Yet Erin didn’t pull away. She looked up at him without the judgement he expected to see, or the outrage he would have forgiven her. When she spoke, her words cut straight to his heart. “That was after he died.”
“Yes.” Years after Greg had drawn his last breath, Shane could talk about it without opening a pit of grief in the depths of his guts. Or he could before Nicole had torn it all open again.
This grief felt different, less immediate but just as raw. Because I couldn’t do what he asked, even if it was maybe a fool’s errand from the start. Or because I’ve lost the last link to him I had outside my memories. If I ever had it.
Erin slid her fingers down his arm to take his hand and squeeze it. Compassion deepened her gaze. “I’m sorry he’s gone. Saying that doesn’t help, I know, but it’s all I’ve got. That, and a shoulder, if you want to talk about what happened. You don’t have to. I won’t be offended.”
He didn’t want to talk about it, but looking into her eyes, he found he needed to. Her kindness built him a place where he could let the armor fall away. Even then, the words had to squeeze past the lump in his throat. “Greg was bitten by a Feral.”
She paled. “Oh, my God, Shane.”
“It was early on in the spread of the virus. He and I, we both had werewolf genes. My grandfather was one. Mom didn’t come up wolfy, but she passed on the potential to the both of us. It manifested for me. Not for Greg. He was so disappointed when puberty brought a voice change, not a shape change.” Once, Shane had reveled in that. Greg had outshone his brother in every aspect of life but that one. The wolf had belonged to Shane alone.
“Can’t you pass that on, though? By biting people?”
“You can, but there are dangers. There’s always the chance you’ll die. Or worse. Greg decided he didn’t want to risk it. He said he obviously wasn’t meant to be a wolf, so he’d leave it to me.” Shane forced himself to take a deep breath. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m pretty sure he did it for my benefit. Being a werewolf was what I had and he didn’t. I felt guilty about that for a long time.”
Erin folded her other hand over his. “Because werewolves are immune to the Feral virus.”
“Yeah.” The word came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “One of the early packs of Ferals slipped through at the edges of town, back before we knew what it would take to defend the place. The virus was new, we didn’t know how important the pack would be… Greg thought he saw someone hurt. Went to help them and…”
“And he got bitten. Shit.” Erin chafed the pad of her thumb over the back of Shane’s hand.
“We didn’t know all of what it meant, back then. He drove home. Washed it. Put a bandage on it. He wasn’t sure what had happened, or maybe, he didn’t want to be sure, but after a while there wasn’t much room for doubt. I came over to find him staring at his arm.”
Greg sat on the couch, arm in his hand. Shane could see the livid lines of infection from the doorway. Red streaks crawled up from the bandage, hot and painful to look at, fast enough that he would have sworn he could see them gaining ground. To him, his brother had always seemed invincible, larger than life and stronger than illness. Until that moment. Until Shane saw the tremors in his brother’s limbs and the stricken, terrified look in Greg’s eyes.
“You need to leave,” Greg said, voice strained and uneven. “Right now. Before this spreads any further.”
“Greg? The fuck are you talking about?” Shane knew in his heart what his brother meant. They’d both seen the news broadcasts and internet articles about what a Feral infection looked like. The realization refused to seep deeper into Shane’s mind. “We should take you to the hospital. That’s— That’s not what it looks like. It can’t be.”
Greg turned his head to stare at Shane with damp, reddened eyes. “Shane. Don’t. I got bitten. They ran off right after, so I thought maybe it was just one of those crazy assholes on bath salts. Maybe I just wanted to think that.”
Scared now, Shane started forward. “Why didn’t you call me? I could have taken you to—”
“Don’t come any closer!” Greg roared. “Stay the fuck back!”
Shane staggered to a shocked halt.
