Watercolour Smile

  Watercolour Smile

  Seraph Black Series

  Book Two

  Jane Washington

  Copyright 2016

  The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publically available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Edited by David Thomas

  ISBN-10: 099427954X

  ISBN-13: 9780994279545

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One: The Messenger

  Chapter Two: Seraph Lela Black

  Chapter Three: Weston-Spawned Bastards

  Chapter Four: Awkward Bowling

  Chapter Five: Angel of No Mercy

  Chapter Six: The Average Life-Span of a Thug

  Chapter Seven: Beware the Hunter

  Chapter Eight: Down the Rabbit Hole

  Chapter Nine: A Mist of Sorrow and Blood

  Chapter Ten: The Devil Deals in Happiness

  Chapter Eleven: Noah Would Never

  Chapter Twelve: Behind Closed Doors

  Chapter Thirteen: Bitches Love Xylophones

  Chapter Fourteen: Feelings

  Chapter Fifteen: Victims of Society

  Chapter Sixteen: Victims of the Heart

  Chapter Seventeen: The Wise Old Owl

  Chapter Eighteen: The Unbearable Weight of Possibility

  Chapter Nineteen: The Middle Man

  Chapter Twenty: Beware the Beast

  Chapter Twenty-One: Patchwork Seraph

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Hole in the Floor

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Hole in My Heart

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Walking Dead Will Have My Head

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Brothers in Arms

  The Encounter…

  Letter to the Readers

  “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

  -Edgar Allan Poe

  I want her to touch me.

  I spent the last month perfecting a gift for her, but now I’m getting ahead of myself… wondering what it will be like to debase her. Not like that. Debase her; degrade her; strip away the things that make her strong, that define her. Like an apple, you know? If you have any idea what kind of pesticides cling to the skin of an apple, you would appreciate the virtue of peeling it all away. I want to pick apart her polluted exterior and when I reveal the fleshy underside of her human condition, she will be born again… mine. Her eyes will crack open with the fresh sight of a newborn, and mine will be the first face that she sees.

  The only face that she sees.

  She will say my name…

  “Oi! You going to pay for that?”

  I tightened my grip on the bag of fertilizer, hoisting it onto the counter.

  “Sorry. Daydreaming.” I offered the guy a smile, making sure to tamp back on the intensity. It was tiresome to pander to strangers this way… but it was necessary. A twist of the lips, the flash of a dimpled cheek, just enough of a squint to imply that happiness was weighted in my stare… and they relaxed. Like magic.

  His attention skittered to the fertilizer as he counted out my cash, the annoyance already running away from his features. What an easy-going twat.

  “No problem,” he said. “Doing some gardening?”

  “Not really.” I smiled once more, and he smiled back, as though I had told a joke.

  “Enjoy your afternoon!” He watched enthusiastically as I hefted the bag over my shoulder before he turned to the next customer: an ordinary numbskull, who had reached the age in which men trade in their hair for an over-generous portion of fat.

  I allowed my smile to filter away as I got back to my truck. That would never be me; that fat, happy, dumb man. I tossed the bag beneath the tarpaulin that covered the back of my truck—on top of the other bags that already lined the tray. It was crazy the lengths that I had to go to just to make a decent bomb, these days. Different stores, different credit cards, different names. There is always someone watching, someone monitoring where you go and what you buy. The gift of modern freedom, I supposed. Freedom simply wasn’t as free as it used to be.

  Things had been much easier when I was a child… Seraph used to love my fireworks.

  Punching the dial for the radio, I cranked down my windows and geared the truck back onto the highway, settling in for the drive home. An alert on my phone sounded just as a pocket-sized, pink hatchback blasted past my truck, distracting me. I pressed a button for my phone to announce the notification.

  You have a new message, my self-built automated system told me.

  “Play,” I replied.

  You aren’t going to want to hear this, but our tail on the boy ran into some trouble—Silas must be running interference.

  “Reply,” I ground out, as my phone finished reading out the message.

  Please state your message.

  “What the fuck do you mean, trouble? What kind of trouble?”

  Do you mean: ‘Luck’?

  “No. I meant fuck.”

  Sending: ‘What the duck do you mean, trouble? What kind of trouble?’

  “I need to fix your vocabulary.”

  I waited, tapping my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as another miniscule car tried to pass me. I swerved, cutting it off, and the woman leaned on her horn for as long as it took for her to realise that I hadn’t been intending to merge, and then for the second longer it took for her to glance up into my window. After that she backed the hell off and decidedly to meekly follow my snails-pace a good distance behind me. She was probably on the phone to the police, but they wouldn’t care. They had better things to investigate, like the pyrotechnic fuse blasting caps that went missing from the nearby quarry in Arlington just this morning and were now packed under my passenger seat.

  You have a new message, my phone piped up.

  “Play.”

  He’s dead.

  “Reply.”

  Please state your message.

  “How dead, Dominic? All he had to do was win the boy over before the Adairs or Quillans get scared and decide to keep him with Seraph. I’m going to be seriously pissed off if they get him. I need him.”

