I took the voice recorder from his hand. My fingers hesitated before pulling out the tape. I slid in the second one—the one with the year 1998. And I pressed play.
Loud laughter burst through the recorder, then complete silence.
“I failed,” the voice said.
A breath. Another laugh, strained this time.
“Turns out when you take cells, you take their traits. Their diseases, too.”
He laughed again.
“Both twins will die by 2019. Same way as Ezra Zane.”
The tape clicked, stopped, then continued.
“I gave life to two monsters,” he said. “Soon, they will start to kill.”
A tired sigh followed.
“It doesn’t matter what environment you raise them in. It doesn’t matter how isolated you keep them. They will always have the mind of a man who left behind nothing but tragedy. Just because he could.”
I stopped the tape.
“We were not like that,” I said. “I am not the monster he wanted me to be.”
My brother looked at me. Really looked.
“No,” he said. “We are not.”
2008.
Zeke called me in the middle of the night.
He sent an address and nothing else.
We were both back in Eureka Springs, and the address he sent was where everything began.
It was almost two a.m. when I entered the house. The door stood open.
The moment I crossed the threshold, a cold crawled up my spine. The air tasted metallic, and it was sharp on my tongue with every breath I took.
I closed the door behind me and moved deeper inside.
Zeke sat on the floor, rocking back and forth as a woman with dark hair hung limp in his arms. His hands supported her neck while his sobs racked his shoulders.
Her eyes stared wide at nothing.
He drowned in regret. I could see it in his eyes.
“It was an accident,” he kept saying, over and over.
But no accidents leave five stab wounds.
My father was right. We can’t escape who we were, or the mind he left behind.
I stepped closer and pulled Zeke’s hands away from the body. I crouched in front of him and slapped his face. The sound cracked him awake, leaving a red trail on his cheek.
“Shut the fuck up,” I whispered. “Clean this mess.”
