by H. P. Bayne
It overwhelmed him, the intensity of a hate so deep he knew it couldn’t be fully his own. He drew on it, let it take over. There was power in it, and he gave into it gladly.
Five men came at him now. All of them. Wielding knives and metal bars.
None of it mattered. They didn’t matter. They were nothing.
He was everything.
The world around him went red, his senses limited to the feel of his fists delivering blow after blow; of flesh shifting and bone breaking beneath him; to the cries of pain from the men. He revelled in those, drank in the smell of their blood as they one by one fell before him.
Through the crimson mist, he watched one flee, then a second. Two were on the floor, unmoving. The last of them was in his grasp, neck constricted beneath Sully’s tightening fingers. He could envision it now, the man’s head popping off like a puss-filled cyst, squeezing until it separated completely from his body.
“Sully, stop! Sully!”
He knew Dez’s voice. Knew and didn’t care.
All he cared about was the man kneeling before him, bulging eyes staring with sheer terror into his.
It had been years. Lifetimes since he’d held the fate of another man in his own, since he’d watched death close in at his bidding.
He would enjoy this. Every blessed second.
“Sully! No!”
He felt it the moment they entered, the red-haired man and his son, sharing space inside this body. They were light to his dark, light that gradually filled every space, every nook and cranny.
A memory flashed, a smoke-scented child seated in a police interview room while the red-haired man knelt before him.
Offering to give him a home.
His first real home.
“Sully, please!”
Dez. That first day at school. Taking on an entire cafeteria and Sully’s bullies, warning anyone to mess with his new brother was to mess with him too.
“Sully!”
Light filled him, drowning out the hate, the rage.
His fingers released, the man previously encased within his grasp falling, gagging, to the floor next to his two moaning friends.
Sully next released Montague, who instantly fled. He watched him go and allowed himself a moment of amazement at finally being rid of his stalker.
“Sully?”
He turned, found Dez standing next to him. Sully tried for a smile, but it was lost to blackness as consciousness faded.
11
Dez wiped another trail of blood from his forehead before it could drip into his right eye.
He needed his vision, every iota of his senses he could muster as he ran. It was bad enough he couldn’t hear much above the pounding of the pulse in his ears, anxiety and physical exertion intensifying the flow of blood. His heart thudded out a manic rhythm, one borne less of the run and more of what he’d just experienced.
Sully, draped over his shoulder, stirred with returning consciousness, but Dez ran on. He didn’t see anyone around, and he doubted anyone would be crazy enough to follow after what had just happened, but he wasn’t about to bank on it. The men who attacked them hadn’t, thank God, had guns. But who was to say they didn’t have friends nearby who did?
“Dez,” came a movement-rattled voice from the other side of his shoulder. Dez ignored Sully for now, making for a thick grove of trees next to a badly damaged house. Branches whipped at his face as Dez dove into the bushes, taking the two of them to what he hoped would be temporary shelter. When a quick scan revealed no sign of any pursuers, Dez set Sully on his feet.
Sully’s hands bunched up the front of Dez’s jacket. “Are you okay?”
“I will be. Bunch of meth heads. Goddammit.”
“Are you sure? You’re bleeding.”
Dez swiped at his head again. The back of his hand was already sticky, coated with his own blood. He’d been momentarily stunned after taking the blow, but he hadn’t lost consciousness. He wasn’t dizzy, wasn’t faint, and he wasn’t tired or confused. No sign of a serious head injury. The rest of him hurt, and he knew bruises—some of them deep and ugly—had to be forming, but nothing felt fractured. Small blessings.
“I’m fine. How about you?”
Sully gave up an obvious visual inspection of Dez to lift his own shirt. A bloody furrow had been left across his abdomen, and the lower left leg of his jeans was stained red.
Dez checked the abdominal wound before kneeling to look at the calf. “You could use a few stitches.”
“Won’t be happening,” Sully said. “I’ve got butterfly bandages back at Ravenwood. They’ve come in handy in the past.”
Dez dropped Sully’s pant leg and stood with some difficulty. On the way up, he noticed his brother’s torn and scraped knuckles, and his thoughts returned to what he’d just seen.
His quiet, mild-mannered brother, completely out of control and in possession of a strength Dez would have struggled to equal on his best days.
“Sully? What happened back there?”
“Not here,” Sully said. “Let’s get back to Ravenwood.”
They kept conversation to a minimum, Dez keeping his focus entirely on their surroundings and on any potential signs they were being followed. They reached the gates of Ravenwood without any further issues, and Dez breathed a sigh of relief as they passed through onto the property.
He was aware of the oddity of the situation, the fact he was grateful to be returning to a haunted house. Everything was relative, and he’d take Noisy Ned over a group of murderous, meth-binging gangsters any day.
Even so, Dez stuck to Sully as he went to get his bag from the hidden passage in the basement. Ned hadn’t come at them upon their return, but Dez wasn’t satisfied he, without his brother, wouldn’t make for a good target.
Bag retrieved, the two of them headed for the lounge at the back of the house.
Sully dug through the bag until he produced a bottle of disinfectant and bandages.
