The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I swatted the memory away. Emmett was coming at me, the knife a hot white line in my vision, and I clamped down around his wrist. I twisted, and with a grunt, he released the blade. It clattered on the boards next to me.

  He was smiling, but not with his eyes.

  “Don’t do it again.”

  “You learned something, didn’t you? They’re not just going to sit and wait for you to come at them. They’re not going to roll over for you. They’ve been doing this a hell of a lot longer than you, and they’re better than you, and they’re nastier than you, and if you keep up your chickenshit and don’t try to get as strong as you can, they’re going to kill you. And I’m not going to some dumbass tweaker’s funeral.”

  That last part, with the hook of his smile, put me over the edge. I reached for him psychically. He tried to bring up the memory, but this time I was ready for him, and I forced my way past it until I floated in the dark emptiness at the center of his mind.

  He wanted to see me be strong? He wanted to see me use my abilities? Fine. Great. Perfect. He was going to get a taste of what I could do.

  It wasn’t an exact science. It wasn’t anything as simple as flipping through a stack of photographs or turning the pages on a calendar. Part of it was like tuning in a radio station, and I focused on grief, pain, anger. And part of it was about focus. Images washed over me: Emmett as a boy standing over a bicycle with a flat tire; Emmett on the cusp of puberty, a giant pimple swelling on his nose, while a group of boys laughed at him; Emmett dishing himself Rocky Road out of a paper carton. They were all from too long ago, and I let them rush past me. More images. And more. I sifted as best as I could and tried to hurry. Time didn’t stop when I was in his head, not exactly; it was warped. I didn’t know how long I had before he tried to get away from me.

  What I wanted was deeper, more visceral. And recent. I tracked it by its scent: total despair, self-hatred, loathing. Then I saw it: the knife coming up in his hand, coming down, the supple resistance of the muscles layering Makayla’s stomach and then steel piercing flesh. Blood squirted out, hot, and I brought the knife up again, brought it—

  My world whited out. I was distantly aware that a star had collided with my eye. Then, with a slightly clearer sense, I realized I was on my back staring up at the ceiling, and my right eye was the size of a baseball. He had punched me. And he’d done a pretty damn good job of it. I blinked; the ceiling bulged, shrank, and settled. Something was whistling.

  Pushing myself up, I froze. Emmett hunched forward in the rocking chair, face buried in his hands, his whole body shaking with laughter. Silent laughter. But the jerking motions of his shoulders were violent, and he still wasn’t making any noise, just that horrible shrill of air that I realized was his breath.

  I got to my knees. The room bulged again. My eye threatened to drop out of my head. Then I crawled toward him. I grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away from his face.

  “Emmett, stop it.”

  He twisted away from me, and his hands snapped back into place, covering his features. It didn’t matter though. I had seen the wide eyes, the puffy nose, the shine on his cheeks.

  “Stop. Hey. Emmett, you’ve got to stop. I’m serious. Pull yourself together. Whatever you’re feeling,” I grabbed his wrists, wrestling with him this time, prying his hands away from his face. “Whatever you’re feeling, it’s just a memory. It’s just something I pulled up, I didn’t mean to do it like that, I didn’t—”

  His head cracked to one side. He twisted, staring up at me. Snot and tears glistened on his face. I don’t even know if he saw me, not the way he was looking at me. He just shook his head, slowly, a steady 1-2 swing with his eyes on the floor. Then he froze.

  I should have been ready for it. I should have guessed. He hit hard, first with his shoulder and all of his weight behind it, and then, as I fell, with his knee connecting just below my diaphragm, duplicating his earlier blow. It was about as effective as shoving the hose from a vacuum cleaner down my throat: it sucked all the air out of my lungs, and I went down with my eyes stinging.

  Emmett scrambled over me, and then I knew: the knife.

  “No,” I croaked, catching his sneaker. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even get my lungs to pump. But I could see him, I could see the black holes in his eyes. I dragged back, as hard as I could, and he skidded toward me. His fingers squealed against the floorboards. He flipped over, onto his side, and scrabbled, trying to get purchase, trying to drag himself just a few more inches so he could reach the knife. He drove his free foot into my stomach, and my breath whooshed out again, and an army of tiny black ants began nibbling at the corners of my vision.

