The Blackwood Curse, page 21
He was rambling and Wax was becoming impatient.
‘We were looking for answers to heal you,’ his mother chimed in.
‘Heal me,’ Wax repeated, flabbergasted with disbelief.
‘It’s true, Bret,’ his father said, putting a gentling hand on his chest. ‘We just thought if we could heal you – find you a cure – you could at least get some relief. And Ainsley agreed to stay here with you to help while we did that.’
I thought Wax would combust.
‘Stay calm, baby … Wax … don’t react. He doesn’t know. You have your answer. Remember your question. They didn’t really know,’ I said, trying to talk him down. I could see him balling his fists and stretching out his fingers over and over while he took in what I said. ‘Stay calm, you’ll only play into Ainsley’s story if you blow up. They’ll tranq you in a heartbeat and you won’t be able to do anything.’
I could see how desperately he was trying to get a hold on his temper. He was breathing deeply and slowly. ‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ he said eventually.
‘I know there isn’t,’ his father said, placating him.
‘We know,’ his mother said as well, making me want to slap her to let him speak, myself.
Then the moment that Wax so badly needed, for a real heart to heart, was obliterated when Ainsley sauntered into the room with a much more modern-looking Lila on his arm.
Her eyes went directly to me and Ainsley said, ‘Ah, the family is all together.’
Chapter 22
My heart almost stopped at being discovered by the most dangerous person in the room. The apex predator. Funny, how I should be reminded of that. I swallowed and waited for her to expose me.
But she didn’t.
Wax had his eye on his uncle, fooled as all men were around this woman. But I knew the real culprit, the instigator of all that was bad around here, and it was all in that one, knowing look. She knew that I knew and, rather than pick a fight, she enjoyed it. Instead of being rattled, that slow smile I’d glimpsed in the painting spread over her face as if life was just about to get interesting.
She terrified me.
I was forced to tune back into the conversation. Wax’s father was on his feet accusing his uncle. They looked so alike right then. ‘Bret says Ollie is here and you never said a word.’ Wax’s father was furious and his mother renewed her tears.
Ainsley turned his head to Wax, contemptuously, ‘That is because your son saw fit to keep that from me.’
The conversation was descending into chaos. Wax’s mother was wailing, ‘My son … my poor son.’ It was clear there was no love lost between this Jed and Ainsley.
‘He’s in his room with all his friends,’ Wax said impatiently, to shut his mother up. I hitched a breath at how rash that was and the look he flashed me was more a flinch and I knew he regretted saying it instantly.
His mother ran from the room.
‘Stay calm, Wax, stay calm.’
But he was on a roll now and continued on. ‘He hasn’t been looking for Ollie, he’s been looking for a Blackwood daughter.’
I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified. I felt both, and proud of Wax for having the courage to confront his uncle. Maybe we’d finally get some help in his father to fight him. ‘A Blackwood daughter,’ Wax’s father repeated. As frustrated as I was, it was a comfort to know that Wax’s parents appeared to be in the dark about it all.
But Ainsley was clever, and, even more so, Lila. ‘You see, this is what I have to deal with,’ he said, immediately deflecting the comment.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Wax continued. It’s what he’s been after all along. He wants the mine for the Elixir of Life.’
I wanted to slow Wax down, so his father could keep up. For a moment, Ainsley and Lila looked at each other, rattled. Wax’s father looked at him, worried and bewildered. He was losing him. I wanted to warn Wax, but Lila seized the opportunity to cut in. She put a hand on Ainsley’s chest to hold him back. She had read the indecision and doubt on Wax’s father’s face as well as I did. ‘Let’s remain calm, shall we? Why don’t you take Jed to the study and I’ll send you some tea. I’ll get the housekeeper to see to some nice breakfast for us all.’
Wax was completely broadsided by her perfectly reasonable response and an awful bewildered, lost look was entering his eyes. ‘Go. Leave, right now!’ I shouted into his earpiece. I wanted to make him move to snap him out of it.
