Water of Souls Page 18

  “I’m on the way now.”

  “Where are you meeting them?”

  “His office. He had a break between patient consults today and his wife runs reception.”

  “Cool. Let me know how it goes.”

  “Will do.”

  When Terrance hangs up, without a goodbye like he often did, I think at Liam. Liam, would you be able to do me a favor?

  Possibly.

  I’m surprised he doesn’t immediately say yes. I wonder how our relationship is changing. The Chief is going to question a couple in reference to the murders, the ones connected with the body they found across the street in the lake. Would you be able to... I don’t know... use your fae wiles to take a peek around their house since we know they won’t be there?

  I know I’m basically asking Liam to break the law. But, hey, it’s human law. I had the feeling he wouldn’t mind.

  Breaking and entering is a tall order. But there’s playfulness in his voice. Anything else I can do for you? Rob a bank? Jay walk? Assault a police officer while I’m at it?

  If you’re so inclined. You’d look good in one of those stripey jail uniforms.

  Oh? That sort of thing do it for you?

  Do it for me? Ha. I think you need to spend a little less time with us humans, Liam.

  ‘Us’ humans...

  I can feel his voice trail off in my head. I’ve said something wrong.

  You realize how very little you have in common with normal humanity, don’t you Tori? Sometimes, I think you forget that you don’t actually belong with people whose biggest worries are how to pay their utility bills and what dinner to cook.

  I frown. Liam, I’m keenly aware of what I am. I’m faced with it every damn day. But I like humanity. I like the realness of it. I like the hope of it.

  You’re the Blood Queen, Tori. One day, probably soon, you’re going to have to leave this all behind.

  No. I won’t.

  He sighs, long and loud and I realize, after a split second, that it’s no longer in my head. Something touches my hair, tousles it gently, lifts it and then lets it fall again to brush against my back and tickle my bare neck.

  I whirl around quickly, fast enough that I feel my hair float away from my body and hover in the air to come swishing back down. It falls over my right shoulder and trails down to the edge of the tank top. I’m not wearing a bra, but at least my boobs are properly pushed down and covered. Of course, I’m suddenly very, very aware of the no-bra situation now that Liam is standing in front of me, staring at me like I’m the sunrise after a too long night.

  “Good morning.” He brushes a hand over my shoulder, swiping the newly-settled hair back to where it was, cascading down behind me. His gaze flits to the open bedroom door when Kyle’s snoring reaches a louder level than usual. “Kyle’s here?”

  “Yes. I thought you’d already know that.”

  “I was focusing on you too hard to notice anyone else.” A tiny smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

  “Liam, don’t.”

  “Don’t what.”

  “Don’t start this up again. I’m with Liam.”

  “With whom?”

  I feel heat burn up my face and scorch my cheeks. “I. Am. With. Kyle.” I bite off each word, like I’m eating a chocolate bar and I’m pissed about it. Not that anyone in their right minds would be pissed about eating chocolate. Unless it was that sugarless kind. Yeah, that would make me less than happy.

  “You said Liam.” He lifts his hand to touch my face, stroke the blush that’s creeped in, but I moved back and bump into the chair. The vase in the middle of the table wobbles precariously and Liam darts around me to right it and keep it from falling. “No need to wake up the sleeping baby berserker.”

  “Liam, why are you here?”

  “I’m never very far away.” He murmurs, walking over to my coffee pot like he owns the place. He opens the lid to see if it’s already set to brew. It is, so he flips the switch, reaches into my cabinets, and pulls down two mugs. He doesn’t get my favorite one. It’s dirty in the sink.

  He probably doesn’t even know which is my favorite anyways. But Kyle does.

  “It’s the one with the odd, black-haired girl on the front.” Liam speaks softly, turning around and leaning against the countertop. The coffee maker is sizzling and popping behind him, beginning to fill the room with the heady scent of dark roast with a hazelnut undertone. I don’t respond to him. He waits quietly and I can feel him pushing against my brain, urging me to accept the fact that he does know me, quite as well as Kyle, if not better.

