The room quieted from emotional strain until we all hovered in the same thoughts. We relived our special times with Kestrel. We rifled through memories; we smiled at antics and shared childhoods.
“What are you doing here?” I looked up as the locked door to the prison cell swooped open. I’d been at the mental institute for two nights and couldn’t stand another fucking minute.
Kes slinked through the darkness. “Busting you out.” Holding out his hand, he grinned. “Time to leave, big brother. Time to make a run for it.”
He’d tried to help me escape that night, just like he’d helped me escape so many times in our childhood.
“Now, what are you doing?”
“Focusing.” Kes sat cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, his hands on his thighs in a yoga pose.
Throwing myself beside him, I rolled my eyes. “It’s not working. Your thoughts are just as horny.” At seventeen and fourteen, our hormones had kicked in, and Kes was a terrible flirt.
His laugh barrelled through the room. “Least I can talk to girls.”
“Yes, but I can feel them.”
“Not in an interesting way, though.” He winked. “You feel their silly concerns while I—” He flexed his fingers “—I feel their tits.”
I punched him in the arm, so damn grateful he was my brother.
God, I would miss him.
He was gone.
It was time for us to go, too.
Moving for the first time in hours, I placed my fingertips on Kes’s icy forehead. His skin seeped my warmth, stealing it the longer I touched him.
Pulling away, I had the incredible urge to touch life after touching death. To hold onto something real. Gathering Nila closer, I hugged my sister and nodded at Vaughn. Flaw would come to pay his respects tomorrow. He was close to Kes; his death would be hard on all of us.
Somehow, two Hawks and two Weavers had come together in sharedgrief, mourning a man who died far too young.
But that was life.
It was cruel. Unjust. Brutal. And dangerous.
Good people died. Bad people lived. And the rest of us had to continue surviving.
* * * * *
A week passed.
In that week, things changed a lot and none at all.
My fever finally broke, my wound healed, and my strength slowly returned. My body was still exhausted but every day, I pieced myself back together.
Nila had a lot to do with that.
The day after seeing Kestrel’s body, I returned to the hospital on my own. I sought out the nurse who’d brought me the cell phone while I healed and paid her a thousand pounds for her trouble. She’d gone out of her way to give me the means to contact Nila. The least I could do was compensate her.
While there, I submitted to a full examination and the doctor’s instructions to take it easy. I was cleared of any concussion or long-term maladies. I also singlehandedly arranged the transfer of Kes’s body to the crematorium. As part of Cut’s meticulous upbringing, all his children had Last Wills and Testaments.
Kes was no different.
I’d found his file amongst the others in Cut’s study. The bones of his dog, Wrathbone, lay in the coffee table as I scattered paperwork and skimmed through Kestrel’s final wishes.
I already knew he wanted to be cremated and scattered on Hawksridge grounds. We’d shared many a late night conversations as young boys about how unappealing the thought of being buried and eaten by weevils and worms sounded. We were both slightly claustrophobic, and I understood his wish to be sprinkled as dust, prisoner to the breeze, and weightless as the sky.
