The Lie Spinners (The Deception Dance) (18 page)

I
clear my throat. “No, I don’t think you do,” I say,
taking a deep breath. “Look, I’m not trying to insult
you. I just… this is how it is: I need your help; you’re
my best resource here. And as much as you’re trying not to, you
need to face the fact that you need my help too. I’m finished
with being manhandled and bullied by you. You’re not in charge
of me; I do not recognize your authority over me. Get it?”

“
No,
Raven, I don’t
get
anything. All I’ve seen you make is one bad decision after
another,” Jones snaps. As if that earlier crack spread and
then, with his words, shattered his carefully contrived stoicism,
anger explodes forward in a torrent. “You know what really
pisses me off? You didn’t even learn your lesson. After
everything, after you caused hundreds of thousands of people to be
murdered, you didn’t even learn your lesson.”

“
Yeah,
what lesson is that?” I say so loudly, it’s almost a
shout.

“
You
knew, and you still risked everyone else on this Earth just to
protect your own precious emotions.” Jones stands up, his note
pad spilling to the ground, he steps toward me.

I
stand, shouting, “What are you even talking about?”

“
First
your sister then Nicholas Tapper, you’re willing to let
thousands of innocent people die just so you won’t have to
suffer the loss of someone you care about. You’re selfish.”
He takes three steps toward me, closing the distance and looming over
me. “Self-centered. Immature. You think you deserve
respect
for anything you’ve done?”

“
Screw
you,” I say, right into his face. “You’re twisting…
screw you.”

“
No
thank you.” He says, with a sneer, “Never going to
happen. You say abhorrent, the idea of being with you revolts me.
And, are you kidding me? You want me to trust you to make your own
decisions? Shit, I don’t trust you to walk down the street
chewing gum. You can’t even chew without putting the world at
jeopardy. I would rather this responsibility be on the shoulders of
any other person in the world, than you. A blind, deaf, mentally
disabled, paraplegic, lemming would do a better job than you.”

“
Only
because you could scoop it up and put it in a cage and I won’t
let you, you control freak! You can go ahead and feel so
self-righteous but any other person would make the same decision I
did. If it was your brother-”

“
Don’t
you ever talk about my brother!”

Suddenly
I realize I’m on my tippy-toes and his face is less than an
inch from mine.

I
step back quickly, retreating until the bed hits the back of my
calves. “I didn’t ask for this, you think that I want
this? I’m just… I’m just doing the best I can.
Look,” I sit back on the bed, rather unceremoniously. “Look,
we need some kind of truce, or I’m a zombie and the world is
screwed. We are getting nowhere-”

“
You
need to shut up and…”

“
You
need to shut up!” I yell.
Mature,
I know
.

“…
and follow what I
say,” Jones snaps.

“
But
I’m not going to. We can talk ourselves in circles all day
long, but I’m not going to just follow your orders. That’s
it. That’s final. You don’t agree with my decisions, well
I don’t agree with yours. I feel bad… responsible…you
cannot imagine how wrong I feel about what happened to all those
people last summer. But not for a moment, have I regretted buying
back my sister’s soul. If I had to, I’d make the same
choice again. Some people are worth the world.”

Jones
stands there, for a long moment, just staring down at me. I’m
not sure what I’m expecting, maybe another elbow to the face,
but when Jones moves, I instinctively flinch. Jones doesn’t
come at me, he spins on his heel, throws open the hotel door, and
slams it behind him.

That
is when I, for the first time, notice my sister peeking out of the
bathroom. “Yeash,” She says.

And
that one word covers it, perfectly.

Day
Four (continued)

“
Found
it!”
Linnie says, bouncing on the bed, “
One
who knows foods or food types, may refer to a culinary expert.
That’s kind of cool! Do you feel extra knowledgeable about
food?”

I
step away from the window I was trying to shove open and cross over
to my sister. “Here, let me see that.” I reach for the
Thai/English dictionary in my sister’s hand before plopping
down beside her on the bed. Glancing at my arm, I compare my mark to
the word Linnie is so proud of finding. I’m not at all
surprised that it’s the wrong word.

My
sister and I are making use of this time that we are locked up in our
hotel room.

Yes,
that’s right, locked.

It’s
been two hours since Jones stormed out. The upside: we don’t
need to be hanging out with Jones or Madeline, who Linnie tells me
brought her to the hotel after Jones tracked her down by phone (who
knows how, as I definitely didn’t see those two pass digits).
The other upside: Jones left all his books and notes so-far-taken
behind in his anger.

The
downsides: no coffee. No coffee. And yes, you guessed it, no coffee.

Linnie
opens the second bag of cookies from the snacks that we found, which
from the price list we also found were definitely not complementary.
Whatever.

“
Absolutely
no culinary knowledge, as that’s not the same word, it doesn’t
even have the right number of letters,” I say as I snatch one
of her cookies.

“
Well
you try it,” She says, snappishly, midst chewing, “going
from Thai to English is way harder than going from English to Thai.”

Linnie
grabs the travel guide I had been studying, before I got too
frustrated and got up to recheck the window. “What were you
looking for in here?” She asks, while brushing her brown hair
out of her face, and tucking it behind her ears.

I
glance at my sister; to prolong having to answer I chew my cookie
slowly. I’m not sure how to put what I was looking for into
words, or if I should. Honestly, it would probably sound nuttier than
the cookies we’re eating.

