Lead Heart (Seraph Black, #3)
Jane Washington
“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
So much had happened. It was hard to keep it all straight in my head. It was becoming a pattern of sorts for my life to suddenly explode and then for the fallout to rain down on me in a shower of clandestine snowflakes for months and months while I waited for the next attack. Only… when the attack finally came, I would discover that the snow had been falling for so long that I had become buried to the neck, utterly helpless to fight my way free. It was hardly surprising that the messenger didn’t seem to be utilising every free moment of his time to stalk me into submission. He was more than just a masochist with a fixation. He seemed to consider himself a master of illusion, and he needed time to prepare for his next trick. That was what worried me, in the end: the fact that he was so unreliable. Give me a casual neighbourhood stalker any day: someone who would predictably follow me to work and back, maybe peer through the window a few times, maybe steal my hairbrush and make a voodoo doll out of the loose hairs. Anyone, really; anyone with predictable stalking habits and a medium-level fixation on cult magic.
That was a testament to how messed up my situation had become… I was pining after a perfectly normal stalker that didn’t even exist.
The messenger had gone dark for another three months, leaving me alone with a single, recurring nightmare that replayed inside my head on a broken loop, spinning around and around in search of a better outcome. My father was alive. He wasn’t my father. Kingsling was dead. Silas had shot him. Silas had shot me. Quillan had shot Weston. Silas was gone.
Silas was gone.
He had endured three months of unthinkable torture while the rest of us tip-toed around the house, afraid of even admitting that we had been defeated. We were wasting too much time trying to think of a solution to an unsolvable situation. I wanted to turn myself over to Jayden, who might be able to organise a trade: me for Silas. Quillan had once explained to me that Jayden was an unreliable asset to the Klovoda. People called him the hypnotist because of the strength of his ability to manipulate the mind, and that power only occasionally benefited the Klovoda. Sometimes his actions benefited Weston, sometimes Kingsling, and sometimes nobody at all. I had a feeling that Jayden was on his own side, and it was almost worth the risk to see if his side would line up with mine.
Unfortunately, Quillan wanted to err on the side of caution. It was the only time we really spoke—when I wanted to push the plan and he wanted to warn against it. I wouldn’t say that we fought, exactly… but we certainly weren’t getting along. Noah and Cabe might have gone for my plan if their memories of our bond hadn’t been taken away by Jayden—or, at least I assumed that it was Jayden. As it was, Cabe was withholding any opinion whatsoever and Noah wanted to bypass Jayden’s involvement and ship me off to Weston without preemption. Surprisingly, Poison and Clarin were siding with Quillan, and unsurprisingly, Tariq didn’t want me anywhere near the Klovoda at all.
I was outnumbered.
I might have been willing to give Jayden a chance: he had given me back a memory of something that the others had been hiding from me, and his men had been following me around for months now without once harming me in any way, but I wasn’t sure that I could betray everyone else to do it.
At the end of the day, the choice was a clear one. I could put myself in danger and betray all of the people that cared about me, or I could leave Silas in danger and betray myself. I knew the options, but knowing the options didn’t make it any easier to decide, so I continued to put it off, waiting for something to appear out of nowhere and change things—to tip me one way or another. Graduation had been a non-event, because I no longer cared about normal human things. My life was no longer what it once was; I no longer cared about getting a job with the Zevghéri; I no longer cared about getting a job in the human world; I no longer cared about the fact that my dead father was both alive and not my father.
I did care that my brother wasn’t my real brother, and that my real brother was a faceless ghost, shadowing my every step… but even though I cared, there was nothing to be done. The messenger had won. For now, at least. He had succeeded in dividing me from one of my pairs, while Kingsling and Weston had taken care of the rest.
He had won.
I slammed the door of the car, the sharp sound cutting through my pensive mood and drawing my attention back to the present.