“Sure,” Brian smiled. He dragged the word out a little and stared into his coffee cup. “That sounds like fun, actually. We could even go camping at the beach. It would be sandy as hell, but could be fun. I bet Owen would like that. Campfire cooking and s’mores and sand fleas.”
“Um, I don’t know about the sand fleas.” Laura sat back in her chair, listening to the sounds of Owen playing with the toy laptop a friend had given him for his birthday. She hated the noisy thing, but Owen loved it. “Oh! How about a compromise? My aunt has a cabin about an hour out of town, up near Sandy Bottom. It’s not too far if we have to get back for whatever reason, but it’s not too close to any neighbors so it’s fairly quiet, and it’s also near a nice calm, sandy stretch of the river. I could call her in a little bit and ask to use it. You’d even get a whole, real bed in a bedroom all to yourself! With a door you can close, even!” Laura teased. Brian laughed and looked up at her. He had a wonderful laugh. The joy in it was genuine and you could feel that to your toes. Shit, she was in trouble.
“What, I’m not sentenced to sofas for life? Well that’s a relief,” he smiled. “I think that sounds great. Much more fun than getting arrested for beating the shit out of your ex. Because I probably would if I saw him again.”
“What get arrested?” Laura asked.
“Beat up your ex. I’m sorry, but I have to admit it would be pretty satisfying. That guy’s a total creep.” Brian’s smile had vanished. Now he scowled down at his coffee, brooding. “I know it’s none of my business really, but guys like that get to me.” Laura reached her hand out and covered his own.
“No need for that. It’s all over now. And you get a bonus surprise vacation!” Her heart flipped in her chest when Brian turned his hand over and squeezed hers in return, briefly.
“That sounds fantastic. Thank you.” He smiled back at her— though she could see anxiety mixed with the joy in it now— and she hoped he had the strength to make it through a whole week.
Chapter 6
The three of them spent several fairly pleasant days wandering around the woods, paddling in the river, and eating more s’mores that Brian knew could fit into a four-year-old. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so calm and relaxed. His mother had been ill for so long, and then once she had died and he’d found her papers he’d been carrying that stone in his gut ever since. But here, for a few days, he’d managed to not think about it.
Now, though, he lay on the slightly lumpy bed in one of the rooms of Laura’s Aunt Emma’s cabin and stared at the fine crack in the ceiling. Just a hairline in the paint, a sign of the house settling over the decades, but in Brian’s mind it was the opening to a black abyss. He’d flopped down on the bed after his shower, intending to get up again after a moment to rummage up a book from the shelf in the living room. Instead, he’d sunk into his own thoughts, which were once again spiraling into the dark of the unknown.
Who the hell had his father been, anyway? How did his mother meet him, really? How’d they get together? Brian had spent his whole life being told that his father had died on a business trip and that his mother was an orphan, so they’d had no family at all. It was normal, in his mind. Just the two of them against the world, and that was fine. Then, just a few days before she’d died, she had called him into her room. Brian figured that she knew she was going, even though the doctor said she would live just fine for months still. What his mother had told him then was staggering.
She had lied to him. His whole life lived while the one person he had trusted completely, loved with all his heart, spent the entire twenty-two years of his life before she died, lying right to his face. She wasn’t an orphan.
His mother’s family was alive and well. Thriving, in fact. Wealthy of all the damned things, while the two of them had been scrimping and doing without. She explained that she’d been disowned when she got pregnant and that was that. Her family wanted nothing to do with her or her child, and she’d decided that the feeling was mutual if they could only see the scandal and not their daughter. In the end, she said it was for the best. Safer for both of them.
That was when she’d said the strangest thing. It made no sense at all. How could being on her own and penniless, living in a downright rough neighborhood and barely scraping by be safer? Brian was inclined to think it was the medication talking mostly, and exhaustion from fighting the cancer. There were things out there in the world, his mother said, that were beyond her ability to explain. They looked human and they sounded human, but they weren’t. They were monsters. The Temple knew of them, and she was afraid of them. Afraid of both the monsters and the people who fought them.
Brian hadn’t known what to make of that statement until a few months later, after her funeral, when he read her letters to him. In it she told him as much as he now knew— which wasn’t a lot, but was more than enough to destroy what little faith he had left in his image of who he was.
That was when he’d decided to shut up the small house he’d called home for almost as long as he could remember, and just ride off down the road. He couldn’t stay there, where he’d lived a false life for so long. Granted, he didn’t have the first idea of how to find the truth, but he just knew he couldn’t stay where he was. He felt like everyone in the town he’d grown up in was looking at him with fear, pointing and whispering, and he knew he had to move. Had to run from his mother’s revelations, from himself. He was starting to feel twitchy again, like he should get back on the road, but he’d made a promise, and truthfully, he selfishly wanted another few days of just feeling normal again.
“Unca Brian?” Brian jumped at the voice and turned his head to see Owen standing in the door of his room, in his baby dragon pajamas and bare feet.
“Owen, it’s way past your bedtime. What’re you doing up?” Brian asked. The idea of anyone calling him ‘Uncle Brian’ was completely crazy, but every time Owen said it, it was like a glass of water on a sponge and he just soaked it up.
