Disclaimer: ...do I really have to say it again?

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Fallen (Working Title)

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It had to happen. Since the night my mother married Richard Blake, it was just waiting to happen. Of course it was.

I should have known. The moment I lay eyes on my stepbrother I should have known. Of course I didn’t have a clue

“So, Alexiel, who was your night time visitor?”

The moment my mom said it, I knew I was dead. The calm nonchalance as she blurted it out at the breakfast table screamed murder. She never calls me by my full name unless I’m in more trouble than I can shovel.

Every sound in the Blake–Du Val dining room went AWOL.

Rich, who doubled as my stepdad and homeroom teacher, even looked up from his morning newspaper, something I’d never seen him do since he moved in. There was nothing more important to him in the morning until register.

Oh yeah, I was so dead.

Deader than dead. Mince meat. No anesthetic in this operation, and a really blunt scalpel.

I didn’t doubt that my mom knew as much about inflicting pain as she did about curing it. Not that she could make my appendix burst, but she could, for instance, phone my father.

My father, who would laugh it off, until my great-grandmother got a sniff of it, and came down on him like truckload of mercury. Then it would be lecture here, lecture there, you’re grounded, no more Prada, and you are getting married at the end of the week.

It was just the kind of excuse Claire would be looking for to get me under the hood, and ship me off to some villa on an Australian beach, where I would spend the rest of my life running around making the life of my husband miserable.

Because my fiancé? I don’t like him. I would say I hate him, but I pity him too much for that, so loath is quite enough.

I thought about the many horrible things Ewen O’Conner would do to my stepbrothers, who he currently blames for my disinterest in him, if this ever came to his ears, as I sheepishly looked up from my Special K and swallowed. Hard.

I knew that look on my mother’s face. No amount of denial and lies–not my specialty in the first place–could get me out of this one.

Like, when I tried to tell her I didn’t eat the pie she made for Thanksgiving when I was eight. There was not a crumb to prove me guilty, but she just took one look at me and made me go straight to bed, without dinner.

That’s harsh, especially if your name is Alexiel Du Val and food is your hobby.

Alongside getting into sticky situations. Not that it’s a hobby I particularly enjoy, but it happens so frequently that it just has to be a hobby. I don’t get a kick out of people wanting to kill me, yet recently it seems like a lot of people just can’t stand having me around.

But if I was going to be dead, well then Adrian just got himself booked on a one way ride to the afterlife, since mom, Rich, Ewen or I were going to kill him. Preferably very slowly, with as much excruciating pain as possible.

Especially when I saw his smug smirk as he looked across the table at me.

“Night time visitor?” my sister went suddenly, glass of juice paused halfway to her mouth, blinking tiredly at my mom over the brim of her specs. “That’s highly improbable Samantha.”

No one but Silver–who is in no way related to anyone in our odd family but me–ever used my mom’s first name. Even my stepbrothers called her mom, and Rich always referred to her as honey, sweetheart, or ‘your mother’. To everyone else she was just Dr Blake.

Silver got away with calling her Samantha because, well, she’s Silver. Silver gets away with any and everything. Like only wearing long sleeved men’s shirts and baggy jeans all year round.

I mean, for most other females this would mean social death. But not Silver, oh no. She has a magnetic field that just sucks in males or, according to my ex-best friend, females.

Still, we both agree that she now has a boyfriend, though we can’t figure out who he is.

“Jeshh, don’t use words that big this early in the morning,” Julian, the younger of my wretched stepbrothers and most recent member of the household from hell, said, looking mildly amused. My shriveling glare bounced right off his toothpaste ad grin. “And why is it that improbable?”

Silver put down the concoction–equal parts grapefruit, lemon, orange and tomato juice–she insisted on downing for breakfast every morning, and began to matter-of-factly tick off her fingers.

