Dark Vengeance Part 2

by Reinke, Sara

  The melee from the foyer had migrated into Lamar’s bedroom, and here, it had only intensified as his wives, siblings, and sons flooded into the room, crammed shoulder to shoulder, everyone shouting and crying and jostling and jockeying for position. At just months shy of his sixteenth birthday, Julien was tall and lean, all gangly limbs and long torso, but even so, he could barely skim his gaze high enough to see anything over the crowd of panic-stricken adults. As he slipped into the room, he pushed and shrugged his way through the throng toward the towering posts of his father’s bed.

  He saw Vidal wading past him, making his way to the door with Victor barking orders behind him all the way: “Get Michel Morin—drag his ass back here as fast as you can! We need a doctor, goddamn it!”

  His voice was shrill and ragged, and for a moment, Julien didn’t know what amazed him more—that his older brother sounded near to tears, or that Victor might have found it within him to weep for their father.

  I sure as hell can’t, he thought, coming to stand beside the bed, blinking owlishly at Lamar as he lay, ashen and motionless, atop the rumpled bedclothes. He thought about what Aaron had said, of how Lamar had pushed Lisette down into the grass—and what Julien knew had happened after that. He thought of all of the times his father had beaten him—too many to fully recollect or count. He thought of all of the times Lamar had raised his hand or lash against his brothers and sisters, because none of them had been safe or spared from his brutal wrath. Not even Aaron, who was little more than a baby, and too little yet to understand that if you cried, it only made Lamar angrier; if you begged, it only made the punishment worse.

  I hope you die, he thought, balling his hands into tight fists that shook from the force of repressed hatred. I hate you, you son of a bitch, for what you did to Lissie—for what you’ve done to me, to all of us. I hope you die. I hope it hurts like hell, and you beg for death. For everything you’ve done, everyone you’ve hurt—I hope you die slowly, screaming yourself hoarse.

  Lamar’s hand shot up, his fingers coiling fiercely against Julien’s collar. Julien sucked in a startled breath to screech, but his voice cut short as Lamar jerked him forward. Surprising and terrifying strength remained in his arm and he yanked the boy closer until they were nearly nose to nose.

  No one else seemed to even notice. Victor was too busy yelling for someone to bring him brandy and bandages, and everyone else seemed too busy fretting, fussing, or scurrying about. No one noticed Lamar holding Julien in a veritable chokehold, with blood peppering from his lips in a fine, frothy spray as he hissed through pain-gritted teeth.

  “My desk…lock box…”

  With his free hand, Lamar fumbled for Julien, shoving something against his palm—a small iron key.

  “Lock box,” he seethed again, gasping out each word. “Bottle…bring it…to me…!”

  In his terror, Julien floundered backwards and fell onto his ass when his father turned him loose. Although Lamar’s hand flopped heavily back against the mattress, his eyes rolling closed, Julien still moved as if the man was awake, whip in hand, barking orders directly into his ear. Pushing and shoving his way through the crowd, he clutched at the little key and took the stairs down to the main floor two and even three at a time.

  He meant to go back to his bedroom, to Lisette and Aaron, but instead, ran headlong into Julianne.

  “What’s going on?” she exclaimed, tilting her head back to gawk at the heavy throng on the stairs and upper landing.

  “Father fell off his horse.” Julien seized her by the wrist hard enough to make her wince, then dragged her into the library. So far, none of their other relatives had managed to spill over from the corridor and stairs to Lamar’s personal, book-lined sanctuary, and Julien meant to keep it that way. He shoved the door closed, then threw the bolt to lock it, and whirled to face his cousin. “I think he’s dying.”

  “Oh, no!” Julianne clapped her hands to her face in a melodramatic gesture that Julien might have found hilarious under normal circumstances. For some reason, she’d never seemed to develop the deep-seated loathing and fear of Lamar that everyone else in the family had. Perhaps his abuses didn’t extend beyond his own children; Julien wasn’t sure.

  “He gave me this.” With a shaking hand, he held up the little key. “He told me to get something out of his desk drawer. There’s a lockbox there, he said.”

