Eternal Hope (The Hope Series) (19 page)

Daniel reached out, smiling, to touch his fingertips to Farley’s face in the window. She poked her tongue out at him then, and laughed, suddenly filled with nervous energy. In a flash she ripped off up the street toward the pharmacy, running as fast as she could go. The paper bag from Kathy’s with its sharp corners banged into her leg on every other step, bouncing high. Daniel was behind her before she’d made it five feet, but it didn’t matter. It felt blissful to be nothing more than those ordinary, every day reflections.

The picture didn’t really capture her, but painting from memory wasn’t one of Kayden’s strong points. It wasn’t a bad job, though. He’d still got her face right, the way her eyes went flat like calm water when she was thinking hard, and the way she pulled on her lower lip with her teeth when she was watching someone talk. That was the Farley he’d painted- her sitting on the leather sofa in the library, bathed in light, concentrating on someone out of frame. She had one leg pulled up to her chest with her arm wrapped around it, the way she did when there wasn’t anything else to hold onto. He hadn’t meant to paint her, but this image was the only thing that came to him when he approached the canvas. He’d tried coming at it from a different angle, literally, from the left and then from the right; he’d held his brush as many different ways as he knew how. He’d even dropped the brush and found a spatula at one point, but it had been no good. This was what he had been supposed to paint.

He rolled the unstretched canvas up into a cylinder and threaded an elastic band around it, then left it on her bed. As he came out of Farley’s room, he nearly tripped over Tess. She sat on the floor outside the room she shared with Oliver, her knees folded upwards like the peaks of mountains, staring off into the distance.

“Hey, Tess,” he said. She looked up at him like she was expecting someone else, and stiffened.

“Hey,” she whispered.

“You okay?”

She shook her head. When the light hit her face, Kayden made out a dark bruise flowering on her right cheekbone. She quickly dipped her head, as though trying to hide it.

“Mind if I join you?” Kayden sank down to her side before she could object, studying the vacant way she gazed off down the hall. She wasn’t comfortable around him, he knew. That was no big surprise. Most people had an innate wariness of him; they knew better than to stand too close or to touch him in most cases. But some people were hypersensitive to what he was, and that made them outright rude occasionally, as they did their level best to avoid him like the plague. Tess was one of those people.

“What happened to your face?”

“It was an accident.” Her voice came out sounding practiced, like she was having a hard time making herself believe the line.

“Tell the truth,” he said sharply. Tess’ head whipped around on him. She narrowed her eyes as though realizing for the first time they were actually having a conversation.

“Why should I tell you anything? I don’t know anything about you.”

“What do you need to know?”

She clenched down on her jaw, looking him up and down. “Nothing.”

He nodded, picking at the raven-colored paint on his fingernails that he’d used to make Farley’s hair. “You know what I am, don’t you? She told you?”

Tess looked away. “I think I already knew.”

“And you’re afraid of me?”

“No.”

She was lying, but that was okay. Kayden rubbed his jaw. “Tess, did Oliver do this to you?”

She didn’t say anything, just tucked her hands into the crook at the back of her bent knees. Eventually, her shoulders sagged. “No, he didn’t.”

“
Tess
.”

“He didn’t hit me. This has nothing to do with him.”

“Well, then, what happened? Was it an accident?” Kayden gestured to the bruise on her face, careful not to touch her. She flinched away from him anyway.

“Yes.”

“Have you noticed anything different about him recently?”

“I told you, this has nothing to do with Oliver,” she hissed. She looked panicked. Terrified. Something was definitely going on.

“Okay, I believe you,” Kayden told her. If she could lie to him, he could do the same in return. “Answer the question, though. Have you noticed anything different about Oliver?”

She shot him a sideways glance and shrugged. “He just doesn’t sleep much. He has bad dreams.”

The shadows under Oliver’s eyes were hard to miss. But was this anything more than bad dreams? “When did he start having trouble sleeping?”

“The day we arrived here.”

Something in Kayden relaxed. For a moment he thought this had something to do with Daniel’s conversation with the guy the other morning. But this had been going on longer. It really wasn’t that surprising. Oliver was full to bursting with a power he’d never experienced before, and that kind of power always wanted a way out. Without knowing how to handle it- with kid gloves- it would blow up right in his face. Or Tess’.

“I can make your face better,” he breathed, crossing his hands over one another his lap. The Quorum had told him his sole responsibility was to take care of Farley; he was specifically not to interfere with people from the Quarters. If that hadn’t been the case, he would have healed Cassie’s gunshot wound the second she’d staggered, bleeding, in through the front door. It barely hurt at all anymore that Cassie wasn’t interested in him, but it was still cruel having the power to heal her and not being able to use it. That aside, Tess was human. Healing her would be nothing more than a tiny flex in the rules. She looked at him with wide eyes.

“You can’t tell
anyone
,” she whispered.

“I won’t.” He reached out slowly, the way he’d done a thousand times before with as many different people, and let his finger rest against her forehead. Her face fell slack, and he felt the heat passing from his body, down his arm and into her. She shivered, her arms falling loosely to the floor so that her knuckles knocked against the wood. When he took his hand away, there were tears in Tess’ eyes.

“I’ll never feel that again, will I?”

Kayden knew her sorrow. It was a raw, flayed thing that lived inside him. He shook his head. “Hopefully you won’t have to in this lifetime. One day, though.”

