Ashes (The Slayer Chronicles Book 3), Page 2

  I drained my glass. “I don’t think I’m comfortable with this entire conversation,” I muttered. “Can I have more wine?”

  The guys both looked at me.

  Eden furrowed her brow. “I think you probably have a lot to work through. You need to talk to each other.”

  Since no one was refilling my glass, I got up and crossed the room. I poured more wine into my glass.

  “So, we could… switch off?” said Logan.

  “It doesn’t have to be at the same time?” said Naelen.

  My hand started to shake. It was spilling wine all over Eden’s carpet. I set the glass down on the end table.

  “No, it doesn’t have to be,” said Eden. She looked up at me. “Clarke, are you all right?”

  I walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I pretended to sleep for the plane ride to Naelen’s vacation home. And when we arrived, I didn’t say much. I gave myself an impromptu tour of the house. I’d only ever been to Naelen’s house in Sea City, which was large and opulent. This house was much more cozy. It was only one story, and it contained three small-ish bedrooms, each stuffed with a big king-sized bed and its own private bathroom, and a kitchen/living room that was divided off by a marble breakfast bar. It was immaculately and tastefully decorated, like something out of a magazine.

  I claimed a room as my own that had a view of the lake. It also opened out onto the house’s wraparound porch.

  The porch was the real selling point of the house, if you asked me. It was deep, stocked with rocking chairs and lounge chairs. There was a swing on one corner. In the back, it had a built-in picnic table next to a huge, state-of-the-art gas grill. Near my room, however, was a big hammock, complete with a pillow. I imagined myself lying down in that hammock and reading trashy romance novels—

  No. Not trashy romance novels. Definitely not that.

  Cozy murder mysteries, then. I would find of those series with twenty-books about a woman who solved murders while baking cupcakes or something and then I would read each book, one after the other, and I would stay on that hammock for weeks.

  Logan was in the doorway to my room.

  I turned away from my view of the lake and the porch and the hammock. I tried another smile. This one didn’t seem quite as wobbly.

  “Naelen’s going to the grocery store,” said Logan. “You want to go?”

  “Are you going?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I’ll stay here,” I said.

  He was quiet.

  I crossed the room to face him. “You guys should have fun, I guess. I don’t know if I’m up for crowds.”

  “I could stay with you.”

  “Nah, I’ll be all right.” I cast my glance to the corner of my room where I’d set my bow and arrows. It was my spare set, the one I kept on Naelen’s plane. Cunningham had taken the other set. It was comforting to have my weapons, however.

  Logan leaned against the door frame. “Are you trying to avoid me? If you don’t want me around, if you want it to only be you and him—”

  “I’m not trying to avoid you.” Silently, I added, not just you. Maybe I wanted to avoid them both.

  “Clarke.” He gave his head a nearly imperceptible shake. “I know you. You’re not okay.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “And you’re doing peachy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Naelen appeared behind Logan. “What’s going on? You coming to the store, Clarke?”

  “I think I’ll stay here,” I said. “Maybe I’ll lay out on the hammock for a while.”

  “It’s a nice hammock,” said Naelen.

  “Looks nice,” I said.

  A long pause.

  “Well,” said Naelen, “if you don’t come along, you’ll have to be satisfied with whatever I buy.”

  “You do a lot of grocery shopping?” I raised my eyebrows at him. In Sea City, he had a private chef.

  “When I cook, I do,” said Naelen.

  “You cook?” I laughed a little. “How do I not know this about you?”

  Naelen considered. “Maybe ‘cook’ is stretching it. I grill. And I’m planning on bringing back lots of meat.”

  I smiled. “Grass fed organic meat?”

  He grinned. “If that’s what you want.”

  It was only then that I realized my smile wasn’t wobbly at all anymore. “I don’t want to eat anything that lived its life in a little pen being fed corn meal and getting pumped full of penicillin.”

  “Umm… kay,” said Naelen, who was still grinning, but looking a little unsure.

  Logan rolled his eyes. “She was worse when she was vegan. Trust me, she’s mellowed.”

  “Vegan?” said Naelen.

  I shrugged.

  “Ask her about the mama cows sometime,” said Logan. He looked back and forth between us. “You two never talked about this before?”

  “Never came up,” said Naelen. He eyed me, a mischievous expression on his face. “There’s still all kinds of things I don’t know about you.”

  “I have layers,” I said.

  “Mmm,” said Naelen, and then he walked by Logan in the doorway and came over to me. He kissed me, eyes closed, arm around my waist, pulling me against him.

  But I went stiff, my eyes open, staring at Logan. Logan was standing right freaking there. I knew that things were all weird between the three of us now, but still, this didn’t seem kosher.

  Logan straightened up, hands curling into fists.

  Naelen let go of me. “Well, see you,” he said.

  I couldn’t talk.

  Naelen cast a questioning glance at Logan.

  Logan relaxed his fists. He let out a shaky breath. And then he grabbed me and kissed me too. Hard.

  I couldn’t close my eyes for that one either.

  And when Logan let go of me, he was giving Naelen a look, and it was tinged with challenge.

  Naelen’s lip curled. “Let’s go buy some meat, Logan.”

