Charcoal Tears (37 page)

“Miro actually found you first,” Cabe said. “But he didn’t know what you were. He suspected, and he didn’t want Weston to find out about you, so he kept you close, but distant. About a week after his first day teaching at that school, Tabby moved to Seattle. We all thought that it meant our father had somehow found out about you, so Miro sent us to watch over you. We followed you to the supermarket after work. You probably don’t remember but—”

“Oh my god,” I interrupted. “I’ve met you both before?”

“No.” Cabe passed a hand over the back of his neck. “We didn’t speak to you or anything. We only spent the afternoon watching you. You went to pick Tariq up from football practise and on your way back to the car you ran into me.” Colour rose in his cheeks, and he flicked his eyes to the window, a wry smile twisting his lips. “You stared straight through me, but I felt it.”

“Imagine our surprise.” Noah chuckled. “Miro met you a week earlier, and suspected that you were theirs, and then Cabe ran into you and suspected that you were ours. It left us with quite a dilemma. We had to stay the hell away from you after that. We got kicked out of school after school until yours was the only one left.”

“Why did you keep getting kicked out?”

“We didn’t want to be there.” Cabe shrugged. “We wanted to be where you were, and it made us pretty angry that we needed to stay away from you. Eventually… we couldn’t.”

“You knew,” I repeated dumbly. “For a year. Silas too.”

“Silas.” Noah snorted on an incredulous laugh, disguised as a cough. “He never wanted an Atmá. He ignored every single woman that Weston shoved at him, to the point where our father was sure that there was no use in using him anymore, because it wouldn’t be clear that the girl belonged to him even after he met her. He would probably just send her on her merry way like all of the others, without even blinking an eye. We had no idea he had tracked down where you worked.”

“He never spoke to me. Not for a year.”

“Yeah, well, let’s just say that you’re a bit of a sore spot for Silas,” Cabe said without expression.

“So when did you find out?” I asked, ignoring the dread that immediately began to churn in the pit of my stomach at Cabe’s last statement. “When did you all know for certain?”

“When you jumped in front of my car,” Noah answered immediately. “I didn’t worry that I had almost killed a stranger, I worried that I had almost killed myself.”

“Silas always knew,” Cabe added. “He touched you the first night he saw you, didn’t he?”

I nodded.

“He would have wanted to make sure, to know for certain who you were. He doesn’t like loose ends.”

“And Quillan?”

“It took Miro the longest to accept it. He was still arguing right up until he saw your mark. I’m discounting Silas, of course. He’ll probably be fighting this until the day he dies.”

“So what do we do now?” I asked as the tension slowly drained out of me. “If the messenger finds out that I bonded with Silas and Miro, he’s going to come after me for real. He’s wanted to get me away from you guys all this time, but now that the bond is complete—and… wait…” I trailed off, frowning at their faces.

“He hasn’t been waiting for you to bond with Silas and Miro.” Noah hesitated, voicing the thoughts that had pulled me up. “He only has his eye on
us
. As far as he knows, the bond that he’s waiting for still hasn’t happened. He doesn’t realise that you have two pairs. He’s going to keep trying to separate us, and the longer you resist, the more he’ll act out.”

“I don’t see how that’s a good thing. Especially after tonight.”

“He overreacted tonight, Seph. That means he’s losing composure.”

“But the painting—”

“How many of your paintings have gone missing? Do you even know?”

I blinked, and then recalled a painting that I had drawn in my first art class with Noah and Cabe—it had disappeared from my bag the next day. “Oh,” I said. “I guess… I guess I don’t know.”

“His messages usually feel very premeditated. Tonight was different. It was rushed, sloppy, even; Aiden doesn’t mean anything to you or the messenger, he was simply convenient. And did you see the gravesite? The messenger—or whoever buried Aiden—had left in a hurry. They left their shovel behind, and didn’t cover their tracks.”

Nothing he said was making me feel better, but it did make sense, in a way. “So you’re counting on him acting out like this again?”

“Hopefully not,” Cabe replied instead of Noah, obviously sensing the emotion bubbling just beneath my surface. He squeezed my hand. “But if he does, we’ll make sure we’re prepared this time. We’ll be waiting for him.”

“I can’t have anyone else die because of me.” I spoke to the floor, feeling my panic swirling around me like the four sides of a box, gradually closing in on me and suffocating me.

Noah and Cabe moved closer, pressing into me from either side. The scratching feeling was back, crawling over my skin and itching against the marrow of my bones, infecting my blood with uncomfortable fire… and yet, it felt almost good. It was
good
to have them there, supporting me. Holding me and telling me—without words—that they were in this with me.

Telling me that they were part of me.

I hadn’t realised it until this moment, but the bond was important to Cabe and Noah. Whether they wanted to share me or not, whether they liked me as a friend or not, whether they prolonged the bond for the next six years, or formed it tomorrow… our connection meant that we were a part of something, the three of us, the five of us. We belonged to each other, in whatever way we chose to acknowledge, but we belonged all the same, and that was special.

We were—in a strained, awkward and extraordinary way—united. We were a tribe, a unit, a partnership, a family. We would protect each other, revolt against each other, and curse how our very existence was tied—and yet, like elastic, I had a feeling that we would always snap back.

We would be okay.

For now.

21

The Messenger…

I was close enough to touch her. I could have reached out and wrapped my hands around her pretty little neck. Of course, I’ve touched her before, whether she knew it or not. I’ve brushed past her in the hallways, followed her home from school and watched her sleep. She didn’t have a very wide bed, but it fit me comfortably. I sat there and listened to the sound of her breathing. I wanted to touch her then, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to wake her.