She stifled back a sob and rolled into his arms. They were usually like this. Comforting them was part of his punishment. When she’d finished crying, Kayden scooped her up from the floor, noting with satisfaction that her bruise was gone, and carried her into her room. He set her down on the bed. She was drained and half asleep, staring at him with the glassy eyes of someone who has just experienced a deeper sense of peace than they could possibly comprehend. Kayden turned away, leaving the room with the distinct taste of jealousy on his tongue. He swallowed it down and closed his eyes, trying to sense Oliver’s presence in the house. The guy needed watching like a hawk.

Cooking was a life skill Farley had learned at a young age, but Tess was in charge tonight, and apparently cultivating culinary competency hadn’t been high on the Kennedy household agenda. She was trying to make butter chicken curry, but it smelled more like burned hair. Every single window on the ground floor of the cabin yawned open, begging for an exchange in uncontaminated oxygen. Daniel, unsurprisingly, managed to conceal his horror, probably because his experience in walling up emotion was extensive to say the least.

“How can you sit there and pretend like this isn’t stinging your nostrils?” Farley hissed.

“Well, there’s you first mistake. You’re breathing through your nose.” He kicked back in his chair, throwing his feet up onto a low rattan table that sat out on the deck. They’d escaped outside to watch the moon chase the burning embers of the sun across the vast expanse that was the Montanan sky. But mostly it had been to avoid the foul cooking smells, and Tess was acting really weird, besides.

“You’re suggesting I breathe through my mouth? Are you crazy? You can actually
taste
it. It’s like licking a wet dog.”

Daniel arched an eyebrow, saying it without words:
How do you know what wet dog tastes like?
She ignored his look and hooked her toe under one of the chair legs- one of the ones he wasn’t utilizing, as he balanced on the back two. She gave it a small jerk, threatening to tip him over. He shot her a treacherous smile that dared her to try it.

“You like flirting with danger, don’t you?” he said in a low voice.

“I like flirting with
you
.”

“Some people might consider that the same thing.”

“Ha! Only the ones who don’t know you. I’ve been impervious to that cold attitude of yours for some time now. I know it’s all faked.”

It looked like a smile was itching at the right side of his mouth. “
Lies.
”

Farley would have spoken again, but when she opened her mouth, a particularly potent waft of Tess’ kitchen experiment tripped over her taste buds, provoking a body-wide convulsion. She jumped to her feet and held out a hand. “I can’t stand this anymore. Let’s get out of here.”

Daniel looked up at her, solemn, considering the way she stood there, considering her face and the hand she held out to him. Slowly, he accepted it. “Where are you taking me?”

“Nowhere special. Maybe we could go make out in your car.”

His mouth fell open. “Nowhere special? I don’t know if I should let you sit in her after a comment like that.”

Farley rolled her eyes. There was no way she was going to get into it with him over how he thought his car was a
her.
They’d be stuck there for hours. “Please accept my fervent apologies,” she laughed. “Now, can we go?”

“Only because your apologies are fervent.” He avoided the steps and jumped off the deck, making the action look like a casual hop. Farley peered down at the meter-long drop and then swiftly chose the non-ankle-breaking route. Once they’d made their way around the front of the cabin, Daniel made a show of being gentlemanly, adding a low bow to the chivalrous flourish he gave as he opened the passenger door for her.

She just looked at him. When had he turned into such a geek?

The leather seats were still hot from the sun blistering through the windshield all day, and she let out a pained yelp when the backs of her bare legs made contact. Daniel smirked mercilessly, pretending he hadn’t noticed. He fiddled around at the side of his seat for a moment, at which point his backrest began to emit an electric humming noise, reclining until he was almost laid flat. “Care to join me?”

Farley’s cheeks prickled, probably slightly red. It was a fifty/fifty:
care to join me in adopting a position you’re likely to fall asleep in
, or
, care to join me over here, where you’ll have to straddle me to fit and you’ll probably find a gear stick digging into your ass
. The first option sounded like the safest. She found the small lever at the side of her seat and held it until her eyes were level with his; they looked charcoal tonight, reflective and suddenly pensive.

“Can you tell me what Simeon said to you, Farley?” he whispered. “I really need to know.”
Whatever she’d been expecting him to say, it hadn’t been that. Her skin broke out into gooseflesh, instantly cold. He shifted slightly so that he lay on his side, watching her. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I feel like we’re running out of time. He could have said something important.”

“He didn’t,” she murmured. Simeon had barely said more than five words to her. None of their incredibly short conversation was going to give them any clues as to how to fight him. Daniel fixed an intense expression on her.

“Please?”

“He called me Soul Child. I told him I was going to go, and he said,
not for long
.”

“Anything else?”

“I told him to leave me alone, and he said he couldn’t- that he and I were one.” Repeating his words was frightening. It gave her the same jelly-legged feeling she’d got as a child when people dared her to say candy man three times in the dark. She’d always known with her rational mind that saying something like that didn’t make homicidal specters appear out of thin air, but there was something about Simeon…

He hadn’t felt like a human being. His presence had felt carnal and animal-like. Now, her rational mind balked, convinced that because she’d repeated the words he’d said, he would somehow know it and be able to find her. Daniel stared at her, his ubiquitous blank look firmly screwed into place.

“The men at Beatty’s weren’t regular Immundus,” he sighed. “They were different. When they left, one of them, this Clay guy, said to tell you that your husband was waiting for you.”