Eventually, his tears turned to sleep.
**********
Damien lay in the ghost darkness of the hospital. The phantom glow of the safety lights was floating above him. He drifted in the otherworldliness of the hospital room. Felt the odd stillness of the air, the unfamiliar sounds and smells, the nurses passing like ships in the night.
The doctor had insisted Damien stay overnight for observation, although Damien suspected it had more to do with the fact that social services needed some time to arrange a bed for him. He had been told that, most likely, he would be put in a foster house with several other children rather than with another foster family, which was perfectly fine with Damien. He even got a hospital room to himself for the night, although Damien was convinced Mia had had something to do with that.
Social care kids didn’t get private rooms. Even suicidal ones.
Mia had been adamant about staying the night with Damien, saying that he shouldn’t be alone, but Damien had rejected the offer and almost had a panic attack when she insisted. He had already forced her to save him from himself, to sit there whilst his wounds were gutted and cleaned. He wasn’t asking any more of her, at least that night. Eventually, the doctor had practically forced Mia out, claiming that Damien needed rest.
In the end, Damien settled into a familiar numbness, evading sleep. He had kept waking up in a panic, surfacing from distorted nightmares, believing that he was tied down again.
It would be best, he thought, if he lay there and tried to be as much of nothing as he could.
The attempt, however, was cut short as the door to his room opened suddenly. He barely glanced, assuming it was a nurse, but his heart leapt into his throat as the outline of two people stepped into the room.
For a moment, they were backlit by the light of the hallway and a terror that felt as suffocating as tar choked his throat and lungs. He scrambled to a sitting position because—it was them. The McKenzies. He should have known, he should have—
The door closed. The light adjusted. Damien doubled over, weak with relief.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, clutching at the cloth over his still-racing heart.
“Sorry. We didn’t mean to scare you,” Koko said, walking slowly into the room beside Hakan.
“No worries. What’s a little heart attack when you’re fourteen?” Damien joked, then winced as it fell flat, a reminder of the day’s events. “Sorry,” he said quietly, head still bowed.
The word only added to the silence that thickened around them. The same shame from before was bubbling up again, eating away like acid. He heard Hakan and Koko stop and stand a few feet from his bed. Damien took a deep breath before tilting his head up, although he still couldn’t look either of them in the face.
“Did your mom send you to check on me?” Damien asked. “I’m not going to do anything. And it’s not like I’m gonna spill your secret—obviously.”
“That’s not…Damien, that’s not why we’re here,” Hakan said quietly.
“Mom doesn’t even know we’re here,” Koko said. “Well, I mean, she probably does, but we didn’t tell her,” she amended. Her voice was quiet too, as if there were a spell tensing the air of the room that none of them felt capable of breaking.
Damien didn’t reply. The silence stretched. And then, from that odd stillness came a soft noise, like someone was breaking a breath into parts. Damien looked up and—God. A shuddering breath left him. He closed his eyes, but their faces were imprinted behind his eyelids.
Koko, her eyes and cheeks glowing with tears, jaw clenched as she tried to silence the trembling breaths that clogged her throat. And Hakan with that look in his eyes. There wasn’t a word in the English language for that look. As if he were trying to track every clue that could have led Damien to that moment and then projecting the ‘what if’ of his suicide onto Damien’s small frame on that small, white bed.
It was the look of someone who was mourning something that hadn’t happened and blaming themselves for it.
Damien had thought he didn’t have any strength left to cry. But in a moment, he was doubled over, face in his hands, as he tried to find one single breath that wouldn’t rip him apart.
“Damien,” Hakan said, and then Damien was being surrounded. Pulled apart, put back together again as Hakan and Koko climbed on the bed and gripped at him so the current wouldn’t take him away.
They collapsed on the small bed, Koko at his back, Hakan at his front, until Damien was laying not on the bed but on their shaking bodies. Damien could feel Koko’s tears as she pressed her face to the nape of his neck, and Hakan’s wet breath at his throat.
