A Portrait of Pain Read online

  “The Seer,” I whispered, recognising his image from the painting in the old Klovoda headquarters. I had no idea what was happening, but the image before me was unmistakable. “You’re the Original Seer.”

  “Very good.” There was a smile in his voice as he dropped his hands, the orb immediately disintegrating into nothing. He didn’t need it anymore; it had only been a prop. “We’re connected, you and me, but you knew that—didn’t you, Lela?”

  “Are you still alive? Are you real?” I didn’t answer his question, but I remembered reaching out to that painting. I remembered touching his image and feeling his infinite knowledge. It had been more powerful than the power of the other Atmás.

  “No.” He was laughing again, and I found the fear leaving me in an exhilarating rush. I hadn’t felt so safe in a long, long time. So welcome. So at home. “I’m only a memory,” he corrected. “Just a memory of the power I once held—a power you have connected yourself to.”

  “But …”

  “Power cannot die.” He was reading my mind now, answering my unspoken questions. “It stays: waiting, hovering, seeking a new host. Sometimes the host is only powerful enough for a sliver of power to slip through, but you were powerful enough for it to flow through without limit.”

  Without limit?

  “You mean I can … do more?”

  “You can access the source of your power, which should be an impossibility. You can do as much as I ever could. As much as Lucas ever could.”

  “Lucas?”

  “The Elementalist. He was just a boy, once, as you are only a girl. A girl capable of incredible things.”

  Capable of incredible things. He was trying to get me to do something. Surely that was dangerous: a sign that I had finally succumbed to complete insanity.

  The voice of a dead person was inside my head, trying to tell me what to do.

  I turned, intending to walk away. To shroud myself in dark nothingness once again.

  “Don’t turn your back on your people, Lela,” the voice floated after me, causing me to pause.

  Now the voice was reminding me of Weston.

  “I’m not sure that they’re my people,” I replied, even though I knew, on some level, that I couldn’t betray the Zevghéri.

  “They have accepted you as friends. They have welcomed you as family. They have stood by you. They have supported you, saved you, forgiven you. They are standing by, even now, waiting for you.”

  Shame washed over me, lodging something heavy into my chest. He was right. Poison and Clarin were my people. My pairs were my people. Jayden, Jack, and the Sophies … they had all sacrificed for me—no, because of me. Weston had been a horrible person, Dominic had been a maniac, and Danny was pure evil—but those three didn’t represent the whole Zevghéri race. Maybe this strange vision was here to manipulate me, but what he was saying was true.

  “I’m sorry.” I hung my head, watching as the coal-coloured strands of hair slipped from my shoulders, floating into my field of vision. My people. “Why am I here? What do you want?”

  “I didn’t bring you here,” he reminded me gently. “What do you want from me, Lela?”

  I spun, then, moving back to him, reaching out for the sleeve of his cloak. It was softer than silk, a barely-perceptible texture between my fingers.

  “You’ve been giving me visions.” I wasn’t sure if I was accusing him, or questioning him. He didn’t reply, but I knew it was true. “And you’ve been refusing me visions.” This time, I was definitely accusing him.

  “The power wishes to keep you alive,” he said calmly.

  Maybe he was a sign of my insanity, but he … he was making sense.

  I nodded slightly, my hand falling from his sleeve. I had suspected, at some point, that the timing of some of my visions had been a little too convenient. In some cases, the lack of a vision had saved my life. In other cases, the visions had taken me unawares, changing my fate with the simple advantage of timing.

  “The power—the forecasting power—it wants something from me.” I spoke with hesitance, unsure of my own suspicion. “It keeps trapping me. Even the valcrick is angry at me. Why now?”

  “Haven’t you noticed, Lela? The closer you grow to your pairs, the stronger your power becomes.”

  Some part of me must have been aware of the correlation, because I wasn’t in the least surprised to hear him say it. “Are you saying that it’s getting too strong for me?”

  “Not for you.” He smiled again, reaching out, his hand against my shoulder.

