Tremble (Terraway Book 2)

by Mary E. Twomey

  I still remember stepping onto something sticky, and then something sharp. Then the mountain fell, burying me in refuse and maggots. I don’t remember the things they screamed at Bev that night, but I remember the feel of a maggot sliding into my ear when I was pinned down and couldn’t hoist the chaos off myself. Something heavy hit me in the head, and I passed right out. It took Ollie and Allie too many minutes to unearth me, all while Bev freaked out that I had ruined her “special things” that she’d had arranged just the way she liked them.

  I had a thing about tight spaces after that.

  Ollie and Allie had already taken on the role of being my mama and dad, but after that, security was heightened. I still remember Allie suturing my foot with no anesthesia, while Ollie held me still as I screamed. Not the best way to realize I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up, but whatever.

  Allie kept crying, scared at the thought that they’d lost me in the garbage. That was a rough night I still didn’t have the words to talk about. I recall them pulling the mattresses off the bunk bed so the three of us could sleep together on the floor with me sandwiched in the middle. I was afraid, but I had Ollie and Allie with me, so I knew that somehow everything would be alright. There was no one but me to hold them through the trauma they’d had to endure, so they were somewhat less hopeful.

  Mariang’s small body on mine began to feel like a two-ton weight atop my chest. I let out a small whine when the garage door opened. The car started up and we moved down the driveway out into the night.

  Von wrapped his arm over Mariang to hold her more securely in place. He cleared his throat. “Two beautiful women who can’t get enough of little old me? Not a bad way to go.” I knew he could feel my impending freak-out, and was making a joke to cut my building anxiety. His fingers brushed my shoulder, and I felt him pull a layer of Dear-Lord-get-me-out-of-here. “Hey, it’s alright, love. Danny’s going at a normal speed, which means they aren’t following us.”

  “It’s not that. I…” I didn’t know how to voice such a sore subject without going into detail. If I let myself get too upset, I knew the maggots would find me again. One had fallen into my mouth when I screamed for Ollie after I came to. I still recall the horror of them tickling my ears to make my body their new home. I swallowed hard and tried to rein in my crazy. “I have a thing about tight spaces. I can’t… I have to get out of here!” The air felt thin, and I sucked in guttural gasps, like someone was choking me. My leg started kicking without my consent. My body jerked as the maggots gunned for me with purpose.

  Mariang spoke up through her tears. “Von, is there room for me to lay on you instead? That way October can have some breathing room.”

  My hands itched like they had trails of Lang’s ants crawling up them. “Ollie!” I begged my brother to find me as my chest heaved unnaturally. I knew better than to cry for Allie anymore. She’d stopped answering when we called. I couldn’t blame her. She’d given up her adolescence to take care of us. She deserved not to see my face and be reminded of all she missed out on. I couldn’t give her much, but I could at least give her that. Tears squeezed out of my eyes, and I was grateful for the pitch black. “Allie, Allie,” I sobbed, utterly woebegone. I wished I never needed anything, but in that moment, I desperately needed my sister to find me in the refuse and save me from the avalanche of garbage that crushed down upon me.

  Von shifted so he was laying on his back. I breathed afresh when Mariang crawled over atop him. I knew she’d felt a few of my tears, and they’d both heard my choked sobs. The embarrassment clutched me around the throat.

  “Close your eyes,” Von instructed me in a soothing voice. “Now roll on your side and cuddle up to me. Pretend we’re back in your bed and there’s loads of space. We just don’t need it because we like to sleep close.”

  “I’m freaking out!” I confessed, finally able to claw at my hands and arms to relieve the trauma, now that Mariang was off of me. My legs were still twitching, unable to find a shred of calm to steady them. I tried arching my back to alleviate some of the suffocating fear that raked at my insides. “I can’t do this for a whole hour! The bugs! Get the maggots off me!”

  Von shushed me. “We’ll be there in five minutes,” he lied. “You can do anything for five minutes. I’m here.” He drew in an exaggerated breath. “Take a deep one and let it out.” His tone changed to something darker that made my spine tingle. “Oh, no. I smell blood! It’s fresh. Oh, it’s fresh.”

