Finally, I made it through Ashburn’s one stop light without incident and made my way onto the highway where the speed limit rose to fifty-five, then seventy where the new lanes had recently been opened. At that point, I became the impediment to people in a bigger hurry than me. I was driving forty-something, a speed in which I felt comfortable, like Kes told me to do, yet I was impeding traffic. The assholes started passing me, even in no-passing zones.
I was close to the exit and our road wasn’t far now. Our road, which also led to the cemetery. I signaled my turn in case anyone else thought they’d take a turn passing on the right – which was strictly prohibited in every driver’s handbook, by the way.
My fingers shook as they gripped the steering wheel. When the opposing lane was clear, I steered off the exit, drove gently through two stop signs, and merged onto our street.
Foggy Mountain Lane was as quiet as it got. The collection of split-level houses was all built in the eighties and had the same look; brick on the bottom with siding at the top. Each was a different color, some had garages and some didn’t, but that was as daring as the builders ventured to go.
I steered around parked cars and yapping dogs and made my way down the street. Lined with clear sidewalks and shady oak trees, everything seemed so normal. This whole thing should be over with soon, I told myself. And then said self reminded me that my classmate had vanished right before my eyes.
The girl disappeared. I saw her. She was there, then she wasn’t.
Slowly making my way down the street, I spied our house in the distance. I checked my cell to see if a signal had returned, then screamed when Kes suddenly appeared in the passenger’s seat. I dropped my phone and it fell between the seats.
I was about to have a panic attack. Or a heart attack. Or both.
“You should never play with your phone while driving,” he scolded.
I hit the brakes hard and he flew into the dashboard. Instant karma.
“You should never just appear in someone’s car while they’re driving, Kes. That’s way scarier than texting.”
He fished my cell out of the crack between the seats and put the car in park, flinging his door open. “Come on.”
“Where’s Dad?” The car was in the middle of the road. Surely, we couldn’t just park and leave it here. “Is Mom still home? Are we going to grab her on the way?”
Instead of answering my question, he demanded, “Get out of the car, Larken. We have to run.”
I turned the engine off and opened my door, my feet hitting the pavement and grinding the small gravels atop the surface.
Kes was beside me in an instant. “We have to hurry! There’s no time.” A pause, then, “This might hurt.”
“Hurt?” I barely had time to utter the word before he clamped his hand around my forearm.
It hurt.
He wasn’t kidding. It felt like some sadistic form of acupuncture, like tiny needles had been shoved into every available sliver of skin.
I was still screaming and swiping at my skin when we reappeared in the middle of the cemetery. Seemingly unaffected, Kes strode away toward the old mausoleum nearest the woods.
The stone was old, covered with strange etchings, with a roof arched like a miniature cathedral. Green, leafy vines crept up the sides, slowly swallowing it as it crept closer to the edge of the woods. Though I’d seen it a hundred times at night and in the daylight, I never dreamed Kes thought this place was safer than all others. I mean, off the top of my head I could think of a thousand other places that felt safer than this. Maybe five thousand.
“Why are we here, Kes?” I screamed after him, patting my arms and legs, running hands down my chest and stomach to make sure all of me was still there. I didn’t know how he transported me. I mean, in my mind he wasn’t a faery. Or a changeling. Kes wasn’t one of the fair folk. The fair folk weren’t real.
Kes was.
And I’d seen him appear and disappear more times than I could count, but he’d never – never – taken me with him. I never thought it was possible.
“Where better to hide the living, than among the dead?” he fired back.
Kes didn’t bother with a key but kicked the mausoleum doors in and strode inside while I gaped, dumbstruck on the lawn. We are so going to hell for this. This had to qualify as tomb desecration. I was too young to go to jail. Not to mention I looked awful in orange.
“Kes, this is insane!” I hissed. “You are insane. And where are Mom and Dad? Did they disappear, too? Where did that girl go?”
Kes yelled from inside, “Stop messing around and get in here, Larken!”
His tone wasn’t just ‘irritated brother’. His tone was dire. I hauled butt inside.
I’d followed Kes here before when we were younger and he snuck out after Mom and Dad went to sleep. While I’d hovered outside these walls plenty of times over the years, I never had the courage to push the door open and peek inside.
The dust was thick in the stale air. Motes flew in every direction as Kes cut through them like a speedboat through still water. A marble vault lay at the far end of the room and I was glad the lid was closed. My shoes left a fresh set of footprints on the dusty floorboards, overlapping the trail Kes had just blazed. Layers of older prints, all Vans, all Kes’s, lay beneath the fresh ones.
Kes gripped the edge of the giant stone slab positioned over the vault and began to push. The sound of stone grating against stone filled the room.
“What are you doing? Stop! You cannot seriously open up a grave.”
“It’s… not a grave,” he gritted, pushing the stone harder. It slid farther and farther to the side and then fell to the floor with a violent thud. Kes waved me over impatiently. “It’s a staircase.”
“A staircase to what?”
