Charcoal Tears (30 page)

His smile was devilish, and Cabe snorted, trying to hold back his laughter. It seemed like a terrible idea veiled thinly with the kind of sense that grappled for traction. And yet… if they each gave me something… and kept to their rules… a wave of dizziness overtook me, and I pushed down the thought of all of them getting involved with other girls, unwilling to examine it for too long. I would do this, because it seemed like the best way to move forward. An image of Silas with another girl flicked through my head and I clenched my fists on the table.
Don’t think about it
.

“Okay,” I mumbled. “Sure.”

“Good.” Noah smiled at me like the angel he seemed to be, and I shook my head a little bit, knowing better.

“Seph…” Cabe had his head tilted to the side, considering me just as Noah had been moments before. “Come shopping with us this afternoon.”

“Okay.” I had nothing better to do. Plus, I’d probably go anywhere with them.

“We can get your ear pierced, and then…” He trailed off as someone sat down beside him.

I turned to the girl, bracing myself. I should have been used to it by now, but something about her made me pause, and I examined her a little more closely than I had the others. She was tall, and her hair was a silky golden-blond. Her eyes were soft brown, with flecks of gold, and she was dressed to shock. Her shorts were tiny, and ripped along the pockets. Her shirt cut off at the stomach, and was paired with a streamlined black blazer, also cut off at the stomach. There was a gold chain hanging from her neck, a pendant dropping into her cleavage. She was typically beautiful, but her edge made her sexy, and a little bit frightening. Cabe was grinning at her.

“Hey there, Poison,” he said.

“Yo, cousin,” she stage-whispered, “Introduce me to your fake sister.”

Cabe laughed and Noah rolled his eyes. “Lower your voice, Poison.”

Poison flounced up from the table and walked around, sitting right beside me. Her arm dropped over my shoulder, and she propped her chin on my head.

“Awe, she’s so itty bitty and cute. Can I defile her? Pretty please?”

“No.” Noah sighed, like she was asking a legitimate question.

She pulled back and did a rapid examination of my features. “Do you speak, cupcake?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

Her lips quirked. “I know you’re not their real sister, because I’m their
real
cousin. Or half-sister, or… whatever. Clarin is too. He told me these two neanderthals kidnapped you and that you’re a political refuge on the run from Lord Weston. Is it true?”

“Ah…” Across the table, Cabe nodded slightly. “Yes?” I ventured.

She nodded. “Thought so. So where is your pair? He said you had a badass power, and that’s why you’re running.”

Cabe hadn’t told Clarin the truth. “They’re… I don’t know.”

“Ooh, you haven’t met them yet?”

I nodded.

“Makes sense.” She pursed her lips. “Aren’t you worried you’re gonna run out of time? How are you surviving your power without them?”

Run out of time
?

“We’re helping her out as best we can,” Noah interrupted. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I see! So she can still be defiled.” Poison grinned, knocking me with her shoulder. “Come to my party tonight, cousins, bring the little flower. I’ve got big things planned for her.” She surged up and wandered off, not waiting for a response.

“I’m not supposed to tell people, right?” I asked, after she had left.

“You did good.” Cabe answered. “You should probably stick with that story. It fits with everything. Mostly.”

I had my doubts, because there seemed to be some pretty massive holes in the logic as far as I was concerned, but I didn’t argue. The rest of the school day passed in a panic-inducing blur. I endured girl after girl hitting on the boys, sometimes more than one girl at a time, and sometimes with both of the boys there at same time. I was pretty sure that my nerves were ready to snap by the time we piled into the Lexus to drive home. We were barely out of the parking lot when Cabe’s phone rang. He switched it to speaker.

“You’ve reached the Adair residence—”

“Cabe!” It was a girl’s voice. “It’s true, you’re really back—”

“Who’s this?”

“Tabitha.”

“I don’t know any Tabithas.” He hung up, drumming his fingers happily on the steering wheel to the tune of the song on the radio.

“Did you just say that?” I asked, curious despite myself. “Do you actually not remember her?”

Clarin looked back at me from the passenger seat. “Cabe’s a bit of a man-whore. You haven’t heard?”

I laughed, and Cabe smacked him.

“I
was
a man-whore,” Cabe corrected. “I’m reformed now.”

