I want to sound offended when I ask. His soft laugh hints I failed.
“Did you think you were special?” he asks, looking to me with a mischievous look.
“Never a day in my life,” I reply before I can stop myself.
Jedrek places a finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he says. “Your trauma is showing.”
“Being an ass is an art for you, isn’t it?”
He shrugs, returning his attention to his search. “You do make it rather easy.”
Tugging me to him, he spins me to face down one of the hallways joined to the lobby. He whispers in my ear, “Look familiar?”
I would answer him if all logic wasn’t just stolen from me. A second ago I was ready to match his remark with one of my own, telling him how easy he makes hating him, or something along those very witty lines. Now, I don’t even remember my name as the heat from his body wraps around my own body, tighter than the clinched robes I was craving to feel.
“Well?” he whispers again.
I’m fighting to remember why we are here and what his impatient voice is asking of me. When I see her, deep in a fake smile of conversation with a man, I remember everything. There, in all of her purple hair and casual demeanor, is the witch from the night with the Ripples. Seeing her brings her taste to my throat, tickling it with her signature tartness of the aftertaste of her powers.
“I’m going to take that sharp inhale as a ‘yes’,” he tells the concave of my neck and a part of me wilts when he withdraws from our embrace.
“You’re just going after her?” I hiss, chiding myself for being so ridiculous, mentally listing all the reasons I hate him to chase away the butterflies he has caused.
Jedrek smiles at my agitation. Ignoring my question, he asks one of his own. “Coming?” he asks, and his smile widens when I feel my blush spreading from my cheeks to my chest.
“Just do us both a favor?” he asks me when I finally catch up to him. “Act like you’re a real witch.”
“What does that even mean?” I hiss again in an attempt to try to not have the whole place watching us. “Want me to cackle? Find flying monkeys? Sing a song to coax children into the woods?”
“How about just not talk?” he asks, wearing his face framed with mirth.
“I really hate you,” I tell him, but I’m mostly telling my vagina, who is doing her best to argue that I don’t.
He shows me one more smile before turning into the flirting bastard act I’ve watched too many times already.
“Regan!” he shouts down the hall as if he owns the place, completely not interested in the many who stare at his invasion of their tranquility.
I watch as she quickly dismisses the man glaring at Jedrek. Her body holds a similar posture as GiGi when Jedrek arrived. Her smile is forced, fake and curved with trepidation. The way her eyes bounce from him to me following is his wake portrays all the falsehood of her painted smile.
“Jedrek, how nice to see you again,” Regan coos with her lie.
I mentally give her points for her voice being mostly steady.
“Am I the only one who hasn’t met you till now?” I ask, risking betraying my own false bravado.
“Now, darling,” Jedrek turns to me with a smile of warning. “I thought we agreed you’d let me do the talking?”
“No, darling,” I repeat the pet name with a touch more sarcasm than he used. “You agreed I wouldn’t talk, and I agreed you are an ass.”
For a second, his face flashes a look of contempt, a quick coloring to his natural calm behavior, but either he saw something upon my face to change his mind or another mood swing hit him. “She’s so adorable, isn’t she?” Jedrek asks Regan. “There are days I could just kill her with how stinking cute she is!”
Regan is looking from him to me with her fake smile still proudly boasting of her unease. She says nothing to agree or disagree, much as GiGi had when we were at the shop.
“Now, Regan,” Jedrek’s voice pulls her eyes fully to him. “Tell me why you were sneaking around and peeping on my little witch here.”
Jedrek is completely calm, almost playful with his question. He’s leaning on a cleverly placed side table covered in pamphlets and brochures of the spa. He’s all smiles and gentle eyes, reminding me of a cat toying with its prey before fully launching into an attack.
“If you’re here, then you know why,” Regan tells him, her smile never slipping.
“I know someone has been very naughty,” Jedrek whispers playfully.
“We have our rules,” Regan quips, almost sounding insulted.