  And, I feel him reminding me without words, he cares for me in a way that’s not magical at all. He cares for me the way a man loves a woman. Or, rather, how a fairy loves another fairy. There is not the blood bond of berserker and the necromancer he is duty-bound to serve.

  “Stop it, Liam.” I finally breathe out, fighting through all the images he’s now pouring into my head. It’s images of a future, a future that could be, if I were to choose him over Kyle.

  “You’ll never be sure of him, Victoria. You’ll always wonder if he only loves you because of what he is and what you are.”

  “Kyle and I accept that. We... we love one another.” I turn away, crossing my arms to keep myself whole, and I stare out the window. I hadn’t realized that the snow was falling. Great powdery chunks drifting from the sky to settle across the thick layer already present on the ground. I can see the salt truck has already come by. The roads are still clear. They are also white, but it’s a different shade than the virgin snow alighting across the world.

  “I’m going to wait, Victoria, if it takes forever.” Liam hasn’t come up behind me or made a move to touch me again. I can hear him working in the kitchen. I hear the sound of coffee pouring into the generic cornflower blue mugs he’s chosen from the cabinet.

  I can hear the sugar jar popping open as he breaks the seal.

  I can hear the fridge opening so he can retrieve the cream.

  I can hear him sitting down at the table to drink.

  I wait, for what feels like forever, until there are no sounds anymore. I don’t know how he sits behind me and calmly drinks the coffee, but he does. How is it that, in matters of love, women are the ones made crazy by the storm? How is it that men, with all their emotional anti-growth, can sit around cool as cucumbers and act like they’ve not just been keenly torn asunder by a romance gone wrong?

  Men. Mars.

  Women. Venus.

  I just want to live on the freaking Earth for a while.

  I’ll go check out that couple’s home for you. Liam’s voice, so lovely and warm, sounds in my head once more. I turn around and he is gone.

  I want to whisper back ‘thanks’, but I don’t.

  God, everything is so damn complicated.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mrs. Leeds’ funeral is as depressing as I expect it to be. Even the pastor—the Baptist one from downtown, the only one I could get to come graveside to do the service—only does the bare minimum, with little personal flourishes aside from mentioning when she was born, her late husband’s name, and the number of children she had.

  She had three.

  Three children and we were burying her in a banged-up, discount coffin with a second-rate funeral and not a single loved one in sight. Seriously, what the fuck?

  Terrance had kept trying to get ahold of her living relatives. God, I’d even made an effort. Yet despite leaving messages and sending snail mail, we’d never heard back. I had a feeling though, when it came time to read the will and sell her house—the only thing she had really worth anything—the scavengers would come calling, trying to get their proverbial piece of the rancid, rotting pie called inheritance.

  After the funeral, I have to go for a run. I need to breathe fresh, icy air. Let the burn of it remind me that I am alive. Alive for now.

  When I’ve run so far and so fast that I can’t catch my breath and it hurts to stand up straight, I head home,
limping across Leslie’s yard and holding my side so tight that my nails are definitely leaving indents.

  I’m glad that I walk past Leslie’s house without being summoned by the older woman. I don’t have the inclination or emotional capacity to small talk right now. Besides, the last time I’d spoken to Leslie, she’d gifted me frozen fish. One of which contained the earring of a murdered young man. So I’d pass on any conversation or food offerings, at least for a while.

  As soon as I arrive home, I strip down to my sweat-soaked bra and undies. It is cold enough in the house that I sprout goosebumps all over my body almost immediately. I shiver and stamp my feet to generate some heat as I turn the facet on full heat and wait as the bathtub fills. A shower would be faster, but I want to soak my bones and close my eyes.

  I smile when I look up at the shower head and see the waterproof radio that Kyle has added. I usually just sing popular songs off-key that I don’t actually know the words to, but now I can sing off-key to popular songs that I don’t actually know the words to AND have the real thing accompanying me. It’s far less embarrassing when my shit vocals are drowned out by the professionally autotuned ones. I switch the radio on, smiling as one of my favorite pop tunes whispers into the air.

