“Shut up, Cabe.” Silas’s voice filled the car. “Your Lexus isn’t a residence, and I know you’re driving, because I’m watching your GPS dot move down the road.”
“Wait, what? Someone stole my car! Shit!”
“Are you still going shopping?”
“Yeah. Seph wants a piercing.”
There was silence on the other end for a few seconds, and then Silas spoke again. “Am I on speaker?”
“Yup.”
“Who’s in the car?”
“The usual suspects.”
“Noah?” Silas asked.
“Silas,” Noah answered.
“Text me the address. I’ll meet you there.”
“On it,” Noah said as he slipped his phone out of his pocket and texted Silas.
Without another word, Silas hung up.
“Silas seems to be… hanging out… a lot more than usual, these days,” Clarin said. “He hasn’t once been arrested and you guys have been here almost two full days. What’s the deal?”
“He’s reformed,” Cabe said with a smirk.
“Right.” Clarin scoffed again. “You’re all a right bunch of cherubs all of a sudden.”
“Not me,” Noah said. “I don’t have a cherubic bone in my body.”
“Maybe you’ve got your bone in someone else’s cherubic body then?” The quip was light, but the meaning hung heavy in the air.
I wasn’t stupid, I knew who he was talking about.
I slid away from Noah and hovered behind Clarin’s seat. I didn’t worry about getting too close to him, because he wasn’t into girls anyway, so I draped an arm right over his shoulder, until it curved down his torso. Cabe bit out a curse and the car swerved like he’d momentarily lost control of the wheel. I drew on a non-harmful memory and closed my eyes as Clarin froze.
“Holy… holy c-crap,” Clarin was stuttering, and I knew it had worked.
I blinked my eyes open and my arm was encased in slithering lights, like sparks upon my skin. They didn’t seem to be touching him, which was weird because my arm was definitely touching him… but then again, I hadn’t wanted them to. Perhaps they were listening to me.
“This cherubic body,” I whispered the words in his ear, but they carried through the car in a menacing way, “doesn’t get boned. Don’t speak about me like that.”
His head turned slowly, his eyes seeming more moss-green now that I was seeing them up-close. He stared at me like he hadn’t really seen me until now, and he slowly nodded. “So the mouse has claws? Good.” He flashed me a smile. “I was beginning to worry for you.”
I pulled my arm back and Noah immediately grabbed me, hauling me back to his side like he had been itching to do it for days—instead of minutes. Cabe’s fists were so tight against the steering wheel I thought it was going to break off.
“Jesus…” Cabe muttered.
“Yeah.” Clarin reached over and patted his shoulder. “It almost turned me on too.”
Cabe laughed, shaking his head, and the tension seemed to ease as we drove the rest of the way to the mall. As we parked and spilled out of the car, Cabe’s phone rang again.
“Yup?” he said. “Oh, hey Poison—no she’s not here. No, you can’t talk to her. Okay, fine! No need to resort to threats. Here!” He handed the phone to me, and I pressed it hesitantly to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Aw, the birdy chirped. How’s it going, cupcake?”
“Good, thank you. How are you?”
“Fan-freaking-tastic. You better be coming to my party tonight. I wasn’t kidding. I have things planned for you. I bet those boys have been all me-man-you-woman for the past few days and it’s probably driving you crazy. You need girl time. Make them bring you.”
“Um… I don’t really like parties that much.”
“The last one you went to was with them, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“And you had to put up with a bunch of snivelling bimbos, didn’t you?”
“Kind of.”
“And they guarded you like you were the queen of Geneva and didn’t let anyone talk to you, didn’t they?”
“I guess so. Sort of.”
“Thought so. This party will be different. You’ll love it! I promise. Now promise me you’ll come…”
I chewed on my lip. “Okay…”
“Good. I’ll text Cabe the address. Come by early so I can proof your outfit. I can’t have you embarrassing our scandalous family name.”