“It’s been two hours. A little more than two hours. I wrote down the time, so I wouldn’t forget. So I could keep track.” Greg squeezed his eyes closed. Shane could see the muscles in his brother’s jaw clench as Greg fought to retain clarity. “I can feel it, little brother. When I was a kid, I used to think about what it would feel like when the wolf woke up inside me. This was what I imagined. Except this is wrong. This is so damn wrong. Like I want to claw my way out of my own skin.”
Cold dread settled into Shane’s belly and froze his blood to ice. His mouth ran dry. “The wolf doesn’t feel like that,” was all he could think to say, as if preserving that childhood fantasy would help.
“Thank God. I don’t want you to ever feel this.” Greg opened his eyes. Bloodshot, now, and wet with tears. “I can’t go on like this much longer. This is a fight I’m going to lose. Whatever this thing is inside me, it’s going to tear me apart unless I stop it right now.”
Shane knew every word Greg said, yet none of them made sense. They defied Shane, eluded the meanings they should have. His mind felt like a stone in the rain, still and thick and hardened against what it needed to absorb. If he took it in, it would be real, and the reality was beyond what he ever wanted to consider.
Because it would mean Greg would not see another sunset, and heroes weren’t supposed to die this way.
Erin glanced at the picture on the mantel again. “He didn’t go to the hospital, did he.”
“No. There wasn’t any point in going. Less point than today, even. Now, they know the best way to knock you out before they take samples and put you out of your misery. At the start of the outbreak?” Shane shook his head. “Greg decided to handle it himself. While he still could. I offered to do it, but he told me to go and call the cops in half an hour.”
“Did you?”
“What else could I do?” He meant it as a rhetorical question, one he’d asked countless times since that day. Tonight, he found part of him still wanted the answer, and that part held an anger that had never faded. “He was damn adamant that I go before he hurt me. I couldn’t get the virus, but he could still lose his shit and attack. We couldn’t even risk one last hug. It was— It was just over. Get out and ride away. Keep driving until you can’t see anymore because tears have blinded you.”
Erin weathered the storm of buried emotion with attentive silence and a furrowed brow. Her thumb didn’t stop stroking his hand, a tender, gentle counterpoint to the directionless rage that vented from him. Only when he lapsed into silence did she speak. “You’re angry he told you to leave.”
“I’m angry he gave up. I’m angry he had to give up. We’re in the fucking twenty-first century. Humans made this virus. How could it kill my brother? How could we not cure that shit?” Shane took a deep breath and forced his rage down. “And I’m angry because my brother died alone. What the hell kind of brother just leaves?”
“A good one,” Erin said. One hand unwound from his to rest on his chest. “The last control your brother had over his life was the way he chose to die. He couldn’t stop the virus. But he could make sure your last memory of him wasn’t the instant he died. He could make sure you didn’t live the rest of your life knowing you’d been the one to end his.”
“It had to be done. He was just going to suffer.”
“Yes. Needing to happen doesn’t take away the emotions attached. You might feel relief, but it’s a complicated relief that has its shadows.” Her hand flexed on his chest, a tiny hug for his heart alone. “That kind of decision changes you. Even when you’ve asked a doctor to end life support instead of taking the action yourself, it changes you. Your brother wanted to go to his end knowing you were safe. Dying alone was a small sacrifice in the face of that.”
She was right. Over the last day, he’d l
earned she often was. Erin had a way of cutting straight to the heart of the matter, then unwinding the thorns that had grown around it. He let out an uneven breath. “I wanted to save his life, just like he had saved mine. The best I could do was honor the last thing he asked me.”
“What was that?”
“Take care of Nicole.”
He could still hear Greg’s voice, ragged with emotion and the slow onset of the virus. “I can’t go on like this much longer. This is a fight I’m going to lose. Whatever this thing is inside me, it’s going to tear me apart unless I stop it right now.” Greg clenched his fist. The tension in the muscles forced the infected veins closer to the surface, turned them an angrier red than before. “Go. Get out before I can’t stop it.”
“Greg—”
“Take care of Nicole.” Greg’s eyes met his and plead for Shane to listen. “She’s going to be alone. We’re all she has. She needs someone to help keep her head above water. You know how that feels better than most. Try not to let her problems drown her.”
