Chapter 11: A Taste Of The Good Life... Or Maybe Not
Author's Note: So what do you think about Mrs. Montgomery? Luck was on their side now, wasn't it? Anybody curious about what is going to happen at the Montgomery mansion? There's an interesting chapter coming up! And as usual, a reason for Brian to attack Lillian.
Enjoy!
Nessie
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“I think I could get used to living here,” Lillian said, looking around the room. She was wearing that red dress again that kept me from concentrating on the building’s problems and forced my attention to my own personal problem. Lillian.
“Don’t let it grow on you. We may have to leave soon,” I said dryly, kneeling in front of the sink. The pipe had a deep crack and it was spraying water everywhere. Mrs. Modgomery had just finished showing me all the damages around the house and was outside with Kellah to show her the dog she had to train. Silvia wanted to follow her, so I had to let her go and be… unattended. As if my human aunt could do anything if they showed up. We would all just get into a great mess.
“Leaving that place will be hard,” Lillian said and leaned against the tiled wall, gracefully dodging the water puddle.
“Oh?” I said, lifting my eyebrow. “The famous bounty hunter hasn’t lived in luxury before?” I mocked.
She pretended to be oblivious to my sarcasm and still smiling that irresistible smile of hers, which made me look away so that I wouldn’t smile back, she said, “Believe whatever you want to believe, but no, I’ve never had the chance.”
“Whatever,” I muttered and reached for a tool. I had to fix this quickly, before I became shocked to the bone. And I wanted to avoid the conversation really badly. I had never stayed in a house with anything more than a small kitchen, two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. But I wasn’t intending to mention that.
“I’ve been thinking…” she started again. Automatically a sigh escaped my lips and I rolled my eyes. “Don’t make that face. I was thinking what you may be.”
“You know that I am not intending to answer to you, right?” I snapped as I fought to seal the hole in the pipe.
“I still can tell you, right?”
“I don’t really care about your theories.”
“I think you’re a magician.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Yes, I have my hat and wand upstairs though, so if you don’t mind go fetch them for me. And be nice, or I’m going to turn you into a frog,” I snarled.
Her lips lifted in a faint smile. “You wouldn’t.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” she said with such certainty as if she had my written confession of it before her.
“I can do worse than frogs.” I turned to look at her. “But I’m not a magician.”
“I’m going to figure it out eventually,” she said stubbornly. “So why don’t you just help me save some time and tell me?”
“Good try, but no. And no, you may never really find it.” I squinted my eyes when water got sprinkled on my face and angrily hit the pipe, which to my surprise stopped leaking. I stood up, still a little surprised, wiped the water from my face and eyed the pipe suspiciously. “Remind me to take a look at it again later,” I told Lillian and not caring if she was following me or intending to stay in that bathroom, I headed to the closest window. Even from up here I could see Kellah, trying to knock some sense into that stupid, hairy creature’s head and Silvia watching her from a bench.
“The day is really sunny,” Lillian said and I could feel the warmth of her body as she stood really close behind me.
“True,” I said coldly.
“Are you angry with something?”
I shook my head. “Nothing new at least.”
The clicking sound of Lillian’s shoes on the polished wooden floor made me aware of her walking away. I took some steps back from the window, trying to focus in the dust dancing around in the sunlight, but the ghosts were too many. They were creating a silverish barrier around me and I wanted to move my hand and make them dissolve, as if they were smoke. Too bad it’s not as easy as it sounded. They were all observing me, as well as Lillian. It was strange that her presence was this obvious to them. Usually, ghosts were close to the people that had been important to them in life, their best friends, their lovers, their relatives… their killers even. But they more or less ignored the rest of people… except my kind. They couldn’t leave us in peace. I kept thinking about how Lillian seemed important now, being almost the center of the ghosts’ attention. She was stigmatized more badly than I thought. She wasn’t just a prize for the Soul-Shatterers; she was also a prize for the world of the dead now. She had been almost there and somehow slipped away. They didn’t care it was me who caused it; they just cared that she did get away with it. They envied her.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Lillian said.
“I’m not staring,” I said quickly, turning my gaze the other way.
“Yes, you are.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I was. Is that a crime?” I snapped.
“Of course not. You can keep staring if you’d like.” Her cheeks turned this usual sweet cerise shade they always did, but she didn’t flinch as I stared right back at her. She bit her lip nervously. “That… didn’t sound exactly like what I wanted to say…”
“Don’t care. You can stay here; I need to fix more pipes.” And with that I turned my back to her and left the room.
It wasn’t that easy to get rid of her though. Of course not. It never is.