“One, she has too much common sense,” she didn’t actually look like she believed that, “to do something as stupid as have night time visitors.” When she smiled at Julian it was like someone cocking a revolver. “And, two, besides you there really isn’t anyone who would want to visit her at night.”

The sip of coffee Rich took sprayed across the table, though I managed to avoid getting any on my pale pink camisole. Big eyed behind his large round glasses, Rich stared at Silver. “What?”

Silver just gave him a look. No one gives a look better than Silver.

“Oh.” Rich cleared his throat self-consciously. “You were joking.”

Still smiling Silver returned her attention to Julian, who’d gone mildly red under his beach boy tan. “Anyway, three, I slept in her room last night, and if there had been any visitors, believe me I’d have known.”

Satisfied that this would satisfy everyone else she picked up the glass again.

“What do you mean, you slept in her room?” my mother interrupted her attempt at getting the bio toxin past her natural gagging reflex, glancing back and forth between her and me. “Where did she sleep?”

When I was seven I made my mom a Best-Mother-In-The-Universe Award out of pink cardboard and glitter glue. When a teacher in fifth grade asked us to write an essay about our idols, and other people wrote about people like Superman or Mohamed Ali, I wrote about my mom. Everyone loves my mother anyway, since she’s the only surgeon in Chateau Noir. She is probably the most stable person in my life.

I utterly adore her.

But sometimes, sometimes she is just a little too good at smelling lies before they even form in anyone’s mind.

However Silver is the queen of bullshit. “In her bed,” she sighed in exasperation, clonking down the glass. “We were having some girl talk and I decided to sleep over. You must have heard us, we were giggling around in there like harpies.” Another punch to my pride that I suffered silently. “Night time visitor, my ass.”

Mom no longer looked coldly murderous. “Oh,” she said uncertainly, “I just thought, I heard a male voice.”

Silver’s final blow was a raised black brow, her only feature, beside her eyelashes, not staggeringly pale. Are-you-trying-to-insult-me it said, with attitude.

Wordlessly everyone returned to their former occupations.

I would have jumped at her with joy if that hadn’t been a giveaway of the blatant bullshit she’d made the Blake–Du Val household eat like hot doughnuts in December.

The entire thing hadn’t come without a few kicks in the teeth, but hell was it worth it. I was spared the mortification of having to slaughter the smirking hottie sitting across from me, before someone else decided to.

Okay, so what, you may be asking yourself, was said hottie doing in my bed the first place?

… I wish I could lie about that one too. The truth is just so unbearably unbearable it hurts to think about it.

Sleeping. That is the god honest truth. The only reason Adrian Blake, all lean six foot two of him, snuck into my room before sunset every night, was to hog the bed and the duvet. Because, well, he’s afraid of the dark.

I know, I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t seen him almost drink himself to death. But I did, found him passed out in his flat, and I tell you something, that is a sight that will forever haunt me.

What was I to do? I tried to get him to go to counseling, because shrinks aren’t really that bad. Silver frequents them when we live with our great-grandmother in Paris, and she didn’t turn out…

Okay, bad example. But there are so many of them, they can’t be all bad.

But Adrian fought me to the bone. So I gave him a cross to ward off evil–I was fourteen, give me a break–and told him he could sleep in my room.

Which became my bed, a ridiculously large beast made for the likes of him and Silver, not toothpicks like me.

Innocent I tell you. Totally.

So sometimes he mistakes me for a teddy bear, but nothing more. Not like I mind, he can mistake me for a teddy any day.

The problem is, I’m not the only teddy bear in his life. I’m pretty sure, that I’m not the only one, which takes most of the pleasure out of it.

I mean, what do I expect? Adrian, and Julian for that matter, should come with little labels. Warning: Hot. Could get burned, badly, and never get over it.

Because if there is one thing I will never get over it’s Adrian Blake. Actually, I think I may be getting obsessed. The other day I stalked him.

I didn’t mean to. I had every intention of just bunking school and finishing a calculus paper I’d been struggling with since forever. I faked some bad cramps and my mom asked no more questions.