  He settled his eyes on me, and I paid attention to his face for the first time since approaching him. His eyes were a milky white—not the eyes of a person, but the eyes of power, swirling with gentle turbulence.

  “You know the answers, Lela. Think about it. When you needed support for your powers, you reached out for a pair. When one wasn’t enough, you reached for a second. You have been reaching for power ever since you were old enough to know what you needed.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Calm.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Calm.” Once more, that exhilarating feeling swept through me. The feeling of home.

  My hand was on top of his, over my shoulder. I didn’t even remember putting it there. There was nothing sexual about the contact, it was pure connection.

  “You’re saying that I need to do it again,” I finally guessed. “That I need to reach out again.”

  He smiled, but he didn’t confirm one way or another. Instead, he pulled his hand from my shoulder and stepped away.

  “Act quickly,” he cautioned me, darkness pulling around him. “Many people will die before you can end this.”

  As soon as he was shrouded, the darkness swept over me, pulling me off my feet and onto my back. I blinked my eyes open to find my two pairs hovering above me.

  “I’m fine,” I croaked, pulling myself into a sitting position.

  “You scared the shit out of us!” Cabe accused. “What the hell is going on? Why the hell are you bleeding?”

  I glanced from one face to another, thinking about what I was about to say to them. It would sound insane. It was insane. I touched beneath my nose, my fingers coming away with blood.

  “It happens,” I told them. “I mean … it started happening. Something’s happening. Wow, I thought I would be able to explain this a little better.”

  Miro inserted his hands beneath my arms and pulled me up, sitting me on the bed. Noah disappeared into the bathroom and came out with a tissue in his hand, which he passed to me.

  “We don’t want to rush you, angel …” Silas watched me wipe the blood away. “But we don’t have as much time as we thought we did. You need to tell us what’s going on.”

  I nodded. “I guess I’ll just start at the beginning. How much do you know about Atmá magic?”

  “It’s directly tied to the pair bond.” Miro was the one to answer me. “The stronger your bond, the stronger your power. Your power also grows stronger with practise and age. We know nothing about having more than one ability within the same body—or more than one pair tied to you. Nothing other than what we’ve discovered since meeting you.”

  “But what do you know about the origin of the Atmá power?” I persisted. “Where does it come from? How does it exist?”

  They were silent for a moment, before Miro moved over to the table, pulling out the sketchbook and pencil from my backpack. He drew up a chair and sat down in front of me, as Noah and Cabe dropped down to the bed on either side of me.

  I watched Miro as he started to sketch something, but it was Silas who eventually spoke.

  “The first recorded Atmá was Daichi. He bonded to his pair when he was a teenager, but it wasn’t a problem for him to publicly commit himself to more than one woman. He was a political person in Japan’s Yamato period. As a member of the Sogo clan, he was almost royalty. People didn’t question him.”

  “Which one was he?” I asked.

  “The Seer,” Noah answered, his vo
ice quiet. “The Seer was the first.”

  “And the most powerful,” Cabe added.

  Silas nodded. “The power of the Seer is the most ancient, the most revered—but it’s also the least common manifestation. Well—other than the Dead Man’s power.”

  “So who came next?” I asked, flicking my eyes back to Miro’s sketch. I could see now that he was drawing the five figures of the Original Atmás. The outlines were beginning to take shape.

  “The next was Tau,” Silas replied, pulling up another chair to sit beside Miro. “The Reader. He was born only twenty years later, and from there, the other three appeared in quick succession. Lucas, the Elementalist, was born within five years of Tau, and then Bjorn and Bolek were both born two years later.”

  “Which is the Dead Man?”

  “Bjorn was the Dead Man; Bolek was the Materialist.”

  “Why is Bjorn different from the others?”

  “The Atmás are always an extension of their powers,” Silas said, as Miro looked up from his sketch for a moment. They shared a look and then Miro went back to drawing, while Silas moved on to explain further. “The Seer, Daichi, foresaw the creation of a man whose power would be death, and knew that it would mean something terrible. He knew that if the power of the Dead Man was left ungoverned, it would define their uniqueness as something evil, and destroy the rest of their people—people that were yet to exist, but he had seen them. He had seen the outcome of coupling between the Atmás and their pairs.”