There
were so many details I didn’t tell my sister, tell anyone,
about my encounters with Andras last summer. There are three people
who were there for the climactic point thus far in my life, three
people who were present in my showdown with Andras, three people who
knew the truth of exactly what happened.

Stephen.

Andras.

Me.

Weirdly,
it’s as if we’re connected by this, a trifecta of
secrecy. Not that I want to be in any way connected to Andras. But,
it’s one of these details, one of these secrets, that makes me
hesitate now: the fact that I remembered my past life through my
dreams, all on my own.

Last
summer I discovered that my feelings for Andras had been more or less
predetermined, out of even my control. Andras had seduced me by
deceiving me not just in this life; centuries ago, I had been another
person, a woman named Elena, who was stupid enough to fall in love
with a demon, Andras. A demon that had never been loved before-that
got a taste of that which was forbidden in his damned existence.
After I had been murdered in that life, my soul had been taken and
held in purgatory until I was reincarnated. Satan had given me a new
life, reincarnated my soul for a purpose; he only re-created me to
reward Andras’ diligent and voracious soul buying.

Basically,
I’m like an ‘Ultimate Evil of the Millennia’ award.

When
Stephen revealed how Andras had deceived me, resulting in me
despising Andras, Andras tried to behead me so that I could be
reborn, starting the reincarnation cycle again. But, I stopped him. I
stopped him by revealing that I remembered my past life as Elena, as
in: Andras couldn’t lop off my head and get the ultimate
‘restart’ button.

He
ended up trying to burn me alive anyway, but I made him hesitate.

Of
all the details to I’ve hidden from Linnie, this one seems
almost trivial. Nothing like that I walked through Hell fire and
didn’t burn. Or that, when I was in the Hell fire, I somehow
opened a portal to Hell within me and pulled Andras through it. Or
even that I may or may not have had a conversation with, the one, the
only, the Great Deceiver. But as I look at my sister, I can’t
put into words that there might be something more to my dreams,
something-supernatural power like, all my own.

“
Hello?
Earth to Raven?” Linnie says, waving a hand in front of my
face.

“
Yeah,”
I say, and then chew on my lip, thinking of how I could answer her,
or preferably not answer her. “I’m not really sure what
I’m looking for, except, um… I heard something while I
was in the nest about Stephen maybe being in a tourist area, with a
lot of bars on the beach.”

Linnie’s
eyebrows rise, wrinkling her brow. “Seriously? Are you even
sure he’s still in Thailand?”

I
think of the swirling script under the English names of the bars in
my dream. “…I’m pretty sure.”

“
Okay,”
She mumbles while thumbing through to the directory, “Nightlife…it’s
by city…shoot. I’ll check the map, this might take a
while…”

I
thumb through the directory as well, to the English words, first
checking the word love, page 84, but it’s wrong. Then I check
the word lust, but it’s wrong as well. What ‘gift’
could
Räum
give me that would accomplish his goals? A demon can only curse (or
‘gift’) people with the powers they themselves possess,
unless the core of my training about demons was untrue. But of his
powers, immobilizing, thieving, prophesizing, reconciling, invoking
of love (or lust), the last is the only one that would obviously
complete his goals (I already tried to immobilize my sister with my
mind…didn’t work).

But
the dream…and then the burning on the mark…it’d
be a heck of a coincidence.

I
check a few variations of the word ‘love’ and ‘lust,’
but come up with zilch.

I
look up ‘prophesized’. Nope. Then, ‘prophecy’.
Wrong. ‘Prophet’. Wrong.

“
What’s
another word for a prophet? Or prophesizing?” I ask Linnie.

She
wrinkles her brow, thinking, but still stares down at the travel
guide. After a minute she says, “Foreseeing?”

“
No,
I’m thinking of another word… um, ‘clairvoyant,’
thanks.”

“
You’re
welcome,” she says. I catch Linnie rolling her eyes.

When
I look up ‘clairvoyant,’ it’s wrong, but the book
has a long list of ‘see also’s. I look the relevant ones
up one by one and on the fifth one down, I find it.

‘
Prescient’
i.e.: one who knew in advance. Thai:
ซึ่งรู้ล่วงหน้า

“
Find
anything?” Linnie asks.

I
pop up my head, startled. As nonchalantly as I possibly can, I say,
“Still looking.” I turn back to the word, looking between
where its black letters engrave into the page and where they’re
inked into my arm.

I
throw the book down and stand. Crossing to the sliding glass door, I
busy myself with checking the lock on it. It won’t budge again.
The windows are also firmly secured.

“
You
think that it’ll be unlocked the thousandth time you check?”
Linnie says while scrolling through pages.

“
Maybe,”
I say, squinting my eyelids to examine the mechanism that secures one
of the windows. It’s a key lock; at some point early this
morning Jones must have ordered window padlocks from a hardware store
and had them delivered to the hotel, because I doubt the hotel room
came with these locks. I don’t know how he secured the front
door, but it won’t budge either. “He caged us,” I
mumble.

Linnie
calls back, “For our own protection.”

‘
He
caged us,’ says the raven to the linnet canary. ‘To keep
away the cat,’ the canary sings back. ‘I’d sooner
be trapped in a tiger’s mouth than the metal teeth of this
cage,’ says the raven.

My
mother must have had her own version of foresight, naming us what she
did. If she had a supernatural ability and my
past-life-dream-clairvoyance was due to a clairvoyance gene I may
have inherited from her (rather than something stemming from a darker
source), I wouldn’t know; she died before I ever had a chance
to know her.