“And the Ripples?” Jedrek asks, grabbing my arm in a fake motion of tenderness when hearing my inhale.
Regan shrugs. “And they have their rules.”
“Which are?” I ask, trying not to wince from the pain of Jedrek’s hand tightening on my tender flesh.
“To stay out of your way. No one wants a war again.”
Jedrek’s grip lessens when hearing Regan’s response. “No. No one wants that again. So, if you, who very much follows the rules, were to know who is very much not following the rules, you would have to tell Harper?”
It isn’t a question as much as fact check. He just phrased it open ended for Regan’s pride.
There’s a pause, a momentary tick of the second hand on the clock keeping track of the day where it sits on the table. It’s just enough of a mistake for Regan to panic and Jedrek to attack.
“If I were to find out you’re being naughty, Regan,” he almost purrs. “I would have to be naughty too. Very naughty.”
The last part he drops his voice to a husk of his normal pitch. Deep inside those two words vibrates a fear which reaches down my throat to clamp around my heart. I can feel it skipping beats, tossing me into a small panic I can’t explain. I’m not the only one feeling it. Regan is holding onto the doorframe near her for support. Her eyes are wide, seeing something only she can see. The gentle apricot coloring of her skin has faded to a grey pallor. With breath, shaky and uneven, she nods, no longer trusting her voice.
“Long as we understand each other.” Jedrek returns to his playful, sarcastic self. “I so hate when we don’t all get along. Do tell Deon I’m taking extra special care of their father for me?”
Whatever I was feeling is slipping from me the way a thick lotion cools on the skin, slowly and chillingly. My heart is returning to its normal pattern, unlodging itself from my airway.
“Oh, darling,” Jedrek calls me his mockery of a pet name when seeing me recovering from whatever the hell just happened. “You look positively chilled.”
He doesn’t ask the man who has remained near enough to be seen but not hear our conversation for his robe. Jedrek just takes it, twirling the man with his action. To my surprise, the now nude man, doesn’t offer any resistance, or seeming humiliation, over the treatment. He’s now standing unrobed, cupping a very ungroomed area, as he rushes further down the hall into an open room.
“Here, he insisted.” Jedrek is draping the robe around me, enjoying my look of discomfort and shock.
With the grand show he has demonstrated to those around us, he waves, not waiting for me to follow his path of exit. He doesn’t have to wait. He knows I will. Once again, not because I want to, but because what the hell else am I to do?
Glancing over my shoulder to Regan, still grasping on the wood of the door like it’s a life raft, I see she still hasn’t fully collected herself. Whatever I felt was just a brush of what Jedrek somehow did to her. She isn’t wearing her smile anymore. She’s let the mask fall away and now I’m staring into grey eyes filled with a warning. Unfortunately for us both, I’m still not smart enough to read the invisible words she’s trying to share with me. I have a feeling, that inadequacy, will be the death of me, literally.
Neither of us speak to the other for the ride back to Great Hexpectations. Jedrek is humming some tune he seems to remember. The only tune he seems to remember because he does it ov
er and over again. Even if my nerves weren’t already frayed while wearing a robe once worn by a nude man, and the other many cherries of the day, his repeat of the same notes would have sent me over the cliff of annoyance, to the gulf of manic, even on my most non-hormonal days.
It wasn’t until he steered his car behind my own, he spoke his first words.
“I’m sorry for what happened back there.”
He’s hidden by the early shadows of the faded sun. They encompass him, shielding his face with their blurring of his features. I’ve never heard this shade of his voice before. Normally he’s flaunting and full of flirting colors like a peacock strutting through the landscape. Now, he’s timid, shy with his slow, carefully thought out words.
I hear this new voice of his say, “I didn’t think I could even influence you. It’s comforting to know I can,” he says with a touch of the familiar ego I know, “but I didn’t think it would happen.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
He sighs, moving in his seat as if uncomfortable by the complaining leather. “Because I’m not supposed to be able to. Not even one as old as I, an original if you must place a title on it, should be able to.”
