Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  Troth wailed, grasping at her husband’s fragile torso as Sam crowed a hoarse laugh. Her hand raised again, knife held high. Sam freed the handcuff chain in time to deflect the blade with a metallic ring, but the tip caught his face on the altered path with a spray of red. Andrew jolted at Sam’s punched-out yowl of shocked agony.

  He’d never heard someone make a sound like that before. The disorienting wonderment of a fresh kill on the air coalesced with his own frantic need to help Sam. If he’d found the richness of his fully realized power intoxicating before, the added burst of sustenance made him and the revenant feel like a small god in their new flesh. Filmy, auric impressions radiated from Sam—and from Troth, who throbbed with the malevolence of a siren. He recognized the ochre sourness of her magic from the ring, the baited gift she’d used to confirm him as her next target. But, he realized with a grim flowering of determination, she’d made a miscalculation—leaving him unattended, as if he occupied a limited human body. Ropes weren’t sufficient to restrain the thing she’d forced him to become. Troth’s knife lifted and Sam fumbled to free himself of her husband’s corpse, bound at ankles and arms. He wouldn’t get loose in time. The revenant wrapped their starvation tight around the oil-stained vibration of her power, with the same instinct as a python testing the size of its prey.

  Eddie’s remainder murmured with Andrew’s mouth, “She’s ours.”

  The wind that lashed through the barn frightened the horses into a shrieking frenzy as he poured himself into Mark’s responsive corpse, now twitching it like a marionette. Things inside Andrew wrenched, and Mark’s limp arm flopped up to catch the next stab Troth aimed at Sam’s throat. Her knife stuck on bone. He severed the connection and the arm dropped, twisting the hilt loose from her flinching hand.

  Compared to the darkness of Troth’s void, Halse burned bright as an ember in their unearthly sight. His life was precious; on that, he and the remnant agreed. The doubled creature returned their attention to the viscous sore that was Troth, and Andrew followed his animal instinct—allowing the revenant to tear in with abandon, gnawing through the foul source of her magic.

  Troth made a curious noise, pausing mid-reach for her blade. Her balance wavered where she knelt above her husband’s corpse. Incomprehension washed across her expression. She toppled to the side. Andrew saw the terror twisting her face and hesitated as she seized on the ground. The revenant didn’t hesitate. The revenant was the one who sank fangs into her core and shredded and shredded, until only the finest thread connected her flesh to her being.

  “Andrew,” Sam wheezed—scared and hurting.

  Driven by the recollection of Eddie’s pain and the fresh insult of Sam’s, Andrew bit through that remaining psychic tendon and swallowed the force that had been Troth whole. After a hanging second spent casting around for further threat and finding none, their stacked power drained into the earth again, sated.

  Andrew wrestled into control of himself once more. His skin stretched around the haunt, though it curled inside him with cautious stillness. Scattered memories cluttered his brain, his own and Eddie’s, twinned: giving himself the tattoo with broader hands and a frantically pumping heart, while at the same time holding his breath and riding the stinging pain out for the sake of the marker. The vulnerable beat of his pulse and the bumps of his vertebra, held within the cup of Eddie’s palm, silken skin under a sweeping thumb; his own soothed lull at the grounding weight, the squeeze, the welcome reminder of his belonging. Their alternate perspectives notched like puzzle pieces, building a whole. Eddie, bound to this chair, flinging their gift to Andrew in hopes that he’d latch on and tearing himself asunder in the process.

  Movement caught his attention. Sam crawled from the pile of bodies, grabbed the knife, and sawed through the rope around his ankles. His cuffed wrists bled sluggishly. His breath came in sobs. With a shock, Andrew realized that the mask of blood on his face covered his eye, stuck shut with gore. Sam cut the ropes around Andrew’s wrists first. He tried to lift his arms, experiencing a lag as the possession that controlled his flesh caught up to his impulse and assisted in the movement. It was now the work of two minds to move his body. The high whine of terror that slipped out of his throat was all his own.

  Sam finished working him loose and dragged him off the chair, spilling his unresisting form out on the ground. He huddled around him to touch his wounded forearms, his bruised face. The slashes had closed themselves a little—perhaps enough to keep him living for another night. The phone that appeared in Sam’s hand was incongruous in its mundanity. He watched Sam dial 911.

  “Help,” he rasped into the receiver.

  The ghost and Andrew made a fist in Sam’s shirt at his solar plexus. Sam’s lips shook as he gasped disjointed chunks of information into the phone. His teeth were tinted red. He tossed the phone aside while the operator continued speaking. Sweat dappled his sallow brow. The splayed gash ran from the middle of his left cheek to his hairline; Andrew forced himself to acknowledge that Troth’s knife had crossed deep over the eyelid. His gorge rose. Sam had suffered that for him.

  “Your eye,” he whispered.

  “It hurts,” Sam said, voice so small that it made goose bumps rise on Andrew’s arms.