“I’m scared. Will you come look for monsters?” Owen asked. He glanced back down the hall at his own room, vague childhood fears written on his face. It was the last thing Brian had expected, and it he felt the weight in his stomach reassert itself, cold and heavy.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’ll come look,” he said. How he kept his voice sounding normal when his throat felt so tight he wasn’t sure, but for Owen, he’d make the effort.
He swung his feet off the bed and lifted Owen up as he stood to carry the boy the few feet down the hallway. After tucking him back into the bed, Brian dutifully looked under it, then in the closet and behind the armchair in the corner, then under the bed again just to be sure. Brian pulled the worn patchwork quilt up around the boy’s shoulders and perched on the edge of the twin bed.
“You go on to sleep now, before your mom finds out you’re still awake,” he said.
“Do you have a mom? Does she get mad if you stay up past your bedtime, too?” Owen asked. Brian suddenly felt dumped right into a minefield.
“I had a mom, yeah,” he nodded. His chest tightened. It was a horrible secret she dumped on him at her death, but she was still the only person who’d loved him through everything. At least he thought she had. “She got really sick a while back, so now she doesn’t get too mad at me about anything. She used to though, when I was your age for sure.”
“You were a kid?”
“Sure I was,” Brian laughed. “I was a real tough kid, too. Made my mom so mad sometimes, and she was pretty much always worried about me cause I got into trouble a lot. I spent a lot of time in the Time Out Chair.”
“No way.” Owen snuggled under the blanket and peered up at Brian with a look of total disbelief. “Did you have to go to time out for a whole year?”
“Not for a whole year all at one time,” Brian laughed. He reached into his shirt and pulled out the pendant he wore. It lay warm against his fingers as he held the small metal plaque out for inspection. Owen sat up to look at the raised marks, runes that embedded the spe
ll into the bronze.
“Is that magic?” Owen asked. “Mom works for people that know a lot of magic.”
“I know. Yeah, it’s magic. My mom got this for me when I was just a little older than you are. She worried about me, you know, and it helped keep me safe when she wasn’t there.”
“Even against monsters?” Owen looked hopeful. Brian’s gut clenched.
“I suppose so. I’m here now, right? It must have worked.” Brian had no idea how he kept his voice steady. Owen lay back down again.
“What about your dad? Roger at school laughs at me and says I don’t know anything about boy stuff ‘cause I don’t have a dad. His dad is the one who looks for monsters and they go to football games and stuff. I don’t like football.” Brian took a deep breath and tried not to bolt.
“No,” he shook his head. It took all his effort to sound normal now, forcing his voice past the tightness in his throat. “I was a lot like you that way, actually. I never had a dad, so it was just me and my mom, just like you and Laura.” He had to get out of this room. He felt like he was suffocating.
“No way!”
“Yes way. And I don’t like football either. I’m more of a hockey fan.”
“But you’re good at scaring away monsters.” Owen’s eyes were drooping shut and Brian almost wept with relief.
“There’s nothing here to scare away here. Don’t worry, kiddo. You’re perfectly safe,” Brian said, ruffling Owen’s hair. “Now close your eyes and go to sleep. You don’t want your mom to find out you’re still up.” Owen nodded and curled up on his side around a rainbow colored teddy bear.
“There’s no bad monsters here ‘cause you came. They know you’d beat them up, so they’re scared of you.” Owen’s eyelids closed over his expression of contented faith in Brian’s defense against monster assault, and in a moment, he was asleep again.
Brian realized he was trembling, the ice in his gut chilling him all the way through. He didn’t know what he’d do if Owen ever looked at him with fear.
Chapter 7
They were going to catch him, he knew. Eventually he would make a mistake— take a wrong turn and come up against a dead end or something— and they would be on him in a flash, but at the moment they seemed content with stalking their prey. For now, there wasn’t much he could do about it but run, and that was only going to help him for so long. The gods wouldn’t care. Who would? Nobody. Not a single human being would regret the death of a monster, after all.
His lungs burned like they drew lava rather than air as he forced his legs to keep moving. There was nowhere to hide on this street, just a few scattered cars parked on one side, across from all the closed-up shops. None of the vehicles were big enough to be considered shelter from a determined hunter. Brian knew that he had to stay calm, think rationally if he had any hope of getting away, but he could feel the panic coloring all his choices.
His mother’s face flashed through his mind, looking worried and sad. He could hear her saying that they just didn’t know what a good boy he was, once they knew him everything would be fine. She’d told him that so often growing up, after he’d had another fight and gotten in trouble again.
He knew it was his own fault. He should be able to keep his emotions in check even when the other kids were cruel to him. Sometimes that’s just how kids are, awful as that truth was. But once in a while something would happen and he’d lose his temper. Even when he was standing up for someone else, nobody believed him. Why should they? Even his own mother often didn’t, even when she said she did. She thought he didn’t see the doubt in her eyes, but he had always been an observant kid.
