by Gregory Ashe
“It’s not an accusation, Becca. I’m just establishing the facts. It’s more than that, really. He beats the shit out of me. And my mom, you know about that too, right?”
Becca didn’t answer. She was grayish white. She looked like she’d calcified in the last thirty seconds.
“Ok,” I said. “My whole life. Or as long as I can remember, anyway. They . . . they could do it, you know? At first I was too little. And then, when I was bigger, something wasn’t right.” I shook my head. “Something isn’t right, still isn’t right, inside me, and I couldn’t stop them. They always were the ones with power. They were bigger. And they were adults. And they were my parents. They always had the upper hand. And do you know what I did when I started getting control of my abilities? Do you know what I did the next time my dad took a swing at me? Do you know what I did when I was suddenly the one with the power?”
She was shaking her head furiously, drawing one hand under her eyes. “This isn’t fair. This isn’t—”
“I used them on him. On my dad, I mean. He was coming at me, and I just . . . bam. Right inside his head. And I did every awful thing I could think of. I dragged up all the worst thoughts of his life and set them spinning. And do you know what I did then?
“It’s not the same, Vie.”
“I left him to drown in those thoughts. I walked away. For all I knew, for all I cared, he was going to drag himself into the next room and slit his wrists or put a gun in his mouth or OD on his stash.” For a moment, I was back there in that shitty apartment where the carpet stuck to my feet and the cold frosted the inside of the windows. That was the thing about black holes, I thought. Even black holes that are just at the back of your head. They do funny things to time, and I was back there in the apartment with him, watching him flop like a fish, watching the glassy emptiness of his eyes. “That’s what I did.”
“He abused you.” Her voice was shaking. A delta of silver lines covered her face now. “What he did to you—”
“Was exactly what I did to him. As soon as I was the one with the power, as soon as I was the one who was bigger and stronger, I did it to him.”
“You’re a kid—”
“I did it to him, Becca. And you know what? Part of me would do it again. Part of me would do it to my mom if I could. Part of me would go after everybody that’s hurt me and do it to them. I spent so many years being the one who got hurt. Now I want to be the one who’s on top. I want to be the one who does the hurting.”
“Stop it.” She scrubbed at her cheeks. Her fingers came away radiant with smeared silver. “He was attacking you. You were defending yourself. And now, with Ginny, it’s a matter of life or death. It’s about—”
“I told myself it was life or death with Krystal. Do you know what I did to her?”
Becca glared at me and looked away.
“I ripped her soul apart. Ripped it to shreds, Becca. And I don’t even feel bad about it. I mean, I do. But there’s this way it felt good, too. And you know what? I don’t know if she would have killed us. Maybe she was just trying to stop us. I really don’t know.”
“Austin was hurt. He was hurt bad.”
“There’s always a reason, Becca.” I was speaking from somewhere far away now. I had fallen into that dark place at the back of my mind, into the black hole, but my voice came out smooth and steady and gentle. Gentler than that gravitational blackout swallowing me. “I was high. I was drunk. I was mad. I had a bad day at work. I got a speeding ticket. I was scared. I love you, but you made me do it to you.” The pressure was worse, like a vise tightening around my head, but it made me feel lighter too. The world tilted, lost some of its color, and my toes were barely touching the ground. I could float away like this. Drift into that darkness and be crushed. “But at the bottom, it comes down to power. What do we do when we’re the ones with the power? What are we willing to do to other people? And what aren’t we willing to do? The rest of it, those are just excuses. I know, Becca. I was there that night with my dad. I had every excuse in the world. But I know how I felt, too. And I know it felt good. I was powerful and strong and in control.” I was surprised, from where I had fallen into that dark hole, that my arms weren’t drifting up, weightless in the sudden vacuum surrounding me, swallowing me. “I won’t do that ever again.”
She had smeared the silver rivers down her cheeks. The delta was just a muddy silver smudge now. And she wouldn’t look at me.
“I’ll wait until morning,” was all she said. “If we can figure out something else before then—” But she stopped, and her shoulders shook, and she turned away from me.
