“You…” I frowned, trying to figure out what he was saying. “You didn’t think I would like it?”
His eyes widened a little bit, and I understood. He hadn’t expected me to like it. I frowned back down at my lap. A week ago, I would have been drowning in too many emotions to properly comprehend, but now… my head was clear. I had liked it; it was as simple as that. Quillan was undeniably precious to me. I craved his influence hovering over me, and his disapproval was always like a raw wound against my soul. He was a steady presence in my heart and mind, and I had begun to rely on his touch every bit as much as the others.
“Should I not have liked it?” I re-phrased my question.
He caught my chin, lifting my face to his. He was shaking his head.
“No.” His tone was gentle. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t even realise what I was doing until it was over. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it. But I’m not angry at you, Seph. Not at all.”
He stepped back, motioning the canvas, and I suspected that I wasn’t going to extract anything further from him, so I reached for one of the brushes and tried to clear my mind of worry. Almost as soon as my fingers closed around the brush, my mind repelled it from me, and I stumbled away from the canvas. Quillan frowned at me. I frowned back at him.
“Paper,” I said.
He nodded, moving to the desk in the other room and returning with a notebook and a pencil. I took both from him silently, folding myself onto the ground. He hovered behind me, his eyes on the page as I began to draw. My pencil skirted along the outline of a desk, carving the lines of age into the wood and smudging darkness over most of the image but for a bare spill of sunlight that glared off a figure slumped into a chair. He had an inky spill of dark hair falling over his eyes and he clutched at a pen, digging it into a sheet of paper. I felt the scratch of words beneath his pen, and I shaded in the lines of script as a voice echoed inside my head.
“Baby, baby, if he hears you,
As he gallops past the house,
Limb from limb he’ll tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.
And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you,
And he’ll beat you into pap,
And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel snap, snap, snap.”
The voice was familiar, and it tugged at something in my memory that pulled-up short, as I seemed to be trying to tie two people that I was acquainted with into one. It was the voice of someone I knew, mixed with the ghostly echo that I had heard so many times whispering over my face as the messenger conducted some kind of evil.
My pencil moved to the arm of the figure as I forced the thoughts from my head, allowing the vision to pull me in. I shaded the tattoos down his arm, recognising each of the designs, and then sketched a brief impression of his face before drawing back, my breath shuddering inside my chest until I feared that the rattle of it had become audible to Quillan.
With the sudden knowledge of who the messenger was, the parts of my memory that Jayden had blocked from me suddenly crashed back into my head, forcing me to double-over and clutch at my skull.
“It’s getting worse, Lela,” he cried. “You have to save me.”
I caught his hand in mine, squeezing as he collapsed on the ground in front of me. Jayden would be coming to take my memories of the medical centre before my new mother came to pick me up, and my twin was terrified, because we would be separated for the first time in our lives, and we didn’t know when I would be brought back. Nobody would be there to protect him from the power that called to him every night. Nobody would be there to hold him as the regret crawled into his chest and made him cry for hours and hours over whatever new horror he had committed.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told him, crouching down beside him and desperately swallowing back my tears. “Tell me what to do… do you want me to read you some more stories? They always calm you down. What about the nursery rhymes? Danny? What do I do?”
“Make it end,” he pleaded, his grey eyes large on mine. “Use the valcrick. It’s the only way I can die. My power doesn’t work on me, only other people.”
I pulled away from him, horror blooming inside my chest. “No.” I shook my head until it hurt, backing all the way to the door. “No… I can’t. I’m going to tell Jayden. He can help you.”
“NO!” He stumbled to his feet, grabbing at my clothing and flinging me away from the door.
He was stronger than he realised, but I saw the regret that flashed over his face as soon as I picked myself up off the floor.