by W. J. May
“Touch her again, I’ll end you.”
No one could doubt the dark sincerity of his words, but Kraigan wasn’t in a mental place in which he cared. He was seeing red. The house and all its occupants were already collateral.
“Like it was nothing!” he screamed, launching himself towards her again. “Like he means nothing to you!”
This time it was Julian who leapt in between. Probably in a desperate attempt to save his best friend from the pending murder charge. The multiple lacerations on his face might have been painful, but they certainly didn’t slow him down. Faster than Rae’s eyes could even track, he spun around in the air and came down with a devastating kick, knocking Kraigan to the floor.
Angel’s eyes lit up with a grin as Rae pushed furiously past her.
“He doesn’t mean nothing!” she fired back. “For better or worse, he’s our dad. He doesn’t mean nothing to me. He just can’t stay here. He’s going to prison, Kraigan! He deserves to be—”
But Kraigan was back on his feet, fighting like the whole world was about to end. He body-slammed Julian into the wall, receiving two quick strikes to the face in return. A fountain of blood exploded from his nose, and he fell once more to the floor.
“Just stay down,” Julian panted. “You don’t win this.”
But ‘staying down’ wasn’t in Kraigan’s nature either. The second the psychic turned his back, Kraigan reached into his jacket pocket and jabbed something in the air between them. It took Rae a horrified second to realize it was a switchblade. It shot open with a silver glint as both she and Devon went tearing forward at the same time.
A flash of white hair swept in between. Followed by a terrifying question.
“You were going to stab him?”
It wasn’t said very loud. It wasn’t even all that threatening. But Rae suddenly knew that even though Kraigan was the one who brought the knife into the fight, it was he who should be afraid.
Angel flew forward in a blur of speed, one hand freezing him while the other ripped away the knife. But it wasn’t enough to disarm. She didn’t hesitate a second before jamming the thing into his shoulder. All the way up to the hilt. It went in with a cry, and came out dripping red. “Like this?”
There was another excruciating cry, echoed by cries from Rae and Devon as well when Angel stabbed him again.
But it was like a dark switch had flipped. Angel yanked the knife out to do it again, but as the blade streaked back towards Kraigan it froze suddenly in the air. Like it had gotten stuck.
Rae whirled around in daze to see Gabriel watching silently from the corner. Although the fight may have started with him, he certainly didn’t participate. He had merely watched. Now that it had progressed to actual knife-play, he lifted two fingers and silently brought it to an end. A second later the blade flew towards the living room, clattering over the checkered tile.
“That’s enough, Angel,” he said softly.
The rest of them were frozen in shock, not by Angel, but by surprise. Unable to believe that things had progressed so far.
Julian was staring at the knife with wide eyes, like he couldn’t believe it was actually there, while both Rae and Devon were still positioned on either side of him, gripping fistfuls of his jacket to pull him out of the way.
Only the siblings remained immune, one glaring fiercely as the other calmly stared back.
Finally, when it became clear that Gabriel wasn’t going to give, Angel turned back to Kraigan with a look of chilling promise.
“Devon wouldn’t really kill you,” she said quietly. “He’d never be able to do something like that since it would hurt Rae. But I could, Kraigan. I simply don’t care.” She cocked her head towards Julian. “Touch him again… and I will.” She left without another word. But there wasn’t a person in the foyer who didn’t believe with all their heart that she would do exactly as she promised.
Strangely enough, the person who looked the most upset about this was Julian.
He stared after her for a long moment, a very particular kind of heartbreak shadowed on his face. When he left, it was in the opposite direction.
Devon looked between his best friend and his fiancée for a moment, before staring entreatingly into her eyes. “Sweetie, I—”
“Go,” Rae said quickly, “it’s fine. I’ll finish up here.”
As he swept from the room as well, she turned with fierce hatred back to Kraigan. The guy had pulled a knife on one of her best friends. He had tackled another, taken a swing at her fiancé, not to mention the hurt he’d intended for her.
And yet…
“Come on.” She touched him with a far lower dosage of Camille’s vibrations, shaking him loose of Angel’s Novocain-like freeze. “Let’s get that taken care of.”
“No need,” he said stiffly.
The second he’d unfrozen, the cellular regeneration tatù he’d taken from Rae—the one that gave him his immortality—mended the wound. A second later, only the bloody shirt remained.
He shot her a truly indecipherable look, then took off through the front door. Whether he was ever coming back had yet to be seen. But Rae had a sinking feeling that they would be seeing him again. In fact, she’d be willing to bet he’d be back before dinner time.
This was his home now. For better or worse, he had nowhere else to go.
“Another eventful day…”
Rae jumped in alarm. She’d completely forgotten that Gabriel was still there. He was staring at her now with a crooked smile, one that didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“What?” His head tilted sarcastically to the side. “You didn’t really think that Devon would leave you alone with your homicidal brother, did you?”
Rae made the connection at the same time. But then made another as well. “No. He trusted I would be fine with you.”
The same thought seemed to have just struck Gabriel, and without thinking he glanced up in the direction in which Devon had left. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say. Then he shrugged it off with an admirable air of nonchalance. “The guy always had a loose grip on reality.”
