Sightlines

by Santion Hassell

  Elijah leaned back to meet his shifty gaze.

  “Or I could just stay here if you don’t want to go.” As pathetic as he sounded, Chase didn’t actually care. He’d be pathetic as fuck if it meant being with Elijah in whatever state he chose to reside in. “Never mind. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Elijah grabbed the front of his T-shirt. “I’ll go to California with you. I was just surprised, not weighing my options. At this point, you’re the only option that matters. I know we fought this big fight to straighten out the Community, but I don’t know that . . . I’m the best person to be involved anymore. There’s been too much awfulness.” Elijah shuddered. “And seeing people die is just . . . I just can’t.”

  When Elijah sagged in his arms and pressed his face to Chase’s chest, Chase wondered when he himself would finally react to everything that had happened. Would there be a point when he closed his eyes and be unable get the image of his father lying in the mud out of his head? When he’d feel like a monster because of the relief he’d felt in that moment?

  He didn’t think so. But, then, he’d never been able to react to the deaths that had happened at Evo. He’d never had any downtime from any of it. No time to think or feel.

  Chase closed his eyes, waiting for the moment when it all hit him, but all he felt was an overwhelming desire to take Elijah and get the hell out.

  “See, this is why we should leave,” he said. “I don’t want to be involved with the Community in an active way. They’ve fucked with me too much for me to ever trust anyone involved, including Kyger and Hale. Besides, can you see me on a board of directors?” Chase gave Elijah a pointed look, and nudged Elijah when he smiled. “Exactly.”

  “So we go to Cali.” Elijah kissed Chase’s jaw. “We start over, get stupid jobs—”

  “Or use our psychic shit to scam money.”

  “Or that. But first we need to talk to the others. Even if we take off as soon as everything is, like, settled, we need to stick around to see it all through. After all this, we owe it to ourselves and everyone else.”

  This was one of those times when Chase wished he was the asshole he’d always told himself, and everyone else, that he was, but he wasn’t. They’d thrown the chips in the air, and the only way he could walk away from this for good was to see where they all landed.

  “How do you feel?”

  The question startled Chase, and he met Holden’s troubled gaze. They were in the back of the same truck they’d driven from the city with Six driving and Elijah napping at his side. Jessica and Lia were in another vehicle, whereas Nate and Trent had stayed at the Farm with Lorelei and Shelby.

  “You probably don’t want to know,” Chase said. “My head is fucked right now. About Richard. About my mother.”

  Holden looked down with a slight headshake. “What happened to Lorelei is unimaginable.”

  Chase pressed his head against the seat and looked out the window again. “I wish I knew what to do. I hated her for all these years, and for all these years she was being tortured and assaulted in the same fucking place they’d tortured me. I feel like a piece of shit, and I want to help her, but I have no idea how.”

  Holden’s hand brushed his shoulder briefly. “You can help by supporting the decision she made to temporarily stay at the Farm. I know you and Nate didn’t like it, but . . . it’s her choice, Chase.”

  “Fuck, I know. Especially since there’s kids involved.” Chase pressed his forehead harder against the window. Trees rushed by them, and a steady snow had started again. The blur of white reminded him of that drive with the terror twins, and the destructive power of his telekinesis. Would snow always remind him of that, or was it because it was so recent? Either way, moving to Cali was starting to look better and better. “Maybe . . . maybe she’ll want to come away with me once everything is sorted.”

  “I bet she’d love that you want her to,” Holden said softly.

  Chase sighed softly and glanced at his brother. “What about you? How are you feeling? You just watched your father get blown away.”

  Holden looked startled. “You’re trying to be nice to me.”

  “Uh.”

  “You are.” The barest trace of a smile formed on Holden’s face. “You’re trying to be compassionate. I can feel it.”

  Chase sneered. “Don’t use your empathy on me just because my brain is too fried to hold up a decent wall.”

  “You don’t need to shield yourself from me, you know. I’m not going to use that single incident of compassion against you.”