  I hauled him backward again. This time, his ass popped up off the floor, and when he came down, he landed on the rag rug. I kept dragging, and the rug slid easily over the floorboards, and Emmett came face to face with me. He was gone. Those huge eyes, emptied all the way to the bottom, didn’t see me. I don’t think they were really seeing anything. He slapped me, his nails curling at the end to rake one side of my face. He drove the heel of his other hand into my forehead, and my head struck the floor and caromed back. My grip slackened, and Emmett twisted away, planting one of his big feet right across my stomach, the rubber of the sole gripping painfully against bare skin.

  For the first time in what felt like an eternity, breath rushed into my lungs. I twisted, reaching after him, and realized too late that I’d made a mistake. Emmett didn’t go for the knife. He leapt, shooting toward the tacklebox like a runner diving for home. The orange plastic box toppled, and the lid popped up, and gauze and medical tape and a flash of silver and a half-flattened tube of Preparation H spilled out.

  The snippers.

  His hand closed around them. Those long, elegant fingers tightened until the knuckles bulged. He rolled onto his back, his head falling to the side, the long, smooth expanse of his neck bare. A pulse fluttered like a dying hummingbird in his throat. He brought up the scissors as hard as he could, driving them straight toward the artery.

  I caught his wrist. I was sucking and blowing air like an old horse, and my spit flecked his face, sparkled on the back of his hand, on the steel of the snippers. He roared at me, past words, past anything except the need for what I wouldn’t give him. He clubbed me on the side of the head. Those ants rushed back and forth across my vision, swallowing parts of the room. I was falling sideways, I realized. And when I hit the floor, when I didn’t have the leverage to keep the snippers away from his neck, he was going to get exactly what he wanted.

  Gravity only pulls down. At least, that’s as far as it goes for me, for a guy who doesn’t know physics. But throw a baseball. Kick a rock out over a canyon. Shoot a goddamn cannonball. The same thing will happen every time: gravity pulls down, and there’s something perfect about the parabola of the fall, the long, graceful arc toward the ground. Mr. Spencer, in English class, had read to us about how the ancients thought that all things were attracted to their home, and so when you dropped a stone, it fell toward the earth, and that explained gravity. An explanation like that didn’t do much for science, but it sure as hell made sense to me.

  When I reached for him, it was like falling. It was easy when it shouldn’t have been easy. All I had to do was fall, and gravity pulled me home.

  Inside, a storm blew through Emmett. All the hate and pain and guilt and sorrow that I’d dragged up spun across his psychic landscape. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do. I just knew that what happened next, happened, again, like gravity pulling me down. I let the memory that he’d been throwing at me wash back over both of us. The blond guy stepping down from the bus, the slight rock of the suspension, the hollowness in his eyes, the kids streaming past and tugging on his arm, the fireworks detonating in sequence 1-2-3-4 from my breastbone down.

  The storm stopped. Everything inside Emmett was there, with me, inside that memory. The fireworks kept exploding, points of heat moving deep in my belly, lower, alm
ost painful between my legs.

  With a gasp, I came back to the real world. I was lying next to Emmett, still holding his wrist, with the snippers shining in his hand. I rolled on top of him, squeezed his wrist and turned, and he whined. His fingers spasmed, and the snippers clattered against the floor.

  Then it was just the two of us, and the wet cotton of his shirt rubbing against my bare chest, my whole body so sensitive that it felt like sandpaper. Emmett was breathing funny—huge, gasping breaths. He rolled his head to the side, his eyes closed, and a flush ran from his chest to his eyebrows.

  Shifting my weight, I reached for his face.

  “Please.” It was a whimper. It was Emmett begging, honest-to-God begging. His head snapped toward me. His eyes shot open. The pupils had almost swallowed the swirl of his irises. “Please, Vie. Please.”

  “What?”