Rae fought back a smirk. “Uh-huh.”
“So…” he peeled himself off the wall and crossed towards her over the tile, taking care to avoid the bloody puddle in the middle, “things are just falling apart all around, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know about that.” She leaned into him without thinking, taking comfort in the warmth of his arm as it draped automatically over her shoulder. “Things are coming together, too.”
People were coming together. Whether they wanted to or not. They’d need one another if they were going to whether the storm that was sure to come.
They stood there for a long time, each one mentally recovering from the shock of the day.
Strangely enough, the scene couldn’t have felt more natural. Just two friends, leaning on each other for silent support, glancing occasionally at the bloody knife in the middle of the floor.
Not a lot of time had passed since Devon and Gabriel’s long-awaited showdown, and yet things had already begun to change. This, for example. This was suddenly, somehow, okay. There were no undercurrents to worry about. No charged feelings or suppressed emotions waiting to give way. For the first time since they’d met, both Rae and Gabriel could just be… normal.
And in that precise moment, there was nothing in the world Rae wanted more.
“What are we supposed to do now?” she asked after a while, wondering aloud as she played back fragments of the interrogation with Fodder in her head.
People were angry. Dangerously angry. And while not all of them assumed this was automatically Rae’s fault, a lot of them were getting there quick. A lot more than she’d like.
“Well… there’s always Australia.”
She looked up with a laugh to see Gabriel staring thoughtfully into the distance.
“You know something crazy? When Molly told me she was pregnant, that’s the first place I suggested we should go,” Rae sai
d with a grin. “Just her and me. Raising the baby together.”
Gabriel shrugged with a soft smile, his eyes lost somewhere in his imagination. “You still could. We could all go. Scrub this ink off our arms. Or at the very least, add something non-magical to make it a regular tattoo.”
“Tat’s on my back.” Rae laughed again, and his arm tightened.
“We could raise sheep, live in a hut on the top of a mountain,” he mused. “Twice a year I could hike into town to visit Angel at the psychiatric facility…”
They cracked up at the mere suggestion, probably picturing the same image of the lovely blonde freezing everyone in her therapeutic ceramics class. Then they quieted abruptly as the joke hit a little too close to home.
“I don’t know how much longer they can keep doing this,” Rae said quietly. “It’s been years now. Years of days exactly like this one. I’m not sure how much more I can ask them to take.”
“You’re not asking them anything,” Gabriel said reassuringly. “It’s their choice.”
“I know…but you know what I mean.” She sighed as she glanced around the empty-looking house. There was still a giant hole blown through the side of the kitchen, and every now and then she would shiver as a draft of cold air filtered through. “They’ve been through too much. Seen too much. Been broken too many times. I’m not sure how many more times it can happen before they don’t fit back together again.”
There was a quiet pause before his arm tightened again. A second later, a pair of warm lips kissed her forehead.
“You’d be surprised how much you can take.”
She twisted around so she could better see his face. It was still smiling at her; the smile seemed fixed no matter what. But it was sad. Sad in a way she couldn’t begin to understand.
“Until then… Australia?” she joked, trying to lighten the mood.
The smile warmed and sparkled for a moment in his eyes. “Australia, kid. You’ll learn to love it.”
Chapter 3
Rae woke up the morning of Thanksgiving, ironically feeling very much like the Native Americans must have done all those years ago. Not the lucky dozen or so who were invited to the actual meal. But all the rest of them—the ones who were mailed smallpox blankets for Christmas.
After groping a moment on the empty sheets beside her, she rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. Devon wasn’t there. He was presumably still off consoling Julian. Since he hadn’t come to bed the night before, it was likely the two of them had drunk themselves into a stupor and were passed out somewhere in the boathouse. Such was the way of men. Or at least her men these days. The ones supposedly under her, the president of the Privy Council.
Strangely enough, this occasional bromantic competition for her fiancé’s attention was one of the more normal things in Rae’s life.
Is this how it’s going to be when we’re not all living together? When we actually move out, get married, and have houses of our own?
Rae stifled a grin as she tried to imagine it.
She and Angel having to coordinate pick-up times and schedules, like a bunch of regular domestics. Dropping off their boys for playdates. Arranging some sort of a time-share system so they could still see each other to their little hearts’ content.
The image was too ludicrous for words.
Dream Rae, sitting at the kitchen table. Dressed in a sweater set as she read through a newspaper in which she was not the main headline. Angel, wearing an apron. Wielding a carving knife as she bent over a holiday ham. A huge, unnatural smile spreading across her face.
Then the thought of Angel wielding a knife of any sort turned Rae’s stomach, and she pressed her face into the pillow once more.
One way or another, that kind of life didn’t seem to be in the cards for any of them.
Gabriel had joked the other day about shipping his sister off to a psychiatric ward, starting the long process of trying to navigate through her endless damage. Except, they were all damaged by now. All broken in their own little way.