She hung up and I stared at the phone for a little bit, wondering what had just happened.
“We’re going to a party,” I told Cabe, handing back his phone as the sports car I remembered from the garage slid into the parking spot beside us, purring.
Silas got out, stuffed his keys into his pocket, and nodded to us all. Eloquent, as ever.
“What kind of car is that?” I eventually asked, when it seemed like nobody else was going to be speak.
“A Lotus Elise,” Noah answered, taking my arm. “Now let’s go get you pierced before Miro shows up and manages to stop us.”
“How do you know I’m not here to stop you?” Silas asked.
“Because I know how you work,” Noah answered. “You would have called every store capable of doing it and bribed them substantially to take an extended break until we were clear of the vicinity.”
“Yeah,” Cabe agreed. “You’re here to watch, you sick bastard.”
Silas’s lips quirked, an almost smile. It tugged at me. We walked into the shopping centre and Noah hunted down the store he wanted. Clarin fit right in with a tattoo on almost every spare inch of his body, and he and Cabe started flicking through books of tattoos while Noah and Silas walked over to a cabinet of piercings.
“Why are we doing this?” Silas asked me, the second we were away from the others.
“Girlfriend insurance,” I answered.
At his confused look, Noah breathed out a half laugh, grabbed my wrist and held it up to display Quillan’s watch. “Seph is worried about our connection thing—” his lips twitched into a smile, and I saw amusement glinting in Silas’s eyes—“so Miro gave her his watch, and said that she didn’t have to worry about how the bond would affect him wanting to be in a relationship until he asked for the watch back.”
“I see.” Silas touched the watch briefly, and I almost saw another smile. “And naturally, you’re piercing her ear?”
“Naturally. I’ll tell her to take it out when I want a girlfriend.”
“So naturally, I should get a tattoo.”
“Naturally.”
“Huh?” They lost me with the tattoo.
Silas turned on me, the wheels ticking over behind his eyes. “I’ll get a half-finished tattoo,” he said. “More girlfriend insurance. When I want a girlfriend, I’ll get the tattoo finished.”
“Isn’t that a little… permanent?”
His eyes flashed; there was something that he was finding enormously funny about all of this, and it was distracting me from the fact that the whole situation was tipping off the far end of strange, into something distinctively unusual, because hell, Silas actually seemed to be having fun.
“Trust me, angel. When that day comes, it will be permanent.”
I turned away so that he didn’t have to see how his words had just affected me. The pain ripped through my chest with the niggling memory of Cabe insinuating that Silas had a secret girlfriend, and it wasn’t the alien jealousy that I often felt with Noah and Cabe… instead, it was as real, as gut-wrenching, as it would have been if Silas had slapped me clean across the face. I walked over to the tattoo book, pushed Cabe and Clarin out of the way, and started flicking violently through the pages. They seemed to recover from their shock, and both stood there silently. I stopped at an image, running my fingers over it. Yes. It was the one.
I marched back to Silas, the book tucked under my arm. “I get to pick the tattoo. It’s my insurance policy.”
Any trace of amusement was now gone
from his face, but I suspected that it was only so that I wouldn’t feel as though he was laughing at me—since all other emotion had been wiped from his expression right along with the hilarity, and there was a tightness to his mouth instead of his usual frown. Noah, however, was now trying so hard not to laugh that he was leaning against Silas with his face turned away from us.
“Sure,” Silas said.
I slammed the book over the piercings cabinet and pointed at the image. “That one.”
“That one it is.”
I paused, not having expected him to agree so readily, and looked back at the design—a set of angel wings.
“Really?”
“I can get the wings done, and then colour them in later. How’s that?”
“Okay…” I couldn’t really argue after he had so readily agreed to my design.
“Come choose your earring.” Noah gently lifted the tattoo book and handed it to Silas.
I looked into the case and browsed the rings there, more to distract myself from the back-an-forth reeling of my mind than with any real concentration.
This is a terrible idea.
He’s going to get the wings.
