"Did he ever take it out on you?" I asked.
Jaesung's lips twitched and he glanced up. "Once. That's when we left. I saw him shove Mom, so I jumped on his back. He flipped me into a coffee table. Broke my arm. I went to the hospital and two days later we were on a plane to Chicago. I was so doped up on pain killers. God, that flight sucked."
I swallowed, moved my hand to his back. "Is that how you got those?"
He winced, pulling back, and I worried that I'd invaded too much. But then he sighed. "It was a glass coffee table. It broke too."
This time I winced. "Was he...I mean. He was sorry." I said this with confidence. Jaesung gave a soft laugh.
"He was definitely scared. Mom went nuts, started throwing shit at him. He left pretty quick. She called her brother, and he came and got us. I guess Dad's sorry. At this point I sort of don't care. Sorry excuses nothing. Anyway." He shrugged again. "That's why I wanted to acknowledge that I shouldn't have shaken you. I promised I would never touch a girl when I'm mad, and today I did. And even if it's not a big deal to you, it is to me."
"I get it," I said, and then, because magical ice seemed to have shattered my usual defenses, more words tumbled out. "It's got to be harder, when you're being hurt by the people who are supposed to protect you. My parents couldn't always protect me, but they never hurt me themselves."
He looked up, and the hand that had covered mine went to my shoulder. “What about these? You’re not eighteen yet.”
My tattoos. He would have seen them when he stripped me from my wet clothes, and the scar now forming over the slave tattoo. And here the truth had to end.
"They're just decoration," I said.
Some of the openness in his face closed off. "They look like those mandalas you draw."
"They are."
He nodded, then drew his arm out from under my hand and stood. "Get some sleep, Hel."
"Thanks for telling me," I said. The words had come without my permission. Not because I'd really wanted to say them, but because I wanted him to stop walking toward the stairs.
He did. He glanced back at me, mouth making a smile that was neither happy nor exactly faked.
"Yeah. It's hard to talk about. Embarrassing, I guess. Don't worry. I get it."
But he didn't get it. It wasn't embarrassment that kept me from talking about what happened to me. It was that, even if I told them, they wouldn't believe me.
And I found, to my horror, that I wanted them to believe me. To like me. This place was starting to feel like home, and that was ten times scarier than the Guild.
Chapter Sixteen
I stayed on alert after that. It wasn't so much that I confined myself to the rescue, but it manifested as a constant tingling on my neck. Halloween was a blur of dog costumes and parading children, and the first days of November stole the last hopes of warmth. With it came turkey, furious wedding preparations, and my eighteenth birthday. And no messages from Morgan.
Part of me wondered if I should tell them. Morgan’s absence would look suspicious by now and I was sure they'd be annoyed if I didn't mention my birthday, but I couldn't think of a way to bring up either. The idea of going to another pub or being the central focus of a song or having people feel obligated to get me presents sent a pang of nausea into my gut.
My eighteenth birthday arrived without fanfare sixteen days into November. At least, I thought there would be no fanfare. The world seemed to have different plans.
It was still dark when Jaesung shook me awake. He was still in t-rex pajama pants and a sweater, clutching a cup of coffee and wearing a sly grin. A dim stove light shone from the kitchen. For a second, my groggy brain was sure he'd guessed. I sat up, startled.
"Come over here,” he whispered, then grabbed me up, comforter and all, and backed me into the middle of the room. When he let me go, I reached for his coffee, which he relinquished. He turned me to face the bay window.
White fluttered past the panes, thick and fast. Somehow, even though everything in my vision was white, the world outside the window still had depth. I made out the brick buildings across the street and, between them, the distant darkness of trees in the park. Everything bent under a thick layer of snow.
I gasped, mind boggling over just how fast it fell. I'd imagined snow to be slow and fluffy, like dandelion flocks. It wasn't. It raced down like rain, only thicker and brighter. Though still under a darkened sky, the world glowed like morning.
"I thought it might be worth waking up for," Jaesung said. He let go of my shoulders and made a second cup of coffee as I settled on the cushion in the window with his first. He liked it sweet, with milk, and even though I preferred mine without sugar, it was still strong and hot.