She followed me silently around, standing on the far edge of the room and staring at me quietly. I could feel her persistent gaze even when I was looking the other way. I almost had this surreal feeling of her eyes piercing through my back, unpleasantly alike to what I had experienced in that dream. That dream that wouldn’t just leave me in peace. I saw a similar dream that night as well, although this time I was sure that Lillian had no idea about it. Or she hadn’t brought it up yet anyway.
The ghost of a woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty kept looming over me as I inspected the damage in a shower. If ghosts could really affect matter in that world, I would have thought that this place had a really uneasy, troublemaking spirit floating around here, haunting the house. More specifically a spirit that really liked messing with water. But things weren’t like that. Ghosts didn’t have much of a feeling of where in the human world they were. Most of them had limited insight to our world; just like we did to theirs. I could see them, but not all of their world. I knew it lay there, ghostly and semi-transparent between what stood for real and substantial to me, but I couldn’t see the details. The same thing happened to the dead. They usually saw humans – or some of them at least – but they couldn’t quite recognize the objects surrounding us. I wasn’t hundred percent sure about it, but I thought that humans may look to them just as out of place to them as ghosts did to us.
I sighed and let out an annoyed growl as the ghost came closer – her face barely some inches away from mine and she narrowed her eyes offended. I was glad that Lillian was behind me and couldn’t see my face; she had the really bad habit of noticing and memorizing my expressions.
Some time later, maybe just some minutes or maybe an hour later, I heard Lillian’s light footsteps fading away but I didn’t turn around to see if she was gone. I shouldn’t care anyway. I only cared for mom and Silvia. And one of them was none of my concerns anymore. Or she shouldn’t be at least. The memories of her were still vivid inside my head. I remembered distinctly her long blond hair flowing in the summer breeze when we went to the beach. It had been years since the last time; dad was still with us and Silvia was barely four months old. Dad was as clueless about what we were as he could and we were all happy. Silvia’s questions about when we were going to find mom and mom’s ghostly figure floating around were some more painful reminders. When I met up with Mrs. Modgomery at the house’s gate, mom’s ghost was standing right behind Mrs. Modgomery. It was as if she was doing it on purpose. As if she was still trying to say, “Hey! Look at me! I’m still here!” I had tried to look away and used magic to push her away. I couldn’t let Silvia see her. And it wasn’t as if mom didn’t know it. Was she stupid? She knew that Silvia knowing she was gone was the last thing we’d want to happen right now.
“Brian! Hey!” A hand shook my shoulder and I shrugged it off automatically and jumped on my feet. I was about to hit whoever it was who touched me when I realized my aunt’s familiar blue eyes were fixed on me. “I’ve been talking to you for five minutes now. Pretending you didn’t hear me stopped being funny about two minutes ago.”
“I really hadn’t noticed you were here,” I said coldly and dusted myself off.
She gave me a disbelieving look and shook her head. “Come on. You need to grab a bite. You haven’t eaten anything since last night.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Yeah sure. And if you pass out who’s going to get our butts out of trouble if anyone… unwanted decides to show up?”
I looked at her for a second and weighted her words. She had a point there. I couldn’t count on my human aunt to save Silvia. Not that I would admit that Kellah was right in her face though. “You think that half a day without food is all that takes to take me down?”
“If you want an honest answer… I don’t want to find out. Come on, I’m making fish sticks and fries. You eat that, don’t you?”
“It’s not my number one choice.”
“Picky jerk…” she muttered and turned around. To my surprise I followed her.
“It’s not nice calling your nephew jerk,” I commented.
“You’re making fun of my job. I’ll do whatever I want. And you could be my little brother.”
“Only that I’m not. You are my mom’s little sister though.”
“Was,” she said in a low sad voice. Even I could realize that about now it was time to shut up. I didn’t really mind her being upset, but Silvia would see her and realize something was wrong. It wasn’t time for her to find out yet.
“Silvia doesn’t know anything, does she?”
“Of course not.”
Neither of us said anything else as we walked through the big rooms. It was as if the more the minutes passed, the more we quickened our pace. Just before we reached the kitchen I felt as if we were almost jogging. I wasn’t sure why this was, but I was getting the feeling the walls were tightening around us more and more with every step. Which was absolutely ridiculous. The walls weren’t tightening. It was all in my head.
The kitchen brought back memories of mom and Polly and me. The tiles were still that pastel green color and the cupboards made from the same mahogany wood I remembered. I could see mom warming water for Polly’s milk and Polly babbling about the pony her parents were going to get her. I remember feeling jealous. Not that I liked ponies. I just envied her for being able to get one. I couldn’t ask for new toys unless it was Christmas. Silvia was sitting on the counter brushing her doll’s hair. It felt so odd seeing her there. The only five year old I could imagine in this specific kitchen was Polly. Silvia was so different, with her dark complexion and the pitch black hair… Seeing Silvia where I had seen only Polly before made me think that all of a sudden Polly turned from chubby to skinny and somehow all the darkness of her skin and hair and eyes was washed out. After a few seconds my brain processed the sight and I decided that this was really my sister there.