  “You say that now, but next thing we know we’ll be entering the city to a fucking ticker tape parade. Everyone celebrating the fact that Chase Payne found a heart somewhere.”

  “Somewhere. Right.” Holden laughed softly. “To answer your question, I don’t know how to feel. I stopped thinking of Richard as my father when I found out what he was doing to my mother and those other women. To you and Six and everyone else. And he was never . . . really a father to me, anyway. He was an abuser.”

  “He was,” Chase said slowly. “And I’m not sad that he’s dead either, just so you know. Maybe I would have been before, but anything . . . potentially good I’d felt about him in the past died once he told me I’d been research. A science project that he let Jasper tinker with.” He scoffed out a laugh when Holden flinched. “It’s fine, man. That isn’t even the worst of what he’s done. That was just before I knew my mother had been there the whole time.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “For what? You didn’t know. I didn’t tell anyone. I let them make me believe that it would somehow be worse for me if . . . I talked about it.” It was so easy to call that decision stupid while looking at it all in retrospect, but gaslighting and manipulation wasn’t easy to identify while it was happening. Especially when you were isolated and more vulnerable than you were willing to admit. No one wanted to believe they were another person’s prey. “So, nah, I don’t feel a fucking thing. Just relief he’s gone. Big J is gone too.” Chase glanced outside again. “But I get it if me saying it outright makes you feel uncomfortable or whatever.”

  “It doesn’t,” Holden said. “But like I said, I also don’t know how to feel. Right now, the only thing I can identify is . . . exhaustion. I just want this to be over, but I don’t think it will be for a while.”

  “What will you do when it’s over?”

  Holden made a soft sound. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Think of it now,” Chase pushed. “What are you and this big bearded bastard gonna do?”

  Six glanced at them in the rearview mirror. “Fuck and sleep together in a real bed without it being blizzard conditions or surrounded by other people.”

  Chase snorted out a laugh. You had to love a no-nonsense lumbersexual with an attitude problem.

  Holden smiled at Six, and the tension eased from his shoulders. It was weird seeing him be all in love and shit. He was less smug and put a little more care into the words he used. Like he was going out of his way to not be insufferable. Kind of how Chase wanted to not be so much of a bastard for Elijah. Funny how falling in love made you want to be a better person. Or at least less of a total dickhead.

  “I want to go back to running Evolution,” Holden said finally. “And I want to help fix what my father did to the Community. It’s only right.”

  “It’s not your responsibility,” Six said, keeping his eyes on the road. “But I’m in it with you.”

  “I know you are, and I know it’s not. But I’m standing by my mother. Especially since she’s about to face the board.”

  “Yeah, about that . . .”

  Chase spent the rest of the ride telling them about Elijah’s vision and the plan he’d come up with to challenge Kyger and Hale if they decided to go the route of spitting on their own promise.

  “Do you think it will work?” Holden asked as they crossed the bridge into Manhattan. “Or will they make a power grab of their own?”

  “Don’t
know, but it’s not a bluff. If these people have learned anything about me, or us, it should be that we don’t sleep on our promises. If they want to play games . . .” Chase glanced at Elijah as he stirred, waking from his nap. “I can make things really uncomfortable for them before we get gone.”

  They looked like absolute garbage rocking up to the CW. Half of them were in outfits that had seen far better days, and the other half of them were sporting the all-white ensembles the Farm’s lemmings had worn daily. As ragtag as they were, they had no business striding in with a list of demands, but that’s exactly what they did.

  Kyger and Hale sat at the head of a new conference table exactly as they had before, but this time both were decked out in suits reminiscent of Richard Payne. Chase didn’t have to take it as a sign that they weren’t going to play ball. He already knew.

  “Where are the others?” Hale asked, looking past him, Jessica, Lia, and Holden. “I thought the entire crew was present.”

  Chase crossed his arms over his chest, trying hard to look imposing in a white hoodie. “No worries about that. They’re close by. Just no point in us all gathering at once.”