  It seems to take forever to fill the tub and as soon as it nears the overflow drain, I wiggle out of my panties, unsnap my bra, and sink down into the steaming bath. It is so hot that I wince as my body drops, fraction by fraction, into the wetness. Once I’ve gotten used to it though, I lean back against my blow-up vinyl pillow, close my eyes, and hum along to the music playing softly above my head.

  Soon though, I drift off, dozing and soaking and letting go of everything.

  “Lovely view, big sister.”

  At first, I think it is a dream.

  “I suppose it would be a little uncouth for me to take a picture for posterity’s sake?”

  I try to open my eyes, but sleep still has a firm hold of my mind and body. The disturbingly sing-songy voice comes again. “Oh, Victoria? It’s not nice to sleep whilst you have company.”

  Shaking my head a little to clear the dream fog that envelopes me, I try to sit up, only to realize that something is holding me down. Now that wakes me up. Wide freaking awake.

  My eyelids flash open and I see Braeden leaning over me. I thrash, trying desperately to sit up and get out of the tub, but I can’t move my upper body. The weight is still against my shoulder, like two large anvils forcing me immobile. Braeden looks amused, his fingers gripping the edge of the tub and not touching me.

  “Let me the fuck go, Braeden!” My voice is too frightened-sounding to execute the curse word convincingly. I sound like a child tempting God to smite her on Sunday morning.

  “Of course. Anything for you, big sister.”

  With those words, it feels like the anvils are removed from my shoulders, but immediately, something akin to vice grips take hold of my throat and force me beneath the water, which sloshes about so violently that it waves over the lip of the tub to soak the tile floor.

  He pulls me up from the water just as I’ve reached the brink of giving up. “Are you sure you won’t come to the dark side, sis. It’s fun over here. All the candy you can eat and not a single cavity in sight.”

  “You’re a fucking cavity on the world, you piece of shit.”

  “Oh-uh,” Braeden shakes his index finger at me and ‘tsk, tsks’ with his mouth, “wrong answer.”

  And I’m under the water again, with no time to suck in a lifesaving gulp of air. Again, I fight. I kick. I do everything I can to get out of the water and breathe. His magic’s too strong for me though. And I can’t concentrate to call his blood to me. I can’t concentrate on anything except the pin pricks of light I see filtering through the crashing water as I drown.

  Once more, Braeden pulls me from the edge of the abyss called death. I gasp and the air hurts as it inflates my flattened lungs.

  “This is fun, isn’t it? Lovely bit of sibling bonding. I can see why these humans like waterboarding. It should be a sport.”

  I can’t respond, I’m still spitting up water and fighting to get enough air back into my body.

  “Lost for words? Well, that’s a first. Here, let’s see if we can’t loosen your tongue a bit with a nice drink of water.”

  My vision clears enough to see Braeden’s mouth move in a silent whisper and his hands make a motion, palms down, as if he is pressing something to a table to keep it from being picked up by a gust of wind. I take a large swallow of air before I’m under the water again.

  Of course, that only buys me time.

  Please help me. God, please help me. I send out the mental cry, so much anguish in it that I know I am crying. Crying underwater, where no one can see the tracks running down my cheeks. Please. Please. Please.

  I repeat the word, over and over again. Braeden’s not going to let me go this time. He’s going to kill me. Is that possible? Can I die? What happens when we die?

  Everything brightens in a flash of white light and I begin to float to the surface of the water. Slowly, slowly enough that I pass out before my mouth can taste air.

  Wake up, Victoria. Wake up, my Queen. My heart. “Please wake up.” Liam’s voice is coming to me in dual audio. My head hears him faintly. My ears hear him faintly. And that means that I am alive.

  I try to blink, but it takes a moment. My eyelashes feel heavy and wet and I’m so very tired. With effort, I open my eyes. The first thing I see is the ceiling pattern. All the little marks and divots that I pretend are little constellations in my own piece of sky.

