Of Noble Chains (The Ventori Fables) (16 page)

“That’s good.”  Win took a drink, and so did Zia.  Her mother looked at her, and questioned, “Whatever happened to Hayden?”

“Hayden?” Zia repeated.  “I don’t know.  We don’t really talk much.”

“No, I mean,” Win tried to find the right words, “I always thought you liked him.  You were always talking about him.”

“
Wha—no way!  That’s
Hayden Rider
,” Zia protested, “he’s…he’s Hayden Rider!”

“Well whenever you mentioned him you got so passionate, excited” Win shrugged, “I just thought—it reminded me of how I would talk about your father when we were young.”

“No, no way.  No way would I like Hayden.  He was competition, mom, not…bleh.”  Zia couldn’t even form proper sentences when the image of her and Aeryn was replaced with her and Hayden.  Her heart jumped harder against her ribcage.

“Alright, alright,” Win tried to calm her daughter down, and they continued to chat in the kitchen.  Zia attempted to steer the conversation away from Aeryn and Ventori and Hayden, but her mother was persistent.  Two o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.

Standing out front of her house was making him nervous for some reason.  He couldn’t understand it, or the way his throat felt tight thinking of how she had been hurt.  Well, she was Ventori, so she wasn’t really hurt when the Angel had struck her, but he still felt bad about it.  Now, Mal was standing on her front porch, cloaked with a spell, and trying to find the courage to knock on her door.  He only wanted to make sure she was okay, but even that seemed difficult.  Just as he knocked on the door, he brushed his hair forward so that it covered more of his eyes; he had never felt this nervous before.

The door opened, and he let down his shield so that Zia could see him.  Her eyes widened, and she yanked on the collar of his shirt, pulling him inside.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly.  She asked that a lot.  Was it only him she questioned so much?

He glanced around the hallway, and heard a shuffling from the other room.  He said, “I wanted to see how you were feeling, after last night.”  As she stared up at him, he realized he hadn’t changed his eyes for her, and shifted them.  She flinched back, and his lips tightened into a line.  “Sorry.”

“Whatever,” Zia ran two hands through her hair, and looked around the corner.  “Mom, me and a uh…friend are just going to go into my room.”

“Okay, Kehzia,” said a female voice, “I need to go next door to speak with the neighbourhood guard.  If I don’t see you when I get back, have a good day!”  Mal watched as Zia rushed out of sight, and heard more movement.  A screen door opened and shut, and the Ventori girl was back in his sights.  She began ushering him up the nearby staircase, and didn’t stop pushing him, or looking over her shoulder until she slammed a door shut.

“
Why are you here
?” Zia questioned him again.

“You had been hurt,” Mal stammered, “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Zia flinched again, but he wasn’t sure why.  He had made sure his eyes looked human, and he hadn’t cast any spells; if anything, she shouldn’t flinch.  Maybe she really did hate him.  That thought made him look to his feet, ashamed.  He apologized to her, a lump formed in his throat as the words came across his tongue.

“I’m fine,” Zia said.  “It’s not like it was your fault.”

“But it was.”

Zia couldn’t comprehend why Mal had decided to pay her a surprise visit, but when he said he felt her getting hurt was his fault, she was at a loss for words.  He had been banished, which was a lot worse than getting tackled.  To be banished, even for a short time, was seen as the cruelest of acts, and was only served as punishment for the worst of STRAYs.  And yet, here he was, saying sorry for not helping her.

“I promised to help you,” Mal went on, his violet eyes fixated on his shoes, “and I failed.”

“Well,” Zia rubbed the back of her neck, “you did sort of pin him to a wall, which was useful.”  She wasn’t about to admit that he had basically saved the day; it was her first STRAY, and how could she let someone know a Specter had helped her?  Especially a Caster.

But her words seemed to make Mal feel better, and when he looked up at her she felt her heart do a little skip.  He smiled, and he looked so genuinely happy to hear that he had helped.

