Creeping Beautiful

by JA Huss

  No.

  I can share with them. But I can’t, and won’t, share with Nathan St. James. None of us will.

  She is ours. Not his.

  And if there’s one thing we came to terms with after what happened that day four years ago, it’s that Nathan had to go.

  In the months after Adam’s brain surgery and the fall of the Company we learned to deal with our new situation. Which was mostly good, but it came with cons too.

  Adam was recovering in a downstairs bedroom because he had some trouble with physical coordination when he got home from the hospital. He was in physical therapy four days a week for almost three months. And then he started doing a lot of martial arts with me in the side yard where I trained Indie.

  Adam was always a tough fucker. And a little brain surgery wasn’t gonna keep him down. He didn’t have any real lasting side effects of that incident, other than a few personality changes. But honestly, he was just a little quieter after he came home. Maybe he was just keeping more things bottled up instead of saying whatever the fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to. But I maybe liked new Adam more than old Adam, if I’m being honest.

  The jobs though, those were a little bit more stressful than Adam’s recovery. Obviously, we weren’t working in that time frame. We all needed a break. Indie, to forgive herself for practically killing Adam with a candlestick. Me, because I was the one who trained her to do that shit. Adam, for barging in on Indie and pushing her into a corner where she felt she needed to respond. And Donovan, for not predicting this loyalty switch in a situation where all things were supposed to be equal.

  But I’m not sure Donovan could’ve known that Indie would have conflicting loyalties when it came to Nathan St. James. Sure, they were friends. But… were all things equal?

  Anyway. Donovan was home almost the entire time, with just occasional trips back to Duke when he needed to make an appearance. But after a few months of that Donovan showed up one day and said he’d been accepted into some residency program at UCLA for plastic surgery. He quit his medical scientist program and moved west that summer. In fact, he’s spent almost the entire four years that Indie went missing in two residency programs and just got his board certification last summer.

  And when I stop to think about just how long that dude has been in school—the entire fourteen-year period since Adam bought Indie—his brain kinda freaks me out.

  But my point is—not everything about the Company falling was good for us.

  For one, there was no one to call if you got yourself into a sticky situation. No one to swoop in and bail you out. So we had to turn down a lot of jobs that involved high-level officials. That was the major difference in the before and after. The new jobs were very low-key. Stealthy kind of things. And a lot of them involved Indie going off on her own.

  Because, while we could no longer just assassinate senators and shit like that, we could still use them effectively. If the person who hired us had enough money, that is. We just squeezed them in other ways.

  Mostly by using their kids.

  This is how Indie attended three separate prep schools filled with the offspring of CEOs, and congressmen, and movie stars.

  Indie was the least affected by this change. She wasn’t even really aware that there was a change. She just figured she was older now. More competent. And we were giving her more freedom.

  Which we were, but not because we wanted to.

  Every time we had to send her away Adam was quietly stressed. Because he used to go with her and now it was me. He’s a tough dude. And in a fight between us I’m still not sure he couldn’t kick my ass even after the brain injury. But we all decided he was going to stay home and I was going to go when the jobs started up again.

  Not that I did much more than get an apartment and live in a nearby town while Indie was stealthily doing her boarding school jobs. At least I was close if she needed me.

  But you can only get away with that kind of job a few times if there’s no Company around to cover your ass and after three, we were done.

  Adam didn’t sit on his ass while Indie and I were off squeezing important people using their kids. He amassed a whole crew of former Company assassins he knew from back in the day and pretty much started a private army. And those guys were not as disciplined as we were. At all. It was kind of a free-for-all two years after the Company fell.

  Lots of them ended up with hits on their heads. Just way too unstable to keep alive. Even more got killed, or killed themselves, or ended up in prison when the full effect of no Company support finally hit them.

  No shadow government to bail you out this time, my friend. So sorry. Please accept this compensation package for keeping your fucking trap shut and pleading guilty before trial.

  Or… Bang, you’re dead. For opening said mouth during your trial, or getting caught in the first place, or botching the job altogether.

  There was a lot of that last kind of clean-up. These dumbasses actually figured they were free after the Company went under.

  They weren’t.

  They had bosses. And Adam was one of them. Not the only one, not by far. He didn’t step in and take over. No one did. That was the problem. All this infrastructure the Company built was suddenly flapping in the wind. And every former Company wannabe was trying to get his or her share.

  The really important thing that happened after the Company fell and Adam recovered was the realization that Nathan St. James wasn’t going anywhere.

  Indie was in love.

  I will say this about Adam back in those days. He was a good fucking sport about all that Nathan shit. He never said a fucking word to Indie about Nate again.

  But I did. Fuck her. She was not in charge of shit. She was sixteen years old and under my thumb for the duration. Because Donovan was obviously moving on to more lucrative opportunities in plastic surgery. (Insert eyeroll. Why that dude felt the need to work so hard when he had so much money was beyond me.)

