Darkbound

by Scott Tracey

  “He knows something about what’s happening here. He has to,” I said, slowing when Kevin pointed to a lone driveway on the west side of town. I couldn’t see any sign of a house, but there was definitely a mailbox on the side of the road.

  We followed the gravel path back and around, slipping behind several thick oak trees, and a weeping willow that blanketed a large portion of the driveway in swaying tendrils. The house was tucked away in the back corner of the property, as far from the road as it could possibly be. It was a decent-looking log home, not the trailer trash gutterslum I would have expected from Charlie.

  It was the house of a family man, and even now the yard looked well maintained. Garden beds and plants in hibernation lined the house, a flag hung from the porch, amd there were curtains in the windows.

  “This … is not what I thought it would be,” I said, slightly in awe. Luca might have grown up with a drunk bastard for a father, but he lived in a Martha Stewart house.

  “Mr. D never seemed like a decent guy, but Luca never complained, and this is where he grew up,” Kevin said with a quiet resignation from the passenger seat. “I always figured that he was just awkward because of who his family was.” He glanced quickly across the car, shame on his face. “Sorry, man.”

  I waved it off, cut the engine, and climbed out of the car. Kevin got out and followed me, throwing his jacket back on. For whatever reason, he claimed that Luca’s dad had always liked him, and he was pretty sure it had something to do with being on the football team. So when I’d asked him to come along as backup, the first thing he did was grab his letter jacket, which mostly just hung in his locker. Kevin normally wasn’t one for showing off.

  “You think he’s here?” he asked, looking around the house and yard like he should have already been visible.

  I nodded to the bag full of empty beer cans tossed with neglect towards the corner of the porch. Someone must not have felt like dragging them all the way to the garbage can, and that someone probably still had a hangover.

  I hoped so. Hungover Charlie seemed like he’d be easier to deal with.

  I pounded on the front door, taking a small bit of pleasure at the way the door shuddered underneath my fist. How many times had someone come to this door and wailed on it until Charlie stumbled out because of something his family had done.

  He lumped his loathing for his son in with his feelings for his brother, that much was obvious, but the real person Charlie hated was himself. Why else would he stay in Carrow Mill—where people would have no choice but to remember him? If he hated it all so much, he would have left, whether it was his home or not. On some level, Charlie liked being reminded of his brother’s crimes, and as someone who went as far as he could to not know about his father, I was pretty sure that wasn’t something healthy people did.

  “Uh, dude?” Kevin stood by the front picture window, peering inside. “I don’t know if he’s home or not, but I kinda hope not.”

  I peered inside. It looked like it had been a normal living room or sitting area … once. Furniture was overturned, the contents of a bookshelf spilled out across the floor as loose pages were sprinkled like a garnish on the chaos.

  “Call someone. Illana, or one of the Witchers.”

  Kevin already had his phone in hand, but he hesitated. “Not the police? Dude’s not a witch anymore, not really.”

  “Yeah, but Luca is. And he may not use magic anymore, but he’s still a witch.” I went back to the front door, only this time I went straight to the knob. It turned without resistance. The door wasn’t locked. “Stay out here and keep watch,” I whispered. Kevin started to argue, but I silenced him by walking inside and shutting the door behind me.

  He didn’t follow.

  I had to step over a coatrack in the foyer—who the hell had a coatrack anymore? But from the amount of dust coating each of the arms, it didn’t look like the thing got much use, anyway. The living room was to my right, and there was barely any room to walk amidst all of the chaos. Both couches were overturned, end tables, even the television had been knocked over. In fact, someone had taken great pains to trash every single piece of furniture in the room. Even the wall hangings had been torn down, pictures broken and mirrors shattered.

  I walked through the kitchen next, which was better in some ways, worse in others. Someone had taken all the sharp knives and dumped them into the sink, and then emptied everything else out onto the floor. I turned and tried to find another route through the house, rather than walk across the broken ceramic shards.

  There was a lot of destruction, but no signs of a struggle. No blood spatter, no droplets around the dishes. It was like the house had been trashed by someone with a clinical grace, managing to break down everything room by room without giving up anything of themselves.

  Did Charlie do this? There were kids running around with the Prince’s infection inside them, maybe one of them had stopped by. Retaliation against Luca, maybe? But there were only a handful that knew who Luca really was, or what he’d done, and almost all of us were being watched.

  Charlie, then.

  I walked past a closed door in the hallway, opened it to see the eye of the storm. Luca’s room. There was a team poster of the Patriots, featuring Tom Brady and Chad Ochocinco. I wouldn’t have picked Luca for a sports fan, but his room suggested otherwise. The bed was made, a somber blue that belonged in the room of someone older and more mature. In fact, the room was untouched, the only bit of normalcy in the whole house.

  That left two more doors at the end of the hallway. I backed out of Luca’s room, and headed for the first, the door to the master, which was trashed just as much as everything else in the house. The word was overkill. The bed wasn’t just ripped apart, it was literally ripped apart—pillows hacked and stabbed through-and-through, the mattress shredded, the sheets ripped into strips of fabric.