Angel might have stabbed Kraigan, but Gabriel had tried to shoot a girl just a few weeks before. Shoot a young girl right in the chest to save the life of his sister. Was Angel standing up for Julian really any different than that? Murderous intentions and all?
Devon and Julian, instead of calmly taking charge as they’d been trained to do, were passed out in a glorified garage, unaware that they were probably in the preliminary stages of frostbite.
Molly and Luke had effectively separated themselves from the rest of the house, choosing to use the pregnancy as a brilliant excuse to compartmentalize themselves away from any conflict.
And Kraigan? Rae didn’t even know where to start with Kraigan.
She’d heard him come inside at around two in the morning. Even without a tatù, it was easy to do because he’d made a point to stomp up every single one of the stairs before barricading himself in the attic.
Would he venture down at some point? Was he actively plotting his revenge? Had he befriended the local bat colony and declared himself their god?
Who knows? He is a Kerrigan, after all…
Rae finally pulled herself out of bed with a sigh, and conjured a pair of pajamas. Flannel pants, tiny camisole, frilly slippers, and a thick robe-like sweater to drape over it all. She didn’t really feel like getting dressed. Not today. Day one of her father’s newfound incarceration. Day one of the new reality TV show that had become her life.
‘Who’s pissed at Rae Kerrigan now? Down with the whole bloody family!’
She could practically hear the theme music. They could set up a rotating wheel where people could throw fruit and rotten vegetables at her face. Rotate her in with her father when they got bored. In the public eye, they were basically interchangeable at this point.
All her hard work. Years of fighting against the legacy. An unsanctioned, international road trip just to hunt down and save the people her father was trying to hunt down and kill.
But a few misguided newspaper headlines, and it seemed the world still saw them as one and the same. The sins of the father always, always remained the sins of the son—or the daughter. Uncle Argyle hadn’t been wrong when he told her that as she left for Guilder all those years ago. He’d tried to warn her.
No matter which way you looked at it, a Kerrigan was just a Kerrigan.
She was humming the mindless little tune that had wormed its way into her head as she descended the staircase and made her way over to the kitchen. She knew that an entire wall of it had been ripped away, but she hoped the coffee maker had somehow remained unscathed. With the entire world turned against her, she didn’t feel much like conjuring for the entire household.
With a giant, self-pitying yawn, she rounded the corner into the kitchen.
What she saw stopped her dead in her tracks.
Her mother and Gabriel were making breakfast.
Rae blinked, trying to decide if she had accidently warped time once again, or if this was simply one of those ‘alternate universe’ kind of dreams. It had to be. Gabriel was wearing an apron.
“Morning, sleepy.” He looked up with a smile, his fingers dripping with waffle batter as he poured a batch into the waffle iron. “Nice slippers.”
Rae looked down at her slippers, then back up at him. “Am I dead?”
Beth chuckled and wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “It came to both Gabriel’s and my attention last night that this house is in need of a major morale boost. You poor things came here to get away from it all, and now it seems it’s all caught right back up with you.”
Rae stared around the chaotic kitchen. There was something different about it; she just couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was…
“So you decided to make breakfast?” she surmised.
“More than that.” Gabriel flashed her a wink. “We’re making Thanksgiving dinner.”
Rae was stunned. “You’re what?” She gave her head a slight shake. “You are?”
“Better believe it.” He frowned momentarily at a recipe book before heading out to the pantry to get something. On the way, he ruffled her messy hair—deliberately dusting the raven locks with a generous helping of flour. “Better get dressed, princess. There’s a lot to do.”
That’s when it hit her. What was so different. That little detail that kept evading her grasp.
The giant hole in the side of the house had been repaired.
She gazed at it in wonder, gaping open-mouthed at the intricate metal-work holding the whole thing together. Little vines of twisted steel reached up from the floor to the ceiling, shimmering faintly under the light of the iron chandelier, which had also been repaired.
“He did it all last night,” Beth murmured, coming to stand beside her. “Apparently the two of you had a little talk. He thought you might need a bit of festive cheer.” She took Rae by the shoulders and slowly turned her around to see the rest of the kitchen.
Sure enough, Gabriel hadn’t just stopped with the wall. Every single speck of evidence from the explosion had been cleaned away. The kitchen was still a mess, of course. But it was messy with things like sugar and eggs, not sheetrock and blood. Every kitchen appliance had been reformed back to its approximate shape. Even the tongs on the forks had been straightened.
It was a hasty stop-gap, of course. A far cry from the precise replication of conjuring. Most of the things that needed fixing were only partially made of metal, so there was only so much that Gabriel could do, but Rae had never been more touched by a single act of kindness. As she ran her fingers over the salvaged toaster, she knew she’d keep it till the day she died. Giant dent and all.
“So, what do you think?” Gabriel interrupted her tender musings as he breezed back through the door, carrying what looked like ten pounds of powdered sugar. “You up for a holiday?”
Beth winked and returned to the stove as Rae simply looked around in wonder.
“I can’t…I can’t believe you did all this.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Someone had to. You’re a terrible housekeeper, Rae. Did you know there was a giant hole in the kitchen? Your Martha Stewart would be appalled.”