  And Adam had the good sense to let Indie do her thing.

  I would catch him though. Standing in the formal dining room looking out the window at that little brick house across the duck lake. And I have known this asshole since we were kids. I could practically read his mind.

  He wanted to kill Nathan St. James with a burning passion.

  He hated that kid hard.

  Nate, to me? Eh. Whatever. Indie just thought she was in love back then. And she made a lot of mistakes with that guy. A lot of mistakes. But that’s what young people do, right? Anyone with a teenage daughter will tell you that the harder you fight them, the more they resist. So I went a little easy on her during that year and a half when she was doing the boarding school shit and the other, bigger, clean-up jobs in between.

  Probably too easy.

  And then… people started dying. Lots of people started dying. All former Company in one way or the other. The news was calling it a secret epidemic. Some sinister shadow organization had gotten to the world’s rich and powerful and… poisoned them? Maybe. No one was really sure.

  All we knew was that everyone left over from the upper circle from the Company days started dropping like flies.

  Everyone but us and a few others, that is.

  But I don’t want to think about that shit right now.

  Indie is lying in my arms in her childhood bedroom and I am happy for the first time in four years.

  That’s what I want to think about.

  She’s mine.

  All mine until Donovan and Adam get home.

  Then, after we sort out Adam, then we can think about what really happened in the past and try to come to terms with it.

  Try to move forward.

  Try to see how this is all gonna work out.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - INDIE

  Things changed between Adam and I after the incident. He was never the most talkative of the guys. Always preferring his own company, even when we were all together in the same room. Adam is just one of those contemplativ
e thinkers.

  But not in the same way as McKay.

  McKay is thoughtful and introspective.

  Adam is creepily quiet and calculating.

  Yeah. That’s how they’re different. When McKay is thinking he’s wondering about things such as why that man stopped his horse in the woods on a snowy evening.

  That’s a poem by Robert Frost. I didn’t know that until I went to boarding school and we had to study that poem. And I had never actually caught McKay reading that poem—though there was a book of poems by Robert Frost in the Old Home library. But the minute we started discussing it in literature class I knew that if McKay had ever read this poem, he would’ve pondered all these same questions.

  I, for the record, do not think that man was contemplating suicide in the snowy woods on his way home. I think he was just taking a moment to admire the beauty of where he was that night.

  My teacher said I was wrong. That the imagery and word choices were set up in such a way that everything pointed to an ending, i.e. death.

  But I just didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna agree. And Robert Frost denied it anyway. Maybe he was lying? Maybe he just wanted people to keep thinking about his pretty words and not feed them easy answers? That’s possible. But in my mind, it’s as simple as this:

  You do not kill yourself.

  What is the point of that? Someone else is always coming round the bend trying to do that for you. You don’t make it easy for them.

  And I knew McKay would agree.

  Here’s what I think about that poem—once it’s written it doesn’t really matter why that man wrote it. It only matters how I interpret it. And I choose to see things my way.

  Anyway, Adam wasn’t contemplating poems when he was thinking.

  He was plotting.

  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Because it was Adam’s plots and plans that made us such a successful team. Especially after the Company fell and we had no more support. So I’m just saying he was different than McKay in this regard and that’s why he was the boss.

  But after the candlestick incident he started making me uneasy.

  Sometimes he would look at me funny. Not like I was amusing. When I was smaller, I could see those thoughts in his mind at times. He liked me. I know he liked me. I could just tell by the way he took care of me on the jobs. He didn’t say, “I love you, Indie.” Ever. But I knew he loved me.

  After he came home from the hospital, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  I would catch him staring out the dining room window. And while there are a lot of very pretty things to look at through each and every one of Old Home’s windows—the lake, the gardens, the pavilion, the woods, and from some of them you could see the river—that’s not what he was looking at through the dining room window.

  He was looking at Nathan’s house.

  I knew he blamed Nate for what happened to him that day. Even though I was the one who struck him in the head with the candlestick and sent him into surgery and then months of physical therapy and recovery, he did not blame me.

  That much I knew.

  He blamed Nate. And from that day on he hated him.

  But Adam never went over there again. He kept his distance from Nate and me. Even after things calmed down and McKay lifted my grounding and let Nate come over to visit. McKay said I was not allowed to go over to Nate’s house anymore, but that Nate could come here. And that was fine with me. We weren’t trying to be sneaky. We just wanted to be together.

  Anyway. Adam was quiet after he came home from the hospital. He was a little wobbly with his walk and even though no one mentioned it, he slurred his words a little for a few weeks. But that passed and pretty soon his hair grew out and mostly covered the large scar down the side of his head. And we all moved on.

  Moving on meant jobs. And we had lots of jobs at this point.

  Adam was very busy planning and plotting and organizing the leftovers. That’s what we called them. All the other assassin teams that were left adrift after the Company fell.

  We didn’t have any meetings at Old Home for obvious reasons. We didn’t generally mix business life with personal life. So Adam had a warehouse in Baton Rouge and another one in New Orleans where he met with the leftovers and sent them on missions.

