In Stone (24 page)

I wake up with a start from the car dream. The sharp shrill honk of a car horn has roused me. I’m disorientated and aggressively thirsty, like I could drink a lake. But any abrasive movement will split my head in two for sure. As if he reads my mind, Jack flips down the glove box, reaches in, and hands me a bottle of ice cold water. I take a sip and instantly wish I hadn’t. It’s too much, tastes like grease in my mouth.

“Welcome back.” The sky is an ominous mix of grey and deep greens. We’re in Jack’s car. He’s driving fast, darting through the empty streets. It’s early. No one’s around. My stomach twists as I watch the road. I’m never drinking again.

“What time is it?” I ask him when my eyes refuse to focus on the dashboard clock.

“It’s just after six.”

I wince, throw my hands to my head, and massage my buzzing temples. I hope Mom isn’t up. This time she’ll definitely hand me a death sentence.

“Beau, do you remember last night, what I said to you?”

“Not really.” I hate that I was trashed for his homecoming.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Sounds ominous.” I force a smile. He steals a glance at me but doesn’t smile back. “What’s going on?”

“You’re not going to like it, but it will answer a lot of questions.” He swallows hard, pulling the car to a stop outside my house.

“What is it?”

He looks out of the window, puffs a breath, and says nothing. A light goes on in my mom’s room.

“Jack?”

“I know what you are,” he says. “And I’m not the only one.”

NOTHING CURES A HANGOVER
quite like hearing you’re a demon.

“Mom?” My voice trembles as I fly through the door. I hear the wood smash against the coat rack. It doesn’t bounce back, so I presume it’s been impaled on one of the fishhook-like prongs. They were right -- Rachael, the old Bulgarian guy, the demon Lisa. I’m not normal. I am something different. Something dark and dangerous. I don’t have a mole the size of Jupiter on my stomach. I have toxic blood that’s manifested itself into a dirty, black stain. I’m not remarkably resilient, plagued by altitude sickness or angst ridden. I’m a freak.

“You have to stop. Get control. Or I take you away right now!” Jack growls, snatching my hand halfway up the hall. The brace is intense. My shoulder crunches in its socket. The demon juice, or blood as I now understand it, hasn’t risen, yet. The pain registers, and he knows it. He uses it against me, pushing on my palm so I have no choice but to bend my knees and dip slightly to relieve the pressure in my elbow and under my armpit. He stares down on me, pressing his nose up against mine and glowering. “Get control,” he orders.

“You’re hurting me,” I seethe. But he doesn’t care. I’m not the fragile girl he knew a week ago. I’m his natural enemy. I’m a demon -- half of me is at least.

“What the hell is going on?” Mom asks, her voice tainted with shock. “Get your hands off my daughter,” she commands from the kitchen door. Shock is benched; anger replaces it. I turn to her, and she meets my eyes. My shoulders drop; my hostility falters. He lets my arm loose, satisfied that I’m stable and not about to start picking off any humans -- namely, Mom.

She knows. The second she sees Jack’s shiny eyes it’s obvious. She knew all this time. The recognition washes over her face, and her hand flies to her chest, trying to steady a suddenly galloping heartbeat. Her eyes flick back and forth between the two of us. An array of emotions assault her face, pulling her lips up, down, left, right. Her eyebrows rise and fall. Her face is a full on disco.

“Do you know?” she finally asks me, but her eyes flit to Jack. He says nothing. His fingers curl up around mine. It’s a different hold, lacking affection, loaded with restraint. I guess he’s only doing his job.

“That my dad’s a fucking half-breed? Yeah, Mom, I know.”

She unravels. Seventeen years of lies unfurl from around her and fall in a frazzled heap at her ankles. Her face turns the color of ash before she skulks off into the kitchen. The sound of her slippers dragging along the carpet behind her. At first I’m not sure I can follow.

“You need to know,” Jack says over my shoulder.

“I didn’t know what he was,” Mom starts as we step through the door. She takes a seat, plants her elbows on the table, and buries her head in her hands.

I don’t sit down. Control is easier to maintain when I’m standing. Jack’s hands are on my shoulders. Reassuring? Restraining? I feel like it’s a bit of both.