Shane could barely breathe. His chest had tightened, and his throat felt too narrow for air. “I’ll take care of her,” he promised.
“Then get out now. Half an hour. Call the cops. Don’t you come in here. Remember me like I was yesterday. Tell yourself I took another ride to the canyon. I’ll wait for you there. Take your time. I don’t want to see you soon.” Greg turned his back.
Shane stared at his brother’s slumped shoulders, his tense, defeated posture, and wished to Heaven he never had to see it. Then he turned to stride for the door before he couldn’t find the strength to walk away.
“I love you, little brother.” Greg’s voice was almost too low to hear. “I’m proud of you. Keep making me proud.”
The door clicked closed. Daylight blinded Shane, reflected and refracted in the tears that filled his eyes.
Shane swallowed down the lump of emotion in his throat. “I tried. For a while, I thought I’d managed. She was my last link to Greg, and I was hers. We grieved together. Did our damnedest to go on like we thought Greg would have wanted. I tried to love her and save her from herself. She just needed more than I knew how to give.”
Erin’s lips flattened to a thin line. “That’s not true. You know how to give more of yourself than any man I’ve ever known. Ask the town you’ve protected. It sounds to me like Nicole never realized that, at some point, she had to pull on her big girl panties and save herself.”
“She had— A lot of problems.”
“I’m not saying she didn’t. Everyone needs help sometimes. Everyone. When you’re getting that help, though, you have to use it to build yourself a place where you don’t need it anymore. It doesn’t sound like she did,” Erin said.
Shane frowned. “No. She didn’t. She decided to cheat on me with my best friend because he gave her the kind of attention she liked. Then she tried to have me killed by Ferals.”
“Yeah, see, that goes beyond ‘didn’t pull up her big girl panties’. That’s straight into ‘learned nothing from your brother and used her issues as an excuse to be a shit human being’.” Erin leveled a rueful stare on him. “You can’t save someone who wants to drag everyone down with them. You did your part. She didn’t do hers. And I’m really damn offended by her trying to have you killed.”
He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Are you, now.”
“Yep. She and I are not going to be going out for coffee and girl talk. I’d be glad to introduce her face to a new friend, though. Mister Lug Wrench loves new friends.”
“I was a little offended myself. Fortunately, she’s in jail right now. Probably for a long time.” He laid his hand over hers where it rested on his chest. “I didn’t mean to put all that on you tonight. It’s not something I talk much about, and tonight was supposed to be about you. Not me.”
Erin shook her head. “No. I get it. You talk about these things when you feel like you can. Otherwise, they stay bottled up until they rot.”
Again, she was both correct and compassionate beyond what he expected. Her hand on his chest steadied him, kept him in the present where he belonged. Where she was. “You’re easy to talk to. No matter what I say, you seem to understand.”
She took her hand off his chest. For a moment, he wondered if he had overstepped at last. Until she pulled a picture out of her pocket to set it against the overturned frame on the mantel, as if creating her own display just for him. A dark-haired woman wearing a green bowler hat and a green, sequined bow tie smiled at him from the photo.
She looks like Erin.
“Her name was Meg,” Erin said, and turned around to face him again. “Meghan. She was my sister. I lost her five months and seventeen days ago.”
8
Let Us Hold a Candle to the Darkness in Our Souls
She hated those words. Hated them more than almost any other words in the language, even moist and yeasty. She hated the term lost, because it implied she’d left her sister in an unknown location where, if Erin looked hard enough, she might discover her misplaced sibling.
Erin knew the precise location where she had left her sister. The overpriced plot in the cemetery didn’t even have a marker on it yet, because Erin couldn’t afford it until she had an apartment, a vehicle, and a life in Coyote Trail. But lost covered for the words Erin hated most of all. My sister is dead.