  “October, you have to stop scratching yourself!” Mariang cried.

  I tried to fight against hyperventilation, but the phantom maggots found me in my psychosis. I raked at my cheeks, thrashing around to get them off me. “I can’t! I can’t!”

  I don’t know how they did it, but somehow Von rolled Mariang to the very back of the trunk so he could slide on top of me. He boxed me in as he breathed through clenched teeth, his forearms trembling with yearning. “The blood! I need it!” He buried his face in the crook of my neck and howled his desire as I squirmed beneath him. “Just a little taste. I can control myself! Just one taste, and I’ll stop.”

  My limbs were floundering beneath him as I lost myself to two kinds of panic I couldn’t logic my way out of. I screamed when Von licked the back of my hand, scared of the sexual groans he made when he tasted the tiny scrapes that were too fresh for him to resist. “No, Von!” His tongue laved between my knuckles, his pelvis rocking against mine. He cried out in self-loathing as he turned back to my neck, licking the skin and sucking too hard. His lips weren’t gentle, but they covered his teeth that wanted to puncture and drain me. He was holding himself back from biting down on the veins that had terror and unbidden lust racing through them just below the surface. He sucked hard, and unlike the playful nips he’d teased me with when Ollie had walked in on us, I could tell Von was bruising my skin. “Von, stop!”

  “No!” Mariang screamed and pounded on the roof of the trunk. “Danny! Danny! Help!”

  23

  Pushed to the Limit

  Danny pulled the car over about a million years into the trip. When the trunk popped open, I choked on my relief in the moonlight. Mason ripped Von off of me and wrestled him to the ground with a look of “holy crap, this just got real” filling his wide slate eyes. Von’s teeth were bared and his arms swung out to snatch at me like a wild animal.

  Danny wasn’t a person I generally looked to for comfort, but when he lifted me out of the trunk, my face sweaty and my hands red from me clawing at them in the dark, I collapsed in his arms. He let out a noise of surprise that I was clinging to him, but I didn’t care. “Don’t make me go back in there!” I begged, gripping his brown t-shirt like a crazy person. “I can’t do it! Don’t make me! Ollie! I need my brother. Call Ollie!”

  Danny’s forced calm was the same soothing balm he used on Mariang, and I knew his arms around me were pulling the panic out. He was getting better at gently stripping away the layers, even though he hadn’t imprinted on me, but I could still feel the jolt as opposed to the slow trickle I experienced when Mason or Von pulled the stress from me. “Hey, it’s okay. Calm down.”

  My knees buckled, but Danny caught me before I hit the ground. “It’s not okay! It’ll never be okay!” I was beside myself, and completely immune to rational thinking.

  “Shh. Hey, I’m here,” Danny assured me, waiting until my frantic eyes met his. There was something hard in Danny’s gaze that didn’t know how to soften, but I could see him trying. “If I’m here, you don’t have to worry.” For a second, my confusion at his sweetness almost lulled me out of my panic. Almost. “We got enough of a head start. I told the guards I was going to pick up some food. I said it would be best for them to stay out of the house so you three could get some sleep. You can ride in the car for the rest of the trip. Just keep your head down.”

  “Thank you,” I breathed with great relief, the night air filling me with a smidgen of clarity. I smelled pine, and looked around the empty parking lot to find we were parked at a
nine-to-five doctor’s office lit by a single street lamp half a block down the road.

  My knees felt like they’d lost the bones inside as I tried in vain to support my weight. Danny led me to the backseat and sat me down, examining my unnatural panic with his calculating stare. “Claustrophobia?”

  I nodded, wishing for a paper bag or something to calm my jumpy breathing. “I’m fine. Thanks for… Let’s just go.”

  “First let me look at you. Did Von bite you?”

  “No.” I don’t know why I covered my neck with my hand, as if Danny couldn’t see the obvious tell. I was embarrassed and scared, and wasn’t thinking clearly. “I scratched my hands open, and he smelled the blood. He l-licked my h-hands a l-little, but he c-c-c-controlled himself.”