They lay there. Eventually, the quiet smoothed out again.
Damien’s exhaustion was a burning behind closed eyes, a pressure at his temples, but he was warm. Safe. He didn’t know how long they rested there until Hakan shifted slightly, pressing a little closer to Damien’s skin.
“Please don’t do that again,” Hakan whispered brokenly. “Please.”
“Sorry. Sorry, sorr—”
“No, just, no, please. It’s not your fault, God, it’s not—I shouldn’t even be asking that of you, I shouldn’t but I just—please. I-I…Damien,” he stuttered, and Damien had never seen Hakan even remotely like that. He clutched at him as Koko pressed closer to Damien, her arms solid and grounding around him.
“I won’t. I won’t, Hakan, I won’t,” Damien promised, feeling pathetic. Feeling relieved.
He felt Hakan nod against his neck. Felt Koko settle behind him. He closed his eyes again. Damien felt like the land inside him had been scorched, fields and forests reduced to nothing but exhausted ash. But Damien could feel, when he lay very still and concentrated on Hakan and Koko’s breath, a wind picking up.
There was rain in the horizon that foretold good tidings. A softening of the earth.
CHAPTER FIVE
As relieving as being removed from the McKenzies’ was, it was still jarring. Damien was left with a feeling of vertigo for a long time, like the sensation of falling as you hit sleep.
His body seemed unconvinced that the omnipresent threat of the McKenzies was truly gone. They were an evil he had known, and now the fear had been transferred to the shadows. He was jumpy with hypervigilance everywhere but at the Salgados’. It was exhausting to be on edge so much of the time, but it took time for his bones and heart and brain to accept the change in environment.
Even when the feeling began to diminish, the nightmares remained. The Incident, as he called the day with the pills in his head, had seemed to have shaken the earth beneath him. It had unearthed all the buried skeletons Damien had been desperate to hide. Every night he would wake up panting, feeling pinned down by the ghosts of ropes, of hands, of Mrs. McKenzie’s cold blue eyes.
It wasn’t until years later that Damien found out that the McKenzies were never tried legally, as is common in types of cases in which physical evidence is disjointed and contaminated and the burden of proof falls on the victim’s shoulders. Knowing that the defendant’s lawyers would rarely hold back even against children, the trauma of trial was more often than not chosen as the bigger sin to be avoided.
The McKenzies, at least, were removed as foster carers and blacklisted by social services. In truth, Damien hadn’t needed vengeance or even justice. He was just happy they wouldn’t be able to do it to anybody else.
Damien moved into Oak House Foster Home the day he was discharged from the hospital. He was surprised that the place looked very much like a house and not like those cold places shown on TV. It had a large living room, a combined kitchen and dining room, three rooms that could each house two young people up to the age of eighteen, and a yard.
There were currently five young people, including Damien, and a rotation of staff that always left three in attendance. There were laminated rules on the wall. Don’t Hit, Don’t Swear, Don’t Break Things (on purpose). There was a routine that offered structure but wouldn’t be met by punitive measures if broken. It was ne
at, tidy, safe.
The day he arrived he’d felt too exhausted to be truly anxious. He’d been emptied by the last few days. It would take a while to replenish his fear.
The staff members that greeted him seemed nice, but they were obviously the kind of people who didn’t put up with nonsense. Damien didn’t mind. He liked their expressive faces and clear rules. There would be no constant second-guessing at Oak House like there had been at the McKenzies’.
The first fellow foster child he was introduced to was Ty. He was small, even more so than Damien, with dark skin and a silent demeanour. Ty took Damien to the room they would share. It was neat, looking not-entirely lived in. The room was a mirror image of itself. Each side had a bed, bedside table, wardrobe, desk, and chair. There were some boxes under the bed and two shelves on the wall to store possessions. Damien didn’t really need them. He didn’t have much.