My feet didn’t touch the ground, but it wasn’t happiness, it wasn’t that kind of lightness. It was that yawning emptiness in my head. It was back again. And I thought about the blades in my backpack. I thought about how easy it would be to shrug out of my clothes, to take a fresh edge and draw it in a clean line down from my nipple, the oblique angle where it would meet the furrow I had dug on the inside of my thigh. Power. Control. This was my power. This was my control. When I had nothing else, I still had this.
I turned and left the room.
Emmett stood in the parking lot, breathing into his hands, huge clouds steaming up in the chill, wet air. Would it snow? In April? It was Wyoming; that was more than a mere possibility. The air tasted like it, that frosty taste on mornings when every guy with a car is scraping his windshield.
With a jerk of his head, Emmett sent Jake back into the motel room. He stood on the asphalt, blowing those frosted breaths into cupped fingers, eyes falling away to nothing.
“I’m supposed to tell Austin,” I said, not recognizing my voice.
“Yeah, well, he broke up with your dumb ass. What do you need to tell him?”
I scrubbed at my arms and looked everywhere but those eyes.
“Tweaker? Why do you look more fucked up than usual?”
“I just—I’m supposed to tell him. Before I—” My eyes cut toward him, catching him at the chest, where the rumpled vee of his collar framed the hollow of his throat, half scarified and half smooth and golden.
“So? I’m not your boyfriend. And I’m certainly not Austin. And I already told you I’m not going to try to take that shit away from you.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got stuff to do. The rest of us are making hard decisions while you’re playing Boy Scout. If you want to go cut, go cut.”
“Yeah.”
His breath blew out in a thin line like moondust or starlight. “For fuck’s sake, you’re going to fucking drive me crazy. You know that, right? I’m going to be crazier than you.”
Grabbing my arm, Emmett marched me toward the strip of motel rooms, but when I tried to slide out of his grip, he just joggled me once and kept going. Instead of returning to the room with Jake and Becca and Ginny, he jammed a key into the next door, forcing open the room and half-throwing me through the open door. It smelled closed-up, musty, and the air still had enough second-hand nicotine to get my head buzzing by the second breath. Emmett slammed the door. Hard. Hard enough that the whole line of motel rooms shook and threatened to fall over like a house of cards. It was just the two of us in the darkness and the old cigarette stink, and then he hit something, and something clattered, and a bright yellow cone made me blink. Then I could see him, and the lamp, and the halo under the light shade ringing his hand.
Wordlessly, he ripped the backpack from my shoulder and emptied it on the bed. Everything came out. Everything. And he knocked aside a half-finished roll of Life Savers—Becca had picked out all the cherry ones—and the ticket stubs from when Austin and I had seen a special screening of A Christmas Story at the Wynnham 8, and then the back of his hand flipped over the box and two blades slid out.
He flicked one and sent it spinning toward me over the rust-colored quilt. The other, he snagged between two fingers as he wriggled out of his jacket.
“What are you doing?”
With
his head inside his shirt, his voice was muffled. “Don’t be stupid, tweaker. Let’s just get this over with.” Then his shirt came off, and he was bare-chested, his hair flying to the left, the hand without the blade crossing his stomach as though he could keep me, somehow, from seeing him.
“I don’t—” I swallowed. “I need to do this. Me. This is my shit, Emmett. You’re right about that. It’s not your shit. I just—Austin made me promise, and I just need you to know, ok? I don’t want you to—I don’t want you to do it again.”
“Wish in one hand,” he shrugged, “and your limp dick in another.”
“You made your point, ok? I know this isn’t a good thing to do. I get it. But I just need it for a little longer. Until I’m through this.”
“Fine. Where are we cutting today?”
“No. Not you. Me. Just me. This is my shit, Emmett.”
He rolled those dark eyes, and his laugh was angry and jolting. “The fuck don’t you understand about this, tweaker? You’re my shit. Get it? Now where are we cutting?”