  “So what did he do?” I moved to wrap my arms around myself, but as soon as I did, I was reminded that my clothes were soaked through.

  I jumped up off the bed and moved to my backpack as Silas answered me.

  “He introduced a governing body. A Klovoda—though back then, he called it the Sangi-kai. Every year for twenty years—beginning from his own fourteenth birthday—he called the Sangi-kai to session, even though his pair made up the only other members. They discussed his most important visions, including the birth and death of the next century of Zevghéri people. There was a record that one of the women he was bonded to had drawn up: an extended family tree, mapping out three generations of ancestors. Not just Daichi’s ancestors, but those of the other four Atmás too.”

  “Wow.” I had forgotten about my task as I listened to Silas, but now I forced myself to extract a change of clothes. “That’s amazing.”

  That was who I spoke to.

  Daichi.

  “He was incredible,” Miro muttered, his pencil scratching across the page, his eyes focussed. “The best of our people. From the beginning of time until the end of time. The things he did for us …” He barely even seemed to realise that he was speaking, he was so absorbed in his task.

  I pulled up the hem of my shirt, turning away from the others to draw it over my head. I hung it on the back of a chair as the room fell silent. There wasn’t an ounce of discomfort in me, no sense of self-consciousness. Those four were closer to me than blood, and I had more than just accepted that they would be in my life until we all died—I now craved it. The odd combinations of kindness and gruffness, violence and mischief, soul-softening love and almost-painful need. There wasn’t a part of me that I wanted hidden from them anymore.

  As I reached for the button on my jeans, even the scratching of the pencil paused. Complete silence followed the sound of my zipper as I drew it down. I peeled off the jeans, hanging them beside my shirt. I pulled out the second pair of jeans that I had brought with me, considering whether I really wanted to wear jeans to bed before shrugging and reaching for the closest pack instead. The shirt I pulled out smelled like Noah and I smiled, pulling it to my face to inhale the sweet, scented smoke.

  “So Daichi set up a ruling body—a Klovoda,” I recited, my voice muffled as I pulled the shirt over my head. “Did it work? When Bjorn came along?”

  When nobody answered me, I turned around.

  Miro’s pencil was on the ground. “No.” His voice was rough. “It didn’t.”

  “Well actually … it did,” Noah corrected, after they had managed to recover. “For a while.”

  I walked back to them, but a hand caught my arm before I could re-seat myself on the bed. Silas pulled me into his lap, my back against his chest, his arms winding around me tightly, his mouth against my ear.

  “The problem was that the Seer’s visions couldn’t see past death,” he rumbled. “He predicted Bjorn’s death, but not the monster that he would return as. Bjorn was his weak spot. By the time of Bjorn’s birth, all of the Original Atmás had migrated to what is now Scandinavia. It was Daichi’s way. Tau was easy for him to find, but the others required expedition—which wasn’t so simple in the medieval period. They travelled to the continents of the other Atmás, recruiting them in the order of Daichi’s visions and searching out their pairs. Daichi knew—the same way he knew most things—that the pairs were imperative, so his aim was to save the others from a fate that he had seen over and over again in his mind.”

  I was listening to Silas, but I was starting to get a little distracted because his voice was travelling through me and his body seemed almost overheated, his grip abnormally tight. I couldn’t tell whether he was punishing me, or attempting not to punish me.

  “Why couldn’t you assholes tell me this stuff a year ago?” I huffed, my head falling back onto Silas’s shoulder.

  Noah released a laugh, drawing my eyes to him. As soon as our gazes met, he shook his head at me.

  Silas was the one to answer. “If you knew what it meant to be an Atmá to us, it would have taken Weston three seconds to see the truth in your thoughts. If you had only been bonded to one pair, he simply would have killed you. He had backup sons, after all. But you were connected to each of us. Instead of killing you, he would have tried everything in his power to break the bond. He would have disfigured you, amputated your limbs. Anything to keep you from dying, anything to make you repugnant. Anything to make us not want you anymore. Anything to weaken the bond.”