Seraph Black was an angel while she slept.

She was a traitor when she was awake; her wings folded in and turned black as tar and her eyes bled scarlet. Her graceful fingers lengthened into seductive talons, forming hands that I could not hold, her silky hair whipped me in the face when she didn’t see me, when I should have been able to grab onto the length and drag her back to my side. She was still beautiful; she would always be beautiful… but she was toxic malevolence. For ten long years, I have watched her. Noah and Cabe Adair believe that they saw her first, but they didn’t.

I
discovered
her.

She discovered me.

I wasn’t much to look at back then. I wasn’t much of anything. She thought that she was invisible, but I always noticed her. I noticed her because she saved me. I’ve been preparing for her ever since, but ever since then she has looked straight through me. She never recognised me, so I made myself recognisable, and
still
she did not see. I knew that I had to continue waiting. She had the valcrick, she was an Atmá, and one day her pair would come along. If I took her before then, she would only leave me and go to them.

So I bided my time.

She was a block of cheese amid a honeycomb land of rat-holes, and I watched from above as the vermin swooped in. Many tried, and she squashed them all before I was even needed.

Until Noah and Cabe Adair.

I needed to separate them. I needed her to prolong the bond, but tonight she hurt me, and she needed to be punished.

“I’m hurting,” the girl whimpered, looking up at me through vodka-shaded dark eyes. What was her name again? Bronwyn? Brown? She was pretty, but it held no appeal for me. “Make it stop,” she begged, pushing her small body against mine.

“Hmm.” I pulled her into me, grabbing her by the ass and hauling her up. “Maybe I will. Don’t forget how this works though, sweetheart. Tit for tat, and all that.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want.” She pressed wet kisses along my neck, her breath hot. “Just make it stop.”

“I want to hurt your boyfriend,” I told her.

Oh yeah, she liked that. I heard her moan before she caught it.
Typical
. The pairs always had issues, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Being part of a pair meant that you were special, but the only reason you were allowed to be
special
was because you belonged to the truly precious Atmá—the pinnacle, the the coveted obelisk of Zevghéri society. The pairs were nothing more than glorified organ donors.

“He’s my Atmá,” she half-heartedly protested. “It’ll hurt me too.”

“I’ll put you back together,” I promised, leaning back against the glass wall of the gym and shifting her against me. She couldn’t make me hard, but she was probably too drunk to notice. Her body recognised the gesture and I heard another sound against my neck. “What was that?” I growled, pulling her head back by the hair.

“Yes,” she gasped. “Hurt him.”

“Alright,” I laughed, dropping her back to her feet. Man, she was fucked up. “If you can get him alone, outside, in the next twenty minutes… it will be done.”

“N-not too badly,” she interjected, stumbling a little. “I-I don’t want to hurt, too.”

“Twenty minutes,” I repeated, moving to the glass doors.

It took her ten minutes to get him outside, and it took me a further two minutes to chloroform him. After he was tucked away in my car, I drove to the graveyard and killed him gently. I didn’t want Seraph to think that I was a monster; I only wanted to deliver her a warning. She hurt me tonight, and she shouldn’t have. She should have known better.

He was still unconscious when I cupped the back of his head and whispered a single word into the stale night air.

“Die.”

It was my ability. Nothing more was needed.

Aiden Singala stopped breathing, his heart stopped ticking, and his brain ceased transmitting. There was no pain, no screaming, and no blood. He was lucky, really. If he had touched my Seraph, there would have been plenty of all three. I laid him in the shallow grave, and stumbled back as the darkness flashed behind my eyelids, my limbs falling weakly by my sides for the time it took to recover. This always happened when I used my ability to this extent. There were limits, especially without a pair. By the time I gained my feet again, I was smirking at the thought of the pair not five miles from here. What was her name again? Bertha? Belinda? It started with a B, whatever it was. I supposed it didn’t really matter. The bitch was dead now, probably sporting a chick boner at the thought of someone making her Atmá bleed.

I buried one of Seraph’s paintings with the body. It had her fingerprints all over it; ensuring that when the police found him—and they would—they would involve her and deliver my message. What I didn’t expect was for
them
to come blundering out of the forest not five minutes after I had put him in the ground. I didn’t get a chance to cover my tracks or grab my shovel; I had to disappear into the forest where I could watch from a safe distance.

Noah took her to a tree in the middle of the graveyard while his brothers searched the place, like they knew that I had been here… like they knew what I had done. One of them found the grave and shouted out to the others. I watched as Seraph fell down beside it and started to scrape away the dirt.

She was in a frenzy.

I held my breath, waiting for the big reveal. This was better. Much better. I don’t know how they knew, but I was glad that she got to find out this way. The police didn’t need to get involved at all.

It could just be her and me. How it should be.

She found the present that I had left her and unrolled it on the grass to read my message. I strained, trying to hear what she might say, but she turned and dropped it onto the chest of the dead boy. She stood and lifted her head, scanning the line of tress. Her eyes landed on me and stuck, but I knew that she couldn’t really see me. Her lips moved, formed words, and I felt the force of her gaze right through me, heavy in the pit of my stomach and heady in the steady thrum of my heart against my ribcage. Even from this distance, I could make out the beautifully mismatched pupils, the dark strands of hair that floated around her face—or perhaps the image was just seared into my retinas by now.

She was an angel.

She was a traitor.

The B-
something
girl didn’t do it for me, but Seraph Black’s terrified stare did. She had never truly smiled at me, not in the way I had seen her smile at others, but this was almost as good. I reached down and applied a little pressure to the sudden ache with the heel of my palm, my eyes narrowing as she continued to stare. It was almost too much.