  Did you mean: ‘Missed’?

  “No. I meant PISSED.”

  Sending: How dead, Dominic? All he had to do was win the boy over before the Adairs or Quillans get scared and decide to keep him with Seraph. I’m going to be seriously kissed off if they get him. I need him.

  “Goddamn.”

  A ringing sound grated against my ears, and I growled an order for my phone to accept the call.

  “You need to fix your system’s vocab.” Dominic’s voice flooded the cab of the truck, thick and grated by too many cigarettes. There was an influential timbre in the way that Dominic projected his words, but lately that influence was flirting with something that reeked of scare-tactics. I blamed the cigarettes; they revealed the gritty underside of his personality by layering his lungs in gravel to match the rest of him. “And he’s dead enough to not be sending back pings,” Dominic continued. “His GPS has been trashed and his line is dead. Nobody has heard from him in weeks.”

  “That doesn’t mean dead. That means missing.”

  “It means dead, boy. He’s either six feet deep or compromised, and I don’t take well to the C-word. I like F-words like fossilised, and S-words like silenced. Trust me, he’s better-off six feet deep. I’m practising positive thinking.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “I’m positive that I’ll kill someone if the boy doesn’t start cooperating.”

  “Bring in someone else, then. Dumb muscle is
cheap enough if you look in the right places, and they’re good at flexing the compliance out of people. Give them Gerald’s address and tell them to smash things until the boy calls us, begging for a second chance. Or maybe Gerald could be instrumental?”

  Dominic snorted, the sound carrying a hint of derision. He said, “I didn’t choose Gerald for his skills in persuasion. I chose him because I thought he’d be easy enough to manipulate. He’s a glutton and a bully, but he’s not smart enough to coerce Tariq into anything. Tariq hasn’t even spoken to him for at least a month now: he just delivers envelopes of cash to the mailbox and leaves. Why don’t we intercept him on the way to school, run him off the road and truss him up?”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged.

  “I don’t need your permission.” Dominic seemed to be amused. “That’s not what these conversations are about.”

  “Listen, we’ve threatened him before and it didn’t work. That kid is a vault; from what we can tell he hasn’t even shared our talks with Seraph. He’s locking it all down and hiding it away. Maybe he’s bad at coping with shit, or maybe he’s a genius. I don’t know, but it’s working in his favour. Seraph doesn’t know a thing, so she’s not diving in to save him.”

  Over the line, Dominic heaved out a sigh, and I could hear the soft rustle of expensive leather as he shifted around in his seat. “I suppose you’re right… but coercion can be bought in many ways.”

  “The boy won’t be interested in money; the Adairs and Quillans are slipping him enough cash to fund a small army. Find another way.”

  “Maybe you should take care of him. The hypnotist doesn’t need your unique brand of encouragement anymore, and we’ve gone dark with Seraph for the time being; you can’t possibly be that busy.”

  “I’m stocking up on explosives.”

  “Do that in your own time.”

  “All time is my own time.”

  “You have issues, you know that? You’re an egotistical maniac.”

  “If I have issues, it’s because of your medication.”

  “My medication is going to win us this war.”

  “There is no war, Dominic, you’re getting ahead of yourself again.”

  “The hypnotist is showing real potential. Before the end of the year, I’ll deliver us a war—and that’s a promise.”

  “Whatever. Irrelevant. I’m busy.” I flicked my turn signal and pulled off the highway, navigating the truck down a smooth dirt road that ran alongside a stretch of maintained farmland.

  There was a country manor set back into the hills behind two of the front paddocks, and it was draped across the countryside in a way that made it appear even bigger than it was, as though someone had taken the four corners in hand and stretched it out to accommodate the uneven terrain. I turned down the second driveway branching off from the road, my truck slowing to a belligerent amble as I passed the sign that was set with crooked, country elegance into the Kentucky bluegrass creeping along the base of the mailbox.

  S. Stevens Farmstead, it read.

  The property actually belonged to Dominic, but Steven Stevens was his go-to alias for all off-the-books property transactions. He liked to be blatant with his power, and nothing bespoke power better than boasts of invincibility. Dominic liked to sing his weaknesses until they turned to his favour. He hung each of his lies from a flag, and set each of those flags firmly into the soil of his properties, like an empty canon on display. Nothing with Dominic was ever as it seemed. Probably, his real name was Steven Stevens and Dominic Kingsling was the alias.

  “Busy as in you’re the reason a confiscated container of C4 has gone missing from the Klovoda’s off-site training grounds?” Dominic interrupted me from my thoughts.

  “They weren’t using it.”

  “They confiscated it for a reason.” He sighed the admonishment, probably amused more than he was aggravated.

  “You’ve got no grounds to scold me here, old man. Only Maritime Law would be able to accommodate the kinds of punishments you’d be entitled to, after everything you’ve gotten up to in the last ten years.”

  “Har, har.” Dominic hacked out a sarcastic laugh that carried the punishment of his last cigarette, and I waited until he finished coughing. “Just make sure you’re not caught. We might have Weston on our side, but it’s only because of the hypnotist—if we didn’t have him, we’d have nothing… and the rest of the Klovoda are getting suspicious.”