“You are not hurt though?” he asked, his eyes expressing more emotion than she could even comprehend.

“No,” Zia shrugged, “Medean blood keeps me strong.  Hey…”

Mal stepped forward eagerly, and for once she didn’t step back.  “Yes?”

“Why would Achaicious want to kill a Ventori?”

“Do you not believe it was simply because they were Ventori?” Mal questioned, brushing his hair forward more with the tips of his fingers.  It bothered Zia not being able to clearly see his eyes, and she had to stop herself from shoving his hair back.  How had that hairstyle ever gotten popular?

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she admitted.

Mal shifted his eyes away from hers, but quickly met them again.  He asked, “Do you believe that we could work together, then?  That Ventori and Specters could live together?”

Zia paused, and didn’t know how to answer.  Everyone seemed to want this, especially Aeryn.  But she opened her mouth, with the thought of how a Specter had murdered her brother, and declared, “No.”

“I will convince you,” Mal said, not even stopping to think.  “We can work together, last night was evidence enough.”  He held his hand out to her, and she let it hang in the space between them.

She furrowed her brow.  “What?”

“Your hand,” Mal said, looking down at her side.  Stupidly, she lifted it, thinking something was there and the Specter quickly grabbed it.  Zia immediately went for her cobalt chain, but stopped when Mal simply lifted her hand to his forehead, pressing her fingers against his skin, eyes shut.  He felt hot, and his hair tickled her knuckles.  She didn’t want to admit it, but she felt her face redden a bit, the moment suddenly becoming an intimate goodbye.  Mal lowered her hand, but kept it in his and opened his eyes to meet hers.   He whispered, “I will show you.”

And in a flash of blue dust, he vanished.

Zia was left standing in her room, staring at the empty air that Mal had just been standing in.  Her cheeks had turned a light pink, and her hand was still hanging in the space where Mal held it.  Her fingers felt hot, as did her chest.  That was a very personal goodbye, which most Specters only gave to those they loved most; family, really close friends…
lovers
.  Another image of a bed came to her mind, with blond hair and lean limbs.  As soon as she came to her senses, she ran for the vacuum in the hallway closet, and made sure to rid her room of any trace of the blue dust; of Mal.

He was still determined to prove to her that not all Specters were bad, and she could feel some tiny part of her starting to believe him.  But it was only because he was persistent, and had technically helped her; it was sort of her fault he had gotten banished, too.

Zia checked the time, and saw there was too much between now and when she had to meet with Aeryn.  She had tried calling Iscah, but there was no answer, so she headed out to the library.  If anything, she needed something to keep her mind off of Malachi Fel.

When Zia arrived at the library the first thing she noticed was that Trenton wasn’t there.  All the other kids were listening to a story in the back corner of the room, but the Neith that had so eagerly wanted to learn of his heritage was nowhere to be found.  Zia turned to Mrs. Mayfield behind the desk and asked where he was.

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Mrs. Mayfield replied.  Zia shook her head, and the librarian said, “His father passed away last night; I don’t think we’ll be seeing Trenton back for a time.”

“Passed away?” Zia repeated, completely dumbfounded by the idea.  “What happened?  Was he sick?”

The librarian checked where all the children were before leaning over the desk.  She whispered, “I hear he committed suicide, up on the northern cliff.  The poor boy; I’ll never understand how parents can do that.”

An alarm went off inside Zia’s head, and she knew something was off.  Another clan member committing suicide?  She asked, “Did he jump?”

Mrs. Mayfield nodded, “Just last night.  Rumours say that his body was too mangled to even properly identify him; they had to use dental records…for what they had left anyway.”

Zia pursed her lips, and ran out of the library without an explanation for the woman.  She hoisted her bag higher on her back, and hopped onto her bike, already moving towards the furthest part of North Havilan.

The girl abandoned her bicycle near the trees, making sure to obscure it within the bushes.  She wasn’t even aware she was being watched, and the woman followed her with a laugh.  This girl was trying to be Ventori? 
Please
.