  The other door, though, squeaked when I pushed it open. Charlie was sprawled along the tile floor of the bathroom, half asleep in a puddle of a creamy blue shampoo that had pooled off the side of the tub. There was destruction here too, but it looked like Charlie had passed out in the middle of it.

  An empty bottle of whiskey sat to his left, not the knockoff swill I expected, but the kind of bottle that screamed expensive. None of it matched up. The house, the landscaping, the way everything must have looked before Charlie had demolished it all: it didn’t match up with the man in the hospital. There, he’d been the bitter, angry drunk.

  Someone had told me that Luca’s mom had left, but now I wondered when. If she’d left only recently, maybe that would explain the schism. Or maybe her influence had stayed in the air like old perfume, keeping the family together on the surface.

  “Whazzat?” Charlie didn’t even lift his head or open his eyes, but with the stirring of his neck and the smacking of lips, he came back to life.

  There was a gold coin on the bathroom counter, I leaned over and brushed my finger against it. Charlie had missed something when he’d trashed the room. The coin was faded and tarnished, more brass than gold now, with the image of a heart on one side. I flipped it over, a spade on the reverse. Some sort of playing card theme?

  In the back of my head, I remembered the conversation with Kevin and Maddy, about the amusement park that had been abandoned outside of town. It must have been some sort of token, then. Maybe a keepsake from when Luca was younger.

  “It’s your loving nephew,” I said loudly, hoping his hangover was hellacious and I, in some small way, would be able to make it worse. “What happened here, Charlie?”

  “Ain’t gotta neph … ” he trailed off again, whether unconscious or just because he couldn’t stand to vocalize the word, I couldn’t say.

  I waited almost five minutes before I remembered Kevin, and the phone calls. I left Charlie in the puddle of his disgrace (which smelled remarkably like Head and Shoulders) and returned to the front of the
house. Illana and Adele were just pulling up in a town car.

  Neither one of them looked surprised to be called out in the middle of the afternoon. “Is he alive?” Illana called out, her presence somehow managing to drop the temperature around her, so brisk that it was now actually a bit chilly.

  “Drunk,” I said, which was as much an explanation as it was a description of being. “The house was self-inflicted.”

  Adele chirped something low at Illana’s side, but her words didn’t carry across the driveway. Now that backup was here, and I knew there wasn’t any danger, I went back inside to track down the uncle I didn’t want. Charlie had managed a sitting-up position by the time I came back, a soapy blue residue staining half of his head. He was propped between the toilet and the tub, with a hand thrown over each for support.

  “Remember when I said you couldn’t be more pathetic?” I told him, leaning against the only spot on the sink counter that wasn’t a mess of product and water. “I stand corrected.”

  “G’outta my house.” He smacked his lips a couple of times, and I could only imagine what foul taste lurked there inside his mouth, sticking to the words like molasses.

  “Not much of a house anymore, is it? You do that all by yourself, or did you have someone helping you?”

  Charlie didn’t answer, and I didn’t exactly care, so I moved on to the reason I was really here. “You were close to his age, right? You guys went to high school together.”

  “Go t’hell.”

  “So you must have been there when the Prince came to town, right? Why didn’t you ever say anything? How come no one knows what really happened?”

  My questions were met with a snort and a slump.

  “You’re an epic kind of dick, aren’t you? Cyrus saved your worthless life and killed that thing, and you let someone else take the credit.”

  The silence from the other half of the room was only interrupted by the occasional sniffle, throat clearing, and coughing fit.

  “You never said anything. Is that how you afforded the house? Did someone pay you off after Cyrus went to the dark side? Bury the real story, pretend your brother was nothing but a monster every day of your life when you know that was a damn lie.”

  If it was possible for him to slump down any more, he did, and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine, but I recognized the self-loathing when I saw it. I’d struck a nerve. Maybe all of them.

  “Tell me what really happened, and I won’t walk out of here and tell everyone what a liar you are. Tell me what Cyrus did, and we can go back to pretending he was the monster he became.”

  Charlie’s lip curled up, and the self dropped out of his loathing. “You think you’re so much smarter than the rest of us. You’ve got it all figured out. Your daddy was dark as sin, but ain’t none of that keeping you up at night.” A sudden smile, a light flaring behind something that had rotted away long before I came to town. “You know what I know, you little shit-stain? I know what your daddy was. I know all about him, and that means I know you. All the parts you think you carved out for yourself, but you just put the pieces together. Your daddy designed the blueprints.”

  He was trying to strike back, trying to get under my skin the way I’d gotten under his. I wasn’t Jenna, who took every slight personally, or Justin, who felt the need to defy his heritage. My father was a monster. My cousin was a monster. And I didn’t care. It could only affect me if I let it, and I refused.

  “He let it all slide off too,” Charlie said with wicked relish. “He could know horrible things, do even worse things, and it never affected him. He was a cold, little boy. Calculating. You think you know him because you read about him in a book? Daggett’s boy may be the spitting image of his daddy, but you’ve got the soul of yours.”

