It was morning but I hadn’t slept much last night anyway, and I got the feeling he hadn’t slept at all, though I didn’t like to focus too much on what might have been keeping him awake. Right now, it was just me and him, and there was peace between our chaos, dragging me away.
Perhaps when I woke again, Niall would have turned to iron, never to let me go, and perhaps I didn’t mind that at all.
***
Three days passed while Niall was lost to the dark, and I stayed with him while he rode the black tide and his demons tried to drown him in a bleak sea. Mateo made me food, though I had to cart it all out to him from the kitchen because his collar went all zappy if he tried to go in there, but even when I tried to push cherry tomatoes between Niall’s teeth, he wouldn’t eat. Not even the extra juicy ones. Sometimes he stared at me and I swear I could see a whole world in his eyes. There were tiny people in there working on a mountain, rolling huge boulders up its hills only to lose their grasp halfway up and watch them crash all the way back to the bottom. It was an endless loop of unfulfilled need and it pained me that I couldn’t crawl in there and help with his boulders.
I’d never looked after anyone before - except a little matchstick man I used to keep in my pocket. He was really just a single matchstick with a leaf wrapped around him, but one day he’d fallen out of my pocket and blown away on the wind, his little leaf coat left behind. That was the day I found out that I was no good at protecting little creatures, and Niall wasn’t little, he was a huge beast built of muscle and fury. How could I look after him if I couldn’t even save my matchstick man? So I did the only thing I really wanted to do, and tried to make him laugh, desperate to see the smile of my madman drawing his lips into that sinister grin which made my stomach flutter.
Niall sat on the couch with a blanket on his knees which I’d put there as well as a snuggly woolly hat on his head. If he couldn’t be happy, at least he could be warm and fuzzy. Brutus lay at his feet, gnawing on a shoe and wagging his stumpy little tail.
Mateo stood to one side of the room, a dark shadow always watching from afar. He had barely come near me at all since he’d touched me in the swimming pool, and sometimes I caught an expression on his face that was so murderous, he looked like a vampire in desperate need of blood. But we were in the boring people world and if there was a place out there where magical beings roamed, then I was yet to find it. I’d sure as hell looked too. I’d once spent a night hooting to an owl in a tree just in case he might be hoarding my letter to Hogwarts. And don’t get me started on the time I’d stolen a kid’s pot of glitter and thrown it in my face just in case it would whisk me away to Zodiac Academy. I was an Aquarius – obvi – but I wouldn’t have just had air magic if I lived in that world, I’d have had the whole bunch of elements, earth, fire, water, everything. I’d have taken over the entire kingdom too, stolen the throne from the Celestial Heirs while shaking my ass in their hot, preppy faces.
I’d have been an evil Pegasus queen, a villain to be feared and revered, and I’d bring Mateo and Niall and Angry Jack with me too, and together we’d be an unstoppable band of villains. Mateo could really be a vampire then and Niall would be a basilisk, feeding on others’ pain while I rode Angry Jack across the land whenever he shifted into a white dragon and burned all the people we didn’t like, especially the stinky ones. Yeah, that was the life for me. Queen of everything, all powerful ruler of a magical world where not even the stars could stop me-
“Mi sol,” Mateo’s voice cut through my wild daydream and my head snapped towards him.
I was still standing on the coffee table, my arms poised above my head in a ballerina pose and I realised all the blood had drained from them.
“Oops sorry, I got lost in a fantasy of world domination,” I said with a shy smile and Mateo twitched a dark smirk at me.
“Your audience is distracted,” he muttered icily and I realised Niall wasn’t sitting in front of me anymore. He’d moved to the window with his blanket draped around his shoulders, staring off into the mist which clung to the ground outside.
“Niall, I was just about to do a circus show for you,” I huffed, jumping off the table and grabbing his hand.
He looked down at where our skin connected, energy sparking into my limbs as I looked up at him. And he did the starey thing again, gazing directly into my soul and weighing it in his palm. Did he find me wanting? Was the rust that clung to it off-putting to him, or did he like the roughened touch of it?
I reached up to draw one side of his lips higher, frowning as I jammed my thumb into the corner of his mouth and tried to make it stick in a smile. But the moment I dropped my hand, his face fell and a little whimper rose in my throat.
“I miss your happies,” I whispered, tears rising in my eyes. “Are you all hollow inside? Just a big, empty cave?” I asked, resting my hand against his chest to try and find his heart. The thump of it made relief rush through me and I lurched into his body, pressing my ear to it to hear it thunder just for me. “Mr Heart,” I spoke to it, cupping my hand around my mouth to keep the conversation private. “Do you know where his happies have gone? Where can I find them?”
Niall’s arm slid around me and his chin rested on my head, a heavy sigh leaving him and I shut my eyes, breathing in his rich, masculine scent. One moment, two, three, fifty. I stole a whole bunch in the arms of a man who was promised to someone else, then I realised my tears were soaking into his shirt and I lurched away, wheeling around and wiping them out of existence before he could see.
“Face paint!” I announced, running from the room to where Niall kept a stash of the stuff in the kitchen. I grabbed the colour palette along with a cup of water, some brushes and sponges then darted back to the lounge with a smile on my face.
Mateo caught my arm before I could make it back to Niall and my heart rocked like a boat on stormy waters as I looked up at him. His gaze swirled with deadly intentions and his fingers dug deeper into my arm as I stood there, his throat rising and falling. He let me go just as suddenly, leaving whitened marks on my arm and taking two steps away from me as he scored a hand down his face.
“Are you okay, Dead Man?” I asked and he nodded once stiffly, but there was something going on behind his gaze which I couldn’t work out.
I jogged over to Niall, guiding him to a chair and pushing him down into it before straddling his lap and setting up my face paint things on the arm, bouncing a little in excitement.
“Spider,” he rasped and I looked to him with a big ass smile on my face.
“Shhh.” I pressed my finger to his lips as I continued to bounce then started work on painting his face.
I knew exactly what he was going to be, a big smiley clown. And maybe when there was a huge red grin painted onto his lips, it would sink into his skin and coax a real smile out of him.
I bit my lip as I concentrated, finding I was pretty good at this actually. Better than a squirrel with an artistic flare, that was for sure.
When Niall’s face was ghost white, I leaned in nose to nose with him as I painted his eyes black and drew a line through the middle of them that ran down each of his cheeks and up onto his brow. His large hands suddenly clasped my back and he pulled me even closer, our breaths becoming one.