The other girls made sympathetic noises. They knew the situation. Her father’s vices weren’t the same as theirs. Theirs consisted of a few bottles a week, shared amongst the four of them, plus weed if they could get it. Just a young group of friends, having fun. Her father’s were the kind that consumed him whole, and left him useless for days. He’d been that way since Janet’s mother had walked out on them, and although she loved him, she could sense that he was reaching his breaking point. Which meant she needed to get out of the house before he broke her.
“I always thought your mum had something fae in her herself,” Greer offered, after a patch of silence. “She’s got incredible skin for her age, and she always looked like she took care of herself. So pardon me for saying, but small wonder she left him for someone else. I mean, your dad, I guess he might have been good looking when they married, but he’s really let himself go since then. And he isn’t exactly rich, either,” she added, with the fickle pragmatism that could only be achieved by people who were very much in contact with their chakras.
“She didn’t leave for someone else,” Janet replied quietly. “Not that we know of, anyway. She just up and left.”
Greer was right, though. Her mother was very much like a fairy. She was at least as treacherous.
It was Saturday.
Janet struck blindly at her alarm clock, casting it off the bedside table, and wrapped a blanket around her head. She came close to falling asleep again, but then an errant thought made its way to her brain, and she remembered. Saturday. She was supposed to get up early, or early for a weekend, to get to Carterhaugh before midday. The plan might have wormed its way into her mind while it was altered, but sobriety hadn’t made it seem any sillier, and Janet was the type of person who stuck to her resolutions.
Yawning, she dragged herself out of bed, and stumbled through the hallway until she arrived at the shower. The water kept her from nodding off, and minutes later she was as awake as anyone could be at that ungodly hour. There was no need to pretty herself up, as she would spend the day cutting bramble and shovelling dirt, so she threw on some old clothes, used a green ribbon to tie her hair in a practical knot, and headed downstairs.
The first thing to hit her was, as always, the smell. It seemed to never go away, no matter how long or how often she opened the windows. Even the incense sticks Greer had lent her failed to overpower it. It was the smell of a body that had gone unwashed for days, and humidity and mould and rot, and the wine that her father had spilled on the carpet last week, and other things that Janet didn’t bother to identify. Breathing through her mouth, she padded into the living room.
She saw the bulky form of her father strewn over the couch. A line of dried spittle ran from the corner of his mouth, and the floor around him was littered with broken glass. Janet heaved a sigh.
“Da,” she called softly. When he didn’t react she called again, louder, and shook him. A deep rumble came from his belly, and his chest rose and sank like a mountain shaken by an earthquake. Janet took a step back, wary and ashamed of it. The tension that took hold of her whenever she was near him felt like proof that the world was working wrong. He was her father. She shouldn’t fear him — and she didn’t, really. She just feared what the drink did to his head. “You broke another bottle, and I’m not cleaning up after you this time.”
His rheumy eyes opened and focused on her face. His mouth formed a rare smile.
“Mabel?”
Janet swallowed. Her greatest fear, that he would wake and be in one of his darker moods, seemed small and unimportant all of a sudden. He sounded so much like a hopeful child that it was hard to summon the will to correct him. Her eyes went, unwillingly, away from him and to the mantelpiece. It was stacked with empty bottles, but also framed pictures. Pictures of a dead world, a happier world. A world where the only alcohol her father ever touched was a pint on New Year’s Eve, where he and Ian still spoke to each other, where her mother wasn’t gone.
She looked away and took a deep, laboured breath.
“No, it’s Janie. Mum’s not here.” A familiar resentment filled her as she said it, and heartache followed suit. Of course her mother wasn’t there. Her mother wasn’t anywhere that anyone knew of. Janet had attempted to track her down throughout the past year, fruitlessly. Mabel Reed had no family, and her friends were as much at a loss as everyone else. Her Facebook profile hadn’t been updated since January. She might have been a collective hallucination, for all the tracks she had left behind. “She’s gone, you know that. Now get up, you need to shower. It reeks in here.”
Her father kept staring at her, his mind lost in some other realm. It was difficult to tell whether he had understood a word. Janet shook her head to herself, grabbed his slippers and pulled them over his feet, so that he wouldn’t cut himself on the shards on the floor. Then, with great effort, she lifted him into a sitting position and coaxed him into walking. She stayed a step behind him as he hobbled upstairs, prepared to catch him if he lost his balance, and pushed him under the shower fully clothed. What he had on could do with a wash, too.
“I’m leaving clean clothes over here. Don’t come down, I’ll be right back!” she warned, and closed the door on him. Against her better judgement, she swept up the glass in the living room after all, and threw it out along with the bottles — the empty ones and the full ones. He would throw a fit about that, as he had the last time she’d done it, the time that had made her decide that she needed to get out of the house as soon as she was able. Janet didn’t care, though. Until she left, she’d keep doing her part to keep temptation out of his way.
