A Portrait of Pain Page 9

  “We’ll keep an eye on her.” I got out of the car and started walking down the hill toward her cottage. Miro didn’t follow—I heard the door leading into the main walkway creaking open.

  The guy needed sleep. A lot of sleep. He had been crashing on a mattress on the floor of my room for a while, after giving up his room for Tariq. I pulled my phone out halfway down the hill and shot off a message to him.

  Bed’s yours. I’ll take the floor tonight.

  I didn’t receive a reply, but I knew that he would be grateful. That was our relationship: unspoken gratitude and small gestures that spoke big words. It was the relationship of brothers.

  Cabe was sitting right up against the front door of Seraph’s cottage. She would have hated the fact that he was camped outside her house like a dog, but he probably hadn’t wanted to wake her up or frighten her by sneaking into the house.

  “Thanks for coming down,” I told him, when he looked up.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, jumping to his feet and stretching, attempting to hide a yawn.

  “She’s dead,” I returned. Toneless.

  His eyebrows shot up. “You were supposed to talk to her.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Danny. He left a cute little message and everything.” I pulled out my phone and flipped to the pictures that I had sent myself, along with Jack.

  He stared at them for a minute, his lip curling in disgust. “Shit.” He shook his head, handing the phone back. “What was the point of that?”

  “I don’t think there was a point.” I shoved my phone back into my pocket. “I think he just likes killing. He needs to kill, and he’s developed some kind of compulsion with those rhymes. It’s his tell. His signature.”

  Cabe tunnelled his hands into his hair, his face directed toward the sky. “We need to find him before this happens again.”

  “Agreed. But first, we need to sleep. Even killers take breaks.” I pushed my way into the house—I wasn’t as considerate as Cabe—and closed the door behind me.

  Sure, I was accepting the relationship. The bond. The idea of us all as a family …

  But I still wasn’t going to let him follow me downstairs.

  I wasn’t that accepting.

  I moved across the house soundlessly, down the stairs and into her empty bedroom. She was still curled up on her side, pulled into a ball. Oblivious. I didn’t want to wake her, so I sat against the staircase instead, stretching my legs out and ignoring the bone-deep ache that ran from my spine to my head. Miro wasn’t the only one skipping sleep.

  I fought off the exhaustion, even as the first rays of the sun began to peek over the horizon, casting a dim, hazy glow against the glass wall. I’d stay for an hour longer and be gone before she woke up.

  I just needed to know that she was okay.

  I woke up feeling disoriented. It could have been because I was on the floor of my new, empty bedroom … or it could have been because Miro had completely disappeared, leaving behind no trace of him ever having fallen asleep with me in the first place. But it felt like more than that.

  It felt like a forecasting.

  I scrambled onto hands and knees, half-dragging myself toward the staircase, and then racing up to the main floor, searching everywhere for my bag. I found it hanging over the door handle. I must have left it up at the main house and someone had brought it down for me. I ripped it open, spilling out items onto the floor in my panic. I sorted through the mess until a notebook was open beneath me, my pen flying over the page. The more I used my forecasting power, the stronger it seemed to become, but I was still surprised to find the world dropping away from me.

  I could no longer see the marks that my pen was making on the page, or my shaking hands as I tried to hold the notebook steady. I couldn’t feel the paint-splattered hardwood floor beneath my knees, or the chill hanging around my shoulders.

  I was only an echo of a person, existing inside a dream. And yet … everywhere I turned, I could see my own face. Television screens, computer screens, tablets, phones, posters, signs. All of them showing my face.

  “We have identified the first of the rumoured sorcerers,” a newscaster’s voice floated through one of the screens, filling my head with panic. “Subject Number Thirty-Four. They called her Lela.”

  “Lela? Was that like a nickname or something?” This voice was different; the grainy quality of the sound making me think that it was a recorded conversation of some kind.

  One of the screens in front of me changed, showing a YouTube video of a boy talking at his computer. The title of the video was ‘Subject #34: Reaction’. I took a step toward that screen and it seemed to grow bigger, the sound of the boy’s voice filling my head.

  “So I have the leaked document here. It’s saying that this chick, this witch, has been blending in with us her whole life; pretending to be human. I mean look at this. She’s been getting average grades. Her documents are all fake. No travel history. She’s just been … blending. What is she waiting for? Are more of them coming?”

  I stepped away from the screen, shock forcing me backwards, and another image flickered onto one of the other screens. It was the security footage from the strip club. Again. But there was something different this time … I frowned, moving toward it, and once again, a voice filled the room.

  “So this witch has like … how many boyfriends?” It was a female this time, sounding as though she was still in high school. I watched as animated commentary started to pop up all over the video—clippings of tweets and comments. Most of it was name-calling.

  Nice moves, skank.

  Take it off!

  What a whore.

  Bae.

  Does this witch have any self-respect?

  #teamstripclubboy!

  I flicked my eyes to the other screens, trying to search for something that wasn’t going to talk back at me with the judgement of another teenager. Eventually, I made my way past all of the online videos and the eerie, echoing phone conversations.