“So, it’s a good thing, I’m sure for your ego, to be able to? Or is it supposed to be a good thing for my ego you shouldn’t be able to? I really can’t keep track of all of these side notes.” I can hear the exhaustion in my tone. My mind is as over today as my body.
“Neither, Harper,” he says, still using the same sad pitch. “It means we are fucked if they really want to test you. You’re not strong enough to fight them and we just rang their doorbell with an invitation to try.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “I don’t even know who they are and if I remember correctly, I didn’t ring anything. I wasn’t even supposed to be allowed to talk.”
“You’re right,” he sighs again. “It was someone else who dropped into the crowded, most popular bar, with nothing more than a loudmouth and naïve outlook.”
“That was a mistake, maybe, potentially,” I add in a slight agreement. “but not a full grand invitation into my life.”
“What did you think would happen?”
“I thought,” I start swallowing my emotions back down into the depths where I try to keep them. “I would find an answer for a grieving family.”
“Have you?” he has the nerve to ask me.
“No! You know I haven’t!” I scream my frustration into the car. “All I’ve learned is I know nothing about what I am, or who ‘they’ are, or what ‘they’ want but ‘they’ are coming because of everything I don’t know about who I am, what I am, or who ‘they’ are!”
Jedrek’s little laughs pull me from the edge of my building emotional break down. “Better now?”
I’m not. I can feel the tears sneaking their way beyond the will of my self-control.
“If it were up to me, I would tell you everything. As it sits, it’s not.”
“Why not?” I ask, fighting my escaping maturity.
“Because a part of me doesn’t want you to know.”
“Shouldn’t I know if not knowing means we are both fucked?”
He chuckles again. “I suppose that’s a question for Jo.”
“Then I’ll never know,” I grumble, getting out of the Camaro.
I shut the door to the sound of his masculine laughter, and smile, despite my best efforts to stop myself. He doesn’t leave until I am in my own car, still covered in the stolen robe. I ignore the sounds coming from the back seat. I can already picture the scowl of disapproval Myrtle will be wearing.
I shouldn’t have. I should have checked but I didn’t. I don’t until I see her sitting in the seat beside me and not in her normal spot in the rearview mirror. She’s staring straight ahead, focusing on something far away or at least beyond my line of sight. But the noises are still coming from behind me. There are moments when you are almost positive your heart will break your ribs, tearing through your flesh to escape the panic your brain is whispering. I’m on my second one today.
“If you turn, or give any signal…” the male voice leaves the threat in the air, letting me form my own conclusions.
“I don’t have any money,” I weakly whisper. “And to be honest, for a good time, you’re probably better off with your hand and a good porno.”
“I wasn’t sent for either of those.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess. For both of us.”
I’m stalling. Trying to find a way to escape the predicament I have stumbled into. Growing up on B-flick horror movies with GiGi, yelling at the females on the screen for their stupidity, I normally check for such situations. Not because, until now, I believed they would ever happen, but because it was set in my mind to do it. I could almost hear GiGi berating me each time if I didn’t.
“Why were you sent?” I dare ask, hoping Jedrek figures out something is wrong as we both sit here in our cars on an empty street.
“She has a message for you,” the voice whispers.
“…and it is?”
“Forget about all of this or risk it all.”
“That’s not much of an option.”
There is only silence from the back seat now. A stillness which seems thicker than should be possible in such an already small space. I strain to hear a breath, a movement, some clue as to what the man behind me is doing now that he’s stopped talking, but there is nothing. My passenger still stares out the windshield with no interest in what is happening around her. Easy for her. She’s already dead.