“I’d been at the funeral parlor eight months when they brought me his body. He was unidentified, unclaimed. A faceless John Doe. No heartbeat because that’s how they are when they come to me. Dead.” She looks at the both of us. A childlike innocence pulls her eyes wide open. “Stone cold dead,” she repeats. “I turned my back for a second, and before I knew what was going on he had hold of my hand. He was screaming and thrashing around. Hammering his heels and his empty fist into the steel table, puncturing it as if it were paper. I thought I was going to die.”

She shivers as the memory repeats on her. “After hours he finally stopped howling. He wouldn’t let go of my wrist. He just lay there, staring at me.” She gets the look, the glass-eyed, memory look. “He’d only just been changed. The medics pulled him from a fire. They thought he was dead, when in fact, he was just adjusting. He had next to no memory. He was confused...frightened maybe.” Her eyes well.

Jack squeezes my shoulder. He wants me to comfort her. But I can’t. There’s a wall of lies between us. My heart starts thumping as I wrestle with the idea. She’s still a liar -- I can’t shut that out. For seventeen years, I’ve been half of something hideous, and she’s never mentioned it, not once. His fingers ease off when he detects the tension stiffening my shoulders.

“I couldn’t walk away from him. He had no one, and he was this great mystery that I wanted to be a part of.”

“He was evil. That’s just sick,” I spit. Fingers again, clawing at my shoulder, stronger this time. Warning me to reel my neck in. I resist the urge to turn my head and bite him.

“No, not evil. He sold his soul to save his son. He’s not like the others.”

“Beau, your father’s a gatekeeper,” Jack clarifies. I know a gatekeeper. A gatekeeping, half-breed who has a temper, a serious attitude problem for sure, but is not wholly evil. “Like Rachael.” Jack confirms.

“That’s how you know what I am. You’ve spoken to him?” I ask. I hear my Mom take a sharp breath. He nods his head.

“Your father let me out.”

Leah and I used to play hide-and-seek. This one time I hid under my bed covers. It was so stuffy, and the air disappeared so quickly, but I couldn’t nip up and grab a fresh lungful just in case she discovered me. That’s how I feel right now.

One second, I’m staring at Jack, trying to stay afloat in the wave of information. The next, he’s vanished from my sight. There’s such a crash and a clatter that you’d think a truck had ploughed into the kitchen wall. My mom wails as she notes the gaping hole in the side of the house. Broken bricks, torn wood, and shattered work-tops adorn the floor. Wires are snaking their way out of the hole, and a torrent of water gushes from a severed pipe.

“Jack?” I choke on the thick cloud of orange dust. As the smog starts to clear, I can make out two figures in our back yard. One being pinned to the ground, having the life choked out of him -- Jack. And the one on his chest, thick, dark hair down to his shoulders, draped in a leather jacket, pale skin, five o’clock shadow -- demon. I scurry over the pile of debris.

“Beau!” Mom gasps and seizes my arm. “He can handle it.”

“I know.” I shake off her grip and carry on over the mound of debris. Wading through the broken bits of our kitchen. I snatch a length of copper pipe as I emerge through the hole and into our garden. My blood is on the boil, and fury is in my step, but I’m still here. Just me breathing deeply -- silently listing the parts of me that I know, that I recognize and don’t want to disappear. Because I know that if I let the demon poke through it might turn on Jack. To the strongest part of my blood at least, Jack is now the threat, the gargoyle.

I swing the pipe back, ready to deliver a blow to the demon’s head. Jack’s eyes fix on me.

“Beau, don’t,” he chokes. Trying to protect me? Something tells me no. That’s not it. Whatever. He’s alerted the demon to my presence. I bring the pipe down as the demon twists his head toward me. I can’t complete the swing. The pipe leaves my hand. A musical clang echoes in the air.

“Beau,” the demon utters my name. Affectionately? His face is startlingly familiar. This is the guy I remember jumping into a mustard-colored dodge and driving away from us forever when I was four years old. The demon is a half-breed; this half-breed is my dad. I blink and their positions are reversed. Jack’s forcing his knees into the monsters shoulders, pinning him to the concrete, and encasing his neck in a vise-like grip. My dad is now being starved of oxygen. I remember in vivid detail how Rachael flinched when Gray held that nothing-special-knife at her neck. Half-breeds can only live forever if they don’t get damaged.

