by H. D. Gordon
Surah punched her in the face. Hard. She just couldn’t listen to another word from CJ’s mouth, and obviously the girl couldn’t be reasoned with. Her fist struck CJ hard in the jaw and made a noise like cracking wood. A tooth flew free of her mouth and landed somewhere off in the dirt. CJ’s body fell to the ground only a split second after. Surah looked down to see her knuckles were bleeding, but she was still so angry that if there was any pain, she couldn’t feel it.
She leaned over CJ’s unconscious body and shook her head, thinking she could live another thousand years and never gain the control necessary to put up with this kind of girl.
From behind her, Charlie cleared his throat. “Well, that’s one way of shuttin’ her up. I thought I might punch her myself if I had to listen to too much more of her.”
This made Surah smile. She pulled her hood over her head and turned to face him. “How about we stick to the hills today and stay off the road? You know, so we don’t have to deal with any more… unsavory people.”
He gave her a half smile. “Good idea, love. Why didn’t I think of that?”
She laughed at this and looped her arm through his, wondering at the way he could flip her mood upside down. A moment ago she’d been madder than a hornet. Now, she felt happy and at peace again. She was beginning to think of this as the Charlie Effect.
“You ready for the walk?” he asked, as they were climbing the hill that overlooked Candace’s house.
Surah nodded. “I’ll be fine, Charlie… You ready to tell me about yourself?”
Charlie didn’t hesitate now when he nodded, but he didn’t look particularly eager to spill the beans, either. Once again, a bit of worry spiraled in Surah’s stomach, and she rethought what she’d just said.
I’ll be fine, Charlie.
But, would she?
CHAPTER 28
CHARLIE
They were only about an hour outside of the city, and he had told her all kinds of things about himself, but not the thing that mattered most of all. He had told her about the earliest days of his youth, right after his parents had been killed in the Great War. He’d told her about sleeping in the alleys of the city, searching for scraps of food in the dumpsters—which had usually already been picked clean by others who’d lost everything. He told her about how Michael had decided it would be better to take their chances in the forests, where they learned by trial and error how to hunt and find clean water. She laughed when he told her about the time he ate a whole handful of fireberries, how Michael had found him lying on the ground unconscious, and had nearly fainted himself while making Charlie throw up the poison berries.
She asked about his mother and father, if he remembered them. He told her the truth; that he had some memories of them, but they were like photographs where the faces were too blurry to make out. She asked if he thought there were any pictures of them left anywhere. He told her if there were, he didn’t know of them. She had placed her hand on his cheek then and given him a look so full of love he swore he heard his heart crack.
She listened to all his stories closely, growing silent when appropriate and smiling likewise. Several times he worked himself up to tell her what he had to, but each time he had looked at her and seen so much happiness in her eyes, happiness he simultaneously hoped was over him and hoped wasn’t, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. He knew he was just procrastinating, putting off the inevitable, but he also really didn’t want to hurt her. More than anything, he didn’t want to hurt her. But he also didn’t want to lie to her, and therein lie the problem.
They had fallen into a comfortable silence now, and he thought he should just do it. Just do it and get it over with. Then she turned to him and asked, “So how did you earn three terms in Contrain Penitentiary?”
“I killed four men,” he said, and pulled his eyes away from the trees and hills in the distance and looked over at her, his heart beating fast. He wasn’t sure how he expected her to react, but when she didn’t even arch a brow, he relaxed a touch.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what?”
She gave him a look like this was a stupid question. “Why did you kill them?”
Now Charlie told her about the genius plan his brother had hatched (genius according to Michael, anyway) to steal a bunch of things from the people who lived near the forest where Charlie and Michael were living. He told her that at the time, it had seemed like a good idea, that they had stolen things before and had never been caught. He’d known it was risky, and he supposed he even understood that the punishment for this could be death, were they to be caught. But Michael said it would be easy, and once they got the money for the things they’d stolen, they could find a place to settle down and make a real life for themselves. Being that this was all Charlie had ever wanted since his house had been burned down and his parents ripped away from him, he agreed that it was a chance worth taking.
He told her if you’d asked him if it was worth it a week later, his answer would have been completely different.
The plan was simple. Every third Sunday of the month, the local Blacksmith held a card game in his shed, where all the business-owning Sorcerers would attend and drink themselves stupid, sometimes losing a month’s worth of profit in one night. Which, according to Michael, proved that they had more than enough to go around, that the stuff he and Charlie stole from them wouldn’t even be missed. It was during this card game that Michael and Charlie would split up and raid the business owners’ shops, taking only valuable items small enough to carry, and leaving the bigger things that would be noticed firsthand were they to go missing. Simple, right? What could go wrong?
Well, he told her, apparently everything could go wrong, and everything did. Charlie had been in the tailor’s shop, wrapping expensive fabric around his neck and stuffing it down his pants, knowing this was a sensible thing to steal because it would transport and sell easily and also provide new clothing for him and his brother. He remembered just what he’d been doing, running his fingers over a particularly soft piece of silk—something he had never known the pleasure of touching, when a scream cut through the night. His head jerked up and his heart beat fast instantly. He’d stood in the darkness of the tailor’s shop and felt the sudden urge to bolt, to run right back to their little camp in the forest. But, somehow, despite the fact that the scream had obviously come from a woman somewhere near or in one of the surrounding shops, he knew his brother had gotten into trouble.