I don't know how long I watched the snow, hypnotized by the pattern of it falling. Jaesung sat with me for a while, sipping his new cup, then disappeared upstairs. I finished my coffee, set the mug in his empty spot, and pressed ceramic-warmed hands to the glass.
Little rings of fog grew on the pane around my fingers. I leaned forward, letting my breath do the same and drew a snowman in the condensation.
I made another coffee and, just as it finished, Jaesung descended the stairs from the third floor, dressed in thick boots and a dark green jacket with a fur-lined hood.
"Where are you going so early?" I asked, whispering because the clock on the stove said it was five thirty, and Krista was even less of a morning person than me.
"Martial arts," he said with a wink, and stole my coffee on the way out the door.
I smirked, wondering if he could drink it without sugar.
Then I was alone, with hours before anyone else would be awake. Just me and the snow. I traced more figures on the windowpane before retrieving my sketchbook. I flipped past the pages of mandalas and set my pencil on the page.
It had been a long time since I'd drawn for pleasure. I let myself fall into the feeling of pencil dragging over paper. I drew each point on the wrought iron fence, each icicle forming on the eave of the law office across the street. Even as I sketched the scene below me, I imagined people and creatures to populate it. Children peeking from behind trees. A pair of lovers walking down the path, Poo-stank and Leeloo gamboling in the snow.
When my hand cramped, I set down the sketchbook, looking at the picture critically. The lovers were almost definitely my parents. The children crouching behind the trees, snowballs in hands, could have been Krista and Jaesung as kids.
I saw a spot in front of the fence where I could draw a girl looking back into the park. The lovers would be walking away from her; the kids wouldn’t see her; the dogs would be too busy to care.
I closed the sketchbook and put it away, dressed in a thick pair of tights, jeans, and tall socks, topped with a thermal shirt and long, loose gray sweater. I had to loosen my boot laces just to fit the layers.
Krista joined me not long after eight, and together we fed all the dogs and opened the garage doors, kicked back the snow that had piled up against them.
"This is my favorite time of year to work at the rescue," she said, cheeks pink from cold. "Know why?"
"Because the cold keeps the dogs from smelling like-"
"Dog sweaters!" she interrupted, unable to wait for me to finish talking. It startled a laugh from me.
"Dog sweaters? Like…?"
"Sweaters! For dogs!" She pointed back toward the kennel. "You know how Stroodle, Piper, and Mayhem have so much fur gone?"
I grimaced, but nodded. Those three had all been here before me, and most of them had skin conditions weeks in the healing. Their fur was growing back, but it was still sparse and patchy. "You put sweaters on them to make up for the missing fur. It's adorable."
It was, sort of. Stroodle the pug wore his little fair-isle wool proudly on his barrel chest, tongue lolling out of his flat black muzzle. The corgi Piper seemed less happy about his own red-cabled ensemble, but stopped shivering after a moment, and Mayhem, a skinny beagle-boxer mix, rolled in his fuzzy yellow sweater vest, bark
ing at motes of snow that whirled inside.
“I’m going to start on meds,” Krista said. “You want to take those drooligans out for business?” She lifted her eyebrows at me almost suggestively. “Play in the snooow?”
I couldn’t help it. I grinned at her, excitement building in my stomach like a shaken-up coke bottle, waiting to explode.
“Whoa,” she said, leaning back. “You’re smiling. I’ll take that as a yes! Grab Stanky too. He’s gnawing at the bars.”
I bundled up and trotted the dogs across the street. Poo-stank was the biggest but by far the best-behaved. He heeled, even as Stroodle and Mayhem strained ahead. Piper could only move his short legs so fast through the inches of snow.
I listened to the squeak of it under my boots, grinned when Stroodle plowed ahead into the fresh crust as high as his chest and stopped to lick snow from his flat nose. Poo-stank lifted a leg at a nearby tree, and I tried not to snort at the steaming hole he left in the snow at its base. The sun was up, glowing through a sky now white as the earth, and the entire park looked like something from another world.