  “Yeah,” said Logan in a flat voice. “Let’s do that.”

  They trooped out of the room.

  I sat down on the bed and rubbed my temples. I was getting a headache.

  * * *

  Four months ago, Cunningham had locked us up in a room in a big house in Illinois. He’d dumped us in there, and he’d compelled us all not to leave and not to try to get help to leave, and then he’d disappeared for two days.

  The room only had one bed, and when we got there, we were all exhausted. The sun came up, and Logan turned to stone. And then Naelen was all trying to be chivalrous by claiming he’d sleep on the floor, but I was exhausted, and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t slept with him before, so I said we should share the bed. He was intent on sleeping on the floor, though, so eventually, I just shoved Logan’s stone form on to the bed and then Naelen and I both slept on the floor.

  The next night, we slept in the bed together. The floor was really uncomfortable.

  When Cunningham showed back up, he didn’t compel us to do anything.

  Instead, he sat down on the bed and started talking.

  “I like you, Clarke,” he said. He was always saying that. He had said it before he locked us up in that room, but he said it over and over again while we were locked up there. Said it while he stripped away my dignity one day at a time, until he made me something subhuman, something only subservient to his orders and wishes. Until I couldn’t remember which wishes were mine and which were his. “I’m going to do you a favor. You want them both, and I’m going to give them to you.”

  He didn’t make us do anything that day. He just asked if we were all sleeping in the same bed yet.

  Logan told him it didn’t much matter, because he was awake all night anyway.

  Cunningham didn’t like that. He left us alone for another two days.

  But now that Logan’d had the seed put in his mind of Naelen and me doing things in the day time while he was stone, he was twitchy about it all. I’m co
nvinced that he’d sit up all night while we were sleeping and watch the two of us in bed.

  They were at each other’s throats, the guys were. It was awful.

  It got worse after Cunningham started making us do things.

  Before we were captured, when it was the three of us looking for Cunningham, the two of them had gotten disturbingly close. They were best buds; they frequently shut me out of everything. Neither of them gave me the time of day, and I felt like a third wheel, tagging along on their bromance.

  Since I knew that Logan hadn’t forgiven me for sleeping with Naelen and that Naelen hadn’t forgiven me for making him feel out of control, I thought they’d stopped having feelings for me. I had spent two months sure that I’d gone from having two guys fighting over me to two guys being indifferent to me.

  But once we were stuck in that room, it was pretty clear that they still had feelings for me. I wasn’t sure what it was that they cared more about—me or making sure the other guy didn’t have me.

  Cunningham came back after we’d been there about four days, and that was when he compelled Logan not to turn to stone. Then, we all started sleeping at the same time, and we had to decide how we were going to organize ourselves, something that Cunningham was disturbingly interested in. He was often there when we woke up, which happened the same way every morning. Me in the middle of the bed and both guys lying on either side of me with their backs to me.

  Cunningham would ask me awful questions about whether I liked being between them, whether this wasn’t my deepest, darkest fantasy.

  “No,” I’d say. Over and over I said that, but he would just laugh at me. He’d compelled me to tell the truth, but he didn’t believe me.

  And then one day… I don’t know. One day, I said yes. But it wasn’t because he’d finally gotten me in touch with my shameful fantasies, it was because he’d planted them.

  That was when Cunningham took our clothes away. Not all of them. We were left underwear, at least.

  And it kept getting worse. He kept pushing us further and further.

  When Cunningham wasn’t there, I thought the guys were going to kill each other. They were horrible to each other. The room wasn’t big enough for all that jealousy.

  All the time, I kept waiting, trying to count the days, sure that soon, soon—

  And then finally, I didn’t have to wait any longer. That was when Cunningham took me away from them. I was gone maybe six days.

  When I got back, the guys didn’t argue anymore. They weren’t jealous. They were… broken.

  Maybe I was too.

  Now we were free, but we weren’t free at all. They were cooking up some plan between them, and it was going to be like we’d never left that room at all.

  * * *

  “You’re actually good at this,” I said, cutting my steak. I had a plate of grilled zucchini and peppers and onions along with a thick cut slab of meat, which Naelen had left pink in the center. “I can’t believe you cooked this.”

  We were sitting on the picnic table on the porch. It was just after dusk, and the air was warm. In the distance, the only sound was the chirp of insects.

  “Logan helped,” Naelen, gesturing with his knife at Logan.

  Logan had a bite in his mouth. He was chewing. He just nodded.

  I smiled at Logan. “Well, I’m impressed with both of you, then, because I know Logan can’t cook.”

  Logan swallowed. “All I did was chop things.”

  “You’re good with a knife.” Naelen stabbed a zucchini round with his fork.

  “It’s from chopping off so many vampire heads,” said Logan.

  “Eew,” I said. “Not while we’re eating.”

  “So,” said Naelen. “What’s the story about the mama cows, huh?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t know if I want to tell it while I’m eating beef.”

  “Is it gross?” said Naelen.

  “It’s sad,” I said. “I used to live near a farm when I was a kid, and one night, I remember waking up to hear all these cows making these horrible high-pitched mooing noises all night. I couldn’t sleep. It was bad. Anyway, I found out it was because they’d taken the baby cows away from the mothers. Those mothers were crying for their babies.”