And since Adrian has an IQ of one eighty or something like that, I thought, let me go over to the flat and ask him for help.

Originally the flat started out as a guest house in the backyard, but soon after my mom and Rich got married Adrian moved there instead. It was big and white, all modern and extremely cold compared to the three hundred and fifty year old house we lived in.

And I mean house. With eight bedrooms, not counting the attic and the basement, where Silver lives–for lack of better synonym–we have space for another pair of twins.

Not that Nicholas and Tasha, my other half siblings, closing in on fifteen months now, aren’t enough. They were the result of my mom’s happy union with Rich, I don’t even want to think about that, and yet another reason for me to stop thinking about Adrian. Through the twins we are practically related by blood.

Whatever, like my hormones care. My body betrays me at every turn, however many resolutions I make not to be in love with Adrian.

I’m not you know, just infatuated.

Infatuated and in desperate need of calculus help. I’d gotten as far as the kitchen door, which is the most direct route into our backyard, when I saw Adrian lift something out of the trunk of his Porsche’s trunk.

Something decidedly human shaped, wrapped in black plastic bags, sealed with duck tape.

Don’t believe for a moment that I thought it might have been a… you know, body. I didn’t.

Really, what killer in his right mind would be taking a body out of his trunk?

Not that killers are ever in their right mind.

I didn’t think that. I went straight up to the flat after he’d carried the thing in the door, and looked through the window.

Okay, so I ducked while crossing the yard, and made sure not to let the gravel crunch too much under my feet, and I kind of peeked in, but what’s the difference?

Adrian carried the thing upstairs. I carefully, er, quickly rounded the house, since the front door was locked and picked the lock of his kitchen door.

Picked being a strong word. Witches don’t pick locks, they just open doors. On the many occasions my grandmère locks me into my room I have cultivated a talent for opening doors.

I snuck–I mean, walked up the stairs and stopped at the landing. There were two bedrooms here, one of which Adrian used, the other which usually stood empty.

Both doors were closed, but I could hear Mozart or something classical like that–Strauss, Beethoven?–coming from the unused room.

I didn’t know Adrian liked classical music. Truth be told there was preciously little I knew about Adrian. Intrigued I peeked through the keyhole.

The moment I ducked down the door opened and I found myself staring at the mildly surprised face of Adrian himself. “What on earth…”

He shut the door as he trailed off, his expression becoming stern. “Out,” he said.

“But-“ I protested as he took me by the shoulders and turned me around. My glance of the room only portrayed a slight chaos.

“Out,” he repeated.

“Adrian,” I whined, imitating Candy, his ex-girlfriend, batting my eyelashes.

“Out. Now.”

He won. I left. When he snuck into my room at dusk and I raised the subject, he ignored me. I got the hint.

Last night I’d tried another attack,one that involved lots of tickling and loud noises. That someone would hear us just slipped my mind.

At least I was safe for now.

Or so I thought, at least until I clambered out of our family van–a car we only owned because sometimes it was forced to take all eight members of my immediate family–and straightened to the sight of a black men’s dress shirt buttoned to reveal a hint of Victoria’s secrets.

Have I mentioned that my sister sometimes causes people to get nosebleeds?

“So,” Silver purred, mint ice-cream eyes glinting, “who was he?”

Brain freeze. My father has assured me that this has to link back to a genetic trait because he too finds himself frequently affected by this complete loss of control over all though processes and body movements in dangerous situations.

All I could come up with was, “It’s not what you think.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. Spill.”

Usually if Silver used that tone on anyone, anyone, it meant that she got what she wanted. No one ever denied my sister; tall, blonde seventeen-year-old goddess, who cold pass for twenty-four at the drop of a coin. No one.

“Can’t,” I, in an act of commendable stupidity, managed to choke out.

Silver smiled and I knew I was going to be sorry.