He was taken out again to meet the two girls living in the room next to his. They introduced themselves as Elissa, twelve, and Frankie, thirteen. They both had pale skin, Elissa having messy blonde hair and Frankie a dyed black tipped with purple.
“Too bad you’re not older. Jack won’t give us alcohol anymore,” Frankie said when the staff member was out of earshot. Damien had blinked in response.
He’d met Jack not long after that. Jack was the oldest in the house at sixteen and had a room to himself. He barged into the house noisily, causing Damien to jump and look at the boy. Jack had pale skin and the green of an old bruise around one of his eyes. His hair was brown and shaved on one side of his head.
“What are you looking at?” was the first thing he said to Damien, who tamped down the sudden urge to laugh.
It wasn’t funny, but Damien could see exactly how life had shaped Jack. He was almost a stereotype. Damien sort of liked him straightaway. He was used to being disliked, and Jack didn’t look like the type to be deceitful.
“Jack. Be nice. This is Damien,” one of the staff members said.
“You fucking be nice,” Jack said and then winked at Damien. Damien tried not to smile, not wanting to get into trouble. Jack snorted and stomped to his room. The staff member followed.
They all watched the ensuing argument. The staff member told Jack to keep his door open when it slammed shut.
“Can’t I get some goddamn privacy? It’s like a fucking prison in here. Let me jerk off in peace, you pervert,” Jack’s voice said. Frankie and Elissa giggled. Ty looked small and bored.
I guess this is home, Damien thought.
It was an improvement, at least.
*****
Living at Oak House was what it was. That might sound asinine to most, but after living a life that wasn’t his for such a long time, it was a relief.
Damien got used to the routines and quirks of the foster home. He developed a semi-friendship with Ty. They’d wake each other up from nightmares, and Ty never asked questions. Damien appreciated that. He got along with the others too, despite never becoming close to them. There was no pretending they were a family in Oak House. Damien was free to wash himself of the addiction of hope.
Damien even got along with Jack, although the older boy would get angry sometimes, spiralling into what the staff members would call ‘rages’.
Once, after being told he couldn’t go out that night, Jack threw a lamp across the room. It hit Damien square in the head, knocking him back. Everything stopped around him as he sat in a daze.
“Shit! Damien, are you okay?” Jack was the first to come to life, moving towards Damien, but was stopped by one of the staff members. “I just wanna check on the kid,” he said, but Damien was already being helped up by one of the other adults.
His blood was warm on his head, dripping down into his eye.
“I’m fine,” he said.
They took him to the hospital, where he got stitches. Nicola showed up looking upset. Damien repeated the phrase—I’m fine, I’m fine—but nobody seemed to be comforted.
Damien didn’t understand why everybody made such a big fuss about it. Koko gaped when she saw him. Hakan approached him during lunch time, looking angry for the first time that Damien had seen. After school, both Mia and Cameron looked stern and worried at the bruise and stitched cut.
“We just want you to be safe,” Cameron said when Damien finally asked why everybody was making such a big deal about something that was clearly an accident. Damien frowned in confusion.
He was safe. The cut was just his body. No one was getting to his soul anymore.
“Damien, how would you feel if Lallo got injured? Even if it were an accident?” Mia asked.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“ ’Cause…I don’t know. It just is.”
Mia looked at him. Her eyes were sad. Damien didn’t know how to make it better. He froze as Mia leaned down and hugged him tightly, rubbing his back. After a moment, he relaxed against her, tentatively lifting his arms.
He’d been too out of it to appreciate Mia’s hug when he’d been in the hospital. This seemed different. Less desperate. A simple show of comfort.
Damien closed his eyes and let himself feel it for a moment. He didn’t know how long it would last.
**********
Summer arrived with a bleaching heatwave that set the tone for the season. The school year ended with barely a whimper. Damien let himself be dragged through the weeks of tests that dissolved into a week in which they did little more than watch movies and play games as the holidays approached.
