Chapter Thirteen #2
He returned to the house and traipsed through the rooms, spattering damp earth onto rugs that were three hundred years old, woven from dyed blue silk in China.
At dinner he felt as if he were a complete stranger; everyone else had their lives mapped out, aimed toward success.
When dessert was served, Jamie excused himself, stating that he was feeling ill, but rather than retreat to his room, he sneaked into the library and had a whiskey, and then another, fairly certain that his father was listing his flaws at that very moment.
Yes, he was a failure at school, and at sports, and at love, and at life.
But perhaps he was something else as well.
Something they didn’t want him to be. He’d taken to stabbing his fingers, to see the ooze of blood that gave him hope he might be more than his father declared him to be.
He thought of Ava in the cemetery, how she said they were more alike than he might have imagined.
He didn’t feel any magic inside him, but it was there all the same, he simply had to find a way to uncover it.
Now he remembered a time when he was a boy and had found a rabbit torn apart by the dogs.
It was lifeless, but when he held the poor bloodstained creature, he could feel its heart flutter beneath his touch.
It could come back, he thought. What was dead wasn’t necessarily gone.
He’d been so astonished, he’d dropped the rabbit on the grass, and when he went to touch it again, it was too late.
It had grown stone cold. The scar on his left hand had been throbbing then.
It was nothing, a mere bump, just as his mother had reassured him, yet it didn’t feel that way.
It felt as though part of him was missing. It felt that way still.
Lilith House was quiet and dark when Ava took Jack out in the morning.
That was when she found the paper crow on the porch stairs.
Jack was madly yelping, which only served to further confuse her.
“What is wrong with you?” Ava asked, following the excited dog down the street.
Jack continued trotting before her, headed north, and that was when Ava realized where he was going. She had to run to keep up with him.
The bartender at O’Malley’s remembered her, the girl with glossy red hair accompanied by a dog that was assuredly not like any German shepherd he’d seen before. The dog ran directly to the young man who was drinking himself into oblivion at the end of the bar.
“You drink scotch,” the bartender said to Ava, taking pride in the fact that although he often forgot his wife’s birthday, he never forgot a customer’s drink and he certainly would never forget a redhead.
“I’ll have a Coca-Cola,” Ava said politely. Make us proud of you, her parents had said when she left to return to school. Be a good girl. “No ice,” she called more roughly.
“I see. You’re on the wagon.” The bartender nodded to Jamie, who was watching her through narrowed eyes. “You might want to have a talk about that with your friend.”
Ava claimed the stool beside Jamie’s. There were only two other customers at a rear table, old friends from the neighborhood who were playing checkers and drinking bitter coffee. “It’s eleven in the morning,” Ava said to Jamie. “Apparently, you have no sense of time whatsoever.”
“Meaning?” They exchanged a fleeting look, but that alone was enough to cause Jamie to feel overwhelmed.
He ordered another drink; it was a good reason to look past Ava and break away from her judgmental gaze.
The deeds of the summer came to him with a rush of guilt.
Who did he think he was to treat women as if they were there for his use and nothing more?
He’d proved himself to be a Mather through and through.
“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” Ava had a wounded expression on her face. “I waited for you, Jamie.”
“The hell you did.” He seemed in a fury, acting as if she were the guilty party. As his emotions rose, the glass in his hand shattered. There was his magic, wrapped in anger and desire.
“Is that supposed to scare me?” Ava asked.
“I don’t know. It’s scaring me.” He swept the broken glass into a pile.
Ava wanted to say, Be careful. You’ll hurt yourself, but she was still too angry to show her true feelings. “I waited until I fell asleep,” Ava now told him. “You’re the one who left without a word.”
“I asked you to meet me at the Common, but you didn’t show up. I was there all night. I slept on a bench, like a fool.” He reached for his drink and gulped it down. “I waited for you. Obviously, you didn’t give a damn about the note I left.”
Ava felt a chill. There was still the same connection between them. “What note?”
“The one I gave to Lauren to deliver to you.”
Ava thought back to the morning she’d waited so long for Jamie, when she’d woken in despair to see that the white ribbons tied to the tree had fallen onto the ground.
Now her Coca-Cola went untouched on the bar, leaving a watery ring on the wood.
She felt faint and somewhat dazed, baffled by this turn of events. “You didn’t leave a note.”
“Didn’t I?” Jamie finished his scotch in a single, desperate gulp. It was always his poison of choice.
“Lauren would have told me.” She would have, Ava knew that, and yet her voice trembled. “She’s my friend.”
Jamie laughed cruelly. “So you’re still on her side.”
“No, I’m not. I’m on your side.”
“It doesn’t seem like it. It seems you expected the worst of me and that’s what you’ll believe no matter what.”
“If you were there, you should have come upstairs!” Ava cried.
Jamie shook his head. “This time it wasn’t my fault. I was there, Ava.”
She wished she had stayed out on the porch and waited for him that night and that she’d never gone to bed.
Jamie gave her a look that was crushing, and all at once Ava felt she was the one at fault.
She should have sat on the stairs until morning, but instead she’d slept and dreamed that she was chasing after him, her feet bleeding.
She had believed what Lauren, her one true friend, had told her.
“Why don’t you find out the truth for both of us?” Jamie urged. “Go ahead if you have the courage. Ask her what happened. And then ask yourself why you didn’t wait.”
Lauren returned to her room that day to discover it had been ransacked.
Ink was spilled onto the floor, papers were littered across her desk, her precious grimoire had been torn to pieces, with bits of poetry littering the floor.
The culprit who’d created the chaos was waiting for her.
There was Ava, her hair in tangles, her hands blistered from the efforts of her search.
“What is wrong with you?” Lauren cried as Ava paced through the ruins of her belongings.
Lauren crouched down, trying and failing to save her poems. Words were magic, and they had risen from the torn pages.
Now they were nothing more than black lines streaked across the walls, the scattered words no longer making any sense.