it was embarrassment, but quickly realized it was something more.

  Ever since the night of Grace’s attack, I’d felt off. Like parts of me were missing or weren’t doing their job any longer. Phantom pains stretched along my skin, nipping at me with increasing frequency. Moments of vertigo so strong that I had to lie down until they pass. Hot spells. Cold spells. Nausea.

  “We’re going to be late,” Jason said, and just like that, our conversation was forgotten. We had a city full of condolences to accept.

  I didn’t care for the grief. Grieving people wanted to touch, wanted to hug, and if anything it made me want to be touched even less. Every time anyone came close, even if they just wanted to pat me on the shoulders as Jason had tried to do earlier, I had to move away, as quickly as possible. I couldn’t let them touch me.

  After all, it was my fault. The feud, John’s death, the slump in Jason’s posture. I’d set all this in motion by coming here, and it was almost too late to leave.

  five

  “The Harbor Club?” I said when the car finally stopped.

  “It’s a large enough space to hold everyone,” Jason said stiffly.

  “And remind them that Jonathan Thorpe was so much more important than they could ever hope to be,” I muttered. “Lucky them.”

  It was the Belle Dam version of a country club—perfect for the port town with a need for pretense and class warfare. Close to the harbor, its giant wall of windows looked out onto the bay that surrounded the city.

  “The church had a meeting hall they offered to us,” Jason said, sounding suddenly uncomfortable. “I thought you would prefer something a little less … ”

  “A little less what?”

  He slid his phone back i
nto the breast pocket of his suit. “I didn’t know … I was never sure if … Jonathan was never very … ”

  The answer dawned on me. “You didn’t know if we went to church. If I’d be comfortable with an actual church service.” That’s why the service had been so formal, so carefully devoid of words like “God” and “heaven.”

  Jason’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t respond.

  I really, really don’t understand you. I watched him from behind pointless sunglasses. He hadn’t cried at all, but that didn’t surprise me. Jason didn’t strike me as the type to let anyone see any of his weakness. But I hadn’t cried, either. I’d been numb for days, and that was the only thing keeping my feelings at bay.

  It was like John’s death had happened to someone else. I knew it couldn’t last. I knew it would be awful when it set in. But I felt like a freak. Who buries the man that raised them and doesn’t shed a tear? Who doesn’t even get the sniffles?

  Did Jason cry at his own father’s funeral? There is the most fascinating tradition of patricide among the Thorpes, Lucien had whispered to me once. But Jason had resisted, he said, and Lucien had had to take matters into his own hands. Did Jason know how his father had actually died? Should I even tell him?

  I didn’t actually know what Jason thought of me. When I first came to town, it was like I was an item on his agenda. A new toy he’d purchased. But later, after I was hurt, I’d become an inconvenience. And no matter how many doctors he threw at me, none could tell him how to fix what was broken.

  Now I was broken, but maybe in the best way possible. The only problem was that the list of people who wanted me dead seemed to double every day. Unless I was under lock and key for the rest of my life, at some point, they would come for me and the curtain would fall.