Startled at my insistence, Ed stared at the ground, scuffing the dry dirt with his muddy Nikes. “I just knew.”
“Was it like a feeling, or did you know exactly what was going to happen?”
He took his time, probably considering whether it was worth lying to me.
“I saw it,” he said at last. “I saw your shoe fall off, and then you fell with it.”
It should have come as a surprise, but this wasn’t the first time Ed had said he’d seen things before they happened, I’d just never paid enough attention to warrant it with any credibility. He’d always had a wandering imagination, coupled with a sense of dread that comes with growing up knowing you killed your mother. But this was different.
“You knew about his gift,” he says.
Valdemar’s smoky voice pulls me back into the room, and I feel as if he’d seen the memory for himself. There’s no point in lying to him, so I say nothing.
“There are things I wish I could change, things I wish I’d done differently, but there are some things I didn’t have a choice in. Your brother was born with his gift. That was out of my control.”
“What a bullshit excuse.” Squeezing my hands into fists, I try to keep my voice down, as the guard at the back is eyeing me across the room.
“Did he talk to you about his gift?” Valdemar asks.
“His gift is irrelevant. You groomed him, lured him in with promises of a gang-style life, the glamour, the money, the violence, and then you shot him in cold fucking blood, so don’t give me your pathetic excuse about a gift and him being chosen,” I spit.
The hand creeps over Valdemar’s shoulder, its fingers the colour of old chewing gum. I track the bitten-down nails, the blood-spattered sleeve, the elongated neck, and the protruding Adam’s apple, and finally my gaze lands on the face—his haunting porcelain face.
Ed stares through bloodshot eyes as my breath catches in my throat, and I want to clasp my hand over my mouth to stop the shrill cry that’s about to erupt, but I can’t let Valdemar know something is wrong, that my brother is here.
“I wish that were the case. Truly, I do. And I’m not arguing with you about me being the bad guy because I am. I know I am. I have so much blood on my hands, I’m not sure what colour my skin is anymore. But when I tell you that your brother was a Raven Hand, born a Raven Hand, bled like a Raven Hand, and that his gift had everything to do with his death, then you have to trust what I say.”
I don’t have to trust anything this man says, and I have to stop myself from saying so out loud.
My eyes glaze over, the room blurring beneath the stagnant tears I refuse to cry. I feel trapped. I want to look at Ed, but Idon’t want to arouse Valdemar’s attention. It’ll look strange if I’m staring over his shoulder. And my brother’s face is not the smooth portrait I remember.
“Youpulled the trigger.Youshot him.Youspilled his blood. No one else,” I remind him.
Valdemar’s shoulders rise and fall, the sheer force of his stare keeping my tears at bay.
“And I’m truly sorry, but….”
I’m about to interrupt, but he continues, bulldozing my argument right out of the room.
“He asked me to shoot him.”
It’s like an avalanche, the cold rushing into my bloodstream, the world as I know it buried under his words.
“He asked me to shoot him.”
My brother doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch. I want him to nod, to confirm what Valdemar has just said, but just like my mother, he remains silent, his face conveying nothing but pain.
The guards move away from the walls in unison, and I almost scream at them to stay put, just for one more minute.
“Time, everyone,” one of the guards shouts, and my eyes remain rooted on Valdemar. I can’t look at my brother—the torment is too much.
“He asked me to shoot him.”
Leaning over the table, my voice breaks as I hiss, “What do you mean?”
When a guard appears behind Valdemar, my brother vanishes as if someone has turned the TV off.
Valdemar rises, and I’m swallowed by his shadow.
