44
Abel
A bucketful of water landed on him.
“Wake up,” his mother snapped.
Abel couldn’t see her; she’d begun to wear her mask again, a white porcelain creation that was more visually disturbing with the black eyeliner around the eyeholes and the full, cherry-red lips painted around the mouth hole than her ruined face had ever been.
Coughing, he blinked the water out of his eyes. He must have passed out again. All he remembered was the red-hot pokers piercing through his thighs as she’d screamed at him to change and then nothing else.
The dimly lit room with one bulb dangling above them couldn’t be more creepy if it tried. This was like every horror flick mashed into one. The blood stains on the walls. The godawful stench that permeated every square inch of this place—even when he closed his eyes and laid his head down on the pillow, he smelled it. The bile, the human waste mixed in with the rat droppings.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked again, beyond the point of tears. There were no more inside him.
All he felt now was a rage that he couldn’t seem to control. Every time she came near him, he wanted to hurt her. His mother. His own mother who’d given birth to him.
Who’d helped him study for tests. Who’d baked him cookies every time Dad left, taking the circus with him. Who’d listened to him when he’d mentioned his feelings for a certain girl.
But this… woman, this person standing in front of him wearing a mask and holding a pair of metal pliers, she was nothing like that person.
“Mom, please,” he said, trying to somehow reach some primal part of her that had to still feel, still care. She’d often referred to herself as mommy with him.
He was desperate and he was alone. Covered in bruises and cuts, he’d done things in the past few days—weeks, years… God, he wished he knew… all he knew right now was that ever since coming here it’d felt like an eternity—that he wasn’t proud of.
He’d kicked a guard square in the face when one of the bonds tied to his ankle had suddenly snapped, one blow with his heel to its nose. There’d been an awful crunching noise. Abel had thought at first he’d merely broken the guard’s nose until he gazed on in horror at the sight of the crumpled face, unrecognizable as even that of a man’s. The bone beneath his skin had sifted like powder so that it’d looked like a bloody lump of flesh-colored clay.
Abel had killed someone. Shock had made him convulse then, ignoring the aches and bruises he carried all over now.
Guards had swarmed his room, some of them grabbing the arms of their dead partner, but most of them had come for Abel. They’d punched him mercilessly. Kicked and clawed at him. He’d been tied down to a gurney; he couldn’t have done much more than kick out at them with his one leg. But he wouldn’t have anyway.
He’d killed someone. A bad, evil person. But he—Abel—had killed him. He’d felt sick. Shocked. Terrified by his own savagery. He’d not moved when the beating started, feeling in some small way as if he deserved it for taking a life, even if it had been the life of someone as wicked as that guard. By the time they’d finished with him, he’d barely clung to consciousness.
His mother had come to him not long after he’d woken up, telling him there was a black box of rage inside him. One he needed to open. One he was so, so close to reaching.
But he was scared of that box. Scared of what it would do to him if he did. Because every time he was tempted to do it, every time he examined his soul, he felt its darkness.
He’d asked her why, why she was making him do it, and he’d heard her hate, her madness ring through her words.
“You’re a berserker, Abel, that’s why! Your father’s a demon. And I’m…” He could hear mania. “I’m the hero. I’m trying to save you all. Do what Adam never could or would. Too afraid of the Order and their pathetic rules to do what was right.”
Her words hadn’t made sense to him then, but they continued to haunt his dreams.
He’d seen a true shifter the other night. Mom had told him that’s who his guards were, that he lived in a world full of darkness and monsters.
For a while he’d denied what she’d been telling him.
But he’d seen a woman turn into something that looked like a mix between a wolf and a bear and rip a man’s head off his neck with a single, savage swipe of her massive paw.
Then his mom had turned around and shoved a sword through its chest. And it’d stood there and let her do it. Something that powerful, to just stand there and let itself be killed; he could hardly fathom this was his new reality. And his mother had done it all, she’d said, just to prove to him that monsters really did exist.
“Who are you?” he asked now. Always he asked her that question, because he was no longer sure. No longer sure of anything.
“I’m your mother.” She sat, crossing her legs. The entire left side of her body had been burned in the acid accident. At home she’d always been careful not to show too much of her body to others because of how uncomfortable it made them feel.
But not here. Not in this place. Here she dressed in short, tight dresses that revealed every mottled inch of her leg. Bouncing a knee, her demeanor was calm and collected. The sight of her that way, it horrified him. His stomach heaved, the scraps of food he’d been forced to eat now trapped in his throat, wanting to come out. Burning to come out.
But he knew not to do it. Not after the last time.
“Believe it or not, Abel, I’m not trying to kill you. I’m honing you.”
“I’m not a blade that needs sharpening,” he said and then immediately clamped his lips shut when the slop came up.
She sniffed. “You’re wrong. You’re a weapon. Our weapon.”
Swallowing the vile stuff, wishing for a moment he could just die and get it over with, he shook his head. “I’m not a weapon, Mom. I might be a monster, but I’m not a weapon.”
She leaned forward so fast he suffered a moment’s vertigo. He felt her warm breath fan against his neck, breaking him out in a wash of goose bumps.