You’re my shit. The words were like antifreeze, sweet and slick and poisonous. I was his shit. And I realized that he was mine. The way he looked. The way his scars only made him better to me. The heat tumbling low in my belly.
“Take off your fucking shirt and let’s get this over with.” He grabbed my coat and wrestled it off me. Then he wrenched at my sweater until it was on the bed. One hand, his finger pads like ice, pressed on my chest like he was steering me. The other held the blade against the low swell and ripple of his abdomen. “Pick up the fucking blade and let’s get this over with, tweaker.”
You’re my shit.
The black hole at the back of my head, dragging on me, disintegrating me so that I streamed into it like a cloud of particles.
You’re my shit. Those dark eyes alive with electricity. My shit.
Nobody can take our shit away from us.
I kissed him.
“You stink.” His arm folded, letting me closer, and he wrinkled his nose. “You reek.”
I kissed him again, my mouth on his, the rough texture of the scars rocking me like speedbumps.
His arm folded more. The fingers on my chest tensed, flexed, gave way. I hooked one hand in the waistband of his jeans. I twisted, drawing the denim tight, hugging him against me. I could feel how hard he was. I could feel him thrumming like the last note in some enormous bell.
“You haven’t been very good,” he murmured, his throat bobbing with the effort of controlling his voice. “Maybe I should send you to bed without a treat.”
“Who says you get to decide?” I kissed him again. He was rubbing against me now. His other hand, still cramped around the blade, dropped an inch.
For a moment, the dark eyes were flat and deadly serious, and he growled, “Because I get to do whatever I want to you. Whenever I want. And you’ll let me, tweaker. Not the other way around.”
I nuzzled into his neck. I nipped at his collarbone, on the scarred side of his body, and his back actually snapped tight and he grunted.
That was when I grabbed his hand. I didn’t bother trying to get the blade away from him; that would have dragged out the whole thing, and I wanted it over with. I wanted to move on to the next part, to the better part. I just turned his hand, ignoring the flash of pain as I twisted, and dragged the blade low and horizontal across my belly. Just under my navel. I got the length of my hand before he wrenched away, but I kept twisting, and the blade dropped from his numb fingers.
He stood there, chest heaving, his back still bowing like I’d bitten a nerve, his nipples stiff, his erection visible through the stonewashed denim.
“You stupid fucking cheat.”
I crossed the distance. He retreated. I kept moving. He backed into the alcove with the sink and the plastic-wrapped cups and the tiny bar of soap that said French Milled, whatever the hell that meant. I spread my arms and legs, clutching at the alcove’s frame, every muscle lean and taut and on display. He could keep moving. He could backpedal into the tiny bathroom with the shower. Or he could try to get past me.
Clarity was coming back to me. A sense of wholeness was coming back to me. Breathing was coming back to me. That hot line under my navel pulled everything together, and I no longer felt like I was dissolving, like parts of me were being siphoned off into nonexistence. I studied him. I really saw him for the first time since coming into the room.
The pulse in his throat. The hollows under his eyes. The way his hands crawled across his chest as though they might successfully cover him if he just moved them constantly.
Blood chilled the top of my jeans. I dropped my arms, rested my thumbs inside the waistband, the wet denim clinging to my fingers. The thin laceration burned against the heels of my hands.
I took a step forward.
“Stop.”
I took another step.
He flinched. “Not like this, tweaker. It’s one thing if we’re—”
“Do you know how perfect you are?”
That brought up Emmett’s chin, and gray plastered itself across his face. “Don’t do that.” His voice was low and serious and full of a kind of wounded dignity.
“I’m serious. Do you have any idea?”
“Don’t. Vie, don’t. Please. If we’re all riled up, if we’re just going at it hard, that’s fine, but like this, with you—”
I ran one hand down that invisible dividing line at the center of his chest, the scars on one side, the smooth, golden muscle on the other. My index finger brushed a faint, bloody trail.