  “Then get it!” Julianne cried, rushing over to Lamar’s writing table. She jerked open drawers until she found a small tin box—the lockbox Lamar had demanded that Julien retrieve. Pushing aside the heaps of paper and opened ledgers, she put the box on the desktop, and looked anxiously up at Julien. “Hurry!”

  “Maybe it’s his will,” Julien said, struggling to hold the key steady enough to get it in the lock. “Maybe he realizes…he knows he’s going to die. Maybe he means to read his will.”

  Just then, Julien managed to unlock the lid. Pushing it back, he stared down inside the lockbox at a small glass bottle, closed with a little gilded stopper. There was nothing else—no papers, no will, no money, no jewelry. Only that tiny vial, no bigger than a snuff bottle.

  Julianne came to stand beside them and they both blinked in curious wonder. “What’s in it?” Julianne whispered.

  Julien lifted the bottle in hand. The glass was opaque, but he could see the dark shadow of something inside of it. As he moved the bottle, it moved back and forth—something liquid, no more than a tablespoon-full. “I don’t know. Maybe a tincture, some kind of medicinal elixir.”

  “We have to bring it upstairs,” Julianne said.

  With a nod, Julien turned to head back to the door. Then he paused, frowning thoughtfully at the bottle. What if it was something medicinal inside? Lamar had kept it locked up as if it was something valuable. What if he really was dying, and that vial could save him somehow?

  Do I want that? Julien asked himself. And then, in reply, he thought: No.

  But Julianne was there, and Julianne didn’t understand; she loved Lamar, and in her eyes, the old bastard could do no wrong. He and Lisette had always allowed her that delusion, in part because they’d never liked to speak about Lamar or the things he did because they were ashamed of them, certain of some sort of culpability on their parts, even if they couldn’t quite fathom how.

  “Julien, come on,” Julianne pressed, beating him to the door and throwing back the latch. “We have to hurry!”

  In the end, it was as if fate decided for him. As he hurried after his cousin, he tripped over the edge of a hand-loomed rug on the library floor and fell. The bottle tumbled to the ground, and the stopper fell out, spinning in one direction on the hardwood planks while the vial skittered off in another. The liquid inside—something viscous and dark—spilled out between them.

  “Oh, no!” Julianne exclaimed, doing that hand-slap-to-her-cheeks thing again.

  “Shit!” Julien cried. He carried a handkerchief in his pocket and snatched it out now, mopping at the stuff, trying to wipe it off the floor. To his surprise, it didn’t soak into the thin linen. Instead, it rolled and scooted along, like something solid. It wasn’t until decades later—when he first saw a mercury thermometer broken against a flat surface, the liquid metal inside moving about in oily blobs—that he ever had any basis for accurate comparison to what had spilled out of his father’s vial.

  He managed to scoop some of the stuff back into the bottle with his fingers, then clapped the stopper back in place. Using his handkerchief, he quickly wiped up the rest, then shoved it into his pocket and scrambled to his feet.

  “Come on,” Julianne urged, opening the door.

  She followed him up the stairs, into Lamar’s bedroom, and stayed pretty much like a shadow to him as he worked his way back to his father’s bed. Lamar didn’t appear to have moved since Julien had left his side, but at the sight of him, all bloodied, ashen, and unresponsive, Julianne shrank back, uttering a quiet little cry.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” one of the men said, taking noti
ce of her and clapping a heavy hand against her shoulders. “Julien, take her back downstairs. This is no place for a child.”

  Instead, Julien lunged for the bed. Throwing himself across Lamar’s chest, as if in abject despair, he managed to gasp into his father’s ear: “I have it!”

  As he spoke, he pressed the bottle against Lamar’s palm. At first, his fingers remained lax and limp, but as the man caught Julien and drew him roughly backwards, he felt Lamar’s fingers twitch, then fold inward, curling about the vial.

  Julianne squirmed and howled in protest as they were dragged from the room, but Julien didn’t offer a single word or sound of objection. Glancing back, he thought he caught a momentary glimpse of his father lifting the vial to his lips, as if he meant to drink the strange, syrupy stuff inside—but then the crowd closed in around him, and Lamar was gone from his sight.

