Authors: Susan Vaught
“There’s nothing wrong with Darius, he’s just—” I started to say as I put my face on her shoulder, but then I caught sight of my father standing in the doorway at the top of the basement steps.
His mouth made a straight line, and his expression was flat and merciless. All of my blood turned to ice, and I pushed against Addie, trying to get free.
“Don’t, Trina,” she whispered in my ear. “He knows you love the boy. He’ll make it quick. Darius won’t feel any pain.”
I shoved her away from me. She stumbled backward, kicking the grocery bag as she went. My father’s face had become a mask of judgment and purpose. He looked like death walking, and I knew what would happen next.
My father turned and stalked away from the basement doorway.
I charged after him, screaming as I stormed up the steps.
I was still screaming as my father went to the hall closet to get the bag he always took when he went hunting. I pushed around him, and my screams cut off as if something had hit my throat. Not breathing, not thinking, I wheeled on him, blocking the way out of the hall. He could go to the bedrooms or the basement, but he couldn’t get to the front door or the kitchen door without going through me.
Scared wasn’t part of the equation now. I was mad. My chest heaved from running and yelling. My arms stuck out to the sides. Not much of a fighting stance. I had no ninja training or years of experience killing things like my father did, but I’d do something. I’d find a way.
He turned toward me, gripping the brown leather satchel that held knives and axes and iron spikes and herbs and potions and whatever else he needed to take down his prey. He looked like a professor in his black slacks and pressed white shirt, with his
perfect skin and clipped hair, but I knew what he really was: a death machine, with a bunch of wrong ideas.
“No,” I growled through clenched teeth, startled by the loudness of my voice.
This is your father. Are you crazy? He’ll swat you like a fly. You’re threatening your
father.
The air stank of tallow and burned human flesh. The Hand of Glory had done all it could but failed, and now its stench was trying to choke me. I coughed and my eyes watered, but I didn’t move at all. I couldn’t. It was this, or Darius would be dead within minutes.
Addie made it up the basement stairs and stood behind my father, gaping. When he glared at me and went to move, she grabbed his elbow. “Xavier, don’t you dare touch that child.”
Her voice had such a high pitch. She was scared. I could see the fear torturing her, streaks of wild yellow lightning crackling across her smooth brown skin. The color on my father was darker, like blue-black ink. He didn’t suffer from his darkness—he welcomed it. It was his armor of hatred.
The colors I saw weren’t in my head. They were real. When I got really upset or scared or stressed, all the power I had ever been exposed to seemed to pull into me and come through me, and I saw colors and could do things—but not on purpose. It was all random. I had no say in it, no control over it; but right now I didn’t care. This wasn’t something I had ever shared with Addie or my father. Let them find out the hard way.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, my voice still too loud. I sounded mean and serious. I sounded like Xavier Martinez.
His left eyebrow lifted, but otherwise his face stayed still as black alabaster. His gaze flicked from one of my twiggy arms to the other. “You planning to slap me to death?”
I didn’t answer him.
“I asked you a question, little girl.”
I didn’t feel like a little girl, and for the first time, his tone wasn’t working on me. Fresh rage kindled on his face. Colors darker than black seeped out of him, and he took a step toward me.
Addie yanked on his arm, but he pulled away from her. She let out a sob and turned to run back down into the basement.
My heart squeezed, then sank.
I was on my own.
“Don’t you raise your hand against me, Trina,” my father said. “The eye that mocketh at his father—”
“The ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it,” I finished for him. The verse was from Proverbs.
His eyes widened just enough to let me know I had surprised him. I’d never done well with his Bible lessons, so he probably figured I hadn’t been listening. He took another step, coming within arm’s length from me now. I was going to have to hit him or push him or kick him or something. The thought made me sick.
“And he that smiteth his father, or his mother,” he said, “shall be surely put to death.”
“So you’re going to kill me now?” I shot back. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“You will not disrespect me,” my father said, so matter-of-fact
it gave me cold shivers. “Get out of my way, Trina. I’m only going to tell you once.”