  Danny tipped my chin up and pried my hand away from my throat, hissing when he took in the damage. “Bollocks. This one’s on me. I should never have locked you in a trunk with a vampire. Von always seems so normal until he’s pushed to his limit. This was my fault.”

  I turned from his inspection and reached for my travel first aid kit I saw poking out from under the passenger’s seat. I dropped it twice before I finally pulled it onto my lap, my nerves utterly shot and my pride obliterated. Tears fell down my cheeks without my permission, telling Danny more about my weak spots than I had the words for. “Let me fix this f-first. Then we can go.”

  Danny took the kit from me and bandaged up my trembling hands without a word, probably knowing that his acerbic personality would choose the wrong ones.

  “Did you know?” I asked through my hiccupping sobs. I tried to get a hold of myself, but the maggots still felt too near. “The hallucinations. Did you know Mason was s-seeing her when he k-kissed me?”

  Danny leaned closer to be sure he heard me right. “What? Seeing who? He told me he saw someone far in the distance on a beach, but he couldn’t tell who it was. Did you kiss again? I told him it was probably you.”

  I eyed Danny through my watery gaze to make sure he wasn’t lying to me. “You really don’t know?”

  “October, if you’re trying to tell me something, you’re doing a horrid job.”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. I just wanted to know if you’ve been hiding things from me that I should know about.” I ground my teeth and closed my eyes. “I stored up a few days with all that extra reaping. Could I hop on a plane and go see Ollie?”

  Danny watched me closely. “No. You’ve got to take the sagrado stone to the nations before you can think about taking some time off. After that’s done, the burden on us will go down a bit. Then you can go on holiday and see your brother.”

  I bit my lower lip, debating between fight and flight. “Okay. Go help Mariang. I think I scared her.”

  Danny nodded, and went to pull from Mariang while Mason concentrated on pouring alternating containers of blood and honey down Von’s throat to satiate his hunger. Von was shoved back in the trunk when Danny ruled him unsafe to ride in the car with me. I almost offered to take Von’s place so he didn’t feel punished, but I knew the claustrophobia would eat away at me.

  “Mariang, would it be okay if I rode shotgun for a while? I’m not feeling so hot,” I worked out through my sucked up tears. I didn’t want to be anywhere near Mason. Or people. Or magical Terraway creatures.

  “Of course. Let’s go, Danny.” She slid into the backseat next to Mason and cuddled into his side so he could pull from her. She shut the door when Danny revved up the engine.

  I rolled the window all the way down. I kept my face near the opening like a dog to try and scoop in all the fresh air I could while Danny drove down the street towards the freeway. “You can keep the window down, but you can’t have your face visible like that. Pretty soon people will be looking for us, so stay low.” Danny’s tone wasn’t as harsh as it usually was when he was bossing me. He raised his hand between us. “Can I pull a little from you? You look on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

  “No,” I ruled, scooting away from him. “Thanks, but no. I’m fine.”

  Mariang leaned forward in her seat, Danny’s brown cardigan covering the right side of her face to shield it from any onlookers. “What was that all about? That wasn’t normal claustrophobia. You were having a fit before Von lost his mind.”

  I shook my head, my face glistening with tears in the moonlight. “It was nothing. I think it’s normal not to like being stuffed in a trunk.”

  “It is, but that’s not it.” I could feel Mariang staring at the back of my head with her aqua eyes, gunning for the truth this time, unwilling to let me dodge it. “Tell me what happened to you.”

  I shook my head as silent tears flowed. These people were in now. They were stuck in my life deeper than the Do Not Pass Go sign I kept firmly in place to fend off conversations exactly like these. Danny intercepted my reach when I made to scratch the back of my right hand, so to compensate, I clawed at my leg through my pajama shorts on my right thigh. My nails skidded on my flesh to alleviate a little of the internal sting. “Just claustrophobia.”

  Mariang was a lot of things, but when she refused to drop it, I saw in her eyes the same thing that resonated in me: she was a fighter. Despite her slight frame and submissive behavior, she had a will that when kindled, would not bend. “We’re traveling together now. You climbed into the trunk without telling us you couldn’t handle tight spaces. You should’ve told us. What happened to you? Why do you always try to hurt yourself with your hands like that?”

