I felt better the next morning, even only marginally so. I didn’t immediately pass out again, after eating something, and I took that to mean we could start our newest search for Derrick.
I had no clue where to stare.
Lochlynn had taken the couch, and I started to wonder if he actually gave me the bed because he felt I suffered so much. Maybe he gave me the bed because he felt weird making a girl sleep on the couch. Let’s forget that I offered and that every time I woke up, his scent surrounded me. It felt even weirder to admit that I kind of liked that and wanted to keep breathing in that smell.
Pushing the covers off, I got out of bed, legs wobbling despite my best attempts to keep them from doing so. I didn’t understand how walking felt so difficult when I had been doing for most of my life. I didn’t have any injuries, and I had been sleeping for a full day already. My legs should’ve been working.
I walked around the couch, expecting to find Lochlynn there. I found his blanket, which had been tossed off with little care. It laid over the top of the couch, forgotten. His pillow didn’t even have a dent from where his head had laid. I thought about sitting down, giving my legs a chance to rest, and then rejected the idea. Instead, I started toward the bedroom door.
Before leaving, I touched my hair, and felt the way it sat on my head.
What does it matter, what my hair looks like? I thought to myself, still trying to push it down. Just go out there and tell him that it’s time we figure out where Derrick is. Since I don’t know how to do that, it’s kind of up to him.
I touched the doorknob, cursed, and turned back to the bathroom. After a quick shower and taming of the rats’ nest on my head, I left the bathroom. Pausing by my suitcase, I bent to put my dirty clothes inside. I saw something satiny shoved in the corner and frowned at it. I didn’t buy satiny things. I bought functional ones, because what did it matter if you looked good when you felt uncomfortable?
I pulled the satiny thing out, and just stared at it.
Lochlynn found me kneeling on the floor, holding the nightie with two fingers, about thirty seconds later. He cocked his head at it, frowning. “Problem?”
“I think my guardian is trying to get me laid and I’m having trouble not puking all over my clothes,” I said, still staring at the dark red nightie. “This would barely even cover my butt.”
Lochlynn smirked, wandering over to the suitcase. He peered inside. “There’s probably some matching panties in there, too.”
“Oh god,” I said, staring down at my jeans and shirts. I pawed through them, knowing that Lochlynn could see my underwear and not caring. He didn’t seem like the kind to make some juvenile comment about it, and I didn’t feel like being embarrassed about something all girls needed to wear.
I found the red panties at the bottom of the suitcase, just hanging out with the rest of my underwear, with a polka-dot bra resting on it. “This is just so wrong,” I said. “She’s trying to pimp me out to you.”
Lochlynn nodded. “It would certainly seem so. Also, it’s presumptuous of her to think that I would like red satin just because I’m a demon.”
“First of all, we don’t know why she chose the red satin. Second of all, since I’ve never seen these before in my life, there’s a good chance that she—” I gagged “—took them from her own drawers.”
Lochlynn closed eyes and made a sympathetic sound. “That is truly disturbing.”
“Yeah,” I said, dropping the panties with the nightie. I didn’t want to think about where they came from anymore. “I’ll burn these later and scream at Linda when I have the patience to deal with her.”
“That sounds like a good idea. How are you feeling today?” He helped me stand up when I had visible trouble with it. Apparently kneeling on the floor made my knees think they could stop working. When I got up, I felt the muscles in the backs of my legs trying to give out. Then the ache came back. I thought that I had escaped it, but it started in my legs, and began to stretch all the way up to my shoulders.
“All right, I guess,” I said. “Better than yesterday. I’m not sure that says much, though.”
Lochlynn shook his head. “It doesn’t. When my father did this to me, it took about two days before I started feeling like myself again.”
I frowned, mulling over that little tidbit. His father had cracked his soul. After what I witnessed and experienced, it shouldn’t have surprised me. Somehow, it did, making me wish that I could fix Lochlynn’s life. Instead of giving him sympathy I knew he didn’t want, I asked, “Do demons heal faster than humans?”
It took him a second to answer. “It really depends.”
“On wh—wait,” I said, holding my hand up. “It depends on how many souls they’ve taken?”
Lochlynn nodded.
“I thought you took souls for power,” I said.
Lochlynn looked thoughtful for a second, before waggling his hand back and forth. “Sort of, but not really. We take them, because souls are pure energy, energy that we can convert into magic. For most demons, it’s also a kind of high. I never felt that way, but I’ve seen other demons, and it’s almost…addictive to them. Considering that we can also turn people into other things, souls just have a lot of power for our kind.”