He shifted his killing bag to his left hand, freeing his right to deal with me. My heart crashed against my ribs. I hated that I was shaking, and I wished I could punch him or shove him and feel nothing at all, because I didn’t think he’d feel anything when he hurt me.
And he
was
going to hurt me.
I saw it all over him, the barely bottled rage. It wasn’t my fault, but that wouldn’t matter when he hit me. His darkness would strike me down. It would destroy anything that got in his way, and then it would destroy Darius.
My father came closer and filled up my world. I couldn’t see anything but his angry eyes, and the way his white teeth flashed when his mouth twisted into a sneer.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
My stomach clenched, because that was the thing I had always wanted to know about him—what had happened to fill him with so much violence?
He raised his open hand, knuckles toward me, and I knew he meant to knock me to my knees. I had to hit him first.
My muscles quivered. I clenched both fists, but didn’t swing.
“Don’t,” I begged him, and I sounded and felt like a scared little kid as I stared into those dark eyes and tried to find some emotion or concern—anything but rage.
There was nothing.
But no matter how mad I got, I couldn’t hit my father.
I wasn’t going to save Darius or my new friends or anyone else.
Coward. Worthless child.
My arms sagged to my sides, and I closed my eyes.
I felt the
thunk
in my teeth and my bones, but no pain followed. I didn’t stagger, and I didn’t fall.
The thump and clatter of a heavy weight hitting the floor made my eyes fly open.
I hadn’t been hit at all. It wasn’t me collapsing to the floor, unconscious from a blow to the head. My father lay in a heap at my feet, blood oozing from the right side of his face.
Addie stood over him, the frying pan she clutched still raised like a baseball bat. Her expression was full of pain and horror, and the colors coursing over her skin defied labels.
“Addie,” I whispered, stunned, then suddenly terrified for her and for my father, too. I reached for her, but she shrieked and stepped back from me, her eyes wild.
She kept the frying pan raised as she shifted her gaze from me to my father. She said something about healing herbs and spells to make sure his brain didn’t swell, but I didn’t know for sure whether he was alive.
Neither of us seemed able to check.
I didn’t want to touch him. I also didn’t want to take my eyes off Addie, because she seemed to be coming apart.
Seconds passed. More seconds.
My father didn’t move.
Addie wouldn’t lower the frying pan, and she wouldn’t let me come close. She backed away until I would have had to step over
my father to get to her. She muttered a healing spell, and it slammed into me like so many electric tingles. Every cut and bruise on my whole body fixed itself at once, and it hurt.
Maybe the spell hit my father, too. It might have hit the neighbors or people three miles away. Addie was using raw power, no talismans or potions or powders to call it or control it. I was pretty sure my father didn’t know she could do that. Unchanneled power was as dangerous as a flood or a thunderstorm. Like an act of God or a natural disaster, it ran its course until it finished.
Addie’s hair stuck out wildly, and her smooth apron had gotten puckered and wrinkled. Her brown eyes had gone dim, and her skin was all dusky and dull. Whatever she had just done had drained her near to nothing inside.
“Addie,” I tried again, and her gaze snapped to mine.
I saw clarity. And agony. And betrayal.
“Get out,” she said, her voice like a dozen demons trapped in a well.
We stood in the hallway together, gulping air that smelled like blood and the ashes of a dead man’s hand. My skin crawled with the uncontrolled power in the air, and my heart raced.
Then I turned and ran.
“I have to go back and see how he is.” My chest hurt, my hands ached, and my eyes burned so from tears that I could barely make out the faces in front of me.
“You know you can’t.” Darius’s voice was soft, but it wasn’t enough to make me calm down. “Sounds like you barely got out of that house in one piece.”
I shook my head and tried to pretend my father hadn’t been about to do ... I don’t know what to me because I defied him. I just kept seeing him lying in the hallway of our house, bleeding.
What if he died? What if he was already dead?
Levi eased toward me.
I backed up, and my shoulders hit Darius’s front door. “Stop,” I warned, raising my fists. My voice sounded crazy.