The entrance to an alley edged into view, just a slight break in the seemingly endless line of shopfronts marching down the street. Brian’s heartbeat thudded painfully in his ears as he lurched towards the narrow opening. He didn’t pause to glance over his shoulder, not wanting to know how close his pursuer was. He knew there was no real hope; he had been doomed from birth. He had no real friends— everyone he grew up with was frightened of him thanks to a few fights that had turned genuinely violent, and his own fear that it would happen again if he got too close to anyone. His mother was dead now, too. There was nobody who would mourn, and at the same time, he had nobody to turn to for help.
Laura and Owen. They might miss him, despite everything. They must know by now, surely, but still. He had wanted to keep them safe from the knowledge, but maybe even now that they knew they would think kindly of the few good things he did for them. He didn’t want them to live in fear of him. He caught himself against the wall when he stumbled and felt the wetness under his fingers, smearing a red trail across the sandpaper grit of the bricks. He glanced over and immediately bent, vomiting against the wall until his stomach convulsed on nothing.
The blood painted up both of his arms and down the front of his shirt, his hands stained red and his fingers lengthened and thinned and sharp as knives. As soon as he saw that he knew that Laura and Owen wouldn’t remember him kindly. They wouldn’t remember anything at all and the pain of that shot through him.
He didn’t bother wiping away the tears that streamed down his face now. There was no point, no escaping what he had done. He stared at the blood on his inhuman hands and knew that he finally understood that it was over. He’d destroyed everything just by existing. That understanding was more bitter than bile.
He had nothing to live for. Still, even in his despair he knew he’d run until he couldn’t anymore. The alley was almost as bare as the street had been. No dumpsters, no loading docks, not even a fire escape stood out as cover of any sort. Just two long, pitted and timeworn brick walls. The end of the alley was lost in a hazy mist that seemed to be closing in on him now, as well. Maybe if he could run far enough the haze would obscure him from view? Not that he truly believed that, but what other choice did he have? He could feel the presence of the hunter behind him, footsteps that he heard not so much with his ears as with his soul, but each step sounded like thunder exploded right on top of him. Brian ran.
There. A scratched-up steel door in the rough brick wall ahead of him. It was his only chance. Brian stumbled as he lurched to it and threw it open. Maybe he could hide? He ran through the room, his eyes adjusting faster than they should to the darkness, just a tiny bit of moonlight filtering in through the front windows. He knew now why that happened. Knew why he could see so well and hear so clearly, how he sometimes just knew when people were coming even though there was no possible way he should be able to. It was the secret his mother had hidden from him, had tried to keep him from ever learning. She had hidden the truth from the world and from her own son out of the fear of what he could become. That betrayal cut deeper than the knife Brian was sure the hunter planned to use on him in the end.
Cursing, he glanced around, looking for a place to hide, a way to escape. Anything to throw off pursuit before he was caught and killed. The alley door had opened into a furniture store, it seemed. Huge sofas and oversized armchairs lay across his path everywhere he turned with no space between. They tumbled across the store like toys left out after playtime, leaning on each other and tipped on backs and sides and strewn around nonsensically, so that Brian was forced to climb over them. He could hear the hunter coming in the door now and he dropped down behind one long, blue recliner and scrambled away on his hands and knees under a heavily carved wooden dining table, hoping to stay out of sight, desperate for his own life, not caring which way he went as long as it was away.
His head banged into something cold and hard with a loud thud and he looked up to see a glass wall stretching endlessly in both directions. The moonlight behind him seemed stronger now, more than strong enough to see details and turn the transparent glass into a mirror. He looked into his own huge, black eyes and recoiled, scrabbling back on hands and knees to get away from the image in the glass. Somehow, even in the dark room and imperfect reflection he could see himself perfectly, and the wrongness of his own face seemed to glow back at him
. In the reflection, over his shoulder he saw a glittering silver knife, held by a man in a weathered bomber jacket.
“This is it, monster,” the man rasped.
“No! Please! It’s a mistake! It has to be a mistake, I would never… Oh gods,” Brian sobbed. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference what he said, the man would kill him, but he said the words anyway to convince himself before his death. Just as the man started to step closer, unhampered by the furniture that had blocked Brian’s every move, the whole room started to shake.
“Brian!”
“Please! Please!” Brian threw his arm up to shield his face and hit something solid. He blinked, and hovering over him was not the indistinct man bent on killing, but Laura’s face. Her very much alive, worried, slightly frightened face. She was holding his arm just a hair away from her nose. It was her hand that he’d bumped into while trying to shield himself from his dream murderer.
Chapter 8
“Brian! You’re okay. You’re safe, it’s okay.” Laura’s eyes were wide with concern, and her hand where it rested on his arm was gentle. She must have been leaning over him when he had tried to fend off the dream-hunter and had caught him before he flailed into her face. He blinked up at her and felt the wetness on his face even as the terror of the dream started to give way to the calm hush of the cabin. He still shivered as the sweat turned cold on the sheets now that he wasn’t running for his life. He let his arm fall back to the bed, and Laura reached down to wipe the tears from his cheeks.
Personal Demons: A Riverton Demons Novel Page 5
