crystal clear

Grinning skeletons greeted him as he walked through the front doors of the Walmart. They bobbed up and down as he passed, something in the Halloween display letting out a creepy cackle. If Pete wanted that sort of shit put up in reception he was gonna have to do it himself. Asking the one English guy on staff to go and buy the supplies for the Trick or Treaters he thought were gonna come rushing into a hotel on Halloween was ridiculous enough.

Grey puffed out a breath as he trailed towards the crates of bagged candy. He stared down at the brightly coloured packages. Last year he’d still been working in that shitty little motel in Brooklyn. If any kids had been staying in the musty rooms, then none of them had come to the reception looking for a little handout. He’d spent that entire night on duty, watching some crappy slasher movie flicker in and out on the tiny TV tucked in one corner of the office space. The bowl of dry, powdery mints that had probably been on the counter since Lincoln was president might’ve done in a pinch if one of them had turned up. This year was all different though.

The son of a bitch had been waiting for him when he’d got back to his room just a month later. A low, gravelly voice calling his name from the shadows of the parking lot. The smug smile that had been on the werewolf’s lips when he’d emerged from behind a van parked right in front of his room hadn’t lasted more than two minutes, but it had been enough to have him handing in his notice. Staying for the week he’d had to work to end it all officially had been risky. Johnny might not’ve been hunting him alone. Seven nights spent hunkering down behind closed curtains, fitful sleep broken by every faint noise outside. He needed a decent reference for the next place, especially if he wanted something better than night receptionist in some cut rate motel.

Things had settled on the other side of the country. The Elysian wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but day manager was the sort of step up he’d been looking for. The job came with a suite at the hotel – it wasn’t an obligation to live-in, especially as it meant he was essentially on call 24/7, but for the money he was able to put away each month it was a decent trade off. Days like today were an exception.

Maybe we can get some costumes, make it a real event for all the staff. Pete had more money than sense, and was just detached enough from his staff not to notice the looks they’d shot back at him. Grey frowned, tossing a half dozen bags of candy in the cart, a couple of the bright orange pumpkin buckets from the stack next to the candy to hold it all. They were gonna be palming this shit off on the customers for weeks after. His brow furrowed as he looked up, catching the garish splash of colour that marked out where the costumes sat alongside the clothing. Why the hell anyone would wanna dress up as something was beyond him. He’d seen enough of the real thing over the years, the claws, the fangs, blood swirling down the drain in a shower with water flow so weak he’d been shivering by the time the water had gone cold and finally washed away the last of it. The real things didn’t bother dressing up in disguise. Hell, there probably wasn’t anything over there for darach or even druid anyhow.

He could always track down a football shirt, tell people that came in that he was dressing as an English bloke. Thicken the accent towards something Dick Van Dyke-esque and they’d love it. Drifting closer he watched a guy peel away from his girlfriend, dropping a kiss to her forehead before he drifted away. His gaze followed him for a moment, then froze as he looked back at the girlfriend. Girl was probably just as close a description of her as woman was. She’d been beaming before he went, now she was flicking through T-shirts on a rack.

As he approached she looked up. For a moment their eyes locked. Like those dancing skeletons had started throwing off flashing lights, she seemed to glimmer. An inner glow that dimmed in just the one spot. Like a shadow to all that light, he saw the ring of blue-violet violence around her eye. She dipped her head fast, but it wasn’t enough. He’d seen it, and he figured exactly who’d put it there. Grey turned his head, looking after the guy. Would be spot bruises on his knuckles from where he’d smacked her around? Or had he used something to put that mark on her? Shoving her head into a wall, telling her to blame it all on walking into a door, a fall. Fucking cowardly son of a bitch.

Like that piss stain would give him an excuse to return his gift right here, Grey angled closer. Unlike his half sister and the rest of the pack, he always had a reason to do what he did. Self-preservation, ridding the world of a piece of crap. It was downright beneficial. That feeling of light continued to emanate from her and here he was, a moth drifting towards it. The pair of jeans he picked up from a rack at random were three sizes too big, but he barely noticed. The light had come to him.