  “Fuck,” he sobbed. The revenant reduced itself to a passenger as he wrested control of his limbs and eased Sam onto his side. He ran bloodied fingers over his wrists to the cuffs that were cinched tight to his skin. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

  The tip of his nail slipped under the edge of the metal cuff. Sam’s furnace heat, indisputably alive, intoxicated him as he held it within his palms. Sam stiffened. The faintest pop of connection sparked as their blood mingled, prickling at Andrew and the cavernous shadow of the haunt riding shotgun.

  “Don’t,” Sam said. “Don’t make me like you.”

  “I wouldn’t, I didn’t mean—”

  “You killed her with that.”

  Andrew withdrew an inch from Sam to put distance between their skin, more than he could bear but the least he needed to prevent the transmission his instincts clamored for. Sam let him go, lying flat on his back, cuffed hands clasped on his chest as if offering benediction.

  Troth’s self, her lineage, the collected histories and magics and inheritances not dissimilar from his own, weighed like a stone in Andrew’s belly. He’d eaten her, whole and struggling—and it had gifted him a stolen vitality, knitted his flesh, and settled his haunt-half. None of the books had mentioned this. What else could he do, as a whole monster, if he went to the old manor from his dreams and kept digging?

  “It’s no different than what you did,” he said quietly.

  Sam said, “Stop.”

  Andrew stopped. Neither man had to shift an inch for the gap between their skin to widen into a fissure. The sound of their shallow, labored breathing filled the silence as they waited for rescue.

  30

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Blur,” the plainclothes detective said. She locked the screen of her tablet and tucked it into her almost-subtle tactical bag. “We’ll release the effects recovered from the scene to you once the case has wrapped.”

  “Okay,” he croaked.

  The scratch in his throat had come with the passenger occupying his flesh, making him perpetually hoarse. He lifted his hand in dismissal as she stepped out of his hospital room. His doctor, a Hispanic woman in her late fifties, entered a moment later. She had strong hands and a brusque but pleasant manner that reminded him of his late grandmother.

  “I’d prefer not to release you yet,” she said. “The drugs are out of your system, but I’m concerned with the test results for your heart and kidneys. I’d also appreciate it if you’d speak with the psychiatrist instead of ignoring him.”

  Andrew shrugged as grandly as he could with an IV taped to his arm, tucked into his raised bed as if he were a child. “No thanks.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said with a frown.

  “How’s Sam?”

  “I
can’t discuss another patient’s status with you,” she said for the seventeenth time.

  “When will I get out?”

  “We have you another three days for observation, at least.”

  He grunted and closed his eyes. At some point later, she left, taking her vibrating human presence with her. Sam was ignoring his messages. He’d spoken to the detectives about his defensive killing of Mark Troth, Andrew knew via Riley, their strained go-between. According to the coroner’s report, Jane Troth had suffered a sudden stoppage of her heart at the height of her frenetic madness. He knew otherwise; Sam knew otherwise. That secret lay between them, in all its ugliness, festering. Sam’s rejection—of him, of what he’d become, of what he’d done, or all of those things—filled him with a sour, slow drip of misery. After Troth had stitched Andrew’s disarticulated portion of the inheritance to Eddie’s haunting remains, carried within him now, he was less sure than he’d ever been of the neatness of his humanity. Maybe Sam was right to pull away.

  The hospital rippled on all sides with human struggle, little flames guttering and flickering outside his grasp. He had to keep a constant curious need to seek contact with those burning specks in check—curb the part of him that hungered for life, death. His ghoul petted the interior of his skull, soothing his mind. Sleep, or something like it, swallowed him. He tumbled through a blur of memories doubled at the seams, the dew-spangled lawn and the silk of Andrew’s hair knotted in his fist, the gross patch of drool spreading on his chest, watching the sun come up and thinking fierce as devotion this is mine forever until sleep sucked him under again

  watching Eddie snore with a leaf stuck to the side of his neck and the cold damp grass soaking him as he fought to sit still, not shiver, not disturb the perfect moment of being that the pair of them occupied in sleep, in innocence, in dumb happiness

  beer and foam spilled in an erotic embarrassing stream across the plane of Andrew’s chest into the band of his swim trunks, Eddie’s urge to put his mouth there and taste

  Eddie stretching on the floating dock, the midday sun turning him into a bronze god of a boy with muscle from neck to ass to calves, untouchable and unbreakable, savage and timeless

  the night before junior prom both of them dressed in their suits sharing stolen wine coolers alone and pretending, pretending without speaking, that they could be there together

  “Hey,” Riley said.

  Andrew jerked out of his communion with a confused snort, room spinning around him. His arm stung nauseously where he’d tugged at the IV. His roommate sat in the bedside chair, haggard, wearing glasses and sweats, same as the past two visits.

  “Sorry,” Andrew said.

  Riley gestured to his head and asked, “Has it gotten easier, the sharing?”

  Andrew grappled with his desire to hide from that question. He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

  Eventually, he answered, “No, it hasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Andrew,” Riley said.

  “And Sam?”

  Riley’s expression morphed through four versions of chagrin before he settled on an apologetic one and said, “The surgery saved the eye, but he isn’t getting his sight back in it. Too much damage. He’s dealing.”

  Andrew nodded without asking for more; he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “He cares, dude, I swear he does care. He asked after you too,” Riley said.

  “Let me handle his bills at least.”