I let Mayhem lead us around a frozen duck pond, where he snuffled at the trails of small, fuzzy creatures. Piper yapped, bouncing on his front feet, nipping at the falling snow.
This went on for ten minutes before I noticed the quiet. It wasn’t the silence I’d sensed fall over the world when the snow had first come down, but a different kind. The dogs had gone silent and tugged at their leashes. Tails still wagged, but not as vigorously as before, and Poo-stank’s tall ears kept swiveling backwards.
Were we being followed?
I could have cursed, realizing that—in my excitement about the snow, I hadn’t been paying much attention to what was behind me. I slowed, pulling the dogs to a stop, which they didn’t seem happy about. Four heads turned back to look at me, mouths open, steam drifting from their panting mouths. I bent down as if to check my shoes and glanced down the path behind.
The man didn’t step behind his tree fast enough. I caught a glimpse, and it was enough to tell me what I needed to know. The left side of his jacket hung lower, carrying the weight of a pistol. His gaunt face was young beneath red hair buzzed on both sides. In the patched black bomber and studded belt, anyone would think him some tatted subculture punk. And maybe he was, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the necklace on his chest: a silver double spiral. The Guild insignia. This was not the guy I’d seen at the lake, and I couldn’t recall the guy at the train station’s face enough to say if it was him.
I righted myself, looked down at the dogs. If I let them go, would they run back to the rescue, or would they stay here with me, loyal little idiots? I swallowed, making my decision, and let the leashes drop. With any luck, that would make them easier to catch if they didn’t make it back to the rescue, or if something happened to me.
Mayhem scampered off at once, startling Piper and Stroodle into following. But Poo-stank stayed, whined at me. He nosed my hand.
“I know you’re back there,” I called. “You can either come out here and talk or fuck off.”
The man stepped out, the slice of a smirk across his face. He kept one hand deep in his gun pocket. The other held a cigarette still smoldering at the tip. As he approached, I noticed the lip ring and gauged ears filled with mandala-etched silver plugs. He had tattoos up his neck, all the way to his ear, and more down the backs of his hands and fingers.
If he hadn’t been so skinny, it would have given him an appealing air of rebellion. More so if I hadn’t known already that he followed rules as closely as any secret agent. No question—this guy was Guild.
Heavy boots crunched through the snow, erasing paw-prints.
“You got something I need, doll face,” he said, and took a drag of his cigarette. He was in his mid-twenties and his vivid green eyes were direct.
“It’s a bad day for you, jackass, cause I’ve got nothing to give you.” I said. My jaw was tense. It took a lot of effort to make it work.
He chuckled, smoke puffing out his nostrils. “Yeah, you’ve been making it hard for my guys ever since Miami.”
“You mean, since you shot my mother in the head?”
He responded with a slow blink. My hands fisted, and my triceps twitched. I wanted to deck this guy, gun or not. I wanted to punch him right across the jaw hard enough to break my own knuckles. Then I wanted to keep hitting him until he was pulp on the snow. Until blood spread around us like it had spread around my mother’s head.
“Where’s the book, sweetheart?”
“I don’t have it anymore.”
“Is that all you’ve come up with in a month, that you don’t have it? Look, babe, we know you’ve-”
“Don’t infantilize me with nicknames,” I shot back. Krista would be proud. “I burned it in a campsite at Abbie Ridge. Get some of your guys to dig through the ashes if you don’t believe me. It’s gone.”
I watched the shift of his face, subtle though it was. He had decent control over his expression, but the little things I’d learned to watch for tipped me off—the tensing of his under-eye muscles, the slight clench of jaw and flare of nostril as he processed the stick I’d thrown in his bicycle spokes.
“Why the fuck would you burn it?” He sounded honestly shocked.
“Why the fuck do you want it?”
The surrounding chill was complete and the snow only seemed to isolate us further. I watched him consider me, consider the fight I could put up now that neither of us had the element of surprise. Part of me wanted him to go for the gun, because seeing a member of the Guild again made my muscles itch with the desire to hurt something. I just needed an excuse.