“Beau, go back in the house. We’ll be there in a minute.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“No, of course not,” Jack replies. Not that I’m bothered. He can go to hell -- literally and metaphorically -- for all I care. Then why am I asking? “Beau. We’re just going to talk,” Jack reassures me. I don’t like it. I don’t want him to think I’m bothered. He can do whatever he wants with the demonic deserter. Max Bailey means nothing to me.

“I don’t care.” I sniff, turn, and leave them to it.

Mom looks like she’s about to slip into lunacy. Every time a chunk of rubble slips, or I shift my feet under the table, she practically leaps out of her seat. I don’t know what’s wigging her out more, the state of our derelict kitchen that she spent the best part of five years paying for, or the sight of her estranged, demonic ex, chatting it out with a gargoyle in our back yard. I’m going to go with the latter. I avoid looking. My fingers drum impatiently on the tabletop until Mom places her hand on top of mine and silences them.

“I was trying to protect you,” she says. I retract my hand and bury it under the table between my legs.

“We,” the half-breed corrects from behind me. “We were trying to protect you.” I leap up, uninterested in him and eager to see Jack. He flashes a warm smile at me.

“Are you okay?” I nod.

“This is my fault,” the half-breed admits. And here I was thinking I wouldn’t be interested in anything he had to say.

Cue the most uncomfortable family reunion that’s ever taken place, anywhere. Forget crazy aunts, estranged uncles, bigoted grandparents. We’ve got demons.

“You need to understand that keeping this from you was our way of protecting you.” I almost yawn at the tedium of such a tired cliché.

“I thought you were going to keep her sedated,” the half-breed says to Mom.

“I was. She stopped drinking the tea.”

“Excuse me?” I choke. “You wanna run that one by me again?”

“Baby, it was nothing. Just a mild sedative to stop you from…”

“Freaking out and killing people,” I finish for her.

“To suppress your father’s genetics,” she corrects. First of all, it’s way too soon to be tossing around the father title. Second of all, did my own mother just fess up to drugging me? If I’d have kept hold of my bags at the airport and managed to get a cup of fruit tea every day would we even be here having this discussion? The half-breed is looking at me.

“You should never have been involved in this.” He takes a deep breath and pulls his fingers back through his hair. “The knife found its way to you because of me. Because I was an acquaintance of the gargoyle that made it.” This is news to even Jack. I can tell by the way he shifts awkwardly on his feet.

“The bone that it’s carved from, it’s yours,” Jack says. The half-breed nods his head once in the affirmative. He shifts, pulls up the leg of his jeans to reveal an angry, blue scar that starts at his knee and ends at his ankle.

What was it I’d said to Rachael, transference? But she knew. She’d smelled the similarity between me and the blade. This is a nightmare. I pinch my arm. It stings all the way down to my elbow.

“Nicholas was looking for Beau that night, wasn’t he?” Jack guesses.

“I never dreamed that he would seek her out. We were friends, Nicholas and I. When he told me about mixing our blood and doing all sorts of strange things with our genetic makeup in an attempt to make the ultimate weapon, I laughed. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe he could do it.”

“How did he make it? What did he use?” Jack asks.

“I don’t know, like I said, I didn’t believe he could do it. I just donated a piece of bone when he asked. That’s the only part I played in the construction of the knife.”

“How did he know about me?” I ask. I don’t mean to. I don’t want to talk to him, but curiosity pulls the question from my lips.

“I talked about you. I missed you, both of you. Nicholas must have presumed that you were my daughter from my first life. Human. I guess once he knew that the weapon was a mistake, he decided the best place for it would be in human hands. Maybe he assumed you knew more about our world than you did,” the half-breed explains with a firm chin. Like I’m really supposed to believe he was protecting me. Like I’m supposed to believe a half-breed has the capacity to love anyone. Then I think of me, and how I felt watching Jack slip away. I hear Rachael’s maniacal laughter as she worked through her grief. “He had no right to come and find you,” the half-breed hisses.