But when he turned to me and I thought he’d come and pick me up off the side, she put out a hand to stop him. Ainsley was already leading his father from the room. ‘Please stay. Wax, isn’t it? I fear we got off on the wrong foot and I wanted to say thank you.’ The look she gave me over her shoulder was nothing short of triumphant.
How I hated her right then. She was showing me her power over her pawns and all I could say was, ‘Wax. Don’t listen to her. She’s evil,’ and I knew he couldn’t resist hearing what she had to say.
She was dressed in fitted jeans, but her shirt was still frilly and Victorianesque. She wore her blonde hair up with curls escaping around her face. She was like a doll, dainty and beautiful, and that was all part of her power to lure people in. She took a provocative step closer to Wax.
‘Wax,’ I said, but it came out more of a whimper. He didn’t move back or even answer or look my way. ‘Don’t listen to her. Look at me, Wax. Let’s go. Your mum is with Ollie. God knows what’s happening,’ I threw in, in a vain hope of shaking him out of it.
But his eyes remained riveted to hers and she took another step into his personal space and looked deeply into his. My stomach turned to acid as she inveigled herself into his mind and he wasn’t defending himself or pushing her away.
She reached up a delicate hand to the side of his face.
‘Wax! Listen to me. Wax!’ I pleaded.
‘Thank you, Wax,’ she said, softly. Seductively. ‘For getting me out of that place.’ Then she gently guided him down to kiss him on the cheek.
I smacked the screen and tears brimmed in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
I was forced to watch as Wax didn’t push her away. He remained stiff and confused and she planted the gentlest of kisses at the corner of his mouth. It was a masterclass in seduction. ‘You and your friends must be careful of Ainsley. He trapped me there in the first place to teach me a lesson.’
‘No, Wax, don’t listen. It was to save her. To bring her back later. They cooked it up together. Remember?’
‘Then you need to get away. Tell my father,’ Wax said.
She looked at him sadly as if it were only that simple. ‘He needs me. If I don’t do what he says, he’ll get rid of me, and to a far worse place than the mirrors.’
I saw it in the tilt of her head, the lowering of her eyelashes, that she had him in the palm of her hand.
‘Come on, Wax. Please. Don’t buy this line of bullshit.’ It was like he was paralyzed.
I don’t know whether she heard me or had known about the earpiece all along, but she put her mouth right next to it to whisper, ‘I can help you beat him.’
‘What about my friend? She’s trapped now.’
‘Finally,’ I said, in relief, but as soon I said it, I knew he either couldn’t hear me or wasn’t listening. Then I saw the earpiece resting on his shoulder. She had pulled it from his ear. I also hadn’t missed that he’d called me his friend and not his girlfriend either. A weight the size of a medicine ball settled in my chest cavity.
She smiled sympathetically and led him back to a stool to sit down. ‘What Ainsley has done is unforgivable, but the curse must be satisfied one way or another. If you help me, I promise, I’ll help you to get her out.’
‘Don’t listen to her!’ I shouted, but I knew it was useless. I wasn’t even sure if he could hear that he would listen. She had him, just like she had his grandfather and uncle – with too many greats to count – before him. The very thing that had destroyed and cursed the two families in the first place. Only one good thing had come from this, whatever hocus-pocus she used; it had shown me that it very definitely did not work on women.
She reached out her dainty hand and smoothed the furrows along his brow. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. You’ll never be alone here again,’ she said flashing me a spiteful look. Then, with a flick of her hand, my world span and I landed in a heap on the floor. By the time I scrambled to my feet and went back to the screen, I was back in Ollie’s room and his mother was sitting on the end of the bed, crying.
Ollie was sitting helplessly next to her with the others clustered around them, equally unsure what to do. For once, even Tallulah looked lost for words. Ollie instinctively knew I was there and his eyes tracked sadly to me. His mother couldn’t see or hear any of them. To her, she was sitting in an empty room.
Ollie shook his head, proving I was right, and his mother continued to cry into her tissue.