Shane studied the picture with a slowly dawning expression of realization. “Oh, Erin, I’m sorry. That’s— I know how hard that is, and it’s shit.”
Strong arms wrapped around her to pull her against a broad chest. No one had held her this way since before Meghan’s final hospitalization. It almost reduced her to the tears she’d swallowed since her final farewell at the grave side. She set her cheek against Shane’s chest, listening to his heart beat a steady rhythm against her ear, and didn’t have to wonder how she would keep her chin up or her spine straight in the face of grief. He would hold her up until she found the strength again.
“I’d be glad to listen, if you wanted to tell me what happened.” His voice rumbled in his chest as he spoke.
“Cancer,” she said, eyes closed against the statement. “Rare and aggressive. She was only thirty-two when they found it. They thought they’d caught it early, but that cancer grew from her cells. It was just as stubborn as she was.”
“Fuck cancer.”
“Yeah. Fuck cancer. She was gone within six months of diagnosis.” Erin lifted her head from his chest, though she didn’t want to, so she could take a step back. Distance from him was the last thing she wanted right now, but she knew if she didn’t retreat now, she would stay there against him until he pried her off.
When she looked into his eyes, he almost undid her again. The plain compassion and concern for her melted the walls she kept her heart behind. “You took care of her, didn’t you.”
“There wasn’t anyone else. I mean, I would have, even if there had been.” Erin would always have taken care of Meg, no matter who else turned up to do the same. But Erin had done so alone.
Shane’s brow furrowed. “No parents? Other siblings?”
“Just the two of us. My mother and father had a terrible relationship. They dated, they fought, they made up, they thought about ending it after three months. Until Mom missed a period.” Erin snorted, though it sounded more like a sniffle to her. “Dad did ‘the right thing’, though in what world ‘marry the woman you don’t get along with and make everyone miserable’ is the right thing, I’m not sure. He swears she sabotaged the condom so she’d get pregnant and he wouldn’t leave. She swears he did the same. It was probably just defective and they’re both spiteful.”
He groaned. “They really didn’t get along, did they.”
“Not often. They had Meghan, lived through a couple years on anger and cigarettes, then got drunk enough one Saint Patrick’s Day to decide that after-fight sex was a good idea. Ta-da.” She spread her arms. “That’s why my name is Erin. And why I celebrate my birthday on Saint Paddy’s Day
. December birthdays suck when you’re a kid. Meg started throwing me parties in March instead.”
“So that picture isn’t just a night out drinking for the holiday.”
“No. It was the birthday party she threw me last year. Before the doctors found the cancer. We joked that the leprechauns had stolen her luck, because after that night, her luck had surely run out.” Erin sighed. And mine, but at least I lived through it. “My parents finally got a divorce when I was nine. My mother found herself a boyfriend, he put a ring on it, and they moved away to start their own family.”
“Without you?”
“Naturally. Hard to start a new family with the old one in the way. Her new husband wasn’t interested in raising two older children. I’m not sure she was all that interested, either. My father had trapped her with us, after all.”
Shane frowned. “Your mother is a bitch.”
“No disagreement from me. My father isn’t much better. He resented both of us for existing. Mom had trapped him with us…” Erin rolled her hand in an and-so-on gesture. “He and I only got along while we were working on cars. That was the only bond we had. Other than that, it was Meg and me. Meg was the one who helped with my homework, got dinner on the table, everything. She could have moved out when she was eighteen, but she waited until I could go with her. Then we left him alone in his dirty house, with his piles of beer cans, and we never looked back.”
“Did you tell your parents she was sick?”
“Meg did. She called them both. Then she ate half a gallon of chocolate ice cream.” The memory still stood out sharp in Erin’s memory.
Meg slammed a package of frozen chicken breasts onto the counter. Two wrapped steaks with freezer burn so profound they would taste like shoe leather if cooked followed. A venerable bag of frozen mixed vegetables came next. Erin couldn’t even remember buying them.
Brave the Night: A Bully Boys Novel Page 8