The sound of claws scratching the back door made me turn my head to that direction, instantly tensing.
“It’s just the dog. Don’t worry. He’s jealous. He’s seeing us all inside and wants to come in. Puppies are like that,” Kellah explained.
“Thanks for the information but I don’t really care. There’s a reason I never took Dog Sociology 101 at school,” I mumbled, earning another of my aunt’s disapproving shakes of her head.
“I thought the reason you never took it was because they don’t teach Dog Sociology at schools,” Lillian mocked.
I pushed my lips together in annoyance and didn’t bother looking at her. It had been so great all this while when I hadn’t been listening her voice. “Come on you two. Better keep your mouths filled with foods than talking to each other,” Kellah said and placed two dishes with food on the table. One in front of Lillian and one in front of the chair next to her. Which was probably meant for me. I walked forward, just close enough to take the dish and walked back to the corner of the room, close to Silvia before beginning to eat. Kellah shook her head once more but didn’t say anything.
“Bwyan? Do you know you’we eating fish now?” Silvia asked, placing her doll aside.
“I did? No… those are vegetable sticks, aren’t they, Kellah?” I asked my aunt, looking at her meaningfully. Seriously she told her that this was fish, after last night’s discussion? Someone with Silvia’s stubbornness could turn into a vegetarian overnight. And I was completely clueless about vegetarian diets so lying to Silvia sounded easier.
“Did I tell you, sweetie?” Kellah asked softly. “I’m sorry, Brian is right. They’re veggie sticks. Do you want to try some?”
“So thewe’s no dead fish in it?” she asked, crooking her head on the left.
“Nopes,” Kellah said at the same time I said, “No.”
“Suwe,” she said, smiling. And just as I expected, she paid no attention to the fact that the sticks didn’t taste anything like vegetables.
* * * * *
I squeezed the pillow more tightly against my ear and groaned. This was the fifth time I woke up tonight. The other four I didn’t bother getting up to trace the source or the disturbing noise but I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up and tiptoed across the hall, using only my ears to find the source of the sound. With rough calculations I could say, that the room I ended up in, was down the same hall the guestroom I had picked to sleep in was too. It took my sleepy head a while to figure out what kept me from enjoying the perfect mattress I had the chance to sleep onto. Birds. Lots of them.
“That wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be,” I heard a voice behind me that made me jump. “Having trouble sleeping?” I felt a cold hand touching my arm and turned around.
Lillian was standing there, with her big brown eyes looking at me. I tried to hide the relief that washed over my face as I saw it was her. “Yeah. I kept waking up from those things. Aren’t they supposed to sleep at night?” I asked, trying to take her focus away from me and on the birds. The room was circular and there were big cages across the length of the walls. And the cages were filled with so many birds. The sounds they made seemed to pierce through my ears.
“Dunno.” She shrugged and moved around me, leaning against the wall really close to me. “I like it. It just… won’t let me sleep.”
“I don’t like it,” I said honestly. “It makes my ears hurt. I could do with a little quiet.”
“You’re so not an animal lover, huh?”
“I love animals!” I objected. “As long as they sit in a corner and sleep all day long.”
She chuckled and shook her head. “Let me see… You don’t like birds, you don’t like dogs, you don’t like humans… What do you like?”
“I’m here to protect my sister. Okay? This isn’t supposed to be fun. I’m not supposed to like anything,” I snapped.
“If you were more positive, you may find it easier to keep your sister safe,” she said softly.
“Did you see something positive in running from Soul-Shatterers?” I looked at her, waiting for her answer. Which I was sure that was not going to come. As I predicted, she opened her mouth but no sound came out. She just stared at me as if I had stolen her voice or something.
“Why are you running from them? I mean, what is so special that this five-year-old has that nobody else does?”
“She has something the rest of them don’t. Something absolutely nobody else does,” was all I said.
I felt her eyes on me, examining my face, even though I was looking straight ahead. “So I get no details.” It was not a question.
“And you never will. Why exactly did you come with us again? Why don’t you just walk away and go live your life however you were before?” I said angrily.
“I… I’m not quite fond of my style of living. I’ve told you before. I think I am taking some time off, to think it all more clearly. Plus… aren’t I your prisoner?”