Then an idea came to me. It was wild and out there, but I was all out of options. Lila was downstairs, all but making out with my boyfriend and making fools out of us all. ‘Hey! Hey! Is that you, Mrs Waxley-Black?’ She stopped crying, sniffed, and looked around her. ‘Mrs Waxley-Black! The computer screen on Ollie’s dressing table.’
She looked a little startled in the direction of my voice and slowly stood up. My hunch had worked. I thanked God for Ollie’s tech genius. It would be a lot easier for his mother to take than speaking to an apparition in a mirror. My voice could be heard electronically, on the static airwaves and it appeared she could see me too as she looked right at me. ‘Hi!’ I said. ‘You’re Ollie’s mom?’
She stopped crying completely and eased into the chair opposite me at Ollie’s desk. ‘Hello,’ she said, dabbing under her eyes with her tissue. They were red and smudged black from crying. She tried to smile a little.
Seeing her like this reminded me of my own mother and any hostility I’d felt towards her earlier disappeared. ‘Hi,’ I said again. ‘You don’t know me, but my name is Beccah and I’m a friend of Ollie’s.’
Her face began to crumple again, but I didn’t have time to let that happen. ‘No, no, don’t, please. I just wanted you to know he’s right here.’
She looked beyond me through the screen and it was clear she didn’t understand what I meant at all. I had to take a chance that I wouldn’t completely freak her out. ‘No, not here with me, but right there with you.’
For a moment her face clouded as if I was playing some kind of cruel joke. ‘He’s next to your right shoulder and Tallulah and all his friends are right there with him,’ I said, saying a quick prayer that she didn’t close me down before she heard me out.
She frowned, unsure what I was saying. ‘You’re a clairvoyant?’ She turned her head and looked straight through him. ‘He’s here?’
I didn’t correct her with what I was. Instead, I kept to the point. ‘Yes! Close enough to touch.’
Ollie put both his arms around his mother’s neck and hugged her. She must have felt something as she closed her eyes. ‘I can smell him,’ she said on a breath.
‘He’s hugging you right now.’
She blinked away more tears, but didn’t argue as if she was processing it all. I guess she was good with weird; traipsing around India and Tibet trying to make sense of it all.
‘He’s there, I promise you.’
‘Is he OK?’ she asked, turning to me again. ‘Can you ask him if he’s happy?’
‘He can hear you. He’s reaching for your hand.’
She held up a hand as if it was an alien thing on the end of her arm. He held it, but it was clear she couldn’t feel him at all.
‘He says he’s fine but that you need to look out for Wax. He has his friends and he’s happy, but Wax is alone and you all need to be careful of Lila and Ainsley. She’s a Blackwood and dangerous.’
She looked stricken for a moment as if I’d deeply shocked her. ‘A Blackwood? Ainsley?’ She said it as if it was highly unlikely. ‘I’m not sure what I can do.’
‘The thing is,’ I began, not sure exactly how to say what I needed to say, without it sounding ridiculous. ‘I’m not sure what she does, exactly, but she has her claws into Ainsley and she’ll do the same with your husband and Wax too. It’s what she does. We need to protect them and keep them safe.’
She looked down at her hands, holding her tissue, in her lap. I could tell she was warring with what to believe. She picked up a long pendant hanging around her neck and ran her fingers over the smooth green stone. ‘We searched for a very long time for answers about my son. What happened. The meaning of it all. And to think he was here all the time.’
I felt desperately sorry for her and was reminded again of my own mother and what she must be still going through. ‘He didn’t move on, because Ainsley hasn’t allowed him to. He was trying to free Lila,’ I said, trying to keep the desperation and hatred out of my voice and not spook her.
She shifted in her chair uncomfortably, still not convinced. ‘Can you ask Ollie something for me please?’ she said, still not getting that he could hear quite clearly what she was saying.
‘Go ahead,’ I said, looking straight at Ollie.
‘Can you ask him if he still remembers the little notes I put in his lunchbox when he first started school? He didn’t want to go, you see, and he said they helped him through the day.’ It was clever of her to pose a question only Ollie would know.
