Taken by the Beast (The Conduit Series Book 1) (14 page)

“Burned,” I muttered, thinking how long ago that must have been. “How old are you?”

“I didn’t want to kill her, but I was so afraid and so angry that I almost did. It took all I had in me to run.” He slid down the trunk of a nearby tree so that we were nearly level with each other. “Satina came to me after that, as an apparition of sorts. That’s when she told me what she had done. She’d cursed me, made it so that the monster I was on the inside would be what I was on the outside.”

“But you’re a man now,” I answered, waving my hand at him.

“She’d called on the moon to perform her curse, so it’s only in effect at night.”

“That’s why you could never be in The Castle after sunset,” I said quietly, realizing how close to sunset we were right now.

“I am this thing,” he answered. “I will always be this thing. But I thought I was the only one.” His back straightened. “Something is here, though, in New Haven. Someone else like me. He’s taking women and hurting them, including the girl currently chained up in my family home.”

“But 
you 
have her,” I challenged him, doubt creeping back in. “Not someone else.”

“I found her in the woods. She was near death, and though I figured it was a lost cause, I took her home hoping I might be able to save her. At the very least, I thought I would be able to make her final moments more comfortable. But then something strange happened.”

When he didn’t continue, I waved him on. “
What
happened, Abram.”

“Long story short, the body reanimated. It was hijacked … by Satina.”

I gasped, reacting more as though what I was hearing was a telenovela than my actual reality.

“It was the first time I had seen her since the first time I changed. I didn’t know until then that she’s always been with me, always following me. Because she cursed me with her death, her spirit is connected to mine either until I die or until the curse is broken.” He scoffed, ticking his head to the side. “She said it was time to break it.”

“Break it how?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter!” He growled. “She’s a liar. She wants nothing more than to torment me. Besides, this isn’t about me,” he said, lowering his brow again. “It’s about you.”

“Me?” I asked, scrambling to my feet. “How could any of this be about me?”

“Because of what you are.”

“I’m nothing like you!” I yelled, blinking away whatever momentary crazy allowed me to listen to that story and actually take any of it seriously. Calling himself a monster was one thing, but pulling me into it, that was something else entirely.

“If you would calm down, Ms. Bell—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You’ve been inside me. I think you can call me by my goddamn name.” I gritted my teeth. “Or better yet, don’t call me anything. Don’t call me anything at all.”

“Get mad if you like, but I’m not the reason this is happening. You are. And until you accept that, it won’t stop. If you would just let me explain—”

“Why? Because those girls look like me? That’s why I’m in danger, right? That has nothing to do with what I am.”

“You’ve got it half right,” he muttered. “You’re not in danger because you look like those girls.” His gaze traveled from my toes up to my eyes. “Those girls were in danger because they looked like you.”

Now he moved closer to me. “You’re a Supplicant, Ms. Bell—Charisse. Your
blood has magical properties—the magical properties that a Conduit needs to perform their magic. And there is someone out there like me looking for you, to use you for just that. And it’s obvious he’ll stop at nothing to get to you.”

“How do you know I’m a … whatever it is?” I asked, backing away. “How do you know that beast is after
me
?”

“Because I knew your father,” he said evenly. “He was a Supplicant, too. You have his eyes.”

My mind flickered back to the first time I ever saw Abram and to the first thing he said to me.

You have a freckle in your eye.

Just like my father.

“You’re insane!” I said, my mind spinning. Maybe magic was real, and he certainly was a beast, but I had nothing to do with this. And to bring my father into it—I refused to hear another thing he had to say.

“You stay the hell away from me. Do you understand?”

I turned and ran, bolting through the woods. When I glanced back, he was just staring after me. As promised, he was letting me leave now that he had said all he had to say.

I swallowed hard, resisting the tug in my heart and stomach that made me want to erase all I had learned.

“Don’t ever talk to me again!” I screamed, more to cement my resolve than to rebuke him. “Not ever again!”

This time when I ran, I didn’t look back. And I swore to myself, right then and there, this would be the last time I ever laid eyes on him.