  “Oh fuck me. I don’t know. Fuck me. Fuck me.” It shifted in tone and intensity. “Fuck me. I want you to fuck me right now. Oh fuck.”

  Then I felt the hardness in his pants pressed against my knee. He was shaking.

  Sucking in a breath, Emmett said, “Oh Christ. Don’t move. Just—ah. If you move. If you move, if you touch me, I’m going to—oh don’t fucking move. Or—or do it. Just do it, maybe. I don’t know, oh Christ. I don’t know.”

  I wanted to. I wanted to shift my weight, apply a little more pressure with my knee, and watch him come apart just from my touch. Nobody else would ever be able to do that for him. Nobody else would ever have him like this, so totally open, so vulnerable, so desperate. It would be easy. He’d probably thank me. And then—

  And then what? I’d have tricked him into wanting me, and he’d shoot in his pants and probably have an out-of-body experience. And then tomorrow? What would happen then, when he realized I was still the kid that wasn’t good enough for him or his family? What would he do? Shit, what would I do? Would I trick him again, make him beg for my touch again, because now I knew I could? Would I keep him coming back like an addict? Would I do that, as selfish and horrible as it was, because it would give me a chance to have Emmett in my life?

  I didn’t know. And I hated myself for not being able to say no.

  He was still moaning, tossing his head in tiny, helpless gestures.

  I eased away from him, careful not to brush against him, and when I was clear, I scrambled to my feet. I gathered the snippers and the knife, and I backed toward the door. The wood bumped my shoulder blades.

  Emmett’s breathing, deep and raspy, sounded like someone revving an engine, sounded like the best bass line, sounded like sex. He propped himself on his elbows. I wanted to dive into him again, knowing how easy it would be, knowing I could have him tonight, completely, totally, in a way he would never give himself to me otherwise.

  “Don’t go.”

  “Oh fuck,” I said, and it sounded a hell of a lot like a moan. I jostled the knob with my elbow, managed to get it open.

  “Vie, get back here. Peel off those goddamn shorts, get out that cock, and fuck me until I hit the stars.”

  “You’re not thinking straight.”

  The look in his eyes was obscene; I’d made out with him, had him pressed up against me, and I’d never seen him like this. He palmed himself, his lower lip pulled between his teeth, his irises moonless.

  “Damn right I’m not. Not straight at all. Just thinking about that cock.”

  “This wears off, Em. It’s going to wear off. You can stay up here until it does.”

  “Don’t even think about walking away from me. Get that ass back here. If you won’t fuck me, take off those goddamn shorts and I’ll sure as hell fuck—

  I slammed the door. I took the stairs backward, stumbling, not able to take my eyes off the door. Because if he followed me, if he kept talking like that, like gravel spinning under rubber, it didn’t matter what I thought was right. I’d give in. I wasn’t a good guy. I wasn’t even a decent guy. But I was trying really, really hard not to be a shitty guy, and I wasn’t even going to manage that if Emmett came after me.

  Three steps from the bottom, I missed a stair. I slipped, fell, and hit ass-hard on the floor.

  The shock and the pain helped a lot with the arousal. It was hard to chub up when I was mostly wondering if I’d broken my tailbone and cursing myself for being the biggest idiot in a hundred miles. I lay there, contemplating exactly how stupid I was and staring at the sagging ceiling. What the hell had I been thinking? I knew how easily I could damage someone psychically. I knew how easily I could mess up Emmett—I’d done it before, although never that bad. But he pushed my buttons, and the minute I felt threatened, I lashed out. I might not want to be a shitty guy, but I was feeling pretty damn close.

  I was still lying there when a shadow flicked across me. Sara, her red face floating in her cloud of frizzy blond hair, stared down at me.

  “Vie, honey. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re lying on the floor. Did you fall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In your underwear?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “With a knife?”

  I sighed. “I guess so.”

  “Can you get up?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is this something I should know about?”

  I shook my head, and somehow, that made my ass hurt again.

  “Vie, I know you and Austin—” That boy was her nephew, and her face got even redder. “Should we have a talk? About being safe, I mean?”

