Chapter Seventeen
Silver for the Boatman
Kaleb
I watch Addi order a coffee like she’s a perfectly normal person. Her hands don’t shake as she cradles her, “Tall, dark and handsome with three sugars, please,” coffee in its environmentally friendly, recyclable cup. Her soft smile should light something inside me, but it doesn’t.
Because after her deranged and damaged wraith of a sister turned up and blew her world to hell in two short words, nothing will feel normal to me ever again.
Addi dropped like a sack of potatoes, screaming her fucking head off all while she smiled at me, confused and tired. I didn’t blame her in the least. The dichotomy of it all, broken and ruined, tortured and sweet, will never, ever leave my mind. “Fucking insanity” is the only term I can find to describe the way she smiled so serenely while bansheeing away like her soul was being ripped from within her.
That visual is burned into my soul, the last remnant of the woman I’ve come to love in such a short period, ruined by one of Mana’s castaway toys.
All because of greed.
Possession .
I know enough about the man’s fucked-up life to know the girls he plays with are changed. The more of him they take into their bodies—and I don’t mean his cock—the less human they become. His drugs are the worst sort of addiction. A craving for forgetfulness. Empty husks, soulless and hungry.
For nothingness.
Any priest will tell you that a blank mind invites the Devil. Mana’s toys, once he discards them, appear to be fair game for any demonic possession wandering around out there. Because I can’t imagine the man—demon, fucking whatever—that obsesses over possessing Addi with the same fucked-up fervor as me, that man wouldn’t hurt her the way her sister has done. And Addi doesn’t appear to remember a fucking thing about it at all.
I can’t tell who to aim my rage at. Mana, for starting this shit by accident, or the sister whose envy, one of those lethal mothers of seven mortal sins, her greed—because who doesn’t like to double on down with a little self-sabotage—fucked with her sister a hell of a lot.
Part of me hopes that little shit who smells like Emma but is nothing like her is dead inside. Because if she comes around and realizes what she’s done, no amount of self-flagellation will solve that personal problem.
Mana’s hand is in this, even if it’s accidental. He’s the cause of their blankness, their forgotten sins and fears and hurts that only mortals would ever fuck around with to find out.
Welcome to your own personal hell, bitches.
That’s what the warning over the door to Harken should say. Because if they haven’t found out before they cross that twisted, Gothic threshold, then they sure as fuck will by the time they leave.
Blank, empty minds. It’s a curse, much so more than feeling everything the way I do. Like Mana. Even Bowen. Maybe the other hanger-on Mana collected. All minds free to claim. And when someone—fuck knows who—pushes into their heads and shoves down their souls, their little mortals seem to capitulate, happy to let someone lead while they fulfil their darkest, most fucked-up fantasies, and they aren’t even in control.
It’s the perfect blame system.
My demon did it.
It wasn’t me, sir.
I didn’t want to do it. They made me.
Like an episode of some fantastically fucked-up sitcom designed to satisfy violent cravings at the flick of a single button. And Mana has the motherfucking remote.
Now … now, my precious, stunning, beautiful Addi is one of them, and she doesn’t even know it. Mindless. One of the forgotten.
“Don’t look so down. I got you one, too.” Addi smiles up at me, her head tilted to one side like a Stepford fucking wife made to order.
Only, I want my OG Addi back.
“Adreana,” I murmur, taking the coffee because it seems to make her happy. “Let’s go back to the house. I think there’s something you need to see.”
Like several things. The scorch mark on the floor where she lay as her sister stood there and did nothing but gloat. An instant replay of the way the house’s foundations and something below trembled with rage while she watched Addi writhe on the floor, screaming her soul out, smiling suffocatingly up at me like It. Was. All Right.
None of this is fucking all right.
What scares me most is that I might not be the only one to claim this sister. So, I fucked her. As she showed me earlier in her bedroom, that apparently didn’t mean as much as the weight I put on claiming her first. Maybe Mana holds that honor by proxy, fucked up as it is.
She’s mine.
I sling an arm around her shoulders, drawing in a long breath as I press my lips to the top of her head, and scent something different. Something old. Something broken. And most certainly something not her.
“Home,” I try again as she turns in my arms and angles her head for a kiss she doesn’t return.
Like a goddamn robot.
“Harken,” she whispers with a promise in her voice that isn’t hers.
I sigh. “Harken it is.”
Mana can fix this fuckup. Because I’m bringing the slops to his front door.
****
“The fuck did you do to her?” Mana roars in a whisper that rattles my bones nonetheless. His volume—or lack, thereof—is paired with the thick forearm braced across my throat.
Anyone lesser might fold before his fury.
I match him with that same dose of my own and raise his call with a perfect night I should have had with our girl. Yeah, ours. Because she belongs to both of us. Which means this is both our problem.
