by SM Reine
He checked his watch. Ten minutes after John’s supposed discharge time, and still no John.
Nobody was watching Lincoln, so he got low and stuck his arm in the drawer where snacks dropped. But someone else had already had that idea. Whatever snacks had been in reach on the bottom rows had already been stolen.
“Damn, I really wanna eat you,” he growled at the years-old Hostess cupcakes on the top shelf. They looked pristine. They were mocking him.
He wobbled as he stood and spotted the power plug curled behind the machine.
A thought struck him.
“No way,” Lincoln said.
He plugged the snack machine in. The lights came on, and it beeped.
Lincoln dug into his pocket for change. He came up with enough quarters to get all the cupcakes out of the vending machine.
Three bags. Lucky day.
He ripped one open and inhaled a cupcake. It tasted sorta like cardboard. The best cardboard ever, though.
Lincoln considered the third bag of cupcakes while working on the first two. It wasn’t shortcake. Sophie might enjoy trying it anyway. Even if she found it repulsive, he’d get to see her excitement again, and that was how he’d wanna remember her in the weeks to come. Aglow with the delight of new discovery.
He stuck it in the inner pocket of his jacket, right next to the unicorn dagger. He’d take it to her at the bus stop.
“Thinking of which…” Lincoln checked his watch. Almost a half hour since John was supposed to get discharged. He peered around the nurse’s station looking for an employee. “Anyone here?” There were a couple people talking by a different patient’s room. That was probably the only staff available at the moment.
Lincoln was gonna have to see if John needed help getting ready. He’d have to face him, talk to him, maybe even touch him.
The smile faded from his face along with the lingering taste of cupcake.
It was time to face his father.
They would speak for the first time since Lincoln had learned the hideous, brutal truth about him.
He headed down the hall to John’s room, back where the lights didn’t shine so bright. Where the hard cases slumbered in shadowy rooms with blackout curtains. Where the voices at the nurse’s station grew more distant. Lincoln’s boots creaking against the linoleum sounded too loud, almost offensively so.
The door to John’s room was shut. Lincoln knocked. “You in there?”
His dad didn’t reply.
“I’m coming in,” he called, knocking again.
He pushed the door open.
It was darkest of all in John’s room. Not only were the blackout curtains pulled, but someone had hung blankets over them too. So it took a minute for Lincoln’s eyes to adjust. And even when he could see, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
There was a human figure in the middle of the room. His feet didn’t touch the floor.
Lincoln had been to Hell enough times to see a floating guy and think that it was a demon.
He wished it was a demon.
When he realized that figure was suspended from one of the heating pipes running across the roof, he wished for just about anything except the truth.
John Marshall had hung himself with his belt.
Words spilled out of Lincoln’s mouth—almost more like sounds. Grunts of denial. The word “no” a few times. Something that felt like a sob, even though his whole body was a dried out husk. He almost slipped on the chair the first time he climbed onto its seat, and he banged his shin against the back, but he didn’t feel it.
The leather was tight across John’s throat. His weight was too much for Lincoln to lift, so he couldn’t undo the belt. He could only grasp at his father, pull him to his chest, struggle to raise him at all and groan again when he failed.
It was the closest he’d gotten to hugging his dad since elementary school.
John was room temperature.
Lincoln stopped struggling, and his father swayed to a stop in front of him. There was no way to avoid seeing his face. The bulge of his tongue. The broken vessels in his eyes. The ragged flesh on his neck.
It wasn’t a pretty death.
This wasn’t his father.
This is my father. John Marshall is dead. He killed himself.
Lincoln pounded a fist against his chest—sort of like the way Junior had pounded a fist into the body he’d found in the hospice, angry that Susannah was still killing. Lincoln now knew exactly what his brother had felt. The frustration, the unfairness. John wasn’t going to face justice. He wasn’t going to suffer anymore.
The chair wobbled. Lincoln lowered himself off of it, somehow. His feet weren’t touching the ground…were they? He couldn’t breathe as surely as though the strap were around his throat.
Even through the shock, he could smell everything that had come out of John as he died.
The investigator in Lincoln couldn’t be turned off. He couldn’t be so distracted by the shock that he missed the note on the desk. It had been ripped off a hospital notepad, and the pen remained neatly beside it, as if John had written an emotionless message and stepped away. Both were stacked upon this morning’s newspaper, which had been opened to the last page. That was where a single paragraph article declared that John Marshall Elementary School would be renamed due to assault allegations. His shame was public. But it wasn’t front-page news.
John Marshall’s suicide note had only five words on it.
“This is all your fault.”
Sophie waited for the bus to New York with several members of the pack—nobody that she knew, unfortunately, but she fully intended to be acquainted with all of them before they arrived at their destination. She watched from the back of the crowd with a huge grin stuck to her face. She was just like them. A normal person waiting for a normal bus to take her to a normal city, rather than a Historian sitting around waiting to die.
“Whatever information you need to find, someone in New York will know it,” Summer Gresham had said during their farewells. “It’s a huge city. One of my favorites. You’ll love it.”
There was no doubt in Sophie’s mind that this would be true, and she was eager to begin her search.
She drank in a deep breath of Grove County’s air, no longer as fresh as it had been when she arrived. There wasn’t enough wind through the valley to clear the fumes from the eruption. Still, she caught honeysuckle on the wind, and the smell of grease venting from Poppy’s as daylight waned. Darkness crept from between the trees rather than descending from the sky. The lightning bugs had emerged early tonight, too.
It was a lovely place, despite its dark history. Perhaps, once she had located Omar, she could return to visit the pack again.
And perhaps Lincoln, too.
Her eagerness was somewhat dampened when the bus showed up five minutes after eight—disappointingly late—and Lincoln had yet to arrive. Sophie hung at the back of the terminal to allow everyone else to load their bags first. A werewolf was tossing the luggage into the compartment underneath the passengers’ seats, and it wouldn’t take him long to finish loading.
Sophie had really been hoping to say goodbye properly.
She closed her eyes and inhaled one more time.
The air was so crisp.
When she bent to pick up her luggage, a hand brushed over Sophie’s back.
As she turned, she was already smiling in anticipation of hugging Lincoln—something he would surely loathe.
The white-clad assassin stood behind her.
Sophie jerked back. “No!”
But the assassin’s arm was already locked over her throat, and the world was unfolding too rapidly around Sophie for her to think of self-defense. Nobody even looked at her as the witch dragged her away from the bus station. They had jumped out of the moment. Sophie was watching it pass without her.
The last people were climbing onto the bus, and Sophie’s bags were still piled on the sidewalk.
Sophie pounded her fists against the
assassin’s arm, gagging. The witch shifted her grip so that she could breathe. “Who are you? What do you want?” Sophie gasped.
“My name’s the Traveler,” it said, digging its heels in to drag her between the trees. “I’m here to make you fix the Precept you broke before the whole universe falls apart.”
The Traveler twisted. Sophie felt time flip.
With a single jump, they vanished from this world.
Next book:
Hell’s Hinges
Book 3
About the Author
Hi! I’m Sara, a super-prolific author who publishes as SM Reine. I’ve put out over fifty titles, most of which are urban fantasy, and all of which serve as evidence of my nonexistent social life.
I’m a proud Nevadan, an enthusiastic mom-nerd, and animal hoarder in possession of cats, dogs, toads, bees, and little boys. I write gratuitous violence to balance out my real-life chill. I like kissing books and science fiction movies.
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smreine.com