  “Is there a safe-sex talk that covers the really weird sex stuff like falling down stairs with knives?”

  “Well, I just meant . . .”

  “Austin’s not even here.”

  “It’s not—well, I was reading a parenting article about auto-erotic—”

  That managed to get me on my feet faster than a lightning bolt. “Look at that. Miraculous recovery.” I shot up the stairs, still holding the knife. “Thanks, Sara.”

  She called after me, “If it’s something that Austin’s making you do, I want you to tell me.”

  I groaned. This might actually be the worst day of my life.

  When I shouldered open the door, I didn’t know what I’d find: Emmett naked on my bed, Emmett ready to pounce and rip my clothes off, Emmett trying to make a noose out of a bed sheet.

  Instead, I found nothing. Just an open window, rain, and the night.

  EMMETT, THE LITTLE BASTARD, didn’t answer any of my calls, and I didn’t even know he was still alive until the next day at school when he passed me in the hall.

  It was eight in the morning; the first bell was about to ring, and I was lingering in the hall to avoid Mr. Lynch, my sadistic math teacher. Some of that lingering was also motivated by the fact that I might, maybe, possibly have thought I’d see Emmett if I waited long enough.

  And then, while I leaned up against my locker, there he was: Armani tee, jeans hugging his ass, big old combat boots. He had something to prove, I guess. Guys like Emmett always have something to prove. He was coming down the hallway, surrounded by his new group of friends—an assortment of juniors and seniors, the jocks and the weed-heads who kept the jocks supplied with what they wanted.

  I had every intention of apologizing. I had a whole speech prepared. Yeah, I’d screwed up last night. I’d screwed up really, really badly. And I was willing to take whatever punishment he named. If he wanted me never to go near him again, fine. It’d kill me, but fine. If he wanted to beat my ass, fine. If he wanted to grab me by the jaw, push me up against a wall, and—well, Jesus. I cut off that line of thinking fast.

  All of that went out the window, though, when I heard him say, “That goddamn tweaker did it.”

  Rachel Emmenthal kept rising up on her toes, pouting, and trying to touch his lip. “You poor baby. You need to tell Mr. Hillenbrand. He attacked you. He’s psycho. Amanda Abbott said her dad heard that the cops picked him up for blowing tr
uckers, and Amanda Siegfried said her dad said that he killed a kid at his last school.”

  I focused on Emmett’s lip. It was definitely split. It was puffy as hell. And that brought out my first smile of the day.

  He didn’t want to look at me. He was trying hard not to look at me. But he would have needed a brace, a big old clunky iron thing around his neck to keep his head from swiveling toward me.

  “What the fuck are you grinning about?”

  “I like your new look.” Over Emmett’s shoulder, I saw Austin. He bobbed through the crowd that was beginning to gather. Teenagers could smell a fight like sharks scenting blood. Austin bulldozed between a pair of blondes that looked about as big as his wrists. One of them bounced, literally bounced, off the drinking fountain. “The boots,” I added, flicking my gaze back to Emmett. “Really butch.”

  “You’re such a fucking fag,” one of the juniors said. I didn’t know him; I didn’t need to know him. Guys like him are the exact same everywhere in the world. They’ve been the exact same ever since they evolved those thick necks and empty heads.

  “Shut up, Jack.” Emmett shook his head. “Quit looking at me.”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Quit grinning.”

  “I’m having a great day.”

  “You want me to beat his faggot ass?”

  “Christ, Jack, if you open your mouth again, I’ll knock the shit out of you.”

  “Go ahead. Tell him to beat my faggot ass.”

  Jack hopped up and down like he was about to get into a goddamn boxing ring.

  Then, with a shake of his head, Emmett stepped around me. He didn’t so much as blink when I caught his sleeve.

  “Hold on, I’m not done talking to—”

  He just shook me off, and his new group of friends clustered around him. One of them, a big, red-headed kid, checked me with his shoulder, laughed, and slapped five with another guy as he caught up to Emmett’s little posse. I froze and stared after the departing group.