Don’t let them do this.
Eventually I pointed to a tiny silver hoop. It would fit snugly around the top part of my ear. Noah grabbed the attention of the guy behind the counter and pointed out the ring, detailing where I wanted it. The guy kept glancing at me, probably wondering why I wasn’t speaking for myself. The truth was, I wasn’t sure what I would say when I finally opened my mouth. He had almost as many tattoos as Clarin, and there was a line of piercings up his left ear, as well as one through his eyebrow. When he spoke, I saw the flash of something in his mouth—another piercing, presumably.
“You guys are going to have to wait out here,” he said, pulling a part of the counter up and motioning me through it.
He pulled the shelf out from under the display cabinet, extracted my ring, and ushered me through a door. He pointed me to a chair that looked a little bit like a reclining dentist’s chair, and then he swept my hair away from my face.
“Do you talk?” he asked, fiddling with things on a bench beside the chair.
“Sometimes.”
“Which one of those guys is with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which one is your boyfriend?”
“Ah, none of them.”
He met my eyes for the first time—since it wasn’t so easy for me to look down when I was lying waist-height and horizontal—and he paused a minute, his eyes widening, snapping from my blue-violet eye to my blue-green one. The stillness in the room barely lasted a second, and then he seemed to recover.
“So why get a piercing? Any particular reason? Is it your birthday or something?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
“You don’t have any piercings at all?” He drew my hair up over the back of the chair, his eyes checking my earlobes.
“Nope.”
“Well, this’ll pinch.”
He had a thing in his hand that faintly resembled a gun, and after he disinfected the area, he put it to my ear and pain shot through me. Without thinking, I gasped and grabbed his arm. He chuckled, putting the gun thing down. Another shock of pain went through me as he slid the hoop through the hole he had just made and secured it. My nails dug into his skin for the barest of seconds and then I quickly took my hand off him, my stomach roiling uncomfortably. I’d been brushing past people at school all day, had touched Clarin’s chest in the car, and now this guy’s arm. I had a feeling I was reaching my quota of physical contact with unfamiliar people. I tucked my hands beneath me as he cleaned my ear, and then he sat back, fiddling again.
“So, can I ask for your number, or are those guys out back going to bury me six feet under?” the guy asked.
“The second option,” Silas answered.
I jumped, looking to the doorway. A girl was leading him into the room, and she was pierced and tattooed enough to convince me that she worked here. My piercer glanced back, seemingly annoyed, and touched my arm in the guise of helping me off the chair. I watched Silas sit down in a different chair, and saw the girl fiddling with her own instruments. He was quite a sight, with his half-bruised face and bandaged hands.
“Hey,” I said to the guy who was leading me back to the door. “Do you think I could watch for a bit?” I tilted my head in Silas’s direction. He followed my eyes, and a smile lit up his face.
“Sure, I don’t see why not. Just you, though.”
Silas glowered, and I was cautious of the feral temper that momentarily glinted. Silas wasn’t a guy that you wanted to piss off, and people hitting on me really seemed to piss him off. I didn’t want him following this guy home and beating him to a pulp, so I decided to stay and play bodyguard. I sat in a chair, drawing it a little closer to watch. The guy disappeared out the front for a while, and then came back and drew up a chair next to me, planting his leg over his knee and shuffling it restlessly.
“So, what’s you name?” he asked me.
“Seph.”
“Cool, I’m Danny. That’s Tina.” He motioned to the girl, who flicked us a bored glance.
“Seph is a… different name.” He tilted his head. “Your parents foreign or something?”
I exhaled quickly, the sound partway amused and exasperated. My parents?
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re pretty foreign to me.” Silas’s lips twitched, but I continued speaking, ignoring him. “Seph is actually short for Stephanie. It’s a nickname.”
“Alright.” Tina spun around. “Where do you want it, handsome?”