  I shuddered, but Silas unwrapped his arms, placing his palms on my knees, and the horror coursing through me immediately turned into fire.

  “I have to tell you all,” I murmured, as Silas’s hands slipped up along the insides of my thighs. “There’s … something …” I broke off, losing my train of thought.

  “Here,” Miro announced, turning slightly in his chair and dropping the notebook across my knees. “The five Original Atmás—not the way they’re often painted, but the way they really were. And now that we’ve told you what we know … it’s time for you to return the favour.”

  I stared at the drawing—it was rough, but it looked so real. The detail was there in every shaded angle, every sweeping lock of hair. The Atmás stood side-by-side, all appearing around the age of twenty or so, though it wouldn’t have been possible for them all to have been the same age at the same time. Their features all differed, and Miro had shaded their skin tones in various depths of shadow, making the first man appear tanned, while the fourth appeared almost ebony-black. The fifth man had no shading at all. He was as white as snow. He did have markings, though. Strange, tattoo-like etchings crawling over his arms and chest. His eyes seemed bright, his scowl fierce. There was an axe in his hand and a thick ponytail hanging over his shoulder.

  Bjorn. Somehow, I knew that it was him.

  I ran my fingers over each of them. I had a sense of the man who stood tall, his shoulders pulled back, a rough smile in place, his hands tucked into his pockets.

  “Lucas,” I muttered, touching the tattered replica of his boots.

  Behind me, Silas stiffened, but I ignored him, touching another of the images. This man had raven-dark hair and sly eyes, his waistcoat such a strange shade of colour that I couldn’t quite figure out how Miro had drawn it. He had been the one with the ebony skin.

  “Bolek,” I found myself saying, the word foreign and uncomfortable on my tongue.

  I picked out another of the men, short-statured and broad-shouldered,
I could almost imagine him rocking back and forth on his heels as though I had known him since birth.

  I tapped a place on the man’s head. “Tau.”

  I was smiling when my finger slid across to Daichi. For a brief moment, the rush of warmth had spread through me again, but it wasn’t from the drawing. It was from something inside me: a memory, or an intuition.

  “Daichi.” The name fell easily from my smiling lips.

  “We never told you what they looked like,” Cabe croaked, bringing me back to attention.

  “You didn’t need to,” I replied, as Miro pulled the notebook away, tossing it to the bed. I thought that his hand was shaking a little bit. “Daichi isn’t alive anymore, but his power is. I think the forecasting is alive. Some kind of entity. It exists—it can’t die.”

  “You said it’s alive,” Miro quickly spoke up, “but that it can’t die—how is that possible?”

  “Well it’s alive, but it can’t actually live unless it’s inside one of us. And we … we can die.”

  They were too quiet, and for a moment I genuinely feared that they wouldn’t understand. That they were about to tell me that the valcrick had fried my brain.

  Noah eventually nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “It does?” I squeaked, my voice a little too high-pitched.

  “Yeah.” His mouth hooked in a slightly sardonic smile. “If the Atmá magic is a living thing that passes through the ancestors of the original Atmás, we finally understand how Kingsling created you.”

  I straightened away from Silas’s shoulder, my spine shooting up straight. “He gave me the blood of an Atmá.”

  “More than one, probably.” Cabe grimaced, and I knew that he was disgusted by the thought. Atmás were sacred members of their society.

  The director of their Klovoda taking Atmá blood and using it to experiment on babies under order of the Voda was a hard concept to swallow.

  Silas tightened his grip on my thighs, tugging me back. “Tell us the rest,” he ordered.

  Before I could even process his request, my mouth was opening. “When I had a vision of Danny releasing my information to the media, I got sucked into the vision, and it wouldn’t let me go. It was horrible. Painful. When I finally snapped back to my body, I was bleeding—like just now. And before, when we were …” I flicked my eyes to Miro, swallowing tightly.