He told Surah he never would forget the sound of that woman’s scream.
Charlie had rushed out the back door of the shop—the lock on it broken from when he’d forced entry just a few moments prior—and ran out into the back alley, his eyes darting back and forth, trying to pinpoint the direction the scream had come from. He didn’t have to think too hard, because then he heard a man shouting, and the woman shouting something back.
Then he heard the unmistakable laughter of his older brother.
He tore the stolen fabric out of his pants and off of his neck, discarded it behind a dumpster, and took off in the direction of the commotion, keeping close to the walls of the surrounding buildings for cover. He could tell he was getting closer because he could hear the woman’s cries getting louder and louder, along with the shouting of the man, and Michael’s laughter. When he reached the edge of a building, he poked his head around the corner and peered out into the street. There he saw a woman in her nightclothes, a drunken man holding his fists up, and Michael laughing as he dodged the man’s blows easily, taunting him with each side-step.
It took Charlie about two seconds to realize what had happened here, and he could have punched Michael in the face himself for the stupidity of it. Charlie saw he recognized the woman and man as the barber and his wife, and he also knew Michael had taken the woman to bed before while the barber had been away. Michael must have gotten distracted while raiding the shops, and made a quick stop at the wife’s chambers. The barber must have come home early from the card gam
e and caught the two of them in bed. When Charlie looked closer, and saw that his brother’s pants were unzipped, he knew he was right.
“Stop it, Brock!” the woman was screaming. “It wasn’t what it looked like! Stop right now before you hurt someone!”
The barber turned on his wife. “Don’t you talk to me, you dirty whore! I know what I seen!” he slurred, stumbling toward her with his hand drawn back to strike. “You must’a thought you was pretty clever! You must’a thought I was a fool! I’ll show you a damn fool, you dirty bitch.”
He drew back to hit her, during which time Charlie was desperately trying to get Michael’s attention to tell him it was time to go. He didn’t like that the woman was probably going to be beaten for her transgressions, but he knew it was just the distraction they needed to get out of there. He had a gut feeling that it would be their last chance to get out of there. He had been right about that.
Of course, Michael was never one to walk away from a fight. He stepped between the man and his wife and caught his blow easily. Then he twisted his wrist until he heard a dull crack. The man began to scream bloody-murder, a higher pitched scream than the woman had made a few moments ago. Charlie would never forget the sound of that, either.
He also remembered the look on his brother’s face as he broke the barber’s wrist, the joyous gleam in his eyes and the twisted smile on his lips, as if he had not just destroyed the lives of two people, as if he was doing the man a wonderful favor rather than causing him terrible pain. He remembered Michael’s whispered words to the man, like salt poured into a festering wound, telling the barber of how his wife had screamed out his name while he’d taken her.
All the noise must have alerted others, just as Charlie had feared it would, because at that moment the rest of the men who had been at the card game came running around the corner to see what was going on. Charlie cursed silently, knowing that the situation had just gone from manageably bad, to uncontrollably worse.
“What happened then?” Surah asked, because Charlie had gone silent, receding into his thoughts.
He looked over at her and saw that she was really listening, drawn into the story the way a bug is drawn into light. This made a bit of happiness run through him. At least his past could be good for something, if only to entertain her.
He told her about how the men had come onto the scene to see their friend’s wrist broken, and his wife in her nightclothes crying in the street. When they asked what was going on here, the barber, who’d been sprawled on the ground clutching his wrist, found his feet and pointed his good hand at Michael. “This piece of shit been beddin’ my wife,” he shouted.
This had made the group of drunken men howl with laughter, which only served to make the barber angrier. “You sonsabitches!” he yelled. “Don’t just stand there! Get him! I’ll give free shaves for the next month to the man who beats the shit out of him the most!”
Apparently, this was a pretty good deal, because the four men began to move toward Michael, who looked unworried, but Charlie knew it was just a pose. He could tell just by the way his brother’s eyes darted once around the shops to see if Charlie was near that Michael knew he was in trouble here.
Around the corner of the nearest building, wrapped in shadows, Charlie sighed and leaned his head back against the wall, unable to decide how he should handle this. He wasn’t scared to go out and help his brother fight these men; he had, in fact, on many occasions done just that. But he was angry with Michael. He was angry his brother had somehow screwed this all up, the way he was always managing to screw things up—a quality he still retained to this day. (Surah laughed a little and nodded as he said this.) He was angry that now they almost certainly would not be able to settle down somewhere and start their lives. It had been Michael’s plan to begin with—a simple, good plan that could have worked. Could have changed everything for the better.
Now it was going to do the opposite. All because Michael couldn’t keep his damn dick in his pants.
