Charcoal Tears (Seraph Black Book 1)

by Jane Washington

  Taking what peace I could before the inevitable lectures started, I made it to the bathroom and ran a bath. I pulled off Cabe’s shirt, my hands feeling clunky and useless. Unhooking my bra turned out to be impossible, so I slid it down—a painful process in itself—and stepped out of it. I pulled off my underwear and stood in the bath, enduring the process of trying to wash away the memories of what had happened and what I had done.

  I dressed in the same clothes—sans bra, and hobbled down the hallway to knock on the door of the other apartment with my elbow.

  Cabe opened it and frowned, bending and swooping an arm beneath my legs, the other holding up my back as he lifted me. “What are you doing walking around, crazy girl?”

  He kicked the door shut and walked down into the tech-centre-living-room. The other three were crowded around a single monitor, and they looked like they were in pain. Cabe brought me around behind the desk, and I saw the image paused on the screen. It was me crouched behind the trees beside the bridge, phone pressed to my ear. They had pulled security footage. That explained the pained expressions.

  Cabe pulled out a chair next to Silas and sat down, cradling me gently. Noah’s hand dropped onto my head, smoothing out my damp hair, separating the knots and combing it over my back. Silas looked over at me, his eyes pausing on the front of the shirt I wore for a second before flicking back up to my face. I’d have to figure out how to put a bra on soon.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  Quillan let out a snort. “Next time you disobey me, Seph… but just this once…” He leaned in between Silas and Cabe, grasping my upper arm. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  “Ready for the show?” Silas asked, ending the moment as Noah finished combing out my hair and let his hands fall to my shoulders.

  I turned my face slightly. One of Noah’s hands lifted from my shoulder and cupped my jaw from behind. I pressed into the touch, tears pricking at the backs of my eyes. “Yes,” I managed, feeling Noah’s roiling emotions behind the touch. He was afraid.

  Silas tapped a button and the scene started to play out. There was no sound, and it was taken from the side, with a clear view of both the van and me talking on the phone. It was cut off just before the concrete archway. The girl barely even looked like me. Her skin was pale beneath the tan, her mismatched eyes wide and horrified. The phone slipped from her grip and she stumbled forward, throwing out her arms. The vision shook, and I realised that it was the camera shuddering. Light sluiced through the sky, thick and blinding, and the van exploded. The girl on screen was thrown back, and some of the men in black were tossed too. They gathered themselves, some limping, one of them unconscious, and vanished from the screen. The girl was still lying on the ground. She turned, crawled and found the dropped phone. She pushed to her feet, swaying. Blood ran down her arms and legs. She spoke into the phone and then put it away, stumbling toward the van. She tried to get close, pulled back, and then circled it. Then there was nothing.

  Silas pressed a few more buttons and drew up another image. This one showed Cabe and Noah tied to a rusted ring welded into the concrete archway. They looked only half-aware, like they had been drugged. This time the girl on screen was invisible, and I was glad… until two of the masked men pulled guns. I tensed up all over again. Noah’s hand shifted against my face, reminding me. Cabe squeezed my knee, and I looked at him, letting the warmth of his eyes draw me in as the van exploded on screen for the second time. By the time I looked back, the girl was there again. She was staring at one of the car doors, and the body pinned beneath it.

  She gripped the door and tried to lift it, ignoring the flames that were still licking at parts of the metal. I could feel Cabe’s breath hiss against my ear. The girl on screen struggled until the door was lifted off, and then I jumped up, feeling the need to vomit rise again. I swayed, tipped, and Silas caught me—just like he had the last time. He reached back and smashed a few of the keys, making the recording disappear. He steadied me and handed me off to Cabe, who lifted me again, taking me into the kitchen.

  “Silas pulled the footage so that the cops wouldn’t find it,” he whispered to me as he set me onto the kitchen bench.