“You wouldn’t hit a murderer,” Levi muttered. “You won’t hit me.”
Forest had him dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with silver Aerosmith wings, but it didn’t make him look any less scary.
His long black hair was pulled into a ponytail, and his pale face seemed twice as white. The air around him glittered silver and black, dark and light, and shadows moved on the walls and ceilings.
They didn’t scare me. Not even when they howled and honked and started to pull out of the paint and turn into dogs and birds. One of the dogs bristled as it got between Levi and me. My eyes saw it as a beagle, but it was wrong, somehow. The angles were off, like any second it might explode into something huge and slobbering, ready to eat me.
“My father’s no more a murderer than you are.” I shook a fist at Levi and his pet hunting dog, suddenly glad I was blocking the door so nobody could go charging toward my house. “I can’t believe I betrayed my family for
you
!”
Darius blocked Levi by stepping into his path. “Uh-uh, man. That’s my girl. You stay put.”
“He’s got a right to be mad,” Forest said. “Xavier Martinez killed Levi. Don’t you get that? He murdered him and threw his body on a pile of wood for burning. That man’s as crazy as anybody locked up in the asylum.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that. My father thinks he’s saving the world—and you
know
there are bad things at Lincoln.”
Please don’t let him be dead.
Levi pointed his finger at me as his biggest, meanest dog growled. “If you take his side, you’re no better than he is.”
Forest stepped closer to Levi, not seeming to notice the five or six hounds growling around his ankles. The tilt of her eyes and the eerie calm she always gave off made her seem like she was
from some other planet. She had total control over Levi, when she chose to use it.
“That’s going a little far,” she told him.
He broke off glaring at me long enough to glance at her and say, “The sins of the fathers are the sins of the sons—just ask Imogene.”
He sounded sure, but his eyes darted to Forest.
“That’s in Exodus,” I told him. “But it doesn’t really say that.”
“I don’t care if it says that or not, it’s stupid,” Forest said. “Trina’s not responsible for what her father did, just like Darius wasn’t responsible for what Eff Leer did.”
Levi’s expression stayed mean for a second, then softened. The goose and hound shadows on the wall started to fade, and the real dogs at his feet disappeared like they had never been there, all but that biggest one. “But if your great-greats hurt people, you have to make up for it.”
There it was again. He was trying to sound so sure and so pissed off, but he couldn’t. Not when he wanted Forest to agree with him.
Forest frowned at him. “I don’t buy that.”
“Imogene says she’s unforgiven because of them that went before her,” he whispered, reaching down to pet his dog. That made him look almost normal, but I knew better. “She thinks that’s why she hasn’t died.”
Forest shook her head. “She isn’t unforgiven. None of us are. We haven’t done anything bad.”
When Levi still didn’t back down, Forest brushed her fingers
against his elbow. Darius had told me that’s all they could share, quick touches and long looks, because of some weird bracelet somebody fastened on Forest when she was a baby. It lay on her wrist looking like nothing special, just carved wood and smooth beads, but it grew with her, and as long as she wore it, nobody with Madoc blood could touch her without being burned.
Levi’s posture stayed tense, and Forest touched him one more time. He flinched, but something other than pain flickered across his expression.
“Trina’s not her father,” Forest told him. “And you can’t go gunning for him, because he
is
her father.”
Levi’s eyes got bigger. “What if he’s on his way here to kill us all?”
Forest shrugged. “If he shows up, we’ll deal with him.”
“He’s not coming.” My lower lip quivered even though I didn’t want it to, and fresh tears pooled in my eyes. “I really don’t know if he’s even alive after Addie hit him like that.”
Darius glanced at me over his shoulder. I could tell he wanted to stop guarding me and put his arms around me, and I wished he would—but I couldn’t help thinking,
Darius is one of
them.
“I’ll probably end up a patient in Lincoln instead of working there,” I muttered. The cess-a-pool. The place I was going to help watch, to make sure nothing truly evil found its way out into the world. “I don’t even have clothes to start my externship tomorrow.”