Clarin scoffed, and I felt Noah’s quiet chuckle against my hair. I was leaning lightly against him.

“So you don’t remember her?” I asked.

“I do.” He seemed to think about it for a moment. “I think… I think she… yeah. I’m positive. She had hair. And a face.”

I giggled, and slapped a hand over my mouth to curb it, but Cabe glanced in the rear-view mirror, catching me.

“Are you laughing at me, little ghost?”

I dipped forward, my hands landing on his shoulders. I felt the muscles tightening beneath my touch. “You’re a funny man-whore, Lucifer.”

His phone rang again, and he turned it on speaker. “Adair residence—”

“Shut up, Cabe.” Silas’s voice filled the car. “Your Lexus isn’t a residence, and I know you’re driving, because I’m watching your GPS dot move down the road.”

“Wait, what? Someone stole my car! Shit!”

“Are you still going shopping?”

“Yeah. Seph wants a piercing.”

There was silence on the other end for a few seconds, and then Silas spoke again. “Am I on speaker?”

“Yup.”

“Who’s in the car?”

“The usual suspects.”

“Noah?” Silas asked.

“Silas,” Noah answered.

“Text me the address. I’ll meet you there.”

“On it,” Noah said as he slipped his phone out of his pocket and texted Silas.

Without another word, Silas hung up.

“Silas seems to be… hanging out… a lot more than usual, these days,” Clarin said. “He hasn’t once been arrested and you guys have been here almost two full days. What’s the deal?”

“He’s reformed,” Cabe said with a smirk.

“Right.” Clarin scoffed again. “You’re all a right bunch of cherubs all of a sudden.”

“Not me,” Noah said. “I don’t have a cherubic bone in my body.”

“Maybe you’ve got your bone in someone else’s cherubic body then?” The quip was light, but the meaning hung heavy in the air.

I wasn’t stupid, I knew who he was talking about.

I slid away from Noah and hovered behind Clarin’s seat. I didn’t worry about getting too close to him, because he wasn’t into girls anyway, so I draped an arm right over his shoulder, until it curved down his torso. Cabe bit out a curse and the car swerved like he’d momentarily lost control of the wheel. I drew on a non-harmful memory and closed my eyes as Clarin froze.

“Holy… holy c-crap,” Clarin was stuttering, and I knew it had worked.

I blinked my eyes open and my arm was encased in slithering lights, like sparks upon my skin. They didn’t seem to be touching him, which was weird because my arm was definitely touching him… but then again, I hadn’t wanted them to. Perhaps they were listening to me.

“This cherubic body,” I whispered the words in his ear, but they carried through the car in a menacing way, “doesn’t get
boned
. Don’t speak about me like that.”

His head turned slowly, his eyes seeming more moss-green now that I was seeing them up-close. He stared at me like he hadn’t really seen me until now, and he slowly nodded. “So the mouse has claws? Good.” He flashed me a smile. “I was beginning to worry for you.”

I pulled my arm back and Noah immediately grabbed me, hauling me back to his side like he had been itching to do it for days—instead of minutes. Cabe’s fists were so tight against the steering wheel I thought it was going to break off.

“Jesus…” Cabe muttered.

“Yeah.” Clarin reached over and patted his shoulder. “It almost turned me on too.”

Cabe laughed, shaking his head, and the tension seemed to ease as we drove the rest of the way to the mall. As we parked and spilled out of the car, Cabe’s phone rang again.

“Yup?” he said. “Oh, hey Poison—no she’s not here. No, you can’t talk to her. Okay, fine! No need to resort to threats. Here!” He handed the phone to me, and I pressed it hesitantly to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Aw, the birdy chirped. How’s it going, cupcake?”

“Good, thank you. How are you?”

“Fan-freaking-tastic. You better be coming to my party tonight. I wasn’t kidding. I have things planned for you. I bet those boys have been all me-man-you-woman for the past few days and it’s probably driving you crazy. You need girl time. Make them bring you.”

“Um… I don’t really like parties that much.”

“The last one you went to was with them, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you had to put up with a bunch of snivelling bimbos, didn’t you?”

“Kind of.”

“And they guarded you like you were the queen of Geneva and didn’t let anyone talk to you, didn’t they?”