Slipping my hand to the door’s latch, I wince with every sound the cloth seat makes, positive at any moment the man will speak again, or worse. The release of the metal latch sounds like shrapnel, spreading its damage through the car, but still, he remains silent behind me. I don’t wait to test my luck. Without any grace, other than the goal to escape, I almost throw myself from my seat, sure at any moment the threat he left hanging in the air around me will tighten like a noose around my throat.
Tripping over my own feet with my fear, I land as a most ungraceful heap in the middle of the road. Still, I wait to hear my attacker rushing for me. When he doesn’t, it is almost more unsettling than if he were.
“You’re that afraid of her?” Jedrek has exited his own car, leaning against the high gloss of its metal frame. He’s looking with unhidden amusement from me, where I lay in the middle of the road like an attempted roadkill, and to the woman who is also watching me from the passenger seat with her normal annoyed face.
“No,” I tell him, still catching my breath. “Not her. Him in the back seat.”
Jedrek moves before I have finished my explanation. I reach for him, knowing he is unarmed and not knowing the same about the man in the back seat. Sidestepping my outstretched arm of caution, he seems to glide towards the car, pulling, without hesitation or worry, open the back door. What he sees doesn’t stir the same sense of urgency as was stirred in me.
“This is what threatened you?” he asks, turning to unblock my view of my car.
Stretched across the beach styled seat is dead man. A very obviously dead man. In his hand, he holds a wilting yellow carnation. The bright coloring of its petals contrasts sharply with the greying pallor of the man’s skin. The stench, which I somehow missed until he opened the door, rolls out as if it’s a physical cloud, mocking me even more.
Jedrek pulls the body out, bouncing it against the pavement. Standing over it, he chuckles, but not from amusement. His laughter is thick with disgust and his eyes hold a fire of anger.
“He was not dead a moment ago,” I insist.
The ground feels like quicksand underneath my feet when I stand. I’m sinking into confusion and fear. I know this man was just talking, threatening me, sent from some unknown woman with a riddle of her own. Now, he lays before me, rapidly rotting in the street. The yellow flower has slipped from his hand. His extended fingers seem to reach for it like a lost token.
&nb
sp; “He is very dead.” Jedrek kicks the man, sending him rolling forward with putrid fluids left in his wake.
“He was speaking!” I raise my voice trying to convince him I’m not as insane as I feel standing here watching as the man slowly stops rolling.
Jedrek laughs again, louder, and still tainted with disgust. “And what did this dead man say to you?”
I repeat his threat. “Forget about all of this or risk it all.”
“While holding the yellow carnation?”
I can’t tell if he’s asking me or making an observation about the current situation.
Jedrek turns his full attention to me. “Do you understand?”
“No!”
Letting out a frustrated breath, giving it almost a sound, he stares up into the night sky. “This, littlest witch, was a test. You see,” he says, slowly walking towards me in such a way to set my stomach with unease, “if you really are what you say you are, what Jo says you are, what everyone thinks you are, you should have sensed him in your back seat. Even if you didn’t,” he stands in front of me, touching my face with just the tips of his fingers, “you should have been able to control him. For that is what you are, death, and he is very dead.”
“I raise the dead.” My voice is just a whisper of strength. It floats away from me before I can muster any conviction.
“And then you?” Jedrek asks, almost matching my whisper.
“Control them,” my whisper admits.
Jedrek’s fingers are tapping my cheek bone. It’s a forceful touch but also like a feather caressing my skin.
“The flower?” I ask, hushed and concealed with worry.
“The message.”
Jedrek slips from me. Without his fingers, my cheek feels chilled. I watch him retreat to his car with an almost sadness aching inside of me. I feel like a child saddened for not meeting someone’s approval. My mouth moves with the urge to speak words to win back his smile, but I have none.
“Go home littlest witch.” I hear him say. “Go tell Jo everything which has happened. Tell her, her little lies are going to kill you. Tell her she knows now. Tell her she’s coming and I’m not sure even I can keep you safe anymore.”
The Little Lies (The Great Hexpectations Series Book 1) Page 9