It was strange how easily I found my way out of the woods that night. Maybe I had been up and down this path enough to know my way around. But, given my astonishingly bad sense of direction, it probably had more to do with the way my thoughts were racing.

Monsters and witches, curses and fangs—all these things filled my mind. Conduits, whatever they were, and all that other garbage Abram expected me to believe mentally batted me around like one of those beanbags Lulu and I used to kick back and forth in grade school.

While my subconscious guided me to the main street of New Haven, my actual conscious was trying to make sense of all the senselessness that was now my life.

If he expected me to believe him—that magic was real and he was a douchey product of some Conduit witch’s temper tantrum—then he had another thing coming. It was too farfetched. Well, except for the douchey part. Abram definitely fit the bill where that was concerned.

But what about all the crazy things I had seen? I couldn’t ignore them. Like it or not, I couldn’t explain half of the things that had happened to me since I returned to New Haven. But magic? Could that really be the answer?

My head was still swimming when I made it up Lulu’s walkway. It was after dark now, which technically made me a fugitive thanks to the town’s ridiculous ‘women only’ curfew.

Screw that. If I could deal with strange woods monsters, possessed witch prisoners, and a boyfriend who could throw me around in all the wrong (and right) ways, then this one-horse-town’s Barney Fife patrol was the least of my worries.

I heard the baby crying before I even settled in front of the doorway. The sound of his wails, haggard and tired as though they had been going on awhile, sent shivers down my spine. Something wasn’t right. When Jack cried, his mother dealt with it. She was freaking Super Woman.

Instantly, I thought of the fence, of the way Lulu freaked when she saw it was broken. It made sense now. If there were creepy kooky monsters doing creepy kooky things one hundred feet from where my kid slept at night, I would want to keep the fence up, too.

My entire body went cold as I fumbled through my purse for the key to the house.

“It’s okay, Jack. It’s gonna be okay,” I said, my hand shaking as the key found its way into the doorknob.

Of course, I couldn’t back that up. For all I knew, there could be an army of Conduits or weird wolf-monsters or hell, leprechauns, waiting to hijack me as soon as I walked through the door. And what could I do? I was a plus-sized model whose only knowledge of self-defense came from last winter’s ill-fated trend of designer combat boots.

Oh, that’s right. What was it Abram said? I had magic blood that could do spells or something. And apparently that meant my blood was in high demand.
How refreshing
. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t speak well for my safety, let alone my ability to save others.

God
,
please tell me I’m not considering it’s true
.

As the door swung open, I saw the reality in Lulu’s home was a bit more ordinary in origin, though no less horrifying.

My friend lay on the floor of the foyer, her face pained and tense, a puddle circling her body. Her water had broken. She was in labor.

I ran to her, forgetting all my worries as I knelt beside her on the floor.

“Are you all right?” I asked as she did her breathing exercises. “How long have you been like this?”

“The phone,” she said through grunting breaths. “Get the phone.”

She was calmer than she had any right to be—definitely calmer than I would have been if my glorious ass was in the same position. Looking over, I saw her cell phone was out of reach. She mustn’t have been able to get Jack to bring it to her.

I lunged for it and was already dialing 9-1-1 before I realized I could have used my own phone without the dramatic dive into the living room.

I didn’t even let the operator finish her intro before I cut in. “My friend is in labor. I need you to get somebody to—”

This time she interrupted me, reciting the address.

“Yeah, that’s it. Hurry. I think she’s about to blow!”

Lulu crinkled her eyebrows. “About to blow? I’m not a whale, Charisse.”

“Forgive my lack of etiquette. I’m trying to get the morons to hurry,” I answered. Then, realizing I was still on the phone, I said, “Not you, 9-1-1 lady. You’re awesome. Just send someone.”

Ending the call, I flung the phone back onto the couch and joined Lulu at her side. 

“Relax, please, Charisse,” she said, wincing. “People give birth at home all the time. It’s not—” She moaned, keeling over farther where she lay on the floor. “—life or death.”