“Alright then,” she said with the melodiousness of someone who finds everything on earth highly amusing. She turned to go but paused and looked back at me. “I meant what I said earlier. You’re a smart girl Lexie.” There was something disturbingly innocent about the smile when she added, “But don’t forget to use protection.”

I glared after her retreating back as she drifted off to her homeroom, hands shoved deep into her back pockets. Only she didn’t drift. Neither did she swagger, or sway her hips, but she did something as she walked that made me wonder sometimes if she was quite mortal.

Then of course there was the snake; blacker than tar, with eyes like polished obsidian, he definitely swayed, head moving like a pendulum across her back. Thanatos seemed to be watching me, and his tongue shot out teasingly.

Tell me, what kind of mentally stable person lets a python wrap itself around her neck and go to school like that? Who, other than Silver Du Val?

She wasn’t making this any easier, when it wasn’t fair to begin with. If I told her who the nighttime visitor was, I betrayed Adrian’s trust. I didn’t and she deserted me to the dangers that lay between the parking lot and my homeroom.

This wasn’t the first time she’d done it though, since we’d gotten back from our last stay in Paris. With a sinking feeling I realized that she was surrendering me to my demons on purpose.

“When you want to be you can be surprisingly clever,” the lord of hell said smoothly as he stepped up next to me. I tried not to wince, vainly. “Not happy to see me, cherie?”

This was the reason I barely ate anymore in the mornings. I felt sick, and at the same time a calming numbness spread over my brain. “What,” I hissed as I snapped around, “do you want?”

It was by no means what every other female–and sometimes male–who caught sight of Ewen O’Connor did. I wanted to have smelling salt disposers installed in the bathrooms for exactly that reason.

Ewen blinked his long, gold tipped lashes at me in an expression of doe eyed hurt. “You don’t have to be so mean this early in the morning.”

Years ago, when I was young and stupid–younger and stupider anyway–I’d done exactly what every other girl in his immediate vicinity did, and fallen for the entire innocent, hallowed Adonis thing he’d been playing for far too long. And while my stomach suddenly knotted in a painful reminder that I was just a teenager and not some untemptable rock, I didn’t melt now.

My emancipation in that respect began a few weeks back when I beat him over the head with a piece of his own door, after he kidnapped my stepbrother and threatened to kill him.

Let me tell you, that felt good.

“Actually,” I said, smiling pleasantly in an attempt to imitate Silvers cool, “I do. It gives me great satisfaction.”

I moved to sidestep him but he cut my way off. “Come now, Alexiel,” he murmured my name with the silky voice of a man who knew his way with women, “don’t be like that.”

He was close enough for me to smell his aftershave, something expensive and imported. I was where every girl I knew, with the exception of Silver, wanted to be, ever since he followed me across the Atlantic to the once idyllic Château Noir. “This is no way to treat your fiancé.”

That made even my stomach go cold. “I might have signed that bloody contract,” I spat, “but no where on that frigging piece of paper does it say I have to be nice to you.” Aware of how dangerously close I’d gotten to his face I stepped back and added in my best impression of Adrian, “Now beat it. You’re causing a scene.”

Only that when Adrian spoke he also had the advantage of six feet two and the chilliest blue eyes, the likes of which had never been seen on anything but arctic wolves.

Although all five feet four of me did not make the same impression I did get the first real emotion to grace Ewen’s features; cold, hard anger.

The contract was a sore point, for both of us. In it I swore to dutifully marry him, in return for another few years to spend with my mother in my hometown.

This irked Ewen for some reason. He probably found it very hard to acknowledge that someone would have to be forced to spend the rest of her life with him.

“Better get to class then, mademoiselle Du Val,” he said, voice chocked with control. “I hope you finished your assignment.” Then he turned and strode off.

By the looks I got from some of the other student body I was the only one happy to see him go.

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AN: Heh. This is no good. Will go cry now. But it gets better in the next chapter! Too bad that might take a few days...