Silas didn’t answer straight away. He looked at me. “Seph, you should go take those three somewhere before Clarin decides he wants another tattoo and we get stuck here all day. This is going to take a few hours.”
I looked at him dubiously. “Promise me there won’t be any… consequences—” I flicked a glance to Danny so that he knew exactly what I was talking about—“and I’ll go.”
His eyes narrowed, and Danny shared a perplexed look with Tina. Finally, he nodded.
“Thanks.” I gave him a smile and skipped from the room.
I let myself out from behind the counter and pulled my hair back to show Noah my piercing. Cabe and Clarin seemed to have disappeared, and Danny hadn’t followed me out, so we had a moment alone. He brushed a few more strands of hair out of the way and smiled, his stormy eyes flashing with genuine pleasure.
“I like it,” he said, pausing. “It suits you.”
“Good.”
“We’ve got to meet up with Cabe right now before Clarin finishes trying on shoes. We need a moment alone with you.” He led me outside and we met with Cabe as he was walking out of a jewellery store.
He tapped my nose when he saw me. “Hand over Miro’s watch. I need to get a few links taken out so that it fits properly. He’s had the same one since he was fifteen—I doubt he wants to lose it now.”
I unclipped the watch and handed it over. He disappeared inside the shop again and came out a minute later empty-handed.
“Let’s go,” he said to Noah.
They drew me down a short corridor and toward an emergency exit door, and then I found myself on a balcony overlooking one of the busy highways a short distance away. There was a metal tin behind the door filled with cigarette butts.
“Close your eyes and give me your hand,” Cabe said.
I did so, listening to the sounds of traffic and tyring to push away the scratchy feeling caused by his long fingers capturing mine. Even with the odd sensation, his touch was almost comfortable after having felt the piercer’s skin against mine. I blinked my eyes open as I felt him slide a ring onto my second finger, not waiting for him to tell me that I could look, and stared down at. The band was carved into a delicate design, and there was a tiny pearl set into the middle.
“Ohh…” I breathed. Too much. It’s too much.
“Girlfriend insurance.” Cabe’s voice
was entirely too cheerful for how horrible his words made me feel. Weren’t they all taking this a little too far?
I wanted to find fault with the ring, but I still loved it. I touched the pearl setting and looked at Noah, who was watching me for a reaction. Something sparked in my mind then, something that should have occurred to me long before this moment, but somehow hadn’t. I reached out and touched my fingertips to Noah’s chest. Cabe’s expression didn’t alter, but they both shared a flicker of curiosity. I remembered the reaction when I had touched Clarin, and faint alarm bells started to ring in my mind.
I reached out with my other hand and flattened a palm against each of their chests, pushing them gently back to the railing.
“Why doesn’t this bother you?” I fixed both of them with a speculative glance.
“What are you talking about, Seph?” Cabe was wary.
“This.” I tapped his chest, and then tapped Noah’s. “Imagine I was doing this to someone else.”
They both tensed immediately.
“Why the hell would you be doing this to someone else?” Cabe asked, his jaw tight.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but why do you four not seem to care when either one of you touches me, but then you get so… so… angry when someone else does it?”
They didn’t relax, but Noah captured my hand, tugging lightly until I fell against his chest. As if realising it had momentarily abandoned its post, the scratchy discomfort rushed back into me with renewed vigour. “We’re part of a pair,” he explained. “When Cabe touches you… it’s almost like I’m touching you. When you smile at him, it’s kind of like you’re smiling at me. With other people it’s different.”
Noah moved his body in a flash, and I was trapped between them. Cabe’s back was against the railing and Noah had captured my hands, threading his fingers through mine and tugging my arms to his sides, a little way behind me. Cabe pressed against my front, tilting my chin up, his thumb sliding over the side of my jaw and then inching up to brush the underside of my lip. They way they had just coordinated with each other… it shocked me. I knew that it was meant as some kind of demonstration, but my discomfort doubled, and I began to feel lightheaded, the creeping darkness threatening the edges of my vision.
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