  “He’ll be pissed,” Riley warned approvingly.

  “Let him be,” Andrew replied. “Can’t make things worse, can it?”

  “Nah, and it’ll take away his excuse to keep working that second gig, which has been my end goal,” Riley said.

  “Help me sort it,” he said, weakening as the conversation dragged on. The pain meds made him drowsy, knotted his stomach. “Give them my card or something.”

  “Gotcha,” Riley said. “Glad you’re not fucking dead, okay?”

  “You say that every time,” he grumbled, but the comfort mattered.

  On the bedside table, his phone began to vibrate. The number on the display was foreign to him but had a local area code. He ignored the call. Police had taken his statement more than once and had informed him in person of the evidence unearthed at the crime scene—the shattered remains of Eddie’s phone in a spare bedroom storage chest, his hair and blood recovered from the barn. Nurses weren’t going to call his phone to get in touch. Nothing else much was worth his energy. His roommate pulled a book from his messenger bag and curled up in the visitor’s chair, despite it clearly being designed to prevent people from doing so. The end result was a contorted sprawl with one leg tucked through the arm gap, the other bent tight against his chest.

  The phone rang again. And again. And again. As soon as Riley glanced at the table in consternation, his own phone pinged with texts, three in rapid succession, while Andrew’s lit up with messages. The group chat that remained active from their one celebratory drive had come to life with a text from Ethan:

  Vanderbilt Professors Implicated in Occult Murder, Slain in Self Defense

  HEY WHAT THE FUCK

  WHY Y’ALL NOT TELL US YOU ALMOST GOT ACTUALLY MURDERED

  WHAT IS GODDAMN WRONG WITH YOU

  “That’s not good,” Riley murmured. He tapped his screen. Andrew muted his phone. “The article has details leaked from police reports, it’s salacious as hell, and it names you. Eddie, too.”

  Mom lit up the incoming call alert. He answered without preamble, “I guess the news got there.”

  “Oh my god,” she said. Those three words held an operatic implication. “Andrew Thomas Blur, I can’t believe it, you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he said.

  “You’re not fine,” she said. “And Eddie, my god. Oh my god.”

  “I gotta go, I’m in the hospital,” he said—too tired for this. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Baby, don’t hang up on me, please,” she said.

  Riley set his book facedown, split open, on his vacated seat. He left the room with his phone in hand, grimacing as he texted with manic energy. As Andrew listened to his mother cry on the other end of the line, he realized that neither of the cousins had told the group without asking him. The world where he was some sort of living ghoul, where he carried a curse that allowed him to murder with a thought, felt impossible juxtaposed against a sterile Nashville hospital room, a roommate doing homework during his visiting hours, and a sobbing parent.

  Dislocation threw him so badly that he repeated, “Please, I swear I’ll call. I have to go.”

  She let him hang up with an outpouring of relief and affection. Once he tapped the END CALL button, he squeezed his phone until it hurt his stitched wrists. At least he’d finished Eddie’s work. He’d solved their decade-long riddle, uncovered a generational legacy of violence and terror. That, and scattered remains, were all he had left. Riley knocked, slipping inside after a beat of silence. He thumped his forehead onto Andrew’s gown-clad shoulder as he heaved a sigh, then stood straight.

  “You need to get some rest. I’ll come tomorrow. Also, I’m sure those calls are reporters, so turn your phone off,” he said.

  Andrew did as he was told.

  Riley continued to visit, but Sam never did. Three afternoons later Andrew allowed himself to be wheeled out of the hospital in the change of clothes Riley brought him and driven to Capitol in the Mazda, his stitches itching fiercely. The specter kept him from scratching at the knitting skin, though he tried wit
h increasing frustration, trapped in the passenger seat of his own body. He could tell Riley felt the struggle. He avoided looking Andrew in the face, as if he were afraid of seeing a different person there. Given the shock of surviving the reprisal of all his worst dreams, he felt ungrateful for wishing that he’d died.

  What now? he thought.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” Riley said from the living room.

  Andrew carried their mugs of coffee around the corner from the kitchen. Riley turned his laptop and pointed at the screen. The headline read, Local Graduate Student Sues for Misconduct.

  “I never thought I’d be glad to read about West,” Riley said. “But given how Troth got outed as a spooky goddamn murderer, he’s taking the university to court over their handling of his and Troth’s research dispute. God bless that bastard, he deserves some recompense.”

  “I’m going to go to Sam’s,” Andrew said.

  Dumb consternation colored Riley’s tiny “Oh.”

  “It’s been enough time,” Andrew said.

  Riley sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t stop you. I can tell you it hasn’t been enough time, and he’s not okay right now, and you’re half the reason he isn’t.”

  “It wasn’t—I didn’t do anything to him,” Andrew said.

  “He murdered a man with his hands after watching that dude’s wife slit your wrists, and then”—he gestured sidelong at the mess that was Andrew, encompassing the broken remainder of his haunting, feral and barely controlled and part of him—“the ghost shit happened. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Sam gives and gives all the time, and he doesn’t get much in return. Have some patience if he’s being selfish. He seems tough as nails, but he almost died.”