He closed his eyes and took a frustrated breath. When they snapped open again, he cryptically replied, “Not to what, to whom.”
“I swear to God, Kes, if this is some weird, devil-worshipping-cult shit, I want no part of it.” I raked my hands through my hair and tried to soothe the incessant pounding in my head. Just then the world began to tip, and before I knew he was near, my head was cradled in his hands. Kes let out a soft curse as his palms gripped my jaw and his fingers lay against my temples. The vice felt good. The pressure eased my pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” he said quietly.
“I haven’t exactly had time.”
Within seconds, my migraine was gone. Not even a flicker of pain pulsed.
Kes had many powers. Some I knew. Some I was sure I didn’t. But he could heal my headaches and broken ankles like nobody’s business, and I loved him for that.
He picked me up, damsel-in-distress-style, and headed for the vault. “I can walk! I’m fine now.”
“I know, but you’re short and can’t climb.”
My mouth popped open. “I am not short. We are almost the same height, thank you very much.” Kes smiled but didn’t argue as he placed me on the edge of the vault. I raised my feet up, just in case something nefarious was going to grab me from below, but like he said, there was just a dark, foreboding staircase. “I am not going down there.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re going first.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
I made room for him as he swung his legs over the edge of the crypt and started down the steps. “Is there any light?”
Kes whispered a few words and a peculiar blue light flooded the staircase from below. He disappeared when he reached the bottom and his footsteps echoed across the floor. He growled my name, so I took a step down. Then another. When I reached the bottom, I peered around the cavernous room that had absolutely no business being beneath the ground of the Ashburn Cemetery. Tree roots had wormed their way between a few of the smooth, precisely cut stones, but the room was otherwise
immaculate. Kes must have been keeping it this way. Unlike upstairs, there were no dust motes. The floor was black marble, as reflective as a polished mirror, the blue glow spilling over it like an ocean of light.
Matching marble columns braced the ceiling. Scattered along the walls were planters containing a perfumed, blooming plant with star-shaped purple flowers. My fingers drifted over their pointed tips as I crept around the perimeter of the circular room. The roof wasn’t domed but was painted to look like it was. However, that wasn’t the most amazing part. The entire thing was painted to look like the night sky, one constellation shining brighter than the rest… the stars of which glowed, somehow lit from behind.
Aries.
Kes hovered over a marble slab but turned as I approached, blocking my view and moving in front of me when I tried to peer around him. He gripped my upper arms with the same intensity he’d used to clench the steering wheel this morning. “What you are about to witness, you can never breathe a word of.” I nodded. “And for goodness sake, keep your mouth shut. He’ll be disoriented and… never mind. Just don’t say a word. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.”
“He?”
Kes’s grip on my arms tightened. His blue eyes burned. “Not a word, Larken.”
“Okay, jeez.”
“I’ll explain more later, but there’s no time now,” Kes said, turning around.
When he moved, I saw what he’d been hiding behind him. A young man lay on a marble slab. His hands were folded over his stomach, and in the place of each fingertip was a sharp, slightly curved claw. Each was dark blue to the first knuckle, where the sapphire hue shimmered. Not like death had touched him, but like he’d dipped his hands into the glittering night sky and dragged them through the surface.
My God, he was beautiful. So perfect I couldn’t stop studying him. His arms, chest, and legs were chiseled but not bulky, the planes highlighted by the eerie blue light.
My feet slowly carried me closer. My fingers flexed as if they wanted to touch him. To see if he was real.
He didn’t look much older than me, but a feeling in the pit of my stomach said he was much, much older.
His skin was ashen, his brows almost black. The dark slashes were settled peacefully as he slept, but I could picture them slanting in disapproval and stared to make sure I hadn’t seen the expression flit across his face. His hair was dark, though I couldn’t tell its true shade because it was highlighted with a sapphire hue from the lighting in the room. Except for the two obsidian horns that curled proudly from his head like those on a ram, he looked almost normal.
I wanted him to open his eyes to learn what color they were.
He wasn’t like Kes. His body and face were his own. I wasn’t sure how I knew it, but I did. The entire room was constructed for him. To protect him. Maybe even to honor him.
But what was he?
Angel? Demon? Something worse?
The cut of bare, flawless skin was interrupted by the smallest trail of hair that led from his belly button and disappeared beneath a pale loincloth that lay over his groin. My eyes continued their trek down the length of his body. The muscles in his legs looked like they’d been carved from marble. How long had he lain there?
Kes stood beside the man’s head and closed his eyes, then began to speak in a language I didn’t recognize. He whispered so quietly, almost murmuring under his breath, that I could barely hear him, the words blurring, ebbing and flowing until he opened his eyes, quietly watching the entombed.
Kes said he would be disoriented when he awoke, but he never stirred. Never took a breath.
His chest was still.
So terrifyingly still.
It was all I could stare at as he lay there.
I inched closer. Kes snapped at me to stay back, then he yelled for me to stay across the room while he woke him. My heart thundered at the thought. I walked backward until my shoulder blades met the wall, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the strange man.
I wanted him awake.