“You were hot before. You were . . . pretty.” My newfound sense of clarity sharpened everything. It was like I’d been sleepwalking inside my pain, and now the world had come back crisper and clearer. The smell of the old tobacco, yes, but the smell of his skin, the metallic tang of my blood, the heat of his body under one finger, the slight hiccup to his breathing that wasn’t visible, that could only be felt. “But this. You’re incredible. You’re perfect.”
His head swung down and to the right.
I popped open the top of his jeans, massaged the bulge under the denim until he thrust into my touch, and then I curled my fingers along his jaw, printing bloody ownership all over him, turning him to face me.
“You. You’re perfect.”
“I’m not good for you.” That sensation of falling suspended me again when I met his eyes, and they were surprisingly clear and free from self-pity. “We’re not good for each other.”
I drew in a deep breath. I smirked, and I felt his breath catch in his throat. Felt it in the tips of my fingers. Felt it in the slight bob of his Adam’s apple.
“You said something about how I needed a shower?”
“You smell like a shithouse.”
“No wonder all the boys like you.” I slid my jeans over my hips and stepped out of them, then past Emmett and into the cramped bathroom. Over my shoulder, I said, “Be sure to grab the soap.”
Under the lukewarm spray, Emmett was thorough with the soap. Very thorough.
AFTERWARDS, EMMETT WENT TO his bag and took out his kit: the needle and the spoon and the little baggie. Then he disappeared into the bathroom. When he came back, he rolled up everything and hid it away again in his bag.
We lay under the papery quilt, and I ran my thumb over the pinprick on the inside of his arm and smeared a tail of blood to the crease in his elbow. His pupils were hard and constricted, but his voice had turned to cotton candy when he said, “This is my shit, tweaker. Everybody’s got their own shit. Just like you do.”
I could only nod.
“You’re my shit too,” he said, his hand trapping mine against his arm, like he was afraid I’d let go.
I nodded again.
Everything still smelled like nicotine, but now it was overlaid by the cheap perfume of the soap and the taste of Emmett in my mouth. His skin warmed when he slid his legs between mine and tucked his head against my arm. He was dozing, o
r something like it. I drifted; I had reached some kind of state beyond exhaustion, where sleep couldn’t claim me.
In that half-waking state, it was surprisingly easy to drift free from my body, and I found myself on the other side. The thick texture of the other side, the warp and weft and vibrancy of color, marked the recent flare of passion inside the room. If another psychic stayed here sometime in the next six months, the emotional echoes would probably act like some kind of empathic Viagra and keep him hard the whole night. Maybe, after this was all over, Emmett and I could come back here. I wouldn’t mind tapping into some empathic Viagra myself. I could do to Emmett what I’d done a few nights before: I could flood his mind with desire, open every gate inside him until I could scrape a nail down the center of his chest and watch him come apart just from that, just from that grazing touch. Only I’d ask him first, get his permission, and I’d make him feel things he’d never felt before. Both of us would be hopped up on psychic juice. And then we’d really see what we could do to each other.
That would have to wait, however. I had more pressing things to do. Like find a way to keep Becca and Jake and Emmett from doing something that they’d regret for the rest of their lives.
The most important thing right now was to find Hannah and Tyler. If what I guessed about their abilities was correct—based on what I had seen in the Hunt Public House—they were the key to stopping Urho and the Lady. I had to get them back before they could bring Urho over to this side of reality.
More importantly, if I could find the kids on my own, I might be able to stop Becca and the others from moving forward with their plan. I might even be able to convince Ginny to help me. That felt like a longshot, but it was the only idea I had.
A nudge at the back of my brain reminded me that this wasn’t a final solution to my problems with Urho. If Emmett and I were right and the Lady’s abilities had improved, she might be able to do this all over again. I might rescue Hannah and Tyler, but what would stop her from catching another pair of siblings—or twins, a part of me distantly recognized that twins would be even better—and repeat the whole performance. I might save Hannah and Tyler, but it would only postpone Urho’s return. I would have to face him eventually. Or I would have to run—and if I ran, everybody I loved would have to run too. And I didn’t think all of us could run forever.