“The pharmacies were probably among the first places to get raided,” Sully said, wincing as he dabbed at his injuries with alcohol wipes. “The good thing is people were mostly just after the drugs. The place on this side of the island still had a few first aid supplies left. Not much, but enough to hold me.”
Dez applied the bandages while Sully pinched the skin of his abdomen, then his calf together. They then did the same with a couple of bleeding injuries Dez had sustained. “We should be doing this back at my house. This place isn’t exactly sanitary.”
“Dez.”
There was meaning in the tone, and Dez looked up to meet Sully’s eye. “Come on. You’re not seriously planning on staying here? Not after all that.”
“I have to—even more so now than before.”
“What does that mean? Look, if Raynor comes looking for you at my place, he’ll need a warrant to enter. Good luck applying to a judge for an arrest warrant on a dead guy. Anyway, he hasn’t made a move yet, so why would he now?”
“That’s not the only problem. You saw what I did back there. I’m not….” Sully trailed off, looking up and away. A sheen of tears formed, just visible in the waning light from the dusty window.
Dez stood. “You’re not what?”
“I’m not safe to be around. I’m not good.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Honestly, man, all the years we’ve known each other, and the few fights we’ve been back to back in, I can’t say I’ve ever felt safer around you than I did half an hour ago. I mean, hell, man. You saved my life.”
“You don’t get it.”
Dez crossed his arms. “So explain it to me.”
Sully finally met his eye, a challenge in the way they narrowed. “You going to tell me what just happened didn’t freak you out?”
Truthfully, yeah, it had. It had scared the hell out of him. “No. It didn’t.”
“Bullshit.” Sully dropped onto the fainting couch, lowering his head into his hands and running fingers through his hair. He’d lost the tie
sometime during the fight and his hair hung loose now, dropping into its familiar curtain around his face as soon as he released it.
Dez sat gingerly next to him, wary of the capacity of the water-damaged couch to hold both of them. It held, and Dez sat forward, too, elbows on knees as he tried to see around the hair.
“What’s bullshit, exactly? You think because you went a little nuts on those guys, you’re a bad person?”
“It wasn’t all me. It was Montague. I used him.”
It took Dez a moment to puzzle through that one. “Like drawing on his energy, or do you mean like a possession?”
“The latter. Only he didn’t possess me, Dez. I possessed him.”
This time, Dez really did require an explanation. “What?”
“You remember Nora Silversmith? I pulled her off Hackman the day she killed him, but it was more than that. I pulled her into myself. And I did the same thing with Montague. I could hear their thoughts, feel their emotions—because I sucked in their energy. I didn’t use it that day with Nora, but I did this time. And I used it once before, with Harry, the day Lowell and Hackman tried to kill me. Back then, I didn’t know how to hold onto it, how to work with it.”
“And you do now?”
“I don’t know how I know. I just do. Like an instinct.”
“Okay. Wow.” Dez considered what he’d just been told as he searched for the right words. It didn’t take him long to realize there were no right words, not for this. Nothing he could come up with, anyway. “Well, it can’t be that bad, right? I mean, you used it to protect me, and yourself.”
“That’s the way it started. But it’s not how it ended. He’s there, Dez, inside me, and he’s strong.”
“Who? Montague?”
Sully shook his head. “No, I released him. He took off. I doubt he’ll be back.”
“So who do you mean?”
“The hangman.”
“He’s a past life, Marc and Raiya figured. Souls evolve, remember? They grow.”
“But maybe they don’t really change,” Sully said. “I’m not like him, not the way I am now. But when I drew those two spirits into myself, I lost who I am. I became him. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I became me.”
“Come on, Sully.”
“I’m the son of a rapist. I’m half-bad, even in this life. Why wouldn’t I be the kind of person who does the things I did to those gang members?”
Frustration turned to anger, had Dez grasping fists full of his brother’s jacket and turning him to face him. “Because that’s not who you are! I know you. I’ve known you most of your life. You aren’t Gerhardt, and you aren’t this hangman. You’re you. You’re who you choose to be. That’s all. And don’t forget, you stopped it. You didn’t kill anyone today. The hangman would have.”
“Yeah, you’re right, he would have!” Sully shouted back. “And I would have. I wanted to. I wanted to so bad, I could smell the blood. I could picture it in my head, what it would look like, what it would feel like to do it. I didn’t stop myself, Dez. It wasn’t me. I would have kept going.”
“So why’d you stop?”
“Dad and Aiden.” The answer, quietly spoken, had Dez releasing Sully, allowing him to turn back into the shelter of his hair. “It was Dad and Aiden.”
“How?”
“They possessed me, too, I guess. I could feel them, all their light. They were stronger than the hangman, stronger than me. That’s why I stopped.”
Emotion hit, bringing a lump to Dez’s throat that had him gasping out a breath. “Are they here? Now?”
Sully looked up, then lowered his head before answering with a nod.