  Logan sawed at his steak. “And now we’re eating the babies.”

  I balled up my napkin and threw it at him. “It’s not funny. It’s awful.”

  Naelen looked down at his steak. “It is a sad story.”

  “We’re eating something with feelings,” I said. “That’s wrong. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”

  Logan popped the bite of meat into his mouth and chewed. He was impervious to my discussions. We’d had them before.

  I sighed, cutting my steak. “But if it’s wrong for us, then why isn’t it wrong for mountain lions? Mountain lions have to eat meat. They can’t live on plants. So, by the design of nature, some things have to die to feed other things. Even if we humans stopped doing it, it wouldn’t stop death, you know?”

  Logan swallowed. “So, now she’s just against industrial farming.”

  “I mean, I try to be,” I said. “It’s hard, though, because you don’t always know where meat comes from, but I try not to give my money to that. I think giving an animal as natural a life as possible is the most humane thing we can do.”

  “That’s fascinating,” said Naelen, who was still surveying his steak. “Your thought process there is really…” He cut off a bite. “Tell me the truth, though. You missed red meat, so you found some way to rationalize it, didn’t you?”

  I glared at him. “No, I did not. I have agonized over this.”

  Logan snorted.

  “Shut up,” I said to him.

  Naelen grinned at Logan. “It’s like she says, she’s got layers.”

  “Yeah, she’s deep.”

  And then we all winced.

  “I meant…” Logan set down his fork and knife.

  I did too.

  You like him deep like that, don’t you? whispered Cunningham’s voice in my ear.

  Naelen, however, began attacking the meat with gusto.

  None of us said anything.

  I got up. “I think I’m going to go to bed.”

  “Clarke, wait,” said Logan. “It was a slip of the tongue.”

  Naelen gestured with a bite of steak. “We need to talk, anyway.”

  I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

  Naelen put the meat in his mouth and chewed.

  I picked up my plate. “I’ll put this in the dishwasher.”

  Naelen swallowed. “Clarke, we need to figure out how this works. You heard what Eden said. We need to make… ground rules.”

  I started shaking again. The leftover food on my plate was jiggling, dangerously close to falling off the plate. I set the plate down on the table. “Sorry,” I said. “I can’t.” And then I ran back inside.

  “Clarke!” yelled Logan.

  “Let her go,” said Naelen.

  I stopped inside the door. I moved out of their sight and flattened myself against the wall and shut my eyes. And I listened.

  “Maybe we’re pushing her,” said Logan. “We don’t know what Cunningham did to her while she was away from us. And that was months ago, and maybe she’s been carrying that inside and now she’s losing it.”

  “We’re going to kill Cunningham,” said Naelen. “Slowly. We’re going to disembowel him and then let him grow back his entrails and then cut them out again. So whatever the bastard did to her, whatever he did to my sister, we’re going to make him pay.”

  “Okay, sure,” said Logan. “But I don’t know if that helps her right now.”

  “Maybe not,” said Naelen. He sighed.

  It was quiet.

  I really should go to bed. One of them could get up and come inside and see me here, eavesdropping on them, and I didn’t think that would go over very well.

  But Naelen was talking again. “Well, I mean, what do you think?”

>   “About what you were saying when we were driving back from the store?”

  “Yeah,” said Naelen. “It seems like the most simple, fairest way to deal with it.”

  “I guess I don’t have any complaints,” said Logan. “I mean, beyond the obvious.”

  “We both decided we couldn’t do that to her. Look, he made her talk, and she said she couldn’t choose. So… besides, I feel better with you around.”

  “Yeah, me too. I mean, I feel better with you around. But still, I can’t say I like the idea of it. Especially when I’ve got so many different Technicolor images to play in my head whenever I think about the two of you together.”

  Naelen was quiet for a moment. “I know, I know. But it’s better not to think about that. We don’t have to… we’ll be alone with her. It’ll be different. And I need to be alone with her, because it was only ever once, and you have so many other times that the two of you—”

  “Yes, but I’m not the one she—”

  “She couldn’t choose,” snapped Naelen. A beat. “She lost her virginity to you. I’m supposed to compete with that?”

  “Let’s not do that again,” said Logan, his voice taut. “Let’s not go through it all.”

  “Fine.” Naelen sounded tense.

  There was a long silence, nothing but the chirping insects.

  I waited, unsure if I should go to my room now.

  “Every other night,” said Logan. “We take turns. Fine. We just get her to agree to that.”

  “Well, she will, don’t you think?” said Naelen. “She wouldn’t ask for more nights with one of us, would she? She wouldn’t do that to us?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Logan.

  “You ever do something like this before? Share a woman with another man?”

  “Are you kidding me? Of course not,” said Logan.

  “Yeah, me either.” Naelen sighed again. “I guess we should clear up these dishes.”

  That was my cue to move. I darted back the hallway and into my room.

  Instead of going to bed, I went into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes and got in the shower. I made the water hot, and then hotter, and then hotter still. I wanted to scald off a layer of my skin, to emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, some other woman than the one I was now.