  He poured me a glass of water and I tried to hold it between my hands. It hurt, and Cabe took it back, his hand going to the back of my neck as he tipped it toward my lips. I got distracted when Noah walked into the kitchen, and the water spilled from the side of my mouth, dropping onto my shirt. Cabe grabbed a tea towel and dabbed at my face, and then moved to dry my shirt as well, before pausing. The usual sparkle in his eyes morphed into something else, and the sudden strain in the air drew Noah’s attention. I caught the colour rising in his cheeks.

  Noah left the kitchen and came back with a sweatshirt, which he eased over my head. They seemed to relax once it was in place, and I rolled my eyes to cover my embarrassment.

  “I’m sure you’ve both seen boobs before.”

  Cabe cleared his throat, and the colour in Noah’s cheeks deepened. I heard one of them cough, and Cabe tipped the rest of the water down my throat, probably to stop me from saying anything else. They started cooking, leaving me to sit there, and soon the smells of pasta had my stomach clenching. I glanced back out the windows, realising it was evening.

  “What day is it?” I asked.

  “Wednesday,” Quillan answered, striding into the kitchen. “You were released from hospital yesterday morning and slept for about eighteen hours.”

  “Whoa.”

  He smiled. “You needed it. Now you’re rested enough to face the inquisition.”

  I didn’t answer, and once dinner was ready, Silas came into the kitchen. Cabe helped me to a seat at the dinner table, to the right of Quillan, who sat at the head. Noah was across from me, Cabe beside me, and Silas across from him. It took me a while to eat the spaghetti because I was clumsy handling the fork, but I was satisfied once I was done. Everyone else was already finished and Cabe gathered up the plates as Quillan pulled something from his pocket and placed it onto the table. A phone. The phone that had been strapped under my desk at school.

  “How long have you had this?” he asked.

  “I found it under the table when you told me to go to the boys. I went into the classroom first.”

  He held up his finger. “One case of disobedience that I will punish you for.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “You heard me,” he replied easily. He pulled something else out of his pocket. A picture of me at work, wearing the small leather skirt and holding a tray of shots. He held up another finger. “Two. You kept that pretty quiet.”

  I bit down on my lip.

  “She doesn’t usually wear that crap.” Silas spoke so apathetically that it took me a moment to discern the fact that he was finally coming clean. “They had a management change and the asshole new boss made her borrow some girl’s clothes. She changed again halfway through the night.”

  Every head at the table turned, painfully slowly, to fix him with varying looks of incredulity and disbelief.

  “What do you mean she doesn’t usually wear that crap?” Quillan asked.

  A casual smile hooked Silas’s mouth and he dropped back to recline in his seat. His dark eyes flicked to mine, and then back to Quillan. “I’ve been going to the club for a year now.”

  A laugh bubbled out of Cabe, Noah jumped to his feet, and Quillan’s eyes widened. “That’s where you’re always disappearing to? Seriously? Why didn’t you just tell us?”

  The smile disappeared. “You would have flown off the handle. Noah and Cabe would have gotten arrested. That’s my thing.”

  They all turned their eyes to the picture on the table, and Noah fell back into his seat. His eyes were stormy when he looked at me, half a glare. “You’re not going back to work.”

  “Easy, Noah,” Silas growled.

  They all looked at him again, and then back to Quillan, waiting for more. Quillan’s expression was uncomfortable. “For the next ten days you’re on
house-arrest,” he said. “Cabe and Noah can collect your school work, you can check up on Tariq… but that’s it.”

  “You’re grounding me?” I was floored.

  He narrowed his eyes at me, his tone rooting me to the chair. “Yes.”

  “But…” I started, and he lifted a brow. “But…” I tried again, and his lips twitched, like he was thinking of smiling.

  “Don’t try arguing,” Cabe quipped. “Miro makes the rules. That’s his job.”

  “What’s your job?” I turned on Cabe, pinning him with a look that I might have learned from Quillan.

  “I’m the peacemaker!” He held his hands up in mock surrender.