I’d seen that power last night. It should’ve driven me away from Lochlynn, but after everything that happened, I couldn’t blame him for what his father did. I couldn’t even blame him for staying in this house and condoning it. He didn’t condone anything that happened in that room and tried to avoid it. His father forced souls on him. After meeting his entire family, I actually feared what would happen if Lochlynn tried to get away from them. They might’ve tried killing him.
Shaking those thoughts from my head, I rubbed my hands down my thighs. “So, how much power did you have when your father cracked your soul?”
“Almost none,” Lochlynn said. “It was years ago, back when he was still trying to get me to fall in line. He did it, to attempt forcing me into taking some souls, to heal. I didn’t do it.”
“What else has he done,” I asked, and then closed my eyes. “That sounded wrong.”
Lochlynn sighed. “No, it’s fine. I actually thought you were going to ask a lot sooner than you did.” He walked over to the couch, and I followed him. He rubbed his face as we sat down. “My dad’s done a lot of things, Tomorrow. None of are very good. It would take a long, long time to go through all of them. Let’s just say that I’ll tell you when I’m reminded of them.”
“What about the worst thing?” I asked. “And if you don’t want to tell me, then I’ll shut up and stop bothering you. I just want to know…how much I’m supposed to hate this man.”
“You shouldn’t hate him because of me,” Lochlynn said.
“I already do,” I countered. “After seeing what he did to you, how could I not hate him? You didn’t deserve that. I know that my friends and I treated you like you were a monster, but I know that you’re not. You could’ve killed me a thousand times over or done something worse. Like your father did without hesitating. To be honest, I like being around you. I love my friends and my sister, but it’s easier with you. I don’t have to keep you calm, for one thing. For another, you don’t give a shit about my opinions.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
I smiled. “All right, but it’s true. My friends don’t judge me or anything. Yesterday does, but usually because I’m doing stupid, something she doesn’t approve of. With my friends, though…Seanan is very upbeat, and sometimes, I just don’t know how to match her. As for Seamus, well, if he saw us talking like this, I think he would punch you in the face, and scream at me until someone started to cry.”
Lochlynn sat back and looked up at the ceiling. His face had shut down again, preventing me from seeing whatever he felt. I started to think he did that whenever he felt vulnerable, and something I said must’ve triggered that. Living in this house, he must’ve come up with a lot of survival techniques.
The silence started to get awkward, and I prepared to leave the room, figuring that he needed some time alone. I didn’t understand this weird bond that had formed between us over the last two days, so maybe I needed some time too. Some time away from him, where I could just think about everything that happened, and remind myself why this bond was a bad thing. I couldn’t be friends with a demon. It sounded paramount to drinking poison.
“The worst thing that my father ever did…” Lochlynn began. When I looked over, his eyes looked like two pieces of ice, and his jaw hard as a rock. I couldn’t read any emotions, besides an effort to keep himself from bolting. “The worst thing he ever did to me, was…” He trailed off again.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
Lochlynn twisted his head from one side to another, loosening his neck. He sat forward, rubbing the back of his neck, and looking more frozen than he had before.
I decided to stop the torment. “Listen, I’m going to get something to eat, and then we should talk about Derrick. I came here for a reason, and it’s starting to feel like I’m doing nothing about it, ya know?” I got off the couch and started walking toward the door. My stomach rolled at the thought of food, but I thought smelling it might change things. Like it had the day before.
“He used me to make a witch,” Lochlynn said.
I stopped halfway to the door. Turning to look at him, I felt the frown on my face. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you make a witch by taking away half their soul, and replacing it with a demon soul, correct?”
Lochlynn nodded, his neck so stiff that it looked like it hurt him to do so.
I sat back down on the couch, staring straight ahead. “It never occurred to me to wonder how they got the demon half of the soul,” I said. “I guess I always just assumed they took it from a demon that was dying or would be dead.”
“No,” Lochlynn said. “I mean, you can. We often do. when one of our demons is dying, and they can’t be saved, yeah, we make a couple of witches with their soul. They’re dead, but at least part of them gets to live on. But, more often than not, it’s a punishment. Something designed to make the demon suffer. Plus, which ever demon is doing it, they get a witch out of the deal.”
“Why did he do it?”
The ice in Lochlynn’s eyes cracked for a second. I got a glimpse of the pain in his stare and the horror of the memories. Just a bare glimpse, but those emotions slashed through me, making me feel like a monster for asking him these questions about himself. I wanted to erase everything that we said and go back to the moment where I had been kneeling in front of my suitcase with a nightie in my hands.