  Kyger snorted. “Don’t trust us?”

  “Not to turn at the last minute and make us all disappear?” Chase twisted his mouth to the side, pretending to think. “Mmm. Nope. Can’t say that we do.”

  Kyger and Hale glanced at each other. The only thing they had going for them right then was the fact that neither appeared surprised or offended by the assertion.

  “Makes sense,” Kyger admitted. “We haven’t exactly give any of you reason to trust in our word.”

  “He’s right.” Hale looked like she wanted to push away from the table to pace the room, but coped with it by gripping the edge of it instead. “We didn’t know the extent of what was going on at the Farm, or Richard’s activities, but—”

  “Horseshit.” Jessica leveled them with a cold look. She’d been in no-bullshit mode ever since Chase and Elijah had broken the news about the vision. It honestly looked like she was hoping for a reason to hand their asses to them, and had just found it. “Regardless of the details, you knew psychics were going to that property and not returning. And you were handing him the most vulnerable psys who came to the CW, for whatever purpose he intended, even if you didn’t know what that purpose was.”

  “Jessica, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” Hale smoothed her palms over the glass table, but this time it looked like she was trying not to swing a punch. Her smile was razor-sharp and clearly sending undertones of cut a bitch. “You followed your husband out there years ago. How do we know you weren’t involved?”

  “Because you’re a fucking psychic,” Chase said, incredulous. “It’s not like we’re dicking around grasping at straws here, lady.”

  Kyger inhaled deeply, the sound of someone who thought they were dealing with angry toddlers, and that set Chase off like nothing else. However, before he could speak, it was Lia who strode forward.

  “This is bullshit,” she said, looking between them. “I may not be part of your Community, but that’s because I knew from the start that something about it was off. The code of silence, the fear people had of crossing the higher social tiers, all of the clambering to be the best and the most talented, the most powerful—it wasn’t healthy. The cover-up with the disappearances was a large part of it, but not all of it. And you can’t put all that on Richard and Jasper. You can’t deny you let them pick off marginalized psychics for their experiments, and you definitely can’t fucking deny that you have no desire to change your ways.”

  “We came here today to talk,” Kyger said, a flash of annoyance in his face. “We could have simply turned you away, but here we are. Maybe we won’t do exactly what we discussed—”

  “You lied,” Holden said. “You said you would be willing to change the board if we took on my father, and you lied.”

  “You bombarded us.” This time, Hale did jump to her feet. “We barely had time to process anything before you were making ultimatums and demands.”

  “Right, and now that we put our lives at risk to hold up our end of the bargain, you want to back out,” Lia said. “Do you deny it? Because if you do, then you’re lying right to our faces.”

  Genuine frustration washed over Hale. After a moment of standing ramrod straight and glaring, she raked a hand through her hair. “You don’t understand. None of you do. CW was our baby. It was all we ever wanted for psychics. A safe place—”

  “Where you could save the ones you found worthy and dump the defective ones at a creepy farm like serial killers?” Chase raised his eyebrows when the question earned him a death stare. “’Cause that’s what you did, so save your fucking sob story.”

  Hale glowered at him, but Kyger awkwardly remained in his chair. He gripped the arm rests, fingers closed around them, and seemed to be waiting for the entire meeting to go to shit. If he was all Hale was working with, no wonder she was so high-strung and prone to pacing rapidly.

  “The fact of the matter is, we thank you for your help with Richard and the Farm, and are in the process of . . . cleaning up that mess right now . . .”

  Beside Chase, Holden cringed but held his tongue.

  “But ultimately,” Hale continued. “We’re unwilling to step down from the board. This Community was our brainchild. We won’t just turn it over to a bunch of self-righteous children who have zero clue what it takes to run something so complex, not to mention you have no idea who all our contacts are within various government agencies.”

  Kyger nodded and finally stood up. “Exactly. You think you can do this, but you’ll need us. Remaining invisible takes more finesse than you have.”