Ollie didn’t hesitate. ‘Tell her, I do, and I will never forget them: I love you to the moon and back and, if by chance, you get home before me, put the kettle on, I’m coming soon.’
It was a heartbreakingly charming message; just a silly saying they probably said between them again and again; that she’d always be there for him or never far. I repeated the message and she dissolved into sobs, burying her face in her hands. ‘Thank you,’ she said. I’d passed her test and she was ready to believe whatever I told her. I relayed it all.
‘What does Lila want?’ she said eventually, through gritted teeth.
‘The Elixir of Life. We think it’s in the mine.’
She straightened in her chair and looked formidable. ‘The mine is Bret’s. It always goes to the eldest surviving son, never to be reopened, shared with a sibling or partner in any way.’
That explained a lot. Jedediah had seen to it that no other generation would make the same mistake he did by giving his brother shares in the mine.
‘It also gives us a major piece of information,’ Ollie’s mother said, surprising us all. ‘However Lila is managing to exist in the real world, it can’t be permanent if she needs whatever’s in the mine.’
She was right. Lila wasn’t going to all this trouble for Ainsley’s benefit. This was huge. It meant there must be a time limit and we’d have to work fast.
Ollie’s mum was proving a lot stronger than I realised. She looked me directly in the eye with renewed determination. ‘What do you need me to do?’
Chapter 23
It was a relief that Wax wasn’t the only live person who could see me, but scary too. If Wax’s mum could then it probably meant anybody could and that put me in a vulnerable position. I still didn’t know what Lila was. At least when I was ghosting, no one knew where I was.
Wax’s mum introduced herself properly as Olivia, which figured; Ollie must be short for Oliver and named after her. I told her a white lie, that I was Ollie’s friend from school. It was partly true and easier for her to believe, as she knew most of his friends who died around the same time. Although it encouraged more tears when I told her they were all there, with Ollie, in the room.
When she’d calmed down, we formulated a plan to monitor and report back on everyone in the house. ‘You lay on thick the distraught, grieving mum, Olivia,’ I said. ‘Lila will continue to underestimate you. Her power and interest only seem to extend to the men. That should free you up to spy on anyone you want.’
‘No stretch there then,’ she said, with a wry sniff. ‘I can do that.’
I decided I liked her. She was much stronger than she looked and would be a good ally.
After making sure everyone agreed and knew their job, Ollie sent me back to Wax’s IP. It was still a mystery how Lila threw me out of it.
‘You’ll have the best chance of watching Wax. Just don’t let Lila see you,’ Ollie said. We’ll try to flit between him and my uncle … Stay safe,’ he finished.
I was alone, back in the sealed box on Wax’s IP. I dialled his phone. Navigating the fibre optics was becoming easier. My mind thought of it as one of those find-the-quickest route puzzles. Once I knew it, it was always the same way. Although, when it just rang and rang, I couldn’t tell if it was in the kitchen, but, with practice, I’m sure the GPS part would come.
In the end, Tallulah put me back on her Smartwatch and hung it out of a small breast pocket on the jeans jacket she borrowed constantly from Ollie. That way I could see straight ahead at what was going on.
We reached the kitchen and they were still there. Bile went straight to my mouth and my blood simmered. I couldn’t believe it. Wax didn’t seem at all worried about what had happened to me. They were seated together at the island, eating a nice breakfast, relaxed, in quiet conversation. Suddenly, the centre of my chest ached and felt empty, like someone had ripped out where my heart should be.
It took a full minute for him to notice any of us walk in. Lila immediately looked around her, ‘We’re not alone,’ she whispered.
It was good to know that she only sensed but couldn’t see exactly where we were. At least that’s how it seemed. It did make sense. She could see me on devices that were in the real world, the same as any other living person could, but Tallulah’s Smartwatch, just like my crutch, had followed her from death, and so it was as invisible as she was.
‘What are you doing, Wax?’ Ollie asked, as confused and as irritated by it as me.
Wax looked straight from Ollie to Tallulah and down to her watch, hanging at the front of her. ‘It’s OK, it’s just my brother,’ Wax said, ignoring the question.
