A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors (The Gift War #2)

1. An Eleven-Year-Old Girl

one

An Eleven-Year-Old Girl

B lood stained the white fabric between my fingers.

I scrubbed and scrubbed at it with a bar of soap, rinsing and repeating, but the marks wouldn’t fade. The water ran red first, and then pink, and still the bloodstains on the sheet remained.

Fingers numb and bones aching from the icy water, I dropped the linen with a flat, wet slap. Let it gather at the bottom of the sink, suffocating the drain as I pushed myself up on the tips of my toes and stretched over the steel basin to turn off the faucet.

It shrieked, metal against metal, and I sighed to break the heavy silence that followed.

The dead quiet of the house weighed on me like a ball and chain around my ankles, like my bones had been replaced by iron bars.

The leaden weight inside me was the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth, the pressure on my lungs the only thing preventing me from screaming until flesh shredded and bone shattered.

His flesh.

His bones.

I found him in the kitchen.

Standing beside the stove with a beer in hand, staring at the array of empty bottles littered across our small wooden table.

Glaring at the brand-new highchair next to it, a pattern of blue bears and silver balloons on its padded seat and an unnaturally, immaculately clean feeding tray attached.

He didn’t look up at me as I approached, though I trudged into the room with my invisible ball and chain in tow, dragging my heels along the floor.

“We need new sheets,” I said. My voice was sweet, youthful, and monotone—like a flatline on the hospital monitors in the throat of an eleven-year-old girl.

A grunt was the only response offered to me by the hollow-eyed man near the stove.

Then he took a swig of beer.

The ugly smell stuffed itself up my nose like mouldy fruit left in the fridge for too long.

“We need new sheets,” I repeated.

Bloodshot eyes slid to mine. “I heard you.”

“You haven’t moved.”

His eyebrows slowly crumpled into a frown. “You want me to go right now?” he asked, pointing towards the door with the neck of his beer bottle.

“There are no fresh sheets,” I stated. Careful . I have to be so careful. “She’s going to need them changed again by morning.”

“It’s late. Put some in the dryer.”

A rush of cold seized my chest, but I put a hand on the back of the nearest chair to steady myself. Calmly—like I wasn’t repeating myself all over again—I told him, “They’re stained.”

He made a dismissive gesture at the ceiling and began to stride for the doorway. “At least they’ll be dry,” he muttered. “I’m going to crash on the couch.”

Something alive and tangible inside of my chest lunged for him with razor-sharp teeth and talon-like claws—but instead of sinking into its prey, the hateful beast stumbled headfirst into my heart with a ferocious, painful thump .

“No.”

He paused in the doorway. “What?”

“ No ,” I said again with emphasis. My chest rumbled faintly as if the beast was feeling its way around the obstacle of my blood organ, still determinedly set in its pursuit.

There was no way I would replace her bedding with bloodstained sheets.

Again. She deserved clean, untainted linen, even if it didn’t stay that way for long.

She was in there sobbing and bleeding and in unimaginable pain.

She was hurt in ways that could never be healed, losing parts of herself that could never be replaced because of him—

Because of him .

“You don’t want to push me tonight, Auralie,” he warned in a voice laced with violence and suffering and the only promises he ever kept.

The dark things hiding beneath that voice were my constant companions, so my knees did not buckle beneath the weight of his threat. Instinct cautioned me against it, but I opened my mouth once more inside of an unpleasant smile.

“Three days,” I observed quietly. “Is that a new record for you?”

He turned slowly. His eyes were foggy, glazed by the liquor, and he strained to pull his focus onto me. “What?”

“It’s been three days since you last threatened me,” I clarified, my cheeks swelling with a vitriolic grin. “If you don’t count when I was a baby—which I don’t, because I can’t remember any of it—or the months you spend on the run, I’m sure this is some kind of record.”

The air between us trembled and pulled taut.

He clenched his fists, eyeballs swimming in his head, and spent a moment searching for something…

Alas, all he could come up with was more anger and irritation. Shoulders twitching, he shook the beer bottle in his hand and screwed his nose up at me.

“Shut up,” he spat, droplets of saliva spraying from his mouth.

Silently, I lifted my middle finger in the air between us.

The atmosphere cracked.

“Shut up!” he roared again. The bottle went flying and exploded against the wall behind me in a spray of beer and glass that tickled the back of my neck. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

The words assaulted me like a punch in the nose, but I latched on to the abuse like a starving beast and greedily devoured the ugly expression on his face. My own heated to near the point of delirium as blood flooded to my cheeks and filled my head—a warmth, a sensation I hadn’t felt in weeks.

Something. I’m feeling something—

“Hit me!” I screamed back at him. My voice box felt like it had caught on fire, positively quivering in the wake of the falsetto, but it was too late for me to stop.

“Go ahead and do it!” I shrieked. “Just get it over with! Because if I have to spend one more moment in this house, I am going to fucking kill you, you asshole!”

He took a thunderous step towards me. “Aura—”

I didn’t wait for him to finish. I couldn’t take it any longer. I could not be in that house with him, sleeping with one eye open every night, chewing nervous holes through my blankets every time I heard a creak from one of the floorboards down the hall. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t .

Heaving an enormous breath that stretched my lungs to bursting point, I released the most blood-curdling scream I could muster and closed my eyelids against the darkness that splintered across the room in flashes of nightmares and artificial lights.

There was the sound of my terror and loathing as I spent every last scrap of my voice at once in that single scream, followed by a symphony of what sounded like bullets raining down on me—and then there was nothing.

Complete and utter silence.

Part of me prayed that someone had heard me and intervened, but I couldn’t sense the presence of anyone else in the room. It was only me and the monsters…

Or perhaps it was only monsters.

Before I opened my eyes, I tried to gather enough saliva to force down my swollen throat, but my vocal cords were paralysed and my stomach was in knots.

I felt the chilling heat of my scream settling in my chest, curled up between my collarbones like a dragon.

When I tried to take a breath of air in through my nose, I was hit with the stench of exposed flesh and burning wood.

I doubled over and nearly choked as a mouthful of my own blood came hurtling out at an alarming speed, and my eyelids were ripped back on instinct.

All the lights were out.

The whole room would have been in complete darkness had there not been some kind of fire glowing in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink and a second blaze sparking against the doorframe behind my father’s body.

Limply, he lay on the linoleum with his arms and legs spread out, bent in unshapely forms. Everything around him was in jagged pieces—cutlery, crockery, wooden furniture, and chunks of plaster.

I was seeing all of it in black and white.

Even the dark blood pooling beneath his head, which was turned away from mine.

My stomach churned around a knot of unease once more, and I dropped to my knees as I retched and spat another mouthful of metallic-tasting fluid onto the ground. Seconds later, my head followed and turned the whole world off with a skull-splitting slam.

I slept for a long time.

I almost thought I’d never wake up.

I almost hoped I wouldn’t.

When the white-haired woman appeared in the doorway, I must have been dreaming.

And when I did eventually wake up, it was daylight, and the world was colourful again.

I was in my bedroom, tucked under the covers.

The fires were all out. The light globes were working.

The parts of our kitchen that had appeared to be shattered and broken were whole. My mother had fresh, clean sheets.

And my father was gone.