Her reply surprised me. “Wha-” The word got caught in my lips, the t in the end never got out. I pulled myself together and tried my best to look cold and distant as I said, “No. Since I know you have no reason to kill me and am pretty much sure that you aren’t going to work with them again, you’re nothing to me.”
“Nothing nothing?” she asked, half smiling mysteriously.
I bit the inside of my lip and kept staring at her, not daring to be the first to look away. Unconsciously I brought my face a little closer. I instantly regretted it, but I couldn’t move back. “Nothing nothing,” I repeated wearily, the words sounding small and fragile. I felt angry with myself, realizing how soft I sounded.
Her half smile turned into something fuller, but not exactly a smile anymore. She leaned a bit closer as well, and I just couldn’t force myself move away. “You’re a really bad liar, Brian,” she said and kissed me.
My hands relaxed, unable to keep them clutched in fists on my sides anymore. My heart went crazy as I wrapped my arms around her waist, pulling her closer. Unlike her palms, her lips were hot. They were like flames licking my skin. And it felt so good. For a second I felt guilty for giving in, but then every thought was gone and all there was, was her. Eventually I broke the kiss, just for a second, to take a breath, and muttered, “I’m a great liar. You’re just a good reader.” Whatever she was going to tell was muffled by my lips, which brushed over hers again.
A chill ran down my spine, a pleasant feeling of coolness, like water flowing right through me. I closed my eyes, enjoying the sensation and almost forgot I was kissing Lillian. I just stood there, holding her in my arms. Her body felt cool against mine and my eyelids slowly opened, for a second, to look at her as she laid a soft kiss on the curve of my neck. A blue glow near the floor caught my eye though. I instantly bent my head, then froze. Instinctively she froze too, not daring to make any kind of movement. The blue orbs were dancing around my leg though. I wanted to glare at her, but I couldn’t avert my gaze from my leg which she was healing. The little orbs of light seemed to come out of nowhere and wrap around my leg, but I knew that she was doing it; they must have been coming from her hands which were wrapped around my back.
“You’re mad, aren’t you?” she asked quietly.
“What do you think?” I asked back, my voice acerbic.
“That you are,” she gave me the unnecessary answer. She didn’t stop healing my leg though, I saw the electric blue light dancing around my leg, just some inches over the floor, as much as I felt the wound being sealed and vanishing, as if it never existed.
“You can’t accept no as an answer, can you?” I half growled, finally looking at her now that the light was fading away.
“I’m not good with not getting my way,” she agreed.
I held my breath for a second, but couldn’t look away from her. Those thick lashes of hers went up and down as she blinked, and I tried to focus on the movement to calm myself. “There… There are reasons,” I said, sounding calmer than before, but not even close to what I considered really calm. I rarely felt that way anymore. “There are reasons why I had not healed the wound myself.”
“You really could?” she asked, her voice filled with question and surprise.
“Of course I could. I brought you back, do you think a scratch on my leg couldn’t be fixed?” The fact that I had absolutely no intention of doing so, is a different thing.
“I…” She stepped away from me and I didn’t try holding her close. It would help me think more clearly if she were away as well. “I thought you couldn’t heal it yourself. I mean… I can’t see any other actual reason for you to keep yourself in this state, hurting your leg worse for no reason, if you had another choice.”
“For a little while… I thought you were smart,” I said quietly. “But in fact you’re an idiot.”
“No, you’re an idiot!” she snapped back. No matter how we had offended each other in the past, no matter how she had called me brainless and I had called her incapable, we had never actually cursed each other. Thinking about that very moment a few weeks later, I was having a hard time imagining Lillian actually calling me an idiot. “Have you ever, ever considered what this was for your leg? You received no kind of an actual treatment and you just bandaged it up and then ran around like it was just a scratch! Have you ever imagined that it would never heal right? How would you run away from those things then? Huh?”
Her outburst left me completely speechless. What could I say after all? No, just like she thought, I had never imagined none of that. I was calculating, but I wasn’t into first aids, honestly. It really must have been some faulty gene. Both mom and I had it. She had done a major mistake with Silvia because of that. Which was mostly why she was hunted. And I would never forget.
“You don’t know what you may have done. You’re as clueless as Kellah. You think you’re different, but you’re just human. Do you want to know why I did not heal myself? Do you really want to know? Because I do not want to deal with consequences of things that are not in my hand!”
“Then why don’t you just tell me?” she asked angrily.
“Because it’s not my business to tell you. If you were to know, you’d know already.” And with that, I left the room, leaving the door open, the sound of the annoying birds still echoing through the hall. This wasn’t my biggest worry anymore though. I had lost any chances I had to sleep tonight.
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To read the next chapter, chick here.
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