“You look like you’re dying to me,” I said half-heartedly. Truth was, her pain terrified me, no matter how normal the Discovery Channel said this life event was.

“Thanks,” she muttered. Somehow, she was smiling between the bouts of pain, but it never lasted long. She seemed to only get a few seconds break between each of her moaning fits.

I think I was squeezing her hand tighter than she was squeezing mine. Man, those birth shows she was always watching had it all wrong!

“Do I need grab the sheets or boil some water or something?”

“That depends on if you’re trying to get stains out of my bedspread.” Lulu grunted.  Obviously she was in pain, and obviously I wasn’t the type of person you wanted to bring with you to a medical emergency.

“I’ll be fine,” Lulu said, sweat forming on her brow. “Just try to calm Jack down until the paramedics arrive.”

Trying to calm Jack down sounded much easier than it actually was. I was bitten, I was scratched, I was punched, and I was called the only word he knew how to say—which wasn’t really a word at all, but more like a sound I could not replicate. But the kid was scared, and since I was basically peeing my pants myself, I couldn’t blame him.

When the paramedics finally arrived, they were quick, guiding Lulu onto a stretcher and assuring her (and Jack and I) that everything would be just fine. For Lulu, that might be true, but for me it was anything but.

After his mother left, Jack went from simmering to full-blown nuclear. It took every rabbit I could pull from my hat to keep him
quiet for even a minute. I did my best baby voice. I tried pirate cartoons. I attempted to feed him cookies (which were thrown back at me). I even tried to pay the stupid kid, but it turned out twenty bucks wasn’t as big an incentive to a toddler as I imagined it might be.

It may have been for the best, though. The more Jack screamed (and there was a lot of screaming) the longer my mind stayed occupied. It was when he was actually quiet, in those moments of silence, when my own internal monologue got noisy.

I started to worry about Lulu, and not just for the obvious reasons. Sure, she was in labor, and yes the hospital in New Haven was about as big as a Quizno’s (with all the technical advancement). But what was really pulling at my mind was what Abram had told me.

The dead girls … they all looked like me. And, according to Abram, that was the reason they were all dead. Someone was looking for me, because my blood was magic and they could use it to take over the world or make some supermodel fall in love with them or something.

You know, that old chestnut.

But as crazy as all of that sounded, I was actually beginning to believe it. And that was what was upsetting me so much.

Because as much as all those dead girls resembled me, none of them looked as much like me as Lulu did. For our entire lives, people confused us for sisters. We had the same dark hair, the same light eyes. Of course, Lulu was missing my father’s eye freckle, but that distinction hadn’t saved any of the other girls.

A horrible howling echoed from the woods behind us. Jack erupted back into screams, and though my entire body shook, I rushed to grab him. The monster was out there, but which one?

God, I was actually taking all of this seriously.

How could I not, with all I had seen tonight?

Another howl. From the same monster or another one? Maybe it was from an ordinary run-of-the-mill non-monstrous wolf. Hey, a girl can hope.

My mind raced to the worst possible scenario. What if Lulu was attacked on her way to the hospital? What if the monster who chased after me—the one Abram saved me from—had ripped into that ambulance in an effort to get a hold of her?

She would be running through these woods right now, scared and in labor. Or would she not even be able to run, same as she hadn’t been able to get to her phone. Did the Discovery Channel say fear can stall labor? Or was that with animals?

No, if something was after Lulu, labor or not, she would be trying to get back to her child. But what chance would she stand against a beast? She would be ripped apart, just like the rest. And it would be all my fault.

I reached for my cell before I realized who I was intending to call.

My mind shouldn’t have gone to him. I had just told him how awful he was and how I never wanted to see him again.  But if Abram was here, he would fix this. He would run those meaty wonderful hands through my hair and tell me everything would be all right. And I would believe him. Just like, God help me, I believed him now.

I set the phone back down and curled up in a ball on the couch with Jack, squeezing my eyes shut to try to keep the tears from falling.