Her voice was softer than he imagined, probably squashed down by the arsehole who had trouble keeping his hands to himself. Grey squinted faintly as he looked up at her. His gaze ticked to the disguised ring around her eye again before it met hers. Weird? Nah, he thought a second later, it wasn’t weird, just uncanny. Like me. Drawing in a deep breath, Grey tried to let his senses expand, that connection he’d felt between himself and the world around him since childhood crackling between them, catching at the edges of … damn.

Feeling his stomach twist and the wariness suddenly bubbling up into his gut, Grey shook his head. ”I’m not entirely sure what you mean,” he said keeping his voice light. ”Like me?” Oh, he knew exactly what she meant and his awareness was still caught on the fringes of the power she exuded, catching and trapping him like Velcro. ”Nice pyjamas,” Grey added, his gaze dropping to her cart before it flicked in the direction the boyfriend had gone. ”They a gift from that guy? He’s your boyfriend right?” It wasn’t a title he deserved. Too old, too controlling, too vicious for a girl like her. And this close he could see she was a girl, one he hadn’t entirely managed to knock that light out of yet.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 1156

Wide eyed and innocent beneath the watercolour stain of the bruise, it felt like looking in the mirror for a moment. Malcolm had rarely laid hands on hm, but when he had there’d been that same need to hide it. The never ending quest to keep what was going on quiet while they tried to do something to make things better. I’ll try harder. I won’t do it again. I promise I’ll be good. Words they’d forget the second they got angry again. Would he have heard the same things out of the bloke’s mouth as he broke each finger that’d touched her in turn? A promise screamed out in the wake of each snap. The little voice in the back of his head warned that it was none of his business, but he’d pushed that voice aside before hadn’t he?

The girl drifting towards him didn’t make it any more his problem, but that invisible tie snapped into place between them all the same. It was an almost uncomfortable feeling, realisation stealing his breath for a second. If they were both right then she had the power to deal with the guy herself, but she obviously hadn’t. Too shy, maybe. Too fractured beneath the pretty surface by the abuse heaped on her by someone who would’ve been crawling at her feet for a blessing if things were still the way they were meant to have been way back in the ancient world Malcolm had ranted on about.

Colour bloomed in her cheeks, pretty, healthier than the ring around her eyes. He’d left her embarrassed with his playing dumb. If she’d been trained, she’d probably have trusted in that feeling. Grey’s lips twitched up at the corners faintly, an acceptance of the apology she hadn’t needed to make. ”About what?” he asked lightly. There was a faint chance this was all a coincidence, but how often had those actually occurred in his life? Everything had happened for a reason, most for absolutely shitty ones. ”You don’t have to say you’re sorry when you didn’t do anything wrong.” It wasn’t confusion, chances were she wasn’t even a plant. That made it some random crossing of paths, the dark of his drawn close to the light of hers in a way that’d likely piss the boyfriend off if he spotted her talking to some random bloke. Especially if she was still blushing like that, all pretty and bashful.

Grey knew he had to keep reminding himself that she wasn’t his problem to fix, but every time she smiled and his gaze was drawn down to her mouth instead of her pretty eyes, he noticed it again. Like a shadow out of the corner of his eye it caught his attention and pissed him off. She was doing it again, that shy edge to it acting like Velcro, keeping his eyes on her instead of dropping back to the pyjamas. There’d been some vaguely familiar cartoon thing on them, animals, probably from some movie he’d watched at school – Malcolm wasn’t the sort to sit him down in front of some film on BBC1 on a Sunday afternoon to shut him up.

His mouth twitched again, his smile a little stronger, the closest she was probably gonna get to an actual smile from him. He could paste it on when he needed to on the job, but it felt like she’d see right through it if she looked at him too hard. ”It’s good of him to take you shopping, buy you stuff.” Probably a gift to say ’sorry baby’ for smacking her around, like it’d make it all better. This time his gaze flicked to that bruise and stayed there, not quit lining up with hers as the breathy shiver of her laugh washed over him. ”Did he give you that too?” His voice was tighter, but soft on the surface, like velvet over steel. ”Seems like the sort of bloke who’d do it.”

