Phantom Eyes (Witch Eyes) (14 page)

“If I asked you to forget the feud,” I said carefully, playing with the hem of my shirt, “forget Catherine and revenge and everything else that has kept you going … could you do that?”

The problem with asking a question you already know the answer to, is that you already know the answer. “Braden … ” It was a pitying tone, a sad but sincere expression.

“Just don’t do anything rash. I can’t handle anyone else getting caught up in something they can’t handle.”

“I’m the adult here,” Jason said, a measure of his old stiffness evident. “I’m the one who should be protecting you.”

“Trey struck a bargain with Lucien. That’s how he saved me last night.” I don’t know why I had the tendency to blurt things out to Jason without the buildup.

“I figured as much,” Jason said slowly. “Do you know what the terms are?”

I shook my head. “Not exactly. It’s on my agenda.” I looked down at my hands. “It’s going to get bad, Jason. I can feel it.”

“It wasn’t going to get any easier. I could try to negotiate with Lucien, but I don’t know how much either one of us has to bring to the bargaining table.” He eyed me from the desk chair. “He let you live for a reason. That’s not negligible. I don’t know how much latitude that would allow you, though.”

I doubted there was anyone in Belle Dam outside of this room who would believe that Jason Thorpe would ever actually offer to try to negotiate on behalf of one of the Lansings. Jason had never looked older, and as usual, it caused a rip of guilt in my chest. It was like I couldn’t walk into a room without tearing down the people inside. I was less dangerous than ever, but I still caused chaos wherever I went.

“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.” And because I felt like I had to give him
something
I added, “I’ll let you know if I need help.”

Jason eyed me gravely. “Do you promise?”

I nodded, forcing a smile. “Sure.”

It was one of my best lies ever.

nineteen

There was another chess set in the library, identical to the one from my room. I brought mine with me and set it up so that the boards were less than a foot from each other. Then I set up the pieces, dark cherry red and ivory, and stared at the two boards.

There wasn’t just one feud in Belle Dam. There were two. The Lansings versus the Thorpes. And Lucien versus Grace. But then there was also a third feud. Lucien and Catherine versus me versus Grace. But that was a feud that was, for now, contained only in my head. The minute Grace made a move, Lucien was going to be there to strike. And I was going to be there to … well, I didn’t know what I was going to do yet.

I knew there were journals and other books about the feud tucked away on the shelves, but right now reading about the past didn’t seem like it would do much good. I couldn’t learn anything about Lucien or Grace that I didn’t already know—I knew more about their weaknesses than anyone else in town.

The office desk in the center of the room was swallowed up in paperwork, as Jason worked diligently from his computer tablet. He would flip the stacks from time to time, searching out a particular file. I was surprised that most of his work was d
one on the computer. He seemed the type to stick to old-fashioned mediums.

I don’t know if it was our morning conversation or some other pressing need, but Jason had come in a few minutes after me, and neither one of us said a word to the other. He worked behind the desk, and I studied the chess sets.

Lucien had told me once that all demons were adept at contracts. That it was they who taught humans the concept of a binding document. I let my fingers run along the edge of the board until they brushed up against the red/black bishop. That would be the most important part. Without him, I wouldn’t be able to build to anything.

I kept trying to figure out what else I would need—what other pieces were still critical if I was going to do this. Plot a revolution. But something that wasn’t discomfort kept surging up through my chest, distracting me. At first I thought maybe I was nauseous, having skipped breakfast, but it wasn’t that. It was a melody without music. Inside me, where I felt an aching hole all the time now, it was like … a resonance.
Yes,
the emptiness inside me seemed to say,
I know you. I still remember.

“Do you feel that? I—” I broke off in the middle of what I’d been saying. It was like in physics, when we’d learned about sound waves and resonant frequency. How an opera singer could shatter glass if she hit the right pitch.

“Braden? What is it?” Jason stood up immediately.

The feeling was getting stronger. No. The feeling was getting
closer.

I didn’t expect the sharp inhale that followed. I looked over at Jason, whose eyes weren’t trained on me. They were trained on the door. His mouth was open, the little crinkle appearing between his eyebrows the same way John’s did when he was confused. He was rigid, like someone had forgotten to wind him up.