  My leg moved on autopilot, slamming into Charlie’s stomach with every ounce of force I could muster. He collapsed around his stomach with a groan, his voice leaping an octave in a whining cry while I tried to suppress a smile.

  I wasn’t just like my father, and I certainly wasn’t anything like any of the other Dentons. Just because we shared blood and a name didn’t mean they had power over me. I wasn’t anything like them.

  I wasn’t.

  Charlie, though, he howled with laughter. It shook him, made his body jerk and tremble as the laughter spilled out of him like a bag full of worms, oozing out all over the place. I backed up, rather than let that laughter anywhere near me.

  “The … the Prince,” I said, licking my lips and struggling against the faintness in my voice. I kicked him and he thought it was funny. The funniest joke I never told. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Don’t you already know?” His was a sly look, marked with all the knowledge I found myself wanting no matter what. My fist clenched at my side, and it was a surprise.

  “He never told,” Charlie confided. “He liked it better that way. All those dark secrets, locked up inside to keep him company.”

  “You’re lying,” I said, my eyes narrowed. “You were close. Everyone knows that. If he told anyone, he would have told you.”

  “But why would I tell you? He’d hate the sight of you. Last thing my brother and I had in common. We both hate the sight of the things we spawned.”

  “You’re a psychotic little fuck.”

  Charlie coughed again, a hack into a loose fist that left it dripping with a lifetime of bad decisions. “It’s got something you want, doesn’t it?” He smiled around grimy teeth. “That’s how they do it. You’ll do anything for it, just like he would. Monsters make you crave something so bad you’d sell out your own brother. He didn’t care what he had to do—he was getting what he wanted. You’ll do the same. Ain’t that right, boy? You don’t care about anything except what that little Prince has been whispering in your ear.”

  This time, when I kicked him, I knew exactly what I was doing.

  twenty-four

  Missing: Savannah Rowe, 17. Last seen by her sister Alice at Carrow Mill High on April 14th. She was wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket. Please call the CM police department if sighted.

  Police blotter

  April 16–April 23

  “You’re supposed to be the levelheaded one,” Illana said half an hour later in Charlie’s living room. Some measure of order had been restored to the room. The furniture was righted, though the collective destruction had been shifted into corners and out of the way. The front yard was occupied by a half-dozen Witchers, most of them barely out of their beer pong days.

  I ignored the disapproval in her voice. No one had been particularly pleased to find Charlie hunched over, clutching his stomach and groaning about assault charges. Then again, they weren’t surprised either.

  “He’s not going to tell you anything.” I took up a seat on the arm of the couch, resting my feet on the coffee table. Adele clucked at me in disappointment, but the look faded when I offered her a simple smile. Like it or not, she was a girl, and girls liked it when I smiled. It was a weapon I didn’t use often enough.

  “That’s not the same thing as ‘he doesn’t know anything.’” Illana turned her own version of a smile on me: tight, shrewd lips and a hint of calculating steel in her eyes. “I’ve been told I’m a bit more influential than a teenage boy with a tendency to roughhouse.”

  “But only slightly,” Adele offered helpfully from the love seat she’d claimed. The chair was so big that it swallowed her up, giving her a certain Alice in Wonderland vibe where the furniture was too big for the person using it.

  “So they say.” But the moment for levity faded quickly, and Illana clasped her hands in front of her, rocking them back and forth briefly as she eyed the broken shell of a man sitting across from her. I hadn’t realized at first that each of us had taken a different side: Illana across from Charlie, and Adele and I on either side of them. Adele’s eyes twinkled at me from across the coffee table, as if realizing t
he same thing I had.

  “I told the shit-st—” Charlie swallowed down the profanity, and then swallowed again for good measure. “I told the boy that I don’t know anything. Cyrus never told me nothing.”

  “Now that’s not true,” Illana said, unleashing the rarest weapon in her arsenal. Kindness. “You and he were close. Isn’t that right, Adele?”

  “That’s right,” the woman agreed, her feet dangling off the floor.

  “Almost like brothers.” It took me a moment to understand the strange note in Illana’s voice. She was teasing. There were all sorts of weird things happening today.

  “We hated each other,” Charlie spat. “Never hated no one more.”

  “Double negative.” Adele grinned at Illana. I almost ex-pected her to conjure up a box of cookies, spilling a fistful of crumbs into her lap. “He could hate someone more.”

  “Tell me when you decided to hate him.” Illana leaned forward, and her blue eyes were suddenly strong and bright. I could feel something like magic in the air, making the air hum, though no one spoke a spell. “Was it when you slept with his girlfriend? When you stole her away?” The woman canted her head. “When she died? When you married her sister? I know Cyrus is tangled up in there somewhere. Just tell me which thread to pull.”

  I … what? In just a handful of words, Illana had created a dozen different things about Cyrus Denton, images about how he fit into Carrow Mill, how he fit into his family. And just like that … I could feel him becoming more real.

  That was exactly what I didn’t want. I didn’t care what they were like when they were teenagers. I certainly didn’t care that Charlie might have stolen my father’s girlfriend, or that she died. That he’d married her sister. The woman who must have been Luca’s mother.