  “Thank god,” comes a thick, deep voice. I don’t recognize it. It sounds as if it is being filtered through fabric. I turn my head, finding Liam kneeling beside me, his face full of anxiety and also relief. I look past him though to find the other speaker.

  The doorway is filled by his frame. He’s so large, in fact, that he is bent over so that he can lean inward. And he is covered in fur. Thick fur the same color as his human form’s hair. And his body... it is not the shape of a man’s, but of a bear’s. A giant brown bear who can speak English. If I hadn’t almost died, I might have laughed and said something like ‘hey Boo Boo’ or ‘stolen any picnic baskets today?’ But having a near-death experience saps the wit and humor right out of you.

  I stare at him a while longer, as the fur begins to recede and his bones begin to snap and shrink and remold into that of a man. His eyes are the same though—whether bear or human—those deep pools of lovely brown. Puppy dog eyes.

  Not the eyes of a giant beasted-out berserker.

  “Does that not hurt him?” I glance at Liam, who cannot seem to take his eyes off my face.

  “No, berserkers release a very potent pain blocker whenever they must change into the beast. He feels nothing now, though the day after a shift, berserkers have been known to intake large quantities of food and experience some residual soreness once the natural pain-numbing agents have dissipated.

  “It looks like it hurts,” I look back at my beau and grimace as his back arches violently and a sound like gunfire shoots through the room. His face is nearly human again, the bones shifting like gears beneath the skin. He is some half-formed thing now, fur slinking into the skin, legs still shaped more like the animal than the bipedal man.

  “I assure you, it does not.”

  I take my gaze away from Kyle’s transformation and I meet Liam’s eyes again. “Where’s Braeden? How did you get here so fast? Kyle... there’s no way he could get here from the bar in time. How did he know?” I spit the words out fast because I suddenly feel like I’m going to upchuck. “Shit,” I gasp as the acid and bile jets up my throat. “Help me to the toilet. Please.”

  Liam quickly threads his hands beneath my arms and lifts me where I need to go. Which is, thankfully, only a foot away. The lid is barely up before I start choking on foamy yellowness. I’m glad I hadn’t eaten lunch, nor really breakfast for that matter. Liam holds my hair back as I heave, my stomach
going in and out like a belly-dancer’s. A belly-dancer with freaking food poisoning, that is.

  He leaves me only for a moment, to wet the washcloth hanging on my sink and fold it to set against my forehead. The coolness helps.

  When I’m spent and exhausted, I rock back on my heels and look for Kyle. I don’t see him until I lean backwards so Liam isn’t blocking the floor of my bedroom. Kyle is spread out, naked along the floorboards, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. “Is he okay?”

  Liam tosses Kyle a cursory glance. “Yes. Just like you, he’s exhausted.”

  I nod. “Liam, can you help me to bed? And...” I trail off, realizing for the first time that I’m completely naked, wet, and kneeling next to the man I don’t want as a boyfriend, “can you get me something to wear. Please.”

  His lips twitch, fighting a smile. It’s because I’ve said his name and asked him to help me. He wants to be needed by me and I feel bad about that. Because I love Kyle, even if the love is some sort of magical side effect. I still love him. I care for Liam. But it’s different. “Of course,” he says in a flat voice, any hint of a smile gone. He’s heard my thoughts. I hate when he does that. He stands up and walks stiffly to the bedroom, making a great show of stepping over Kyle’s large frame on the floor. At least I’m not the only one naked.

  I know, by Liam’s sudden change of attitude, that he’s read my thoughts, understands that I don’t want him to take anything I say as flirtatious or inviting. Even when I try not to hurt him, I do. Dammit.

  “Here. Do you need help dressing?” Liam hands me a pair of grey panties and a casual cotton dress. It’s not a nightgown, but hell, I’d take a burlap sack if it meant I wouldn’t be naked with my wannabe fae boyfriend in the room.

  “I think I can manage.” I try to stand up, but my legs won’t support me. Liam catches me as I fall. And I am even more aware, very keenly freaking aware, that I’m naked. “Maybe a little help?” I say apologetically. He shouldn’t have to help me like this. He’s not getting what he wants in return.