  “You?” I glared at Silas, like he was the one who got me grounded.

  “He’s the muscle,” Noah answered for him.

  “And you?” I pinned Noah last.

  “I cook.”

  I bit down on my laugh, but it came out anyway. “And what’s my job?”

  “We’ve yet to decide,” Cabe answered immediately.

  Quillan and Silas left the dining room then, and I found that, despite having just woken up, I was already tired again. Noah handed me a small bottle of painkillers, relaying the instructions that I had been too doped-up at the hospital to hear, and I took two of the tablets before going back to bed. I was surprised that my ten days of exile flew by, but then again, I’d never been grounded before. I learned a handful of new songs on the piano, and then Noah recorded himself playing some of his favourite songs, and I tried learning off those. For some reason, I couldn’t do it unless I could actually physically see which keys to press. I also spent most afternoons with Tariq, hanging out in Noah and Cabe’s apartment. It was always hard to see him leave, knowing that he was returning to Gerald without me there to protect him.

  Mid-way through the week, Quillan showed me into the only room in their apartment that I hadn’t yet explored. It was where the piano room was in the other apartment, but this one was set up like an art studio. Quillan’s art studio.

  I avoided it mostly, sticking with my sketching. There was something invasive about spending time in another person’s art studio, and I thought that maybe it would make things too awkward with Quillan. We had grown close, but something told me it wasn’t the kind of close that we were supposed to be growing. I had the connection with all four of them; Noah and Cabe touched me, or pulled me into their arms whenever they felt like it, and they grew agitated when I was away from them for too long. Silas simply stared at me. He floated around with his dangerous eyes, typing away behind his screens and disappearing for short stretches of time, but always returning to haunt me. Sometimes he disappeared overnight and came back with mild injuries. The others said that he was on assignments. Noah disappeared with him one of the nights, and I tossed and turned until morning, dreading seeing him the way I had seen him the last time he had come back from a Zevghéri assignment.

  I only had a thin layer of tape over my palms and a small strip of bandage on my leg by the next Sunday; the rest of the cuts on my arms had healed enough that they didn’t need to be covered. It was with the looming threat of school on Monday that I finally picked up the courage to properly venture into Quillan’s studio on Sunday. I set up a blank canvas and painted a watercolour sunset, weeping with washed tears. The sunset became framed by a dusty window, and the tears became splatters of rain. The sunset was rising beyond a hill. I tasted coffee in the back of my throat as I painted, and felt the rain seeping into my skin as if I had been standing in it. When I felt the touch of a hand on my shoulder, I snapped my eyes open and spun around.

  “What the hell?” I breathed out. There was nobody there.

  Had I been painting with my eyes closed?

  I looked back to the canvas. The painting was finished, perfect. The image made my heart ache, in a good way. I stared at it for a long time, and then covered it and left the studio with a chill creeping into the marrow of my bones. I kept touching my arms as we sat down to dinner that night, trying to rub away the feeling of the rain.

  I didn’t broach the subject until I was lying on the carpet many hours later, working on the homework the boys had collected for me from my teachers. I was staring at the equations on my page, my mind floating away, and the boys were both in similar poses of half-hearted, studious respite.

  I asked them, “What is my second ability?”

  I felt both of them shift.

  “What?” Noah asked groggily, indicating that he had been daydreaming, or more likely dosing off.

  “My second ability. If valcrick is my first… what is my second?”

  “I have no idea,” Cabe answered, sitting up and crossing his legs. “I’ve been watching. I haven’t seen it.”

  “What if it has something to do with my art?”

  “What do you mean?” Noah sat up now too.

  “I’ll show you tomorrow,” I decided.

  After Noah and Cabe went to bed, I crept down the hallway and tried the other apartment, finding it unlocked. It was dark and quiet inside, and I kept my steps light as I opened the door to the art studio and slipped inside.

  “You’re lucky I’m not Silas,” Quillan spoke up languidly, causing me to jump.