I wanted to see his eyes.
I wanted to see his chest rise and fall.
To see his muscles ripple beneath his skin.
To see if he moved as lithely as I imagined he would.
His chest was still, but he wasn’t dead, I knew that much. I could almost sense his energy, and his body didn’t feel empty like Kestrel’s was for a time. Even in slumber, his overpowering presence filled the room. The star-shaped flowers began to twitch, curling toward him like he was their sun, their source of life. Kes whispered over him and the air shimmered with a powerful magic I could taste but couldn’t begin to grasp, bittersweet and dangerous.
His dark lashes fluttered and he mumbled incoherently, though I wasn’t sure if he was speaking the same language as Kes or not. His head listed from one side to the other restlessly. He opened his eyes and blinked steadily, then stopped blinking, going very still.
Silent.
He suddenly bolted upright, grabbing Kes by the throat. A growl tore from the thing’s throat. Kes’s order to stay quiet and on the other side of the room was forgotten in an instant.
“Let go of him!” I screamed, racing to Kes’s side and trying to pry the man’s steely hand from his neck.
The horned man’s pale pink eyes angrily locked onto mine and widened, fury ebbing through him. Emitting a guttural cry, he knocked me away as if I were lighter than a feather. Pain exploded across my side as I hit the stone floor and slid across the room, but I scrambled to my feet and went back to try to defend Kes.
Pulling Kes’s face close to his and pressing their foreheads together, the two whispered in sync. The same lyrical words flowed in an identical cadence that echoed over the ceiling, sliding down the walls and over the floor.
My fingers twitched to separate them, but Kes did this willingly, so I decided to wait.
He gripped the thing’s head and held him in place. A few moments later, the man took his crushing hand off Kes’s neck. I was waiting nearby, and as soon as the monster released him, I grabbed my brother and jerked him away.
And in thanks, Kes had the audacity to yell at me.
“I told you to stay over there and keep your mouth completely shut. I told you not to move!”
I threw a hand in the thing’s direction. “He was hurting you!”
Kes righted his clothes and sniffed. “He was not hurting me.”
“How was I supposed to know that, Kes?”
The guy with the horns sat on the edge of the slab and stared at us, transfixed. His loincloth had come somewhat loose. “He’s about to lose his… cloth thing,” I warned Kes, who cursed and told me to turn around. I laughed as Kes knotted the cloth at his side in an attempt to cover him.
The strange man stared at me over Kes’s shoulders like he was as perplexed about me being there as I was that he existed.
He slid his pink eyes toward Kes as he straightened again.
Kes’s eyes widened in a silent plea I didn’t understand. What the hell is happening? My side stung from where I landed on the stone floor. I ran a hand down my side and hip; I was already bruising in spots.
“You are injured.”
I looked up with a start, realizing he was only inches away. I craned my head backward to get some space. He smelled spicy, but not spicy like curry, spicy like… cinnamon? And something unique I couldn’t name.
He smelled delicious.
“You threw me across the room. What did you expect?” Asshole. I would have called him that out loud if I wasn’t afraid he might do it again.
He looked at Kes, his dark brows furrowing.
“When you woke, you were disoriented,” Kes explained, giving me a pointed look. “You grabbed my throat and she thought you were hurting me. She tried to remove your hand and you batted her away. She fell.”
I took a step toward him. “
I did not fall, and he didn’t bat me away, Kes. He backhanded me and I flew across the room and landed on my side – which, by the way, will be black and blue tomorrow, and prom is this…”
I froze.
The room went still as it sank in. There would be no prom, would there?
I was unable to hold back the tears that flooded my eyes.
Where’s Mom and Dad?
What’s happening?
What happened to Fajita girl?
Why does this guy have freaking horns?
And why is he staring at me?
Why are his eyes pink?
“Larken,” the man rasped quietly from a few feet away this time.
My mouth popped open in shock. How did he know my name?
“Why did you bring her here?” he asked, swiveling his head to look at Kes, a silent fury I didn’t understand lingering in his eyes and in his tone.
“She is my sister. My family,” Kes answered. “Despite what she is and what we are, she’s dear to me.”
The pink-eyed beast moved closer and brought his finger to my cheek, tracing my tear. It was my turn to bat his hand away. I was a little embarrassed that I barely moved it, but my point was made. He withdrew his hand. “I apologize for causing you harm. Shall I heal you?”
“Shall you heal me? Um, no. You shall not lay another finger on me!” I snapped. I turned to Kes. “But you’re going to explain every damn thing. Now.”
Kes gestured to the beast. “Larken, I’d like you to meet Aries.”
5
Aries.
Like the constellation glowing overhead.
My heart thundered, trying to keep up with whatever the hell was happening.
I looked from Kes to Aries and waited for an explanation that never came. Kes turned to his friend. “I invoke my right.”
Right? What right?
Aries went rigid, completely still as he stared holes through my brother. I was afraid for him and eased toward him, ready to get between them again if it came down to it.
Things That Should Stay Buried Page 4