  “Our people are still working through the information packet that was handed to us,” a deep, male voice drew my attention to the image of a suited man being interviewed at a news desk. “As you can imagine, there are select few people that we can allow to examine this evidence. We need to minimise the risk of leaks. There’s no use in giving out information to the public unless we can attest to the validity of that information.”

  “Speaking of the leaks, Commissioner Darvey, we’ve managed to get our hands on yet another piece of footage, and I have to admit, this really isn’t looking good for Special Subject Thirty-Four.”

  “There’s no point in dehumanising her, Carol.” The Commissioner was looking uncomfortable, but his frown was formidable enough to transfer the discomfort onto the interviewer. “We don’t know everything that there is to know about this girl, but we do know that she has a name. A name, not a number.”

  “Well …” Carol was shaking her head, the colour growing high in her cheeks. “We’ll see what you have to say after what we have to show you, Commissioner.”

  And then the screen changed, pushing the ongoing interview into the corner and filling the rest of the screen with a shaky recording of the inside of a car. The static sound of muffled voices battered at me, becoming suddenly clear as the camera lurched to the side and several car doors slammed. The camera rose, turned, and I was suddenly staring at myself.

  Except that I didn’t look like myself.

  My eyes were drooping; my face was slack …

  I was in the limousine.

  The limousine.

  “No …” I begged, even as the me on screen said the same word.

  Amber had warned me that photos had existed of this night—that everything the camera had captured had been saved on cloud storage before the limousine blew up—but she hadn’t mentioned a video.

  I watched as the men in the recording started messing with my clothes, passing me around between them and laughing as they filmed it all with the camera.
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  “Hey, fucker?” The camera turned away from me, focussing on the face of the man who had been holding it. He was wearing a ski-mask. “You getting all of this?”

  I closed my eyes, but just as quickly forced them back open. I thought I knew what was about to happen, but I couldn’t be sure. I had to see it through … or so I told myself, until the screaming started. I sucked in a shuddering breath, turning my back on the screen.

  All sound seemed to drop away, and I thought that the camera had finally broken … until the sound came back again. It sounded different, originating from another device, possibly. The sound of metal scraping over gravel seemed to physically assault me, and the screaming from the video rubbed the wrong way across my skin. I wanted to plug my ears, but it was bad enough that I was looking away. That I wasn’t facing what I had done.

  They screamed for a long time. Long after the roar of the exploding limousine ceased to rip through my senses. They screamed and screamed, all those grown men, as though I refused to let them die.

  I hid my face and endured the screams until everything dropped into silence.

  The quiet stretched for long enough to persuade me to turn around, and I found myself watching the most disturbing thing that I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe that they were showing it on television. I couldn’t believe that it was real. I couldn’t believe that there was another recording. This one had no sound, and the picture was bouncing up and down as someone ran toward the body on the ground. They were clearly staying close to the side of the road because trees kept flashing past, obscuring the screen.

  There had been another person there, that night.

  I didn’t even bother trying to figure out who—Danny would have known what the medication would do to me, and he wouldn’t have been able to pass up the opportunity to get it all on camera. He had been there, when I woke up at Dominic’s house, too.

  He was always there.

  I sucked in a shuddering breath when the camera stopped moving, zooming in through the trees. I was lying in the middle of the road, eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky, slithering sparks creeping over open wounds, stitching together a body that should have been bent, broken, and destroyed beyond all recognition. I didn’t care that I was completely naked, because I didn’t even look human anymore.

  I was a shredded pile of flesh and electricity.

  I looked down at myself, at my real self, and I could still see the evidence of it: the slightest hints of silver in my skin. It had faded so much since then, and every single day it faded more. But it was still there.

  The evidence.

  Back on the screen, the valcrick had done its work, and the slithering lights guttered out like a finished candle. The sightless eyes blinked once, and then closed. I looked like I could have been sleeping, except that I was painted in a thick layer of blood, surrounded by the licking of flames along the wreckage of twisted metal.

  I didn’t even know whose blood it was, because I couldn’t believe that it was all mine. There was no way that I could have lost that much blood, not even the valcrick would have been able to save me.

  I chanced a glance up to the corner of the screen. The Commissioner didn’t look shocked, but his face had taken on a gaunt, grey pallor. He had already seen the footage, but he hadn’t expected to have it played back to him during the interview. Maybe he hadn’t even realised that it had been leaked to the public. I stumbled away. I could see everything that I needed to see on the Commissioner’s face; he wasn’t going to be able to defend me from that.

  “Born on—”

  “But she wasn’t born, was she, Olly? She was made.”

  A new set of voices had my eyes swinging around. Another set of people. Another talk show, this one more informal.

  “Fine. Made, whatever. She was named either Special Subject Thirty-Four or Lela, depending on who you’re talking to. Her birth mother was …” the man glanced down at the piece of paper in front of him. “Anonymous Participant Twelve, and her birth father was Anonymous Participant Seven. She was raised by the now-deceased government-agent, Maryanne Black, previously Maryanne Sheldon, and the now-deceased Gerald Black.”