At first, the girl was a shade of black out of the corner of my eye. But as she sauntered into the library, as carefree as a bird, I had to blink twice. She wore all black like she’d gotten lost on the way to the funeral—black dress, black heels, black clutch, black sunglasses, black gloves, the whole nine yards. Even her thick, black ringlets were pinned up with a pair of raven-colored sticks.

I knew her, but Jason beat me to the punch. “Elle?” he whispered, but he didn’t say her name like he saw the girl. Or the witch.

He said her name like he’d seen a ghost.

“Hello, Jason,” she said. To me, she just nodded.

I looked between them. “You know her?”

Jason finally broke his gaze, looking from her to me and then back again. “Braden, this is … ”

He trailed off, and Elle bit her lower lip. “Adele,” she said gently. “I used to work for your father.”

Adele. I knew that name. “But that’s not possible,” I said. Elle was only a few years older than me, but the girl who’d worked for Jason had disappeared almost a decade ago. Unless he hired
her when she was still in middle
school, there had to be some kind of mistake.

“I took a new position,” Elle continued to Jason. “Which is why I’m here.” Elle worked for Grace—hell, I already knew that Grace was the reason she and the other witch had come here in the first pl
ace.

“Are you dead?” I demanded. “Another ghost like the others? Are you here to try killing me, too?”

“What is he talking about?” Jason demanded. “Adele?” Maybe I wasn’t the only one getting better at reading him, because his nose wrinkled up, and he heard something in my tone. Because he realized this was something more than just the feud. “She’s not working for Catherine.”

“No,” I agreed. “She’s not.” But that didn’t mean I had the slightest idea of why she was here.

“I’m not a ghost, hot stuff,” she said, but there was no fire in her voice today. Normally, Elle was flirty and fun. This Elle seemed more like someone who’d just come off a week-long bender. “And I work for—”

I cut her off, my voice harsh. “I know who you work for. I’m not an idiot. You’re the reason she got involved at all. I’d be
fine
if it wasn’t for you.”

“Dead is a kind of fine, I suppose,” she said evenly. Outside, the sun must have emerged from the cloudbank because the light coming in from all the windows suddenly intensified. Behind her sunglasses, I noticed Elle’s twitch, and the way her head dropped down.

I took a step forward. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Elle brushed by me to address Jason directly. “I really
am
sorry about Jonathan. I wish there was something I could have done.” As an afterthought, she added, “You know I always liked him
.”

“Really?” I snorted. “I think your boss
made sure everything happened just the way she intended.”

“Braden,” Jason warned. It was hard to say if he wanted me to stop being a dick or if he thought I was picking a fight I couldn’t win.

Elle shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“Take. Off. Your. Sunglasses.” I said, because I wanted to
see.
I wanted Jason to see, too.

There’s nothing more annoying than a standoff with someone when you can’t see their eyes. I understood why people always hated getting into them with me, because thirty seconds of it was almost all that I could take. I came really close to just lunging forward and ripping them off of her when an eyebrow flexed upward and the windows all went dark.

Jason didn’t flinch, but I did. I still had a long road to go towards being a badass. Once the light in the room was dimmed—the windows didn’t all have curtains so some were simply darkened until the light couldn’t get through—Elle slowly, and reluctantly, pulled the sunglasses off her face.

“Oh my god,” I whispered.

I thought that when Elle took off her sunglasses, we’d see the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of colors that I’d always grown up with. The witch eyes, ripped out of my head and put into hers. She was the one that Grace had walking around the town, trying to unlock the wellsprings. It made sense.

What I didn’t expect to find was the damage.

Her eyelids were both red and crusted, like scabs that had never been allowed to heal properly. There wasn’t any white left to her eyes: now they were either blood-red or ravaged pink. Her eyelashes were completely gone, and the skin around her eyes was puffy, cracked, and still oozing in places.

And I didn’t feel a moment of pity for her.

“She’s been trying to use my powers,” I said, answering Jason’s unasked question. I could feel his shock from behind me, but he saw the girl he’d nurtured, the girl he’d thought dead these last ten years. All I saw was Grace’s pawn.

“Are you satisfied?” Elle asked, the challenge returning to her voice.