  I closed my eyes and slumped down in my seat to hide from the world. “Because it doesn’t hurt. It makes it feel better.”

  “Makes what feel better?”

  I tapped my chest over my heart. “I’m fine. I just want to close my eyes and forget about it for a minute, okay?”

  “Mason, pull something from her,” Mariang instructed him, scooting to the side so he could reach me. “She’s falling to pieces.”

  I turned to snarl at his hand. “Touch me and I’ll straight up punch you, Mason.”

  Mason hung his head. “October, I’m sorry. I lost my head. I didn’t mean to say those things.”

  “What things?” Danny asked, trying to keep up.

  “Nothing,” I answered, turning on my side away from them.

  “Before we came out of the bedroom, we kissed again, and I saw—”

  “Shut it, Mason! I don’t need my business spilled out all over the place. It didn’t happen, and it’ll never happen again, so forget about it. That’s what I plan on doing.”

  Danny watched my temper spike with confusion. “But you’re in love with her. October, Mason’s in love with you. That’s what it means when an Omen kisses someone, and they have hallucinations. You’re not there yet, but Mason saw the colors and sounds and all that, coupled with a hallucination. You only see those when you’re in love.”

  I squinched my eyes shut. “I don’t think it works like that when the guy hallucinates about being with his wife when he’s supposed to be with you.”

  No one spoke for the rest of the car ride. All we heard were Von’s mournful wails coming from the trunk.

  24

  Sleeping on the Floor

  Danny booked us a room in a hotel not too far from Ezra’s house, ruling even the mansion as unsafe. He’d called Ezra on the way for us to meet him at the hotel to discuss what should be done with Lang’s spy and possible untrustworthy guards.

  The proper man let himself into our room with the key Danny had left at reception for him under a fake name. Ezra brought with him the backpack that held the sagrado stone. It had been stashed in his safe in the basement so no one would try and steal it from me again. The way that Ezra held it like a covetous treasure told me he was afraid to go anywhere without his eye on it.

  The men and Mariang spoke in hushed tones while I unrolled the cot I requested. There wasn’t any great place to put it, so I set it up between the two beds. There was no way I was sleeping with Mason anytime soon, and though I wasn’t upset with Von, I didn’t want
him to slip again.

  Von sat on the bed while the others stood, staring at the drawn curtains, his back to us. He was part of the conversation, but not. He was upset with himself, even more so than Danny was, which I didn’t think possible. I felt for the guy, but didn’t have it in me to talk him off the ledge. I was perched on that same precarious precipice, and if I had the sanity to talk someone down, I’d use that magic on myself.

  I got off the cot after it was decided Ezra couldn’t leave to go to his home, since his mansion had been outfitted with guards as well. He called Lynna, who left the mansion to go stay with a friend in the area. I knew Ezra couldn’t fit on the queen bed with Von and Mason, especially since Mason was still having trouble transforming into his wolf counterpart.

  I grabbed a few towels and made myself a bed on the floor in the far corner of the room up against the locked door. I was so upset about the day that the prospect of feet germs was only a cup of despair to add to my bucket that had long since overflowed. I ignored Mason, Von and Ezra when they each offered to sleep on the floor in the sold-out hotel, clinging to the space I wouldn’t give up without a fight. I felt on the downward swing of a pretty significant low, and knew sleeping in a bed wouldn’t fix it. At least my sleeplessness could be explained away by the unforgiving floor with its barely there carpet that offered no cushion whatsoever. If I was on the floor, no one would touch me while I slept.

  Ezra was the only one with the guts to kneel down beside me and whisper an apology for all that had gone so wrong that night. Danny had filled him in on everything, which only added to my sweeping low. I didn’t want to open my mouth, lest more embarrassing blubbering spill out, so I simply nodded and closed my eyes. The backpack with the sagrado stone was slid into my arms for safekeeping, and I cuddled it like it was my teddy bear.

  It took a few false starts, but eventually I drifted off to sleep, finding Philip, my dream makeout buddy waiting for me on a desert island. His smile was genuine and spread across his handsome face, making his white-blond hair appear even lighter. “I was hoping you’d come here.”