  He forgot about his handkerchief until later that night, when he undressed for bed. Pulling it out of his pocket, he’d unfolded the edges of the wadded handkerchief carefully, and studied the tiny puddle of goop inside. It still hadn’t absorbed into the linen. He couldn’t think of what to do with it, but somehow instinctively he knew.

  I have to keep it.

  Whatever the stuff was, it was important enough for Lamar to demand it on his seeming deathbed. And since he’d swallowed it, he hadn’t died. He hadn’t done much of anything except demand to be left alone, wallowing behind the locked door of his bedroom, and although rumors had started that he’d gone off to die in there the way a feeble dog will crawl under a porch to pass its last breaths, there was, as of yet, no confirmation of this.

  I have to keep it, he thought again. But how? And where?

  Then he remembered.

  Two nights earlier, while at supper, Aaron’s mother Annette had been wearing a small silver medallion on a thin, filigree chain. During the course of serving food, passing platters back and forth, and helping her littlest children cut and dice their meat and potatoes, the chain had gotten tugged hard enough for the clasp to break.

  “Oh, dear,” she had lamented, cradling the necklace in her hand as she’d carried it upstairs to tuck in her room. “And it was my mother’s locket, too. Practically an heirloom.”

  Locket.

  Julien crept upstairs and rifled through Annette’s belongings until he found the necklace tucked away in a drawer. The medallion was round, a Saint Christopher’s medal, with the image of a man carrying a child on his shoulder embossed on the surface. The words Behold Saint Christopher and Go Your Way in Safety had been etched in a semi-circle above the man. When Julien opened the locket, he found a shallow opening inside, just big enough for him to scoop up the remaining ichor from his father’s vial and deposit it inside. Closing the locket, he’d pushed the necklace back beneath her folded linens, nightshirts and undergarments.

  Why doing all of this would seem so important was a mystery to him—and would remain so until three days later, when the wooden door to Lamar’s room had flown open wide, smacking into the wall with a gunshot-like report. In the doorway, Lamar had stood, wearing only a rumpled nightshirt, his shoulder-length hair swept around his face in manic tangles. He’d leaned against the door frame with his arms outstretched wide, his knees buckled slightly, as if threatening at any moment to fail him. His cheeks and chin sported a coarse overgrowth of unkempt beard, and his eyes were ringed heavily with shadows.

  “Get me…” he croaked, his voice rasping and low, “…a goddamn brandy.” And when no one had moved, his entire family frozen with the shock and terror at the sight of him, he’d balled one hand into a shaky fist and drove it furiously into the wall. “A goddamn brandy, I said!”

  With this, Julien withdrew his thoughts, his memories, his mind, leaving Brandon blinking again against sudden, shocking dizziness in the aftermath of his recoil. As his vision cleared, and he blinked at Julien in bewildered surprise—as at a loss for words with his mind in that moment as with his mouth—Julien smiled at him sadly, a crooked upturn to the corners of his lips.

  “And that, kid, is the story of how I stole from my father,” he said, pulling a rumpled pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter from an inner jacket pocket.

  I…I don’t understand, Brandon said at length. It no longer felt so easy to hate Julien. As one with his own siblings—including a sister and younger brother he adored—he found himself struggling not to identify—and sympathize—with Julien. Why are you telling me this? Showing me these things?

  “Because I want you to understand,” Julien replied, tapping the cigarette pack against the back of his hand. “It’s nothing personal. Any of this. My father is—and always has been—a son of a bitch. And I hate him as much today as I did back then.” As he slipped a cigarette into his mouth, pulling it out from the pack with his teeth, he awarded Brandon a quick wink. “More, even.”