Bonus? We both get to fix this fuckup of mother-level proportions.
“Fuck you,” I snarl, slapping him away like he’s less than tinder-ready to flame.
Mana lets me go, and I hate him a little more for his version of leniency.
“She was horny as fuck when I got to her house. We fucked around. Had a bit of fun. The sister turned up. Said boo to the goose, literally two motherfucking words, and this shit happened. The earth rocked, the house shook. Then our girl turned into the ice princess.”
“And the sister?” Mana watches me closely, not an inkling of shock or surprise written across his dark, archaic features that draws mortals to him like he’s the god he’ll never be.
“Gone. What else is there?” I snap, glaring at him.
“What else indeed.” Mana lets out a soft laugh, the sort I hate most. His liquid smile and the way he licks his lips as he looks at me reminds me forcibly of the night at the bell tower.
“Do you ever have normal fucking sex?”
“Can you not swear for once?’
“What, a rich demon underlord cussing me out for my language?” I smirk. “Losing your grip on the overworld, old pal?”
His eyes narrow. “Where did you learn that term?”
“Turns out you don’t keep the texts in your library as off limits as perhaps they should be,” I coo, knowing it will incite the beast inside him. My soul calls for blood and since his is the shit that started this calamity, his is what I want.
Mana lets out a measured purr. “Don’t try me, pup,” he warns softly.
“Or what, you’ll eat my dick?” I flip the bird for an extra visual, knowing this isn’t helping with Addi, but I can’t stop.
I don’t want to fucking stop. If he isn’t about to stake his claim, maybe my girl will be back. If he isn’t there to stake his claim, then she’s all mine.
Mana, however, puts on the brakes to our fight, overachiever that the fucker is. “What did you do?” he hisses between sharpened teeth, baring them to me.
I shrug. “I let my anger out.”
“With her ?”
“What? No. No. Man, you do you. It’s not like we can’t show our emotions with her. She’s not going anywhere, Mana. Even before this, she was…”
“Perfect,” we both whisper as Addi turns toward us, offering a benign smile that looks beyond fucking wrong spread across her face.
“What happened here?” Lethe strides past us, ignoring my growl and Mana’s hiss. His white clothing is darker, more stained than usual. More like Bowen’s, before he decided to advertise his death wish with a mantle of blood. “What did you do to her?” He whirls on us, panic written across his face. The ice-like facade of the pale man crumbles for the first time and he looks … human, though we all know he’s not. He crumples to his knees at her feet, rocking slightly and curling his hands around her calves, massaging them. “This is my fault,” he moans, a broken … well, a whatever. “My fault. I did this to you, my princess,” he whispers, looking up at her as she ignores his suffering, like she’s collecting all the pain in the room from each of us here.
My head snaps sideways as several things click at once.
“He’s an angel,” Mana murmurs. “And from what he said, it’s likely he fucked her last night, or defiled her in some way. Who were you?” he calls to Lethe.
The tormented angel stares back at both of us while a blank, soulless Addi pets his hair.
“I don’t know,” he whispers brokenly. “I was supposed to protect her.”
“Like a guardian angel.” I frown at the cliche that’s that bit too much.
“No. Nothing so mundane. I was to care for her, guide her. Love her as my own.” His pale blue eyes, almost as clear but with more color than Bowen’s, stare up at me with red rims. Tears track his dirty cheeks. “She was mine to protect. Just mine. And I ruined it.”
I exchange a glance with Mana. He holds out a fist and I rock-paper-scissor him for it. Mana’s rock loses to my paper.
He sighs. “Kid, you don’t get to claim that. There’s a whole lot more going on than you know. I’ve been keeping you at bay because I wasn’t sure who you were but it looks like you might be joining us.” He shrugs, like I did a moment before.
“Fun times,” I mutter, shoving my hands in my pockets and watch the angel cry at her feet. A weeping angel…
There’s something in that, but I can’t put my finger on it.
“You don’t understand,” he whispers. “She was to be one of us. Like me.”
“Lost?” I frown. I can’t be the only one not getting this. Surely.
“Perfect,” he whispers.
Mana snorts. “What the fuck ever. This isn’t helping.”
I nod my agreement. “Can your Chemist help?”
Mana watches me from the corner of his eye and raises one shoulder. “Maybe.”
Shrugs for the win.
“No, you’re not listening, ” Lethe shouts, shoving himself up so that even robot-Addi steps back. “She was mine to protect. Mine to love. But now I can’t, and she can’t. She was supposed to be one of us. Her soul was intact.” His eyes are full of the sort of horror that understands everything . Like his penny dropped on a stupidly empty bank.
“And now it doesn’t matter.”