I managed a smile. “Almost. Tell me about her offer.”

“My lady doesn’t have an offer. She just wants to talk.”

“Bullshit.” I sat down on the edge of Jason’s desk and
looked towards him. “Grace Lansing is alive,” I said simply to him. I don’t know who was more surprised, Elle or him. But Jason apparently trusted me enough not to argue, and I continued. “And because she’s a control freak, I’m betting that everything we say here is off the record. Can’t let Lucien know that someone’s been manipulating him all these years.”

Elle didn’t exactly nod, but I knew I was right even before the slight jerk of her chin. She sank down into one of the chairs across from the desk and put her sunglasses back on.

“You can’t open them by yourself. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. So Grace realized she screwed up, and now she has to give me back what she stole. Or she’s never getting out of there again.”

“She didn’t ‘screw up,’” Elle returned hotly. “If she’d wanted you out of the way, she would have killed you.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m more useful to
everyone
alive, I know. No one will shut up about it.”

“Then you’ll come,” she asked, not entirely convinced that I would.

“Tell me what happened to you,” I said, “and I’ll think about it.”

She sighed, throwing her hands up in the air a little. “What happened to me is a very boring story about a very naive girl. And then I learned better.”

“
Girls
,” I corrected, because I hadn’t forgotten that for all the talk that there were two girls who had come to Belle Dam in search of Grace’s secrets, only one had apparently made it back out.

“We came because of the Widow,” Elle said as she looked out the windows.

I read between the lines. “You came for
power
,” I clarified. “Either you wanted what she had, or you wanted to find out how to get it for yourself.” I thought about it for a moment, remembering what Grace had told me about her own origins. About how she’d come to found Belle Dam in the first place. “Did you come for the lighthouse, too?”
Elle shuddered. “Oh, gods no. We wanted power, sure, but we didn’t want anything to do with the lighthouse. That’s eight kinds of stupid right there.” Her expression was haunted. “Had I known I was going to spend the next ten years of my life inside of it, I might have made a different choice.”

No, she wouldn’t have. People who were only after power always made the same choices when it came down to it. The power was more important than anything else. “So the two of you came to town, and you planned to divide and conquer. You went to work for Jason, and your friend went to Catherine.”

“Carmen,” Elle said quietly. “Her name was Carmen.”

“What happened to
her
? As far as everyone knows you both died on the beach that night.”

“We found a way to slip between the worlds. Carmen … didn’t make it. I did.” Each sentence was like another nail into her guilt. I could see the changes coming over her, the gnawing darkness that was eating her up from the inside.

“And you’ve been doing Grace’s bidding ever since.”

Her eyes flashed sudden fire, a contempt washing over
her face that was more Grace than girl. “Watch your tone,” she snapped. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a lot worse off. Hannah tried to kill you when you first came to town. A bus, right? I stopped her before she finished the job. I even tried to warn you about what Lucien was planning, and I’ve been doing everything I can to put out all the fires you started while you’ve been sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Then where the hell were you when Trey struck a bargain with Lucien?” I demanded. “Because from where I’m standing, that wipes out
any
good will you might have earned.”

She made a face, shifting uncomfortably. “I’ve been … recovering.”

Right. The witch eyes. Elle couldn’t handle the power any better than I could. And if her eyes proved anything, it was that she was even worse off than I was. But Grace still kept pushing her to try. “If I were you,” I said softly, “I’d figure out that Grace is not the hero i
n this story.”

“Of course she is,” Elle said, back on familiar ground again. “She contained the demon and has guarded the lighthouse ever since. You have her to thank that nothing else
has come through to this world.”

“She trapped the demon in a town full of innocent victims,” I returned. “Everyone he’s fed off of for the last one hundred years is her responsibility. She didn’t trap him here out of some self-sacrificing need to protect the world. She did it because sh
e was pissed and wanted him to suffer. So she took what was essentially a god and made him human. And she probably hoped to claim his power for herself, but she screwed up and found herself trapped in the lighthouse instead.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“
She threw me out of the lighthouse and ripped out my magic,
” I returned hotly. “Because she passed judgment on me way back when she was still human herself.”

“She still
is
human.”