Dez smiled, eyes going to the spot Sully had been looking at. “Thanks, guys.” Then he turned back to Sully, draping an arm over his shoulders. “Hey, here’s the thing. I don’t know who you would have been if you hadn’t ended up coming into our lives. But what I do know is that it doesn’t matter. You’ve got the life you’ve got, and I’m pretty sure that’s enough. I’ve met a lot of screwed-up people who have done bad things. Most of them aren’t bad. They’re just messed up, and they don’t have stable people to help them get past their problems. Most of what they do is because they use booze and drugs to medicate the pain. The monsters they become when they’re drunk or high, that’s not really who they are. I think, in a way, it’s the same with you.”
“Except it is who they are,” Sully said. “Booze and drugs, they just remove walls. Those people you’re talking about, the people who get violent, it’s because the chemicals tap into something that’s already there. They’re angry to start with. The alcohol, the drugs, they just free it or intensify it. It’s probably the same for the assholes who attacked us at the house. If they weren’t on whatever they were on, they probably wouldn’t have done what they did. But it doesn’t erase the anger they’re probably carrying around. That’s what I’m worried about, that I’m carrying something around inside me that’s like a time bomb. The Dules said their men fall to evil. I almost did.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Not because of a choice I made. It was only because someone stopped me. It’s getting stronger, Dez. I can feel it. Raiya told me my abilities would grow. What if next time, Dad and Aiden aren’t enough?”
“If you don’t use this whole spirit possession thing, it won’t be a problem, right? That much you can decide for yourself.”
“I didn’t use it either time because I wanted to. I used it to try to save people. And if, in the future, I have to choose between losing myself to evil and saving someone I love, I’ll pick the latter every time.”
Dez blew out a breath, then moved his hand to ruffle Sully’s hair before dropping it.
“I don’t understand anything about what you can do,” he said. “But I understand this much: You’re not partly bad because of who supplied the sperm to create you. You’re all good because of the people who care about you. And you’re good because of who you are at your core. Everyone’s got some bad in them, Sull. I’ve been fighting myself to keep from finding Lowell and beating him to death. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me human. For once in your life, you need to stop being so hard on yourself. You’re in a bad place right now, and you’re going through a lot. Maybe it makes you more susceptible to that part of yourself. That’s normal.”
Sully didn’t say anything right away, which relieved Dez. He’d expected further argument. He waited, listening to the sound of the evening breeze outside, until Sully spoke again.
“I wasn’t sure you’d forgive me after what I kept from you. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t in my life.”
Dez patted Sully’s back. “And you won’t ever have to find out.”
He’d left his wedding band and keys behind some books on one of the shelves, and he stood to retrieve them. He checked the time on his phone, discovering it was a little past seven thirty.
“It’s getting dark out,” Sully said. “You should get going. You need to get the boat back to the club.”
“I don’t want to leave you here.”
“You have to.”
Sully stood, leading the way through the house and to the cellar stairs.
“Why this way?” Dez asked.
“Once the sun goes down, it’s safer than going outside. Too hard to see anyone who might be hiding out there. This gets us right up to the river without being seen.”
Dez followed Sully into the cellar, over to the sliding shelf and through the tunnel until they reached the hidden grate. Back outside, the spot in sight where they’d hidden the boat, Dez turned back to Sully.
“Please, come back with me.”
“I can’t.”
“Damn it, Sully.” Dez paused, then drew his brother into a hug. “You be safe, you got that?”
“I will.”
Dez released Sully, but his eyes remained fixed on the darkness behind his brother. The house was back there somewhere, concealed in shadow and overgrown vegetation.
It was impossible to say what else—or, more specifically, who—might be hiding in the dark. They’d barely survived a brutal attack by a bunch of tweaking gangsters. The reality was The Forks was crawling with people like that.
The other reality was that Sully was completely alone now, not even Pax here to watch over him. Sure, Noisy Ned had proven himself a decent alarm system, and Sully could definitely protect himself if he had to—as long as he saw the danger coming. Dez wasn’t sure how much faith to put in a poltergeist when it came to ensuring Sully was looked after.
Dez had just two real fears in life: ghosts and being helpless to protect the people he loved from harm. He had zero control over the first, but he could do something about the second. And the latter fear outweighed the former by a ton.
“You know, I could make you come back with me,” he said.
“You could,” Sully agreed. “But you won’t.”
“No, I won’t. So I guess that means I’m staying too.”
“Dez, come on.”
“Honestly, I’d rather Kayleigh not see me when I’m all banged up like this. And it’s a long way back from here to my place. And—”
“And you’re reaching.” Sully’s features were barely visible now, just the dimmest outline in the dark. Even so, Dez could make out the smile.
He added one more valid argument. “Look at it this way. If I go home, I’m just going to be lying awake all night, worrying about your ass.”
“Here, you’ll just be up all night, worrying about all the noises.”
“Better that than the alternative.” He turned Sully toward the hidden boats. “Come on. Let’s get the boat returned and then come back and get a fire going. We’re going to freeze our nuts off, standing around out here.”
“You’re not going to take no for an answer on this, are you?”
“Nope. You’re stuck with me. Let’s go.”
12
Dez poked the fire, flipping over a log to expose the flame beneath to the air.
He searched for calm in the crackling of the blaze. As long as he kept it roaring, it helped to drown out some of the other noises in the house.