“I’m ready to talk about the Oedipus Complex again,” I rasped to Orson. “Private session.”
“Now that I’ve met your sister, I have a better direction for our conversation.” He raised one eyebrow. I rolled off the mattress and worked my way slowly to the door. Every bone in my body felt displeased to be inside me. I tried to remember how Bree had described this process before. She mentioned aches. I didn’t ache. I burned.
My bones were long, scorching embers that left me grinding my teeth. I was going to chip a tooth before this was over. Every movement stoked the fire. There was no question as to why. It was the increasingly deadly venom running through my body. Others would likely find it ironic if my bones couldn’t withstand my own venom. I wondered briefly if I’d melt in that case.
Nemo reached out to help me out of the van. I reacted with panic, jerking backwards so hard that I fell on my ass. They all went still, staring at me with widening eyes.
“Well, that tanked the mood,” I grumbled. Flinching revealed far too much. Which shouldn’t matter at this point, and with these people. But a lifetime of manipulative psychopathic roommates ingrained the cold dread of revealing personal things unintentionally. Like the fact I cared about all of them.
When I got out of the van, I patted Nemo a few times on the arm so we could all move on from that embarrassing mishap. I could still touch them—for now, at least—and I was going to enjoy that until the bitter end.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“My cabin in the woods. We’ll hunker down for a while,” Orson told us.
“Our new home?” I took a look around.
“For a while.”
“Home,” I said. It didn’t sound right. Surrounding us was an overwhelming number of trees. Nemo peered at them with a sense of wonder. His nostrils flared as he took in the smell. Desire shone in his dark eyes. He was never supposed to be locked in a concrete hole. This is where he was meant to thrive.
He rolled his shoulders and an excited smile bloomed on his face. Then it was suddenly swallowed by distress.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking for gas masks and dart guns in the woods.
“I lived my entire life in a cage.” His gaze swept the woods with a combination of longing and loss. Momentarily, I felt uncharacteristic guilt for insisting we stayed at the asylum after we broke our restraints. Then again, I wasn’t the one who created and raised him in Verfallen.
Doctor Stein—Zero—didn’t understand the cruelty of it. Given what we knew about him now, it was easy to know he was clueless. There were psychopaths, then there was him. Eldritch horrors from other dimensions didn’t get the finer details of our existence. Supra knew that when they tossed us inside and forced him to run their experiments.
“Do you blame him?” I asked.
“Holding a grudge against him is pointless. He was just another inmate.”
“Is that a yes or no?”
“I blame Supra. Do I also blame Zero?” He ran a palm down his face and groaned. “Family's as complicated as everyone makes it sound. Guess we can compete for the shittiest father award,” he grumbled.
“Oh? You think so?” I asked, genuinely curious. It was nice to bond over life-defining trauma.
“No.” He looked over at me. “Yours was worse.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mine is willing to offer me help. Yours never was,” Nemo said. I looked away. Vague discomfort squirmed in my gut. Wow, trauma bonding fail.
“You look sick. Let’s go inside,” Bree said, touching my arm. I patted my pockets, feeling the empty serum vials sliding against one another. But something else was missing.
“Where's the journal?” I asked.
“I have it.” Orson led the way down a small stone path, overgrown by greenery.
“Did you go through my pockets?” I looked between the three of them, touching the darts again.
“It fell out of your pants after the grocery store,” Nemo said. I stared at him a moment, but decided to move on when he didn't appear to be hiding anything.
In front of us was the cutest little murder cabin a serial killer could hope to call home. It was made of dark tree trunks—I think they called it a log cabin. The roof extended over a deck, casting it in nefarious shadows. The roof was sunken slightly in the middle. Knowing Orson, most people who walked into it had likely never come back out.
I stopped moving and took it in fully. It was small, but then again, Nemo would likely spend a lot of time outdoors. Plus, how many bedrooms did the group really need? After we rearranged the beds at the asylum, we generally stayed together.