“I guess so. Sort of.”

“Thought so. This party will be different. You’ll love it! I promise. Now promise me you’ll come…”

I chewed on my lip. “Okay…”

“Good. I’ll text Cabe the address. Come by early so I can proof your outfit. I can’t have you embarrassing our scandalous family name.”

She hung up and I stared at the phone for a little bit, wondering what had just happened.

“We’re going to a party,” I told Cabe, handing back his phone as the sports car I remembered from the garage slid into the parking spot beside us,
purring
.

Silas got out, stuffed his keys into his pocket, and nodded to us all. Eloquent, as ever.

“What kind of car is that?” I eventually asked, when it seemed like nobody else was going to be speak.

“A Lotus Elise,” Noah answered, taking my arm. “Now let’s go get you pierced before Miro shows up and manages to stop us.”

“How do you know I’m not here to stop you?” Silas asked.

“Because I know how you work,” Noah answered. “You would have called every store capable of doing it and bribed them substantially to take an extended break until we were clear of the vicinity.”

“Yeah,” Cabe agreed. “You’re here to
watch
, you sick bastard.”

Silas’s lips quirked, an almost smile. It tugged at me. We walked into the shopping centre and Noah hunted down the store he wanted. Clarin fit right in with a tattoo on almost every spare inch of his body, and he and Cabe started flicking through books of tattoos while Noah and Silas walked over to a cabinet of piercings.

“Why are we doing this?” Silas asked me, the second we were away from the others.

“Girlfriend insurance,” I answered.

At his confused look, Noah breathed out a half laugh, grabbed my wrist and held it up to display Quillan’s watch. “Seph is worried about our
connection thing
—” his lips twitched into a smile, and I saw amusement glinting in Silas’s eyes—“so Miro gave her his watch, and said that she didn’t have to worry about how the bond would affect him wanting to be in a relationship until he asked for the watch back.”

“I see.” Silas touched the watch briefly, and I almost saw another smile. “And naturally, you’re piercing her ear?”

“Naturally. I’ll tell her to take it out when I want a girlfriend.”

“So naturally, I should get a tattoo.”

“Naturally.”

“Huh?” They lost me with the tattoo.

Silas turned on me, the wheels ticking over behind his eyes. “I’ll get a half-finished tattoo,” he said. “More girlfriend insurance. When I want a girlfriend, I’ll get the tattoo finished.”

“Isn’t that a little… permanent?”

His eyes flashed; there was something that he was finding enormously funny about all of this, and it was distracting me from the fact that the whole situation was tipping off the far end of strange, into something distinctively unusual, because
hell
, Silas actually seemed to be having fun.

“Trust me, angel. When that day comes, it will be permanent.”

I turned away so that he didn’t have to see how his words had just affected me. The pain ripped through my chest with the niggling memory of Cabe insinuating that Silas had a secret girlfriend, and it wasn’t the alien jealousy that I often felt with Noah and Cabe… instead, it was as real, as gut-wrenching, as it would have been if Silas had slapped me clean across the face. I walked over to the tattoo book, pushed Cabe and Clarin out of the way, and started flicking violently through the pages. They seemed to recover from their shock, and both stood there silently. I stopped at an image, running my fingers over it. Yes. It was the one.

I marched back to Silas, the book tucked under my arm. “I get to pick the tattoo. It’s
my
insurance policy.”

Any trace of amusement was now gone from his face, but I suspected that it was only so that I wouldn’t feel as though he was laughing at me—since all other emotion had been wiped from his expression right along with the hilarity, and there was a tightness to his mouth instead of his usual frown. Noah, however, was now trying so hard not to laugh that he was leaning against Silas with his face turned away from us.

“Sure,” Silas said.

I slammed the book over the piercings cabinet and pointed at the image. “That one.”

“That one it is.”

I paused, not having expected him to agree so readily, and looked back at the design—a set of angel wings.

“Really?”

“I can get the wings done, and then colour them in later. How’s that?”

“Okay…” I couldn’t really argue after he had so readily agreed to my design.

“Come choose your earring.” Noah gently lifted the tattoo book and handed it to Silas.

I looked into the case and browsed the rings there, more to distract myself from the back-an-forth reeling of my mind than with any real concentration.

This is a terrible idea.