Until she left. Now that the prospect loomed, all rational and tangible and affordable, she felt guilt eat at her. Everyone else was gone already. Her mother. Ian — handsome, regal Ian, who took after their mother the same way she took after their father, who had a great sense of duty but an even greater dislike for weakness. He hadn’t been able to stand the sight of what their father had let himself become. They’d had an argument, and after that he had called her, and told her that the old fool could drive himself to his meetings from then on. As far as Janet knew, the two men hadn’t spoken to each other ever since. She had tried to talk to her brother, convince him to bury the hatchet, but she’d always had a hard time speaking to him. Ian intimidated her, especially when she was telling him off.
If she left too, what would happen to her father? He’d go on drinking and he’d go on withering, and with nobody around to prod him away from the couch and the telly, he’d fall apart. The house itself had already started to do the same over the past year. Realistically, Janet knew that the reason was that no one had done any fixing up or repainting in all that time, but in her soul she felt it was just another symptom of her mother’s absence. Things hadn’t been perfect when she was there, but they had been good, and bright, and optimistic. Her departure had shattered that illusion.
She threw bread in the toaster and waited for it to spring out, still feeling troubled. She’d have to tell her father that she was going, wouldn’t she? Although come to think about it, he might not even notice. He barely seemed to know who she was thirty percent of the time, and confused her with her mother another fifty. But still, it would be better if she did give him some kind of warning. It would be up to him whether he understood or accepted it.
She was startled by the noise of footsteps thundering down the stairs. Her father hadn’t heeded her warning to not come down; she stood paralyzed for a second, fearing that he’d fall and break his neck, but as luck would have it, he came into the kitchen a moment later, unhurt, dry and dressed. In a bathrobe, true, but she would still call it an achievement. Janet bit her tongue and pulled out a chair for him. He sat, heavily, and she placed a buttered slice of toast in front of his nose. He stared at it as if he had never seen one in his life.
She figured it was as good a time as any to break the news.
“I’m going to Carterhaugh,” she said. “And after I clean it up, I’m staying
there.”
“There’s bad sorts there,” he mumbled, without taking his eyes off the toast. She was caught off-guard by the topical answer, almost as much she was by his lack of reaction. Perhaps the part where she was moving out hadn’t sunk in yet, though. She passed him a pot of jam and waited to see if he’d say anything else, but he didn’t. He just began staring at the jam instead.
“I’ll come by every weekend to see how you are doing, and bring groceries and things,” she added. He swallowed, and looked at her directly at last. His lips moved, soundlessly, but then came the whisper:
“I love you, Janie.”
“And I love you, da. Always will.” But there was loving someone, and then there was being someone’s maid, caretaker and sanity-minder, every hour of every day of every week. Janet had been shouldering that burden, because she refused to pull an Ian and wash her hands of the situation as if it had nothing to do with her. She had been able to handle it, too, while it looked like her father was improving. Lately, however, he’d taken a sharp turn for the worse, towards anger and violence. Much as it pained her, he wasn’t safe to be around anymore. Not when she didn’t know how far his downward spiral would take him.
“’m sorry.” His eyes were wet now, and her heart broke, bit by bit. “Sorry I made her leave.”
“You didn’t make her leave.” She reached for his hands and held them, intensely enough to mask that her own were shaking. They’d gone over that hill so many times, and yet they kept coming back to it, and he would never believe her even though she was right. “Mum left because she’s a selfish cow. If you’d done anything, she’d at least have kept talking to Ian and me, but no. Nothing. She didn’t even say goodbye! A note on the table ain’t a goodbye! So it beats me why you think you were the problem.”
His shoulders shook with grief, and suddenly Janet thought she might know how Ian had felt when he still visited, why he’d kept his head turned most of the time. It wasn’t her father’s weakness that was hard to look at. It was his pain, made a hundred times more uncomfortable by the fact that she had no way of easing it. Just the look on his face was enough to compel her to run out of the room and to the end of the lane, before the cloud of depression that hung around him at all times found some way to swallow her too.
“I think I’m going,” she said. “I’ll still be back, but late, so don’t wait up. And eat your toast.”
She left him staring mournfully at the table, collected a shovel and pruning scissors from the tool shed outside, and set off, with a heavy heart and a troubled mind, towards Carterhaugh.
The woods turned out to be nowhere near as fearsome as Janet’s childhood recollections had led her to believe. It helped that the weather was good, and that the trees weren’t clustered together so tightly that they blocked the sunlight. She left her motorcycle chained to one of them, out of sight, although it was unlikely that anyone would think to steal it. The few who came to that place were fishermen, who stuck to the water’s edge and had no reason to venture into the woods.
She remembered the way alright, so it didn’t take her long to stumble upon the house.
Janet stopped and sighed. Bree, much as she loathed to admit it, had had a point. Either her memory had grossly embellished the building, or it had gone to the dogs in the years since.
It was only one storey high, and its neglect showed. The windows were caked with grime, and green streaks of moss burst through the aged paint. She’d expected that the surrounding vegetation would have grown over the walls, but not that it would have colonised them. Disappointed, she peered through a window. Seeds must have flown in and struck root in the dust at some point, because the jungle inside almost rivalled the one outside. She suspected that the ceiling needed serious mending too, because there were puddles spread all over the broken floor.