  But the objective of leftover life was modified from Company life. We were soldiers for hire now. And no one gave us orders. Some of the teams still killed people. There was always a market for that. We called those clean-up missions. But sometimes teams kidnapped kids—this was often in foreign countries after a disgruntled parent would run off and take the child with them. We’d go get them back. We called those recovery missions.

  Or we would steal things. High-ticket items like paintings and jewels. We called those thieving missions.

  Or sometimes they were just boring intelligence-gathering jobs. And then we’d take pictures and compile a dossier and hand it over to whoever paid for it. We just called that reconnaissance.

  And then, of course, I did those three stints in boarding school. I had to make one girl look like she committed suicide—that was, ironically, during the time of that Robert Frost poem. And then the second time I had to kidnap a girl. Or at least lead her to the team who was gonna kidnap her. I’m pretty sure she was held for ransom and let go. And the last one got a little messy at the end because Adam lied about it.

  There were a lot of jobs. That is my real point. And there was a lot of money too. And by this time, I had my own bank account in the Cayman Islands that came with a debit card. So I bought myself a car the winter before I turned seventeen.

  Donovan was busy with his plastic surgery stuff at UCLA so he only dropped by about once a month, if that. Not after every job like he used to. But we talked on the phone a lot. And he recorded those conversations too. He was still taking notes as well. I could hear the scratching of his pen on the other end of the line.

  But Donovan wasn’t there when I bought my car. McKay was. He took me into New Orleans to get it because I ordered it online. It was actually a truck, because we lived on a dirt road in the middle of a swampy forest and that was only practical. But I wanted it the way I wanted it, so I got a custom order.

  That summer I turned seventeen Adam was obsessed with the gardens. Now, we had always had nice gardens around Old Home. I don’t think I explained this properly in any of my previous journal entries, but they were beautiful. Many evergreen hedges, and pea-pebbled pathways, and regular flower plantings, and even a few fountains. Some summers they looked better than others because gardeners were always hard to keep since we lived so far away from everything.

  But that summer I turned seventeen Adam took care of the gardens all by himself. And I took notice of this because he had never done that before.

  By this time, we were talking again. Adam and I were never the best of friends. He was more like a… not a father, but that kind of figure. He was someone I took orders from. And not the same way I took orders from McKay. If McKay said, “Indie, you may not go to the movies with Nate tonight,” I would say, “Please, please, please!” with wide eyes and praying hands, and McKay would often give in.

  Adam wasn’t in charge of my movie dates. Adam was in charge of my life. And I did not bother begging him for anything because he just never relented. He made up his mind and his mind was made up. That was that. I either obeyed or I didn’t and paid the consequences.

  I learned pretty early that disobeying Adam was not gonna get me far. He was much easier to be around when you just did what you were told.

  So my relationship with Adam, from the time I was ten until just after my seventeenth year, was mostly just following orders and going to church with him.

  He was a stickler for that Sunday trip to fucking church.

  But things started to change the summer I turned seventeen and saw him on his knees with hands in the dirt in our gardens.

  At first, I just watched him from one of the windows. He had lots of deliveries from a nursery in a t
own about thirty miles away. They would pull up in their truck and Adam would stand there and point as they unloaded them. He would tell them exactly where to put each pot. But he didn’t ask them to help plant them. He did that part himself.

  We had a small backhoe in the garden shed—which was really more of a building than a shed—and every other kind of garden equipment you can imagine. That’s where Nate and I got those chainsaws to clear trees back when we were eleven. And every morning in the early summer that year I turned seventeen, Adam was up with the sun digging holes and planting things.

  I watched him do this for five days. McKay was busy with a few of the teams Adam told him to run, so he was in and out during this time. And Nate was busy with school things. And his grandfather, who was very, very ill at this point.

  And I was alone.

  Just Adam and me.

  So on day six of this planting stuff I went outside in jeans and mud boots and asked Adam if I could help. It was like six in the morning, but it was already hot. So Adam took off his baseball hat, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, pointed to a row of potted evergreen shrubs, and said, “You can do those, Indie. Just put them in the holes and cover them with a nice mound of dirt and three inches of mulch. Then, when we’re done, you can water them.”

  I nodded and did that. It took me all day.

  They were not much to look at when all this took place and I said so when I was done. But Adam just smiled and leaned on a shovel. Then he said, “Don’t worry, Indie. This coming winter they will have pretty purple flowers with a scent you will die for. And next fall they will have bright red berries and the thrushes will come from miles around to feed on them. They will stay through the winter and the next spring we will have small, cup-like nests on all the trees and they will be heavy with blue-green, brown-speckled eggs.”

  He was smiling when he said all this. Like talking about the berries and the birds was a fond memory he was conjuring up from long-ago days. He sounded a lot like Nate back when we were kids and my heart made room for Adam that day.