Though she had taken on a Black Angel, not even stopping to think she might get hurt.  This Kehzia, the woman pondered, maybe there was more than meets the eye.  But as the woman watched the young Ventori fall to the ground, and swear, she rethought her statement.

She tracked Kehzia through the woods, being sure to stay in the other realm, her realm.  Her black hair and sky coloured eyes could see everything from there, and she wanted to curse how easily she had been caught off guard by that damned Angel.  Achaicious had given him a banishment charm, and she had been thrown forcefully into her own realm at the hospital, along with that boy.  Thankfully, he had been too busy thinking of Kehzia to even notice her there.

Coming back to the present, the woman watched as Kehzia came upon the scene of the latest death; a member of the Neith clan, and a man that had found out too much.  Nobody else was there, and the woman studied Kehzia from afar, watching as she wandered around the area in search of clues.  But she sighed and peered over the cliff, finding nothing.

Just when the woman thought the girl had given up, she knelt down by a tree, and pressed her finger into the dirt.  Curious, the woman approached her, still well hidden in her own realm, and watched as the Ventori smiled.

On her finger was dirt, but also small specs of blue dust; Caster dust.  She knew Kehzia was thinking that the person that killed this man also killed that other woman, the one called Cindel,
but she was only half right.  The woman shifted her eyes to the cliff, and she could see the fading image of a werewolf biting into the Neith, and then pushing him over the edge.  The leftover dust was just from a spell cast on the wolf, she noted, and watched as the image howled upwards.  But something else caught her eye; a cobalt dagger.

That could come in handy,
the woman thought to herself.  She left Kehzia’s side, and reached her thoughts towards the rocks below, searching for the dagger that had been tossed aside so easily.  She found it quickly, and lifted it without even moving.  But even she was capable of mistakes, and as the weapon cut through her veil, she caught it, and it seared her hand.

“
Goddess
,” she cursed and turned to see Kehzia face her.

“Hey!” the Ventori screamed, and started towards her.  But the woman was faster than that, and dropped the dagger as she clutched at her hand.  She vanished back into her realm, and left the dagger for the girl, along with some pale grey ashes.

Zia was earlier than she had expected when she went to meet with Aeryn in front of Ventori Ark.  The sun’s reflection was beating down on her from the tall glass building.  She could see a few Ventori, her comrades, already taking in STRAYs, and she approved.  Too bad it made her stomach flip-flop inside of her thinking of what had happened that morning.

She had gone to the cliff where Trenton’s father had supposedly committed suicide, just like Cindel; but there was blue dust there, just a bit of residue left in the dirt that linked to Achaicious.  Zia’s blood began to pump harder through her system as she imagined him behind these deaths, and she wanted to make sure that she was the one to get him.  Catching such a high ranking Caster…that would surely improve her rank two-fold with the Ark!  But Achaicious hadn’t been the one watching her there, and he hadn’t been the one to leave the cobalt dagger behind. Now that dagger was carefully hidden in Zia’s jacket pocket, right next to her silver one.

Who had that woman been?  It had happened so quickly, the woman hissing as the dagger burned her, and then disappearing into a haze of grey dust.  That was what worried Zia the most; she had never seen grey ashes from a Caster before, and she had never heard of it.  Her lips pressed together into a tight line; she didn’t like encountering something she knew nothing about.

Zia couldn’t help but remember how the woman had looked a bit like Achaicious, from what she remembered in the photograph.  Raven hair, sharp cheekbones, and an elegant aura.  Zia was certain that that woman had been the same one she saw in the library, just after her visit with Trenton.  Maybe there was a connection there?

“You know your face will freeze like that if you do it for too long,” a male voice said, and Zia shifted her eyes to the left expecting to find Aeryn, smirk and all.  But instead she found Hayden Rider; could this day get any more perfect?  She moved her eyes forward again, and kept her hands in her coat pockets; it felt strange to have the weight of two daggers.