Then the ice hardened again, taking over his expression. “My father doesn’t need reasons to do these kinds of things,” Lochlynn said, staring down at his hands. “This happened about three years ago, when I was fifteen. He might’ve been trying to break me again. He might’ve been doing it because he could. I don’t know. Maybe he just wanted me to understand what true pain felt like. Maybe he got bored.”
My stomach hollowed out, and I rested my hand against it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Lochlynn shrugged.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not much to tell,” Lochlynn said. “I was up here, watching TV. Dad called me downstairs to his office. I went, like an idiot. When I got there, he grabbed me, and broke my soul right down the middle, and then pulled half of it out.”
I licked my lips. “Were you…awake for that?”
A bitter smile stretched his lips, one that I had seen many times before. “Yes, I was awake for the entire thing.”
I thought about the pain of having my soul cracked. It had laid me out, and everything hurt. Still, everything hurt. Trying to imagine his pain was impossible. Or trying to remember the rest of it, when he had been lying there, without such a big part of him.
“Then Dad took what he had stolen, and he used it on this girl who had been in the corner of the room. I hadn’t seen her until that moment. She’d been curled on her side, tears running down her face, whimpering and begging as he approached her. He shoved my soul into her body, and she started to scream and scream and scream…” Lochlynn looked away, taking in several deep breaths, one after the other.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I’m sorry for all of this.”
He shook his head, slumping. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t make my father do any of this, and you didn’t make me tell you, either. I could’ve told you I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“That doesn’t make me any less sorry,” I said, shrugging helplessly. “I can’t imagine what any of that had been like.”
“You can’t,” Lochlynn said. “And you should count yourself lucky. If we’re careful about this, then we’ll find your friend, and you’ll never learn, either. I need to get you as far away from my father as humanly possible.”
For some reason, my chest started to sting when he said that. I agreed with all of his words, but the sting wouldn’t go away. “It sounds like you need to get away from your father, too,” I said.
Lochlynn offered up that same bitter smile. “Nothing gets away from my father if he doesn’t want it to. You’re human, so to him, you’re useless unless you give up your soul. That won’t happen. Which means that he won’t care if you leave. I’m a different story.”
“You said they wouldn’t have cared if you didn’t come home for a while,” I reminded him.
“They wouldn’t. I could’ve been gone for up to a week and a half before my father came looking for me. I know from experience. I ran off when I was fourteen. Then again at fifteen. Twice at sixteen. When I was seventeen, I realized that he would always come looking for me, and that what he did when he found me would be so much worse than if I just stayed. Even so, I take a little break every now and then. For my own sanity.”
Trapped. Lochlynn was trapped in this house, with those people, and he would never get out. He would never be able to walk out those doors with assurance that he’d never have to talk to them again. “Why won’t he just let you go?” I asked, helplessly. “Why does he insist on keeping you?”
“You’ve met my siblings. They’re both lunatics. Dad wants to groom me into being in charge or our part of Blackwell Industries,” Lochlynn explained. “He thinks that I have a level head on my shoulders. He just has to break me first.”
My heart twisted around.
I wrapped my arms around my middle. “I miss my father like crazy,” I said. “He was the best father that anyone could have, if you ignore the part about him taking the easy way out. I just…can’t imagine the kind of love or contempt that it would take a parent to act the way that yours do. What about your mother? What is she doing during all of this?”
“Nothing,” Lochlynn said. “She doesn’t care about me or Llewellyn all that much. We’re to act respectful, and not kill each other. We don’t do the first, and we try very hard to ignore the second.”
“What about Danielle?”
“Mom loves Danielle and spoils her rotten. Mom’s also a snake, and her love is a poisonous thing that twists people around. Danielle is unstable, addicted to chaos, full of magic, and wants nothing more than to watch everything burn. Dad puts up with her because he has no choice, not if he wants to keep Mom around. And Mom just likes to watch Danielle go. She thinks my sister is a genius, must waiting to take the world by the balls, and force it into place.”
“Your entire family is made up of lunatics and violent beasts,” I said.
Lochlynn laughed, sitting back against the couch. He covered his face with his hands. “I know. Believe me, I know. I can’t even blame my siblings for the way they act. Llewellyn was supposed a good kid. Everyone who was around when he was a child says that. Years of my father tutelage ravaged him. And who knows what Danielle would’ve been like if my mother had left her alone? Who know what I’ll be like in ten years, when all the people that will remember the way am now are gone?”