There was no way she could fix up a place in that state in a day or a week, or without investing much more money in repairs than she was willing to part with. Slumping her shoulders, she decided to abandon the plan. It had seemed sound on paper, but after taking a look at what she had to work with, it was clear the project would give her more trouble than profit. She’d have to start spending more nights at Shona’s until she found another place.
Well, at least she’d gotten a walk and some fresh air out of it.
Janet turned and walked back. Since she went the exact same way she had come, it was a shock to find out that she somehow ended up somewhere else. She stopped and frowned, but figured that she had simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. Since she could see a bright spot of light ahead, she didn’t turn around. Exiting the woods from the wrong end wouldn’t be much of a problem. She would only need to walk around them — much easier than through — to get back to her motorcycle.
However, once she came out into the open and saw that the woods gave place to a field, it became clear to her that something strange was afoot. First of all, there was the grass. It looked odd. It wasn’t an oddness that could be easily pinpointed, either, since at first sight it looked like normal grass. However, although it might look normal, it certainly didn’t look ordinary. The field that sprawled ahead of her was like the ones seen on postcards. Each blade of grass looked as if it had been positioned to catch the light just right, and photoshopped to the point where it didn’t seem like it belonged in real life.
And then there was the sky.
The sky was what struck Janet as most remarkable. She took her mobile phone from her pocket to check the time, just in case her mind had fallen in a sinkhole and it had actually been that long since she’d left home. The device didn’t want to turn on though, which was odd too. She had left it charging all night. Still, that too didn’t come close to being as odd as the red-and-pink twilight sky that stretched over the field. Twilight, when it should be just a little past midday, if that.
“Huh,” Janet said, putting the mobile away. She tore her gaze from the manicured clouds and focused it lower. The surreal field rolled on until it became perfectly shaped hills, topped by the tallest trees she had ever seen. A herd of red and black cows dotted the landscape, although there was no farm, or even fences, anywhere in sight.
She was just about to wonder in earnest if she hadn’t taken anything far, far stronger than usual last night, when she started to hear the scream. It didn’t begin when she started hearing it, though. It slowly dawned on her that it had been going on since she’d arrived at the field. It had just taken her brain a long time to separate it from the rest of the background noise.
The sound was weary and worn, as if whoever was screaming had been at it for ages, and the distance had made it indistinct to the point where it was impossible to tell if the source was female or male. Still, it undoubtedly belonged to a human being, and knowing that, she didn’t need to ask any further questions.
Janet was off like a shot, chasing the crescendo of shouts through the field and through the trees. These woods were vast and old and unfriendly, and much darker than the ones she’d just come out of, so even with the noise as a guide, it took her a while to reach her destination. She didn’t know what she expected to find — some hiker with a broken leg, perhaps — but whatever fuzzy mental image she’d had of the poor unfortunate soul she was rushing to help, it didn’t match up at all with what she found.
What she found was a naked man, who was tied to a tree. A very, very attractive naked man.
She stopped dead, just as the man took notice of her and stopped shouting. His eyes — dark brown, just as his hair — met hers and silently measured her up. Janet didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know what to think. Luckily, he saved her from letting something idiotic escape her mouth by doing that very thing himself. His lips parted to let out a snarl.
“Cursed fae!” he spat, with such venom that Janet took a step back. His attention shifted to the tools she carried, particularly the pruning scissors. “Have you come to torture me? Was this thrice damned tree not enough?”
“What?” Janet mouth
ed, more to herself than to him. His speech was only barely intelligible. Lots of Gaelic in it, which she spoke badly, and his accent — it was hard to even tell what accent it was — was thick enough to cut with a knife. He warbled some more at her, about things she didn’t understand a word of, and finally spat on the moss ground and pinned her with a defiant glare. Janet thought it was as good a time as any to inquire about what was going on. “No one’s torturing anybody here. I came over because I heard you shout. Do you need my help?”
He cocked his head and regarded her, mumbling to himself. Janet figured that he had as much trouble understanding her as she had him, but after spending a while making more peculiar sounds, he seemed to grasp what she was asking and nodded, though with obvious reluctance.
It was Janet’s turn to give him a stare. Shona’s list of people who hung around Carterhaugh rang in her mind, clear as a bell. She tried to assess what category this man fit in. Vagrant would be right out. He didn’t look like one. Like he had spent a great deal of his life outdoors, yes, that much was clear by his rugged looks. Still, it seemed inconceivable to her that a man with his kind of physique had ever had to have scraps for meals. Rapist . . . well, going by the state he was in, it seemed more likely that someone had had their way with him than the other way around. As for fairies, she wouldn’t know. Greer was the specialist there, not her.
The way he was bound was eyebrow raising, too. The branches exited the trunk and went back into the trunk, as if they had formed naturally around him. Which should be impossible, considering how long that would have taken. If he’d been standing there all along waiting for them to grow, he’d be a pile of bleached bones by now. But there he was, alive and brimming with health and beautiful as a storybook prince, except for the part where he was gloriously exposed in a way no Prince Charming would ever allow. He was a mystery. One that she’d have to wait to sort out, though. Whoever he might be, he didn’t deserve to be in the woeful position he’d been left in.
Twist (A BDSM & Romantic Erotica Boxed Set) Page 22