  “I took it off their hands, Dom. They should thank me. I’m being a good Samaritan.”

  “I’ll have them send a fruit basket.”

  I smirked and clicked a button to end the call—something that Dominic would be well and truly used to by now. The servant was already hobbling out of the manor to set himself upon the front steps like a wrinkled, old bulldog. He raised a weathered hand in greeting, and I parked the truck, jumping out of the cab and retrieving the padded box of blasting caps. There were only two packed inside, since I ran the risk of exploding my car with any rogue friction… but two was all that I needed for now. I had hidden the rest in a safe place.

  “Evening,” I greeted.

  “Good evening, Master.”

  “Take those bags out to the warehouse, will you? We’re heading back to Maple Falls next week. My work here is almost done.”

  “As you wish, Master.”

  I wasn’t an angel by any measure.

  I tried to do the right thing. I only wanted to protect myself, but sometimes that meant that other people would get hurt. It was an unofficial side-effect of my safety: the loss of everyone else’s. Sometimes when I went to sleep, I would see the faces of the people I loved, and I would see the targets above their heads—each brandishing a name in sloping, red handwriting.

  Tariq—Gerald.

  Noah—The messenger.

  Cabe—The messenger.

  Silas—Weston.

  Quillan—Seraph.

  We all had our demons.

  No, I wasn’t an angel—and over the years my appearance had begun to reflect my true nature. My hair was a cloud of shadow on a moonless night deprived of starlight. It reminded me of the midnight air of any place of darkness; mist-clogged graveyards, heavy and solemn; polluted skies, sucked of luminescence. Sometimes I stared into the strands, trying to get lost in visions of places beyond my touch. Even an imaginary, onyx necropolis was a haven for me… preferable to the living dead that clogged my home: Gerald, our own personal demon, and my brother and I, barely daring to betray our living breaths for fear of discovery.

  On its own, without the heaviness of my imagination, my hair might simply have been dark. Black. Plain. My eyes had no such leisure. They told stories unbeknownst even to me. They carried a weight of their own, a knowledge and a hidden augur that frightened me. If you stripped away the illusion, they were an ordinary set of blue eyes marred by the conflict of a violet that smoked almost to blue-black, and a green that danced with the kind of shadows that would keep you up at night—and not in a good way.

  I wished that the peculiarities ended there, that I could stop, say end of story, and I’d be a simple girl, with a not-so-simple darkness eating away inside of me yet again. But that was not possible, because I now also had a very, very complicated relationship with four different men. One of them was my teacher, another was his borderline sociopathic twin, and two of them were pretending to be my brothers.

  I had been turned inside out, and the complicated murk from inside was manifesting in ways that I could never have predicted.

  It was closing in, surrounding me.

  I considered it one relationship that I had with the four of them, but that was only because there was a component that ran true and unmalleable in my interactions with each of them, as indistinguishable and stubborn as if they were all the same person. I fight that component when I don’t like it, and fuel it when I do.

  I have that control; I realise that now.

  “Are you listening, shorty?” Poison poked my arm, and I didn’t answer h
er, so she poked me again, and again.

  Poison and I had grown close since Aiden’s death. She was a constant enigma to me, but I didn’t often push her for information about herself. There was something tragic about her, some kind of horrible vulnerability beneath the surface of her blustering antics. I had once asked her why people called her ‘Poison’, but she hadn’t answered me. The smile had slipped from her face and all that had remained—for an agonising, elongated moment—was hatred. I didn’t think the venom in her eyes was meant for me, but I never brought it up again.

  “No.” I eventually turned a smile on her. “I’m not.”

  She rolled her eyes and pinched one of my cheeks. “You’re lucky I love you. Now pay attention. Chris wants to go out tonight and I refuse to do this alone. What if he gets handsy?” She covered her chest in mock-outrage, twisting her features into something resembling censure.

  I laughed at her, because if anyone was going to get ‘handsy’ on a date consisting of bad-girl Poison and band-geek Chris… it would be Poison.

  “He won’t do anything ungentlemanly, I’m sure.” I patted her knee. “You’ll be fine.”

  She dropped the textbook that she had been pretending to read and rounded on me, swiping my sketchpad from my hands. My pencil dug into the page, cutting a thick, grey line across the sketch, too deep to rectify.

  “Seraph Ophelia Black, you will come on this date with me!”

  “My middle name is Lela,” I grumbled, trying to erase the line with little success. “And I don’t see why you need me there.”

  “If you don’t agree to this, I’m going to call up every girl that Cabe has ever slept with and invite them all to his birthday party next month. It’ll be a surprise party, and they’ll be the only ones invited. I’ll even record his reaction and put it up on YouTube. Do you think I’ll need to hire a hall, or would my mansion be big enough?”

  “Poison! That’s so mean!”

  She waggled her eyebrows at me. “Everyone is starting to wonder what’s up with those two. They haven’t hooked up with anyone since they got here. Noah isn’t getting into fights, Cabe isn’t playing pranks—”