It wasn’t any of his business, but those echoes between the two of them were reverberating through his chest with every word she spoke. ”You don’t have to let him, you know, even if he’s taking care of you.” She’d probably bolt now, like some frightened mouse, back to the arms of the dickhead who’d likely whispered promises to protect her in the delicate shell of her ear. Men like that always swore they’d be the ones to keep their family, their loved ones safe, not that they’d be the ones doing the slapping instead.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 756

He’d never met one, but he wasn’t dumb enough to believe that Malcolm’s death had left him the last living darach. Back in the dusty back room of ancient history they’d been everywhere. Folks worshipped the natural world and were willing to believe in the mystical. They were wise men and women who had tumbled from a high path that was nearly impossible to stay on – although the druids who had spent all of those centuries tearing apart his own family still seemed to be gripping onto it by their fingernails. In time some of them had been killed, lines erased, like someone had tried to erase his own. Names had been lost, the packs they helped serve left scattered, and the web that had once held them together had been left in tatters, blowing in the wind.

Grey hadn’t expected another to appear here, for that feeling of power to crackle around his own and leave strands of that magical silk clinging to his consciousness. This was California, the land of bullshit and reinvention. You could probably find someone on every corner who’d claim to be a new age witch, but real power, that was rare (thank God). The people who bragged about having it were so often the ones who tried to blow up the scrap of it they might’ve had into propotions they could lord over other people. Like her boyfriend.

Liar. It shouldn’t have stung that she wouldn’t tell him the truth about this after she’d been so open about what she was, but it did. Like a needle stick at the doctor’s office (not that Malcolm had ever taken him much), just a scratch as she’d frowned and tried to feed him that line about falling. Apparently just on her face. ”You’re right, I don’t, but I've met plenty of blokes like him. Maybe next time it won’t just be a fall.” There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in his mind that it would happen again, nor that she’d stay with him despite the pain he’d caused. Defence would become forgiveness and soon, if she didn’t already believe it, she’d think she actually deserved what he’d done to her. The same way he’d thought he’d somehow deserved the waves of anger and blame that’d rolled off of Malcolm, stinking of cheap whiskey, to drown him.

The snap of her voice should’ve had him throwing up his hands and walking away. From the start he’d figured this wasn’t his problem, but then she’d approached, giving him a glimpse of that light that existed inside of her despite her boyfriend’s attempts to beat it out of her. His family line might’ve been fucked, but it didn’t mean that hers had to be. Grey touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip before he shrugged. ”You’re not wrong about that either, but I don’t need to know you to see what’s right in front of me.” It was as plain as the bruise on her face. If she hadn’t wanted anybody to see that, maybe she should’ve laid the make-up on a little thicker.

Was he sorry she came over? Grey stood, considering the question before his gaze darted away from her – he'd obviously jammed his thumb into the mental bruise too hard for her to be able to look at him now – and off in the direction her boyfriend had taken. If the arsehole came back and saw it, he’d probably make her so sorry she’d come over that she would shy away from strangers from now on. He should have been. There was enough darkness and corruption to his family that it could probably transfer to anybody else’s. Let anybody get too close and the curse would bubble up like fetid storm water from a drain to drown them.

She was leaving. Grey swallowed hard, letting out a small, disappointed sound as he felt her power withdraw from him. It shouldn’t have bothered him, but it was like the oxygen suddenly being stolen from your lungs. You knew you could breathe in again and everything would go back to normal, but in that moment, it felt like the centre of you had been torn out. Mentally, that small part of him that longed for a connection he’d never had flailed, trying to get a grasp on it again with his own power. Physically, his hand shot out.

Wondering how much this was gonna come back and bite him on the ass later, he gripped her cart to stop it and her. Grey’s brows drew together, a sigh slipping out of him as his chin dropped and he looked at those pyjamas again instead of her. ”I lied,” he said hoarsely. ”You weren’t mistaken, I was just ... telling people what you are isn’t always a good idea. Not everybody’s like me.” He tipped his head towards Tanner, who was likely coming back at any second. Some were like him and would abuse her power, her light, the same way they did her body.

”I meant what I said about you not having to let him touch you like that. There are things you can do to protect yourself. Things I can show you how to do, so that he never hurts you again.” Letting go of the cart seemed like it might be a bad idea, she could run, but he needed both hands to snag a piece of paper and that stub of a pencil out of his wallet. Grey scrawled his name and number on it, reaching out to press it into her hand. Maybe she’d keep it and call, maybe it would end up in the trash the second she walked away.

Tagged: DESTINY BACCARI * Word Count: 951