“That’s only because you refuse to transition as you should.”
“You want me to be like Cain, is that what this is? Wouldn’t it have happened anyway?”
She cocked her head. The movement was so alien and foreign that, for a moment, he wanted to believe this was all just an awful nightmare. That it wasn’t really his mother. That soon he’d wake up and be back in his bed at the carnival, and that lying beside him would be Janet, Rhi, and Flint. That everything was as it should be.
“Oh no. You’d be nothing like him. Abel, Cain never opened that box. None of the berserkers do.”
His pulse spiked so hard he grew dizzy. Fear was a tangible taste on his tongue. Oily, and black, and slick.
“If I had that girl—”
He frowned. “What girl?”
Scoffing, she traced the pliers down the vein of his arm, and he couldn’t help but tremble. She’d gone insane. Lost her mind. Maybe it’d been the acid accident, or maybe, he’d never known his mother at all.
She might have given him life, but in this moment, he had no doubt she’d just as easily be capable of giving him death.
“You know which girl, the one you want. I tasted her.”
He clenched his jaw. Flint. She was talking about Flint. But why was she talking about Flint? He was almost too scared to ask.
“I thought she was one thing. Oh…” She heaved a sigh. “God, I couldn’t have been more wrong.” Her fingers crept up to the mask. “That night I retrieved you, I was there for her too. You see, I was sure she was your compass, and a compass can control you. A compass can make you do whatever it wants. She controls you, and I would have controlled her. Except it wasn’t that simple. Because she isn’t human. At least not entirely. Of course I knew that going in, I just assumed she wasn’t what she actually was.”
“Not human?” He gasped, jerking against his restrains. “How do you know that? What’d you do to her?”
Snorting, Layla got to her feet. “I don’t know exactly. I think maybe she died. I sent my guards in to find her after the earth took her, but there was no trace of her. It was like she just… vanished.”
“No!” He roared, and he saw a haze of red covering his vision. The box he kept at a distance was close now. So close all he’d need to do was reach out and he’d open it, reveal the depths of Pandora’s box.
“Mm.” She sighed. “Even in death she is still your trigger. Maybe she can still be of some use to us. I thought it was your pain that would unleash your monster, but perhaps it’s not you at all. And the more I consider it, the less likely I believe her to be your true trigger. Had she died, you would have torn that box open by now. Given in to your madness.” Then she hissed, and he saw her blink several times beneath the mask. “Unless…” Shooting to her feet, she spun on her heel. “Open the door!”
The metal groaning of the door blared through the room, and then sentries came pounding in. But these weren’t shifters. They were dressed in black leather and carried swords strapped to their backs.
“Alert the Triad that I know what to do now, and it won’t be much longer.” Her chilling words crawled down his spine like icy fingers.
Who was the Triad? He’d never even heard of them. And just what was she planning to do now?
Abel screamed, saliva flying from his mouth as she walked out. “Leave them alone! You don’t have to do this!”
She turned then, hanging on to the edge of the door. “Oh honey, who said this had anything to do with them?”
And with those parting words, she locked him in.
The only source of light in the room flickered out, casting him into pitch-black darkness. Body alive with pain, he closed his eyes, and in his mind stared at the box.
What would happen if he opened it?
The question was a demon that ate at his brain like cancer.
45
Flint
They sat inside her trailer, she and her father and grandmother. Both of them had just looked at her when she walked out of the bathroom, rubbing her still-wet hair down with a towel.
She’d picked out a pair of blue jean shorts and a top, not thinking anything of it until she’d caught a glimpse of Nana’s Tinker Bell t-shirt in the mirror and her father’s gaze had turned suddenly hard and piercing.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t already feel like an aberration, but the way they kept staring only made her feel it worse.
They’d just returned from a trip to the desert. Grace hadn’t given her an exact location—all she knew was they’d been in New Mexico somewhere—but she’d walked them through a labyrinth of tunnels hollowed out of a massive cave system that was a good twenty to thirty degrees cooler than the world above.
And though it was a home in every sense of the word—there’d been a kitchen and bedrooms, and even an underground bathing room that ran constantly with heated waters from repositories deep below the earth—at the end of the day, it’d still only been a cave.
Flint had shivered when she’d stepped through its arched entryway, sensing that someday that would become her permanent prison. That’d she’d be forced into seclusion for simply being what she was.
She’d never been happier to leave a place in her life than when two days later Grace had told them it was time to get back to the carnival. They’d hopped into Dad’s old Ford and driven straight through the night and early morning back to Whispering Bluff.
But that hadn’t been the worst part of the trip. No, the worst part had been Dad’s absolute silence. Not once had he spoken to her, and what few times she’d caught him looking her way, there’d been something in his eyes—an unsettled look—that made her want to cry.
At one point she’d gone in to give him a hug, only to have him practically trip over his own feet in his haste to run away. Weirder still, Grace had stuck to Flint’s side with a worried frown the entire time, even going so far as to stand outside the bathroom door when Flint had to do her business.
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, fingers twitching on her lap, she nibbled on the corner of her lip. “Do I really look that different?”