Charlie decided to hold his position. Maybe Michael could use a good beat down. Maybe it would do him some good to see that Charlie wouldn’t always come to his rescue. Maybe it would knock some sense into him.
Charlie peeked back around the corner and waited. He winced when the first two men moved in and Michael received a blow to the chin that sent him reeling. He rubbed his own jaw as he watched, swearing he too could feel every strike his brother endured. It didn’t take long before Michael was laid out on the ground, the street lights and half of the small town looking down on him now, all witness to his beating. He felt a stab in his heart every time his brother’s eyes darted around, waiting for Charlie to jump in any minute now. But Charlie wasn’t going to, not this time.
But when Michael tried to climb to his feet, only to be knocked down again, something fell out of his pant pocket, and made a tinkling noise as it struck the ground. The men, who’d been just about to call it quits, grew silent as they looked for the item that had made the sound. Charlie didn’t have to look. He cursed in his head again, more profanely this time.
“Hey!” yelled the barber’s wife. “That’s my weddin’ ring! You dirty bastard! You stole my weddin’ ring!”
The men moved in again, and began searching Michael. Of course, they each found items that belonged to them, and of course, they did not think this was as funny as sleeping with a man’s wife. Charlie’s heart sank as he was certain now that this thing was going to end badly, that his brother wasn’t just going to walk away with a few cuts and bruises. His brother might not walk away at all.
He took one last breath and stepped around the corner, the decision made in his heart but not quite in his mind. A feeling he would recall over and over in the next few hundred years, and wonder if he had made the right decision. If he was being honest, he would always sort of wonder that. Certainly he wouldn’t be in the situation he was in now if he’d just walked away and let his brother be killed that night.
In the end, Charlie wasn’t the kind of man who could just let that happen. Sure, Michael had brought this on himself and deserved a beating, but he couldn’t let them just kill him out in the street like he was nothing more than a bug on the bottoms of their shoes.
Also, Charlie had always been the better fighter. He was pretty sure he could at least buy them enough time to escape. He never dreamed he would start that day a decent man, and by the end of it become a murderer. Then again, he supposed only crazy people planned on things like that. For the rest of folks, it was always rapid and unexpected, leaving you breathless.
The men were all distracted, arguing about the best way to do the deed while continuing to kick Michael where he laid on the ground. Charlie saw a long, thick board leaning against the wall of one of the shops amongst other trash and cardboard boxes, and he scooped it up without a second thought, stepping up quietly behind the other men.
“Fellas,” he said, and had to say it twice more before any of them took notice of him. He met each of their eyes, which were filled with murderous, drunken rage, and swallowed once. “I think he’s had enough.”
The blacksmith, who was easily the biggest of the men, laughed deeply and charged Charlie, who stepped out of the way quickly. The man went stumbling passed him, and Charlie spun around and whacked him hard in the back with the board, making a sound like cracking wood as it connected. The blacksmith let out an oomph and fell flat on his face. Charlie kept him in his peripheral vision as he turned back to face the other men. Two of which, were now holding pocket knives in their hands, having had them tucked away in their boots or something.
Charlie lowered the board a little. “I don’t want no more trouble.” He nodded down at Michael, who had a small bloody smile on his lips, both of his eyes nearly swollen shut and his jaw off kilter. “Just let me take him and we’ll go. We won’t ever come back. I swear it.”
Charlie pulled back from the memory now, too overwhelmed by it to keep drawing it out much longer. Surah did nothing but watch him as he
took a deep breath and reminded himself that all of that was in the past now, that he’d paid dearly for his crimes and was done with it. But, the truth was, he would never stop paying for the decisions he’d made that night. The truth was, when he’d killed those men, he’d taken on a weight that would never really fall from his shoulders. A taint that would never really vanish from his soul.
He focused on the land ahead now, listening to the sounds of the birds in the trees and the leaves crunching beneath his boots. He looked up at the sun, which was slowly making its way to the zenith, warming the air as it moved. Finally, he looked at Surah, who was waiting patiently for him to tell the rest of his story. He pulled his eyes away from her and let out a low sigh.
“Well,” Charlie said, “those men told me the only way they was gonna let me take my brother and go was over their dead bodies.” He paused. “So that’s what I did.”
Surah eyed him for a moment, her violet eyes as unreadable as smeared text. “How did you end up getting caught?”
Charlie smirked, but there was nothing but sadness behind it. “An entire town saw me kill those men. It didn’t take long before the Hunters caught up with us. When they did, my brother was off huntin’ up some dinner, and I was waitin’ in our secret little cave we’d been livin’ in, and they found me.” He shrugged. “Prob’ly used some Magic to do it. They told me Michael and I had been charged with four counts of murder.”
“And you told them you killed the men yourself,” Surah said. It was not a question.
Charlie nodded. “’Cause I did, love. All four of them. I left them in the street to bleed and die, right out there in front of their families and businesses. There were too many witnesses. A trial was hardly necessary. Wasn’t no reason for us both to go down. The Hunters took me to the courts and the judge took one look at me and issued three terms.” He shrugged again, as if this were the equivalent of three days, and not three hundred years.