  “And we don’t have access to the full leaked information packet,” the other man stated, “but what’s the body-count at now?”

  “Eight. We’ve seen her kill eight people now, on camera. Nine, if you include the graveyard picture.”

  “For those of you who haven’t seen the graveyard picture,” the first man said, as a picture filled the screen, replacing my view of him and the other man.

  It was an image of me standing over Aiden’s grave. Somehow, the guys weren’t in the picture, only one of their backs—Noah's, I thought, but the quality of the picture was too grainy and dark to make him out properly. What you could make out was my face, staring up, almost directly into the camera, toward the trees on the side of the mountain that boxed in the graveyard.

  Someone—no, not someone—Danny must have been standing in the trees. But that wasn’t the important thing about the photograph. The important thing was the uncovered body on the ground, and the dirt that coated my hands, all the way up to my elbows.

  “So let’s say it’s nine.” The speaker sounded disgusted. “I mean, she does kinda seem to have a habit of it. If it’s nine—hell, even if it’s eight. Even if it’s four! If it’s any more than a few, we’re dealing with a serial killer. And not just any seral killer—a serial killer who can use that freaky magic shit to prevent herself from dying. Don’t you think the government should be making it a priority to hunt her ass down? We shouldn’t be sitting around, waiting for a bunch of experts to determine whether all of this is real or not. These videos have been public for over forty-eight hours now, and any number of common experts have come forward, claiming that it’s all real. Aren’t we just giving her a chance to get away? To escape?”

  “Think about it, Olly. They can’t just go charging after her. What if there are more of them? What if there’s a whole secret society of them, hiding in plain sight and pretending to be human? If we just start charging after Special Subject Thirty-Four, who knows what kind of war we’ll be starting.”

  “Who cares. Most of us are going to want war, anyway. Doesn’t matter if it’s just against her, or if it’s against her and fifty more just like her. She isn’t human; but she is killing humans. And you have to think about who’s responsible for all of this. She didn’t just create herself. There’s something bigger going on, and we’re about to get sucker-punched with it, I guarantee … unless we get our shit together and start the fight now! Let’s smoke out these freaks before they have a chance to ambush us! They’re clearly weaker than us, otherwise they wouldn’t be hiding from us. Maybe there aren’t that many of them. Maybe she’s their leader.”

  I didn’t want to hear or see anymore. I sat down on the ground, curling my hands around my head. The panic was building, slowly but surely, grabbing me by the ankles and pulling me through a sea of premonition that licked over my skin with a thick, oily consistency. I wanted to get out of the forecasting, but I’d never actually been trapped inside of a forecasting before, so I had no idea what to do. I stayed on the ground, my hands covering my ears, my body rocking slightly as I pressed my eyes tight against the images of the screens all around me.

  I really expected it to fade away at my urging, but it didn’t. It stretched on and on until my ears were numb from how tightly I was holding them and my head was sore from the concentration it was taking to try and free myself. I let out a desperate sob, surging back to my feet, and that was when everything snapped. I was flung back into my body, and then my body was flung backward, away from the notebook, my head thumping into the wall beside the front door. I shook off the panic, shoving the feeling roughly away from me, and crawled back to my notebook, staring down at what I had drawn.

  My own face.

  Guilty.

  As I stared, a drop of blood fell onto the page. I rushed down to the bathroom and
landed in front of the mirror, staring at my horrified reflection. My nose was bleeding. I had no idea why. I wadded up some tissue and wiped the blood away before rushing upstairs again. I tore out the sketch I had drawn, tossing it in the general direction of the kitchen before stuffing the notebook into my backpack and slinging it over my shoulder. I exited the house and ran up to the mansion, skipping the busier corridors so that I wouldn’t have to run into any of the Klovoda members, before slipping into Cabe’s room. All of my belongings were still being kept in there, since two out of the four brothers always slept on the pull-out mattresses beneath the bed. They hadn’t left me alone since the last time I had run off without them. I was actually surprised that they had left me alone that morning—until Cabe burst into the room after me.

  “God, you’re fast.” He laughed, shutting the door behind him. “I went outside to turn on the new hot water system, but before I came back inside you were already halfway up the hill.”

  “Sorry, Lucifer,” I muttered, aware that I sounded distracted. “Are you with me today?”

  “Yeah, the others are going to finish up with the houses. We can join them, or we can do something else. Whatever you want.”

  “Okay. We need to see Eva. Is Jayden back?” I was shuffling around in the cupboard that we both shared, deliberately hiding my face from him. I was also deliberately hiding my emotions and the rapid pounding of my heart from him—from all of them—but that was taking considerable effort and concentration. It wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it used to be.

  “Eva?” He moved behind me, and I knew that he was curbing the need to physically spin me around and force me to talk to him. “Jayden got back this morning.”

  “Everyone else has been moved to safety. Everyone except her. We need to go and see her. We need to get her out. And now. Today.”

  “Seph? Is everything okay?”

  He was about to do it. About to touch me. To force me to face him … and then I wouldn’t be able to lie to him.