  Then why do this? Brandon tugged against his restraints, his brows narrowing. Why go along with any of this—you or Aaron? There’s another way—there’s always another way. Let me go—come with me. I can show—

  “Show me what?” Julien cut in, the cigarette dangling laxly from his bottom lip. “Michel Morin’s little Jonestown out in California? No thanks.” With a flick of the wrist, he opened the Zippo, and hit the roller with his thumb. As a blue-tinted flame obligingly sprang to life, he cocked his head and leaned toward it, lighting the business end of his cigarette. “There isn’t any other way. Not for me, or Aaron—or you. It is what it is, kid.” He drew in a deep drag, then snorted smoke out of his nose. “We all got the shit end of the stick.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As a telepath, Brandon had come to understand that many memories—especially those of extreme emotional involvement, such as joy or sorrow—were associated with sensory input—specific sights, sounds, or smells that, if experienced again, could often bring the memories, and all of their related emotional baggage, to immediate, powerful recall. For Julien, the smell of smoke would do the trick. Specifically wood smoke, though any would suffice; in the other man’s mind, Brandon could see that this was why he sometimes smoked. Not because he had a particular penchant for tobacco, or the need for nicotine, but because of the memories the fragrance of smoke would evoke for him—both good and bad.

  The good came in the beginning, an overwhelming happiness and security that Brandon could sense Julien had seldom experienced prior to that occasion, and had rarely experienced since. In Julien’s mind, he could see it clearly—Julien lying on a blanket that had been spread out against the cool, hard ground, the dirt floor of what appeared to be a spring house, with stone walls and a damp, pleasant, earthen smell akin to fresh moss. Julien could hear the soft, melodic gurgle of water as it bubbled up from the underground spring, and through his ears, his senses, Brandon could too. It was summertime and he was naked, his clothes and boots in a neat pile nearby, as comfortable in the pleasant press of the night air as he felt in his own bare skin.

  It was the year 1815, and Julien was in love. Not with Mercy, the woman to whom he’d been forcibly betrothed, but to the man lying behind him, his arm draped across the indentation of Julien’s waist, his fingers laced lightly through Julien’s own.

  Mason Morin.

  What had started out as fleeting, nearly shy encounters, each lasting no longer than an hour at most, had, with time, evolved into trysts that had lasted all night, every night. Their affair was a tightly guarded secret between them; at that time, homosexuality was considered both abhorrent among humans and Brethren alike, but also illegal. Additionally, both Julien and Mason had wives that had been arranged for them years earlier, and even then, eighteen years after the fateful duel that that had left Victor Davenant dead, bitter animosity ran deep between the Morin and Davenant clans.

  “Do you smell smoke?” Julien’s eyes had long since drooped closed in the aftermath of their lovemaking, the light sheen of sweat against his skin cooling him as it evaporated in the breeze. He opened his eyes now, and raised his head
, propping himself up on his elbow. He drew in a deep breath again through his nose.

  “It’s only the lamp,” Mason murmured, tightening his grasp in reassurance against Julien’s hand. “I blew it out a while ago.”

  Julien wasn’t so certain. It smelled like wood smoke to him, like a bonfire—something distant enough for the scent to be faint, but strong enough for it to be from something large. And he’d had a strange feeling all night, even before his arrival at the spring house, a nagging sort of sensation that something was wrong. He’d tried to tell himself that it was because he’d caught sight of Annette wearing a necklace at supper that night—the St. Christopher’s locket that Julien had hidden away in one of her drawers years earlier. Although by that point, he’d convinced himself that the events of that night—and especially the strange, viscous substance he’d scooped into the locket—had been the result of his overblown imagination, he’d still been surprised to see her wearing it, because she hadn’t in ages.

  Everything had felt peculiar to him after that, and he tried yet again to convince himself that it was all for naught, even as he settled down on the blanket again, and felt Mason’s breath against his shoulder.

  “You should be going,” Mason said, the tone of his voice low and mournful.

  Julien shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

  Mason’s lips lighted against his shoulder. “We can meet again tomorrow.”

  Julien couldn’t suppress a wry smile. “What makes you think I want to do that?”

  Mason’s breath fluttered intimately against the slope of his neck as he chuckled. “Because you love me.”

  Julien laughed. “The feeling’s clearly not mutual, otherwise you’d never ask me to go and endure that godforsaken party.”

  Mason nuzzled his ear, his tongue hooking against the lower part of his lobe. “It’s your mother’s birthday.”

  “Annette is Aaron’s mother, not mine.”

  “She’s your father’s wife and she’s expecting you,” Mason said. “She’ll be wondering where you are…what’s keeping you.”