  Chase had no good response for that. When he glanced at Jessica, he realized she didn’t either. And her pale cheeks had flushed, likely from the irritation of having to accept that fact.

  “After everything that has happened,” she said quietly, “the only capacity in which you will stay on the board is if more board members are added.” Jessica glanced at the three of them, her gaze lingering on Chase briefly before shifting to the other two. Somehow, she knew without having directly asked him, that he had zero interest in leading the Community. Or being part of it any more. “Me, Lia, and Holden.”

  “Of course,” Kyger said dryly. “Trade one Payne for two more.”

  “Two less psychopathic ones,” Chase said. “And Lia is a pretty bomb candidate for leadership considering she is the only one who didn’t grow up in the Comm blinded by its supposed greatness. She can keep all of you in check.”

  Lia glanced at him in astonishment.

  “And you?” Kyger asked Chase. “What’s your role?”

  “Heh.” Chase slid his hands into his pockets. “My role is to stay as far the fuck away from you people as possible. I’ll take off with my boy and my brother, and keep my distance. But I do have a suggestion—add a couple of Ex-Comm members to the board as well. If they’re not allowed a voice, they’ll go on assuming the Community hasn’t changed, and all those alienated people who felt the need to come together the way they have?” Chase scoffed, looking between Kyger and Hale. “They’re gonna come for you.”

  “Who do you propose?” Jessica asked. “Damon?”

  “Or his brother, Xander. And Shelby.” Chase spread his hands and looked from Kyger to Hale. “It’s the only way we’re gonna bridge this shit. So do the thing, and stick to it, or else . . .”

  Hale lifted her chin, seeming to have been expecting a threat. Chase winked.

  “Or else I come back and make things uncomfortable for everyone in the Comm.”

  “How so?” Kyger asked. “You blow us up?”

  “Nah. But I will blow up your spots by broadcasting everything about the Farm, Richard, and the murders at Evo to each and every psy in the Community.” Chase spread his hands. “There won’t be any coming back from that, friends. All of this would fall down on your damn heads.”

  The color drained
from Kyger’s already pasty face. Hale, on the other hand, regarded Chase with grim acceptance. There was nothing she could do, nothing either of them could do, but cooperate.

  They stood on opposite sides of the glass table, the original founders of the Community and the people who wanted to usurp and reform it. A standoff to see who would cave first, and whether Hale and Kyger were more interested in preservation than power.

  After a weighted silence, Hale sat down.

  It wasn’t hard to find Elijah.

  Even in a high-rise, there was an invisible rope tying them together that allowed Chase to track him down with barely any effort at all. He was on the tenth floor, standing in a small room that had nothing but one bunk bed and a desk beneath a window. There was nobody inhabiting the room now, but Elijah stood next to the wooden bunk and dragged his fingers along the frame.

  “I know you like stroking wood, but this is a little ridiculous.”

  Elijah looked over his shoulder. “You’re an idiot.”

  “I know, right.” Chase leaned against the doorframe. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Remembering.” Elijah pressed his palm flat against the broad side separating the two mattresses and sighed. “This was where I stayed when I first came to the CW. There was a lady named Marilyn . . . a staff member. She kept apologizing for putting me in a ‘youth bunk’ as she called it, but said it was the only thing available. I laughed because she was obviously just being polite. I’m a short bastard.”

  “Sure as fuck are.” Chase pushed away from the doorframe and strolled over to Elijah. “So . . . good memories of this shitty room?”

  “It’s not that bad. And yes. After running from home with hardly anything, hitching to New York, and homelessness . . . this place was legit a haven for me. I felt so protected. Being surrounded by people who understand you after a lifetime of feeling like an outsider is pretty fucking powerful.”

  “No doubt.”

  Elijah breathed in deeply, briefly closing his eyes, like he wanted to memorize everything about the room. Chase didn’t pretend to understand nostalgia. The only thing he was nostalgic about was the first time he’d fucked Elijah in the storage room at Evo.