“You aren’t going to end up like them,” I said.
Lochlynn smiled bitterly, and I thought he didn’t believe me. I wanted to soothe that bitter look in his eyes, but I thought if I tried, the ice would come back. It had cracked, giving me the barest glimpse of Lochlynn’s pain, of the things that he feared the most. That he would end up like his parents, that he would break, and do the same kinds of things that his father did.
I worried that I wouldn’t graduate if I kept missing school.
Rubbing my hands down my legs, I looked around his room, with all the opulent things he could’ve had. It looked far simpler than the rest of the house, but it suited Lochlynn. It felt like the kind of place that he would hide away. I wished that this space could’ve been in a different building, in a different city, state, or country from his parents. Somewhere safe.
But if he were somewhere safe, he’d be far away from me. And Derrick would die, because no one would look for him.
Lochlynn shook his head and started to rise. “You said something about wanting breakfast?”
“Yes,” I said, allowing our moment to pass. It had been awful, sitting there and listening to those horrible stories…but it had also been nice. He had confided in me, and I would keep everything that he said safe. No one would know about them, even if he and I didn’t see each other after we saved Derrick.
I couldn’t erase his pain, but he didn’t have to bear it alone with my there. I wanted that for him. Someone who could and would listen to every terrible thing that his father had done to him or would do to him. being able to tell someone would change what happened, but maybe it would make it easier to live under that weight. To have it in his head every day. It sounded like hell.
The two of us walked out of the room together. The second we stepped into his living room, the spell broke, and we could go back to normal. No longer talking about things that hurt us or sharing secrets. We’d get down to business.
I noticed the cracks in the wall and frowned. “Is that…where I landed?” I asked, pointing to the wall.
Lochlynn nodded. “Yeah. We’ll get some repair people in tomorrow or the next day. I’m surprised you didn’t notice them earlier.”
I shrugged. “Busy thinking about other things, I guess.” I turned to the other wall and saw where Lochlynn had landed. Those cracks looked bigger than mine. Probably because he weighed twice as much as I did and had way more muscle. He sounded casual about getting the cracks repaired, making me think this had happened before. Then I thought, well, duh. It’s not only happened before, but it’s probably happened dozens of times, to where he doesn’t think about it.
Lochlynn went into this little kitchen without saying anything and started to dig through his fridge. He pulled out a package of bacon and waved it at me. “What do you think about eggs and bacon?”
“Sounds good,” I said, perching on the stool. “You’ve got an entire kitchen staff downstairs, but you’re going to cook?”
He smiled. “Less of a hassle this way, believe it or not. I even do my own dishes. I don’t vacuum, though. Mostly because I don’t know where the vacuum is, and every time I ask, the maids come in here and clean everything from top to bottom. They move all my stuff around.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, I can forgive you for the dirty floors, I guess.”
“Thank you,” Lochlynn said, putting everything on the counter, next to his stove. He got the bacon going first, and the smell stretched throughout the apartment. Just like I thought it would, the scent of food woke my stomach up. It growled in desire, and I had to frown down at it.
While he cooked, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked one question that seemed very important. “Lochlynn?”
“Yes?” he asked, poking at the bacon in the pan. It popped and sizzled, but he didn’t seem to mind his close proximity.
“What happened to the witch that your father made with your soul?”
Lochlynn looked over at me, frowning. “Caroline. Her name was Caroline. And I don’t know. She stuck around for a while. About a year, I think. The two of us actually talked a lot and got pretty close. After I finished growing my soul back, anyway. Something happened to her, I’m not sure what, and then she disappeared one day. My father said that she took off.”
“Do you believe him?”
Lochlynn flipped the bacon while he thought. “I don’t think she’s dead, because Dad wouldn’t hide something like that from me. He’d use it to hurt me, because he could. But I’m not entirely sure that she just took off, either. Not without a reason. My father might’ve done something to her, or she might’ve seen something. I’m not sure, to be honest.”
“But she’s still alive?”
“Maybe. Probably,” Lochlynn said. “Caroline had survival instincts unparalleled to anyone I’ve met before or since. If she died, then it must’ve been something horrible that happened. Something that she couldn’t prevent. So yeah, she’s probably still alive.”
“Do you want to find her?”
“No,” Lochlynn said. “Let her have her freedom. Someone should get to enjoy their life.”
It didn’t sound bitter or pained when he said it. He stated it like a fact, and that bothered me more than if he had sounded worn down. It sounded like he had accepted that his life would never be anything but this misery.
I wanted better for him.