Damien was simply grateful that none of the students had found out about what he had tried to do, steadfastly avoiding the spot where he had taken the pills. He had a singularly uncomfortable meeting with the school counsellor in which Damien was monosyllabic, refusing to cause any more trouble. He kept his head down, determined to simply survive the end of the school year.
The summer holidays started with the usual mixture of anxiety and relief. Damien always felt unmoored by the sudden lack of routine, overwhelmed by choices. Despite this, the summer of his fourteenth year turned out to be the best summer in recent memory.
Life in the foster home settled into a soft-edged routine that managed not to feel constraining. Damien mostly got along with the other people in the foster house, building relationships that were not exactly friendships, but eroded into shape by mere exposure. During those months, however, Damien didn’t spend much time there, instead being invited practically daily to the Salgado House.
Damien resisted that first week. He now had a phone and would avoid or deflect Koko and Hakan’s text messages, giving vague excuses when Cameron or Mia invited him in person for the next day. Damien didn’t want to fall into greed, into taking too much until there wasn’t anything left. Mia had cornered him one day, however, sitting him down in the same spot of the couch from that first night.
“You are welcome here,” she had said. Damien had squirmed under the pin of her gaze.
“I know,” he had replied, but it had only made her sterner, in that soft way of hers.
“Damien. If you don’t want to be here, I would never want to force you. But if you are saying no to our invitations for any other reason—if you think for a second we don’t want you here, or that we will ever not want you here, then I need to just…set you straight. We want you here. Okay?” she had said, each word a press of a hand against his chest, making him breathless and warm.
“Okay,” his small voice had replied.
On one of the first weeks thereafter, Damien got to meet the rest of the extended pack. He realized that Mia must have been keeping them away from him purposefully, because they all seemed eager to meet him.
He was instantly overwhelmed. There were uncles and aunts and cousins. There were witches, a seer, and even a necromancer. There were both wolves and humans in the pack, which Damien had not realized was possible. There was name after name after name. Damien couldn’t keep up.
Damien had expected some suspicion, and some membe
rs of the pack were definitely friendlier than others. But there was no hostility. It was incomprehensible to Damien that they would simply trust him like that, until he realized it wasn’t him they trusted. It was Mia. Their Kephalē. For some reason she had accepted him, and the pack had followed.
All the kids, mostly younger than him, treated him like another cousin.
“You smell like pack,” Koko said like that explained everything. Maybe it did. It was clear that he was being welcomed, but Damien couldn’t help but feel like an intruder. Not just because he wasn’t pack, but because he wasn’t family.
“Hello, there,” Nova said when she spotted him. Suddenly, Damien remembered her promise to teach him about some of her craft. He turned suddenly shy. A lot had happened that year. Maybe she wouldn’t want to anymore. “I believe I owe you some lessons,” she said with an impish smile.
“You don’t have to,” Damien replied.
“And if I want to?” Nova asked.
“Then…yeah. That’d be great.”
“We’ll talk to Mia when she has a second,” Nova said, nodding. Damien smiled.
Eventually, Damien had to escape the onslaught. He sought Hakan out, who was laying on the grass away from the crowd. Damien approached him tentatively, stopping when Hakan turned his head to look at him.
“You probably heard me a mile away, huh?” Damien said.
“Yep.”
“Can I…?”
“Sit.”
Damien lay down next to Hakan. They stayed silent. They looked at the sky, an endless blue.
*****
The summer cracked open then. Damien spent the long, hot days running around with the twins, their nearly inexhaustible energy used to build tree houses and fight creatures of the forest only they could see. They would all take shelter in the hottest hours of the day, fans moving humid air about, stretched on Koko’s bed, or Hakan’s. They would all go to lakes together and took a day trip to the sea. Damien started his lessons, two every week in the Salgado library, Nova’s eyes keen and secretive as they unravelled mysteries together.
In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic) Page 10