The potential of happiness had gnawed at me for weeks, sweet and torturous. If Mom had survived, would she have had it too? Would we be in Canada already, starting a new life?
Poo-stank growled, sensing my anger.
The Sorcerer glanced at the dog. “You.” For a moment or two, he added nothing, too baffled or too angry to string words together. “Y’know that book was the only leverage you had to get our help, right?”
“I’ve seen what your ‘help’ looks like.”
His face twitched into that thin-lipped smirk again. “Just thought you’d be more interested in some backup, now old Master Fuckface’s got his hunters out on you.”
I shook my head, staring at those glass-green eyes like they might translate his words into something else. A small laugh escaped my chest. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He stepped toward me. Poo-stank gave a low warning growl. I grabbed his collar, dragging him back behind me. He pressed into my leg.
“We caught a rogue that was tailing your friend over in Iowa—a sanguimancer. Known bounty hunter. Sorry to say, but he told us the price on your pretty little head, doll, and you ain’t pretty enough to talk your way out of it.” He flicked his cigarette into the snow, where it hissed. “He wants that book back bad. How d’you think he’ll feel about you burning it?”
I shook my head, frost creeping up my spine as I scrambled through his words. “You’re fucking with me,” I said, like saying it would make it true. “No. I saw the boat explode. He’s dead. Gwydian is dead.”
Friend in Iowa. Was he talking about Morgan? I backed up another step, my heart thudding in my throat. Had Morgan mistaken the Sorcerer that captured Eamon as a Guild member when he was actually a rogue? A sanguimancer. Which meant….
I envisioned Eamon, hanging from a rope around his ankles, bleeding from a cut throat like an animal in a butchery. The pulse of turquoise in my chest started up, a surge of lightning threatening to spill up my throat. My control slipped.
The man lunged forward, grabbing me by the jacket. In the same instant, Poo-stank launched himself at the Sorcerer’s arm and latched on. I kicked, connecting with the Sorcerer’s shin, and he cursed, but kept ahold of me, acid green power sending cables around my body and battering back the surge of turquoise power.
“Ground, you stup
id bitch! Don’t you know how to fucking—Jesus, get this mutt off me before I shoot it!”
“Let go!” I shoved at him.
He released me, and I grabbed Poo-stank’s collar, tugging him back behind me, though he snarled and barked at the Sorcerer loud enough to ring in the snow-insulated trees. The man’s jacket was ripped, and blood leaked from his arm.
“Good boy,” I murmured, rubbing Poo-stank’s prickling ruff.
The man grimaced at me. “You need to ground your fucking magic before you turn this park into Chernobyl.”
“Funny enough, no one ever told me how to do that. See, I was getting the life force sucked out of me by a sanguimancer for the last seven or so years, so-”
“It ain’t life-force, doll-face. It’s iron. In your blood. Conducting magic, which he sapped from your little magic umbilical cord-” I winced at the imagery. “-and dumped into his own spells. And grounding’s just what it sounds like. You take that magic and you send it—guess where?”
I kept my jaw shut.
“Into the fucking ground, like a lightning bolt. Fantastic. You’re welcome. Don’t blow yourself up.”
“Why would you care if I did?”
He was already turning away, more concerned with the state of his arm than confronting me. Which was worrying because he hadn’t really done anything threatening yet. Probably had to regroup, figure out what his bosses wanted to do with me now that I no longer had the book. Or maybe they really would go check the ashes in Abbie Ridge.
“You got a lot of power, Martin. Your little stunt at Rinkenburgers proved that. The Guild is interested in what you could do if you actually learned.”
“If they think I’m going to do anything for them-”
“Whatever. We’ll see what you say when the hunters catch you.”
“Fuck off.”
He lifted a hand, waving blood-stained fingers back over his shoulder as he walked away, leaving both me and Poo-stank tense and shivering by the duck pond.
Gwydian was alive? No, that couldn’t be true. The Guild was lying, trying to get me to cooperate with them so they could get the book, or recruit me, or whatever it was they really wanted. If I complied, no doubt they would come up with a story of my ex-master’s defeat in some remote, unverifiable location.
Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1) Page 14