She knew she did, but she was really hoping they’d tell her it wasn’t all that bad. Not that she’d suddenly sprouted a third eye, a second head, or tentacles out of her stomach, but she was different.
Her dad glanced off to the right, his jaw clenching.
Grace, on the other hand, didn’t look so much disturbed as curious. “Ye look so much like him.”
“Who?” Flint asked, even though she figured her nana probably meant her grandfather.
“Why didn’t Becca ever tell me about any of this?” Her dad shot to his feet, pacing between the narrow confines of Flint’s bedroom and kitchen. “Why didn’t she prepare me? Prepare us?” He sounded so angry, so disappointed, that it made Flint’s throat feel suddenly tight, like there was a lump in it.
It terrified Flint that maybe Katy was getting in her dad’s ear and making him hate her, or even worse, that there was no outside influence whatsoever happening and her father was starting to hate her because she was no longer the daughter he’d known all his life.
Curling the edges of the towel in her hands, she stared at her nails, which’d grown twice as long as they’d been before and were now sharply tipped at the edges, the way talons would be. The dream vision she’d had of herself the other night—it’d come true. She looked like a glowing nightstick with claws, and if there was one word to adequately describe her now, it would be ugly.
Not only was she a mess thinking about what Cain would say, but added to that was the stress of spirit-walking each and every freaking night—which she’d still not told anyone about—and she wasn’t exactly sure why she was keeping it to herself.
She was even beginning to doubt her own sanity at this point. Wherever she kept going, whoever she kept seeing, it hadn’t been Abel. She didn’t know who the man was.
Some days he’d look at her, other days he wouldn’t. She didn’t try to touch the iron bars again. Rubbing her fingers together, she recalled the fiery pain. That couldn’t have been imagined, and yet she couldn’t fathom that any of this was actually real either.
It wasn’t that, Flint did want to talk to somebody about what was going on, but she didn’t even know where to start, and each day kept getting harder and harder to confront it.
Grace sighed. “I love my daughter, Frank, but unlike Flint, she feared the world she did not understand. I tried, so many times I tried, to get her to accept herself for who she really was.”
A heavy knock sounded at her door, and the sharp scent of pine and tingly smell of berserker testosterone had her pulse fluttering like drunken, razor-tipped wings inside her belly.
Yelping, coming nearly off the bed, she twirled around, yanking up the towel in one smooth move and holding it in front of her, hoping to obscure as much of herself as possible.
She’d wanted to see Cain, but now that he was here, she didn’t want to see him at all.
“Flint! Are you there?” he cried, his voice sounding near panicked. “Let me in.”
He could have just ripped the door off its hinges. She knew that. She also knew he was trying really hard to respect her privacy.
She swallowed hard.
Her father shook his head. “That demon shouldn’t be here.” His words didn’t sound so much like those of a concerned father’s but like he was angry. With her. With himself. Maybe even with her mother.
Her relationship with her dad was deteriorating so fast it was giving Flint whiplash.
Grace swatted at Frank’s arm with the back of her hand. “Hold on, Cain,” she called out and then hissed low at them both. “The key to surviving this is to make the right friends. Take it from me—I know a thing or two about monsters. You want her live to see her eighteenth birthday, Frank, then you start changing your mind and quick about that boy. And you…” She turned to Flint. “If he really loves you like I thin
k he does, then this shouldn’t matter.”
“Shouldn’t?” Frank bellowed, getting to his feet as panic besieged him before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pistol.
Flint gasped. “Holy crap! Daddy!”
Why in the world did her father own a gun? When had he ever even gotten one? This carnival might be overrun with monsters, but the sight of that weapon made her heart tremble in a way none of them ever had.
Cain, who’d obviously heard her gasp of surprise, did actually rip one of the hinges off the door as he slammed it open, filling the doorway immediately. His hot, red eyes zeroed in on the pistol.
“Mr. DeLuca, put that down.” Cain’s voice was smooth, methodical, and calm, so opposite the reaction he should have had as a rager. Slowly he maneuvered his body so that he blocked both her and her grandmother from her dad’s field of vision.
Frank shook the gun. “You know what’s good for you, then you get out of here now, boy!”
“Don’t you dare!” Forgetting everything but saving Cain, Flint wiggled out from behind him, ignoring his terse command for her to get back.
“What are you doing, Daddy?” she whispered.
His eyes turned toward her, and they were wide and frantic, the whites almost overtaking everything else. “Flint, get out of the way.”
“Bloody hell, Frank,” Grace muttered from behind Cain’s back. He was still attempting to maneuver himself in front of Flint, but she wouldn’t let him.
Her father hated him. One wrong move and that gun would go off, and she’d never forgive him or herself. But he wouldn’t shoot her—she had to believe that.
“I live in a carnival surrounded by monsters straight from the depths of hell. My daughter is dating one. Call this a little insurance.” A laugh that made her skin crawl squeezed out of his throat.
Daddy had always been the lover-not-a-fighter type. What he was doing now, this wasn’t him. Not at all.
The Complete Tempted Series Page 49
