They watched. They didn’t stop. And for once that was all right. For once it was hope and not fear that sent acid bubbling through my veins.
“I don’t know what you want with Cal,” I said hoarsely. Junior was terrifyingly intelligent in his way and I hadn’t seen it. Smart enough that I could taste some sort of bleach solution he had sprayed down the back of my throat while I was unconscious to keep me from screaming. I knew the Grendel could hear me, ragged whisper or not. Tapered predatory ears were made to hear fearful breaths and screams far away.
“I don’t know why you wanted him born and why you watch him, but that monster upstairs”—the Grendel showed an improbable stretch of metal teeth, laughing; it was laughing, at the word monster—“is going to kill him. He could be killing him right now.”
No. No.
“Whatever you want with Cal you’ll never get it now. Not if he dies”—not if he’s is slaughtered—” upstairs. Do you understand me?” I demanded desperately.
The Grendel blinked slowly but the scarlet of its eyes flared like a rising sun and it faded into the sliver of night. How pathetic was I, how much of a failure that my best hope for saving my little brother depended on siccing one monster on another? I didn’t care. I’d take any hope I could get.
I felt the nauseating pain of my thumb slam one more time against the pole and pop out of the joint. There are times pain isn’t pain; it’s relief and it’s hope and it was life. My life. Cal’s life. I folded my fingers into as narrow a wedge as I could, tore them out of the metal cuff, and I ran.
I wasn’t lithe and sleek as my martial arts teachers would’ve hoped. The one cuff still fastened to one wrist and rattling, I stumbled up the stairs, falling once with splinters ramming under my short nails and hitting my dislocated thumb. It should’ve hurt. It should’ve paralyzed me with agony, made me curl into a ball as pain exploded through me.
I didn’t feel a thing.
I slipped in my own blood dripping from my wrists as I hit the cheap kitchen linoleum and kept moving. The attic I spotted in a nerve-freezing moment. The pull-down stairs in the hallway were waiting for me and I went up them as clumsily as the basement ones, but I went fast. Speed over form. Life over death. There was dried blood on them. Long soaked into the raw wood. Cleaner wouldn’t get that out of the grain, would it? No, never. There was death on every step upward, but this wasn’t Jacob’s ladder. This trail of screams and mortality didn’t raise you up—it led to Hell. I knew it.
Cal . . . God, Cal, don’t be dead.
In the space above there was a skylight and it let in enough streetlights and faint painpricks, because they hurt—what they showed—hurt, of stars as well as a quarter moon.
I saw it all.
Cal’s shirt was neatly folded, such a neat serial killer was Junior, on a table of knives and scalpels and other things that wouldn’t leave my memory as long as I lived. My brother was there, his hands duct taped behind him and his dark head flopping loosely with chin down against his chest. He was facing the wall, slumped bonelessly in a far corner.
Limp.
Unmoving.
Rivulets of blood on the floor.
My brother.
Foulmouthed, purple handprints on the refrigerator, smart and lazy, read stacks of comic books instead of schoolbooks, who’d taken on a raging, drunk Sophia to save my money for college, who taught me the difference between shades of gray and black and white and lied to little old ladies if there were cookies in it for him. My brother who I’d seen born and who I’d let die because I didn’t believe him soon enough.
I didn’t look for Junior. I didn’t care. Kill me, don’t kill me—I did not care.
I pulled Cal up in my arms. He wasn’t Sophia’s, he wasn’t the Grendel’s, he wasn’t Junior’s. He was mine and I would keep him as long as I could.
Forever if I could. With my brain crumbling at the edges, fracturing through the middle, forever seemed . . . right.
I pushed his hair from his eyes, leaving my blood on his face. They were closed, black lashes against paper white skin. There was a sluggishly bleeding slice straight across his chest a few inches below his nipple line. The top slash of a J.
“I like to sign my work.”
No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. His blood should be inside him, not out. I wiped a hand frantically over the blood, trying to push it back in the wound, back inside Cal. I only ended up smearing it everywhere over Cal’s stomach and thin chest, making it worse.
How could it be worse?
The thought staggered me.
Swallowing broken glass that had nothing to do with the bleach, I thought numbly . . . wait . . . no . . . the dead don’t bleed. And they don’t breathe. Cal was doing both. I clutched him tighter, so damn small, and all there was in my world.
Junior. Where was Junior? Where was the dead man?
Someone was growling savagely. It might have been me.
There was another crumpled pile in the opposite corner of Cal. This bundle was much larger. I settled Cal against the far wall, carefully making sure the blood wasn’t as much as I’d thought. He wasn’t bleeding out. It was a slow flow, I could see now. For a moment it could wait. Cal wouldn’t mind, considering what I had planned.
I limped over and nudged clothes and muscle disguised as fat over onto his back. Junior’s eyes were half open and bloody foam framed his mouth. That would be from the vicious slashes that penetrated his clothes and several inches of flesh from the base of his neck to just above his groin. I caught the faint foul smell that had to be the spill of intestinal contents. The room had a colored tint to the air, red as the blood all around us, from the crimson moon shining through the tiny skylight made of scarlet glass.
The Grendel had listened.
It had come and gone, but it had listened. It had done what I couldn’t do.
I didn’t know what that meant, but it was worth it. Right now it was worth it.
But it hadn’t finished the job. Oh, given three minutes and Junior would be as dead as the victims in his basement, but the Grendel had left me a present.
Or it might be a reminder.
They were watching Cal. I needed to do that too and do it better.
I picked up the knife that lay across Junior’s slack palm. It had blood on it, Cal’s blood. Junior didn’t get any of that. It didn’t belong to him. I methodically wiped the blade on my pants. “I have a line, you know. It’s been moving around lately, but I have one,” I said cold and brittle as frost. “You, motherfucker, crossed it.”
I rammed the knife through flesh and bone and into his heart.
The faint uneven beat vibrated through the metal, the handle, and into my hand before finally stopping. He touched my little brother—I stopped his heart.
It was a fair trade.
15
Cal
Present Day
It wasn’t fair.
Robin and Ishiah made plans. I guessed that’s what they did. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care. I had my own plan. If I could lure Jack far enough away from Niko, then I could open a gate inside him. Nik wouldn’t die from the mass of moving crystal-feathered shrapnel that was the inner Jack and I’d try to gate away in time to avoid the same fate. If I made it, great. If I didn’t, shit happened. I’d go down fighting. It was the best end I had hope for in my life anyway.
Life wasn’t fair, childish to complain, but there you go.
I would save Nik—that was the bottom line. He hadn’t survived twelve years ago to die at the whim or hand of the same monster now.
Life wasn’t fair and who told you that it was?