  I spun around, finding him on a couch pushed up against the window, a sketchbook in his hands. He looked tired, but amused. There was a dim reading lamp set onto the window sill behind him.

  “Sorry.” I grimaced.

  “It’s fine.” He chuckled. “Come and sit with me.”

  “Why am I lucky you’re not Silas?” I questioned, folding myself onto the end of the couch and accepting the blanket that he passed me, pulling it over my legs.

  “Two reasons,” Quillan began, setting his sketchbook aside and stretching his arms out as a yawn swelled in his chest. “One, he doesn’t like people sneaking up on him. He has an ‘act first, ask questions later’ policy. Two, because…” he hesitated, and seemed to consider me before releasing his last words. “You seem to rub him the wrong way. I’m surprised you’ve known each other for a year now. Very surprised.”

  I looked to my lap, examining my fingers. Guilt swept into me, but it was one of those alien emotions that I felt didn’t entirely belong to me. I grappled with it, trying to push it away.

  “Is he like that with everyone?”

  “Worse,” Quillan sighed. I nodded, and he reached out to touch my shoulder. “Seph?” I looked up, feeling that he wanted my full attention. “I want you to know that no matter what Silas does or says, no matter how Noah or Cabe feel… I’ll always be there for you. No matter what this bond makes us feel,” he suddenly sounded bitter, “I will care for you. The way I always have. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.” Not at all.

  13

  Borderline

  We took the Jeep to school, and I sat in a puddle of nerves the entire time. Somehow, the messenger knew all of my movements, and was always one tiny step ahead of me. He’d planned to punish me, and I had blown up his van and killed one of his men and then I’d gone right back to spending time with the boys—though I didn’t really understand the technicalities of the bond, I knew that the messenger wanted me to stay away from Noah and Cabe.

  Silas had tampered with the cell phone the messenger had left for me, and it was in my pocket now. If he sent any messages, they’d immediately forward to the other four guys. We pulled into the parking lot and Noah said goodbye to us once we reached homeroom. I started toward my seat, but then realised that someone was sitting in it. The girl had brown hair, twinkling blue eyes and she wore a top cropped off at the waist with high-waisted shorts. She was very pretty.

  “Cabe!” She smiled wide when we walked into the room, and Cabe smiled back. The uneasy feeling riding the base of my spine increased with the pressure of acid now rolling in my stomach.

  Ugh. Not this again.

  “Oh.” She pretended to only just notice me. “Didn’t realise you were coming back today, Seraph.” She popped off my ch
air, lightly touched Cabe’s arm, and moved to another chair.

  He didn’t watch her go, but I did, and I noticed how her smile changed when his back was turned. This one was smart enough to realise that Cabe wouldn’t respond to flirting. She was pretending to be friendly. She had probably been asking after my health all week. Lovely. I sat down and wrestled for blessed nonchalance until the cell phone vibrated. I brought it out and flicked it open under the desk.

  I underestimated you. But that only makes me want you more.

  A minute later Cabe’s phone was out of his pocket, and his expression was severe. Another message buzzed in my hand.

  Let’s change the game.

  And then something exploded.

  The floor shook, the desks rattled, and the alarm started ringing. Mr. Thomas herded us into the hallway, and we ran into Noah. He was holding his cell phone, and he grabbed my arm, marching me the opposite way to the other students. In the ensuing chaos, Mr. Thomas didn’t notice us leave. The Jeep was in the parking lot, but it was wrecked. The doors had been ripped open, the car seats pulled out. The steering wheel was wedged into the windshield.

  Noah pushed a few buttons on his phone. “We’re in the parking lot.” That was all he said, and Quillan emerged from the building a few moments later.

  He clicked a button and across the lot his BMW beeped. Noah steered me toward it and we all got in.

  “What did he blow up?” My voice came out a breathless cry.

  “There was a bomb in the gym, but nobody got hurt. The building is caved,” Quillan answered as we passed a fire truck bearing down on the school.