“Your brother’s visit for the day is over,” Clipboard insists. “He can come back tomorrow, or not at all if you’re going to make trouble.”
This fucker has an impeccable instinct for pushing my buttons at the worst possible time.
I am going to make trouble.
Leo
My head still feels like it is half-full of sand and half-full of angels. I haven’t spoken to Aiden since I left the city. I didn’t want to chat to him with a captive in my trunk, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to him once I’d been drugged and left to have a spiritual experience that left me wrecked. The embarrassment of admitting to him that which I just confessed to Luke would have been too much. Luke fucks up enough that telling him wasn’t really so bad.
But there’s more.
Things that I will not tell either of them. Things that I will probably never tell anyone.
I saw things in that state that I know weren’t real, but that felt as though they certainly were. I saw Teddy. I saw him as a baby. And then as a man. And then as a corpse.
I saw our family. Our mother and father. The darkness that took them. I saw all of it poured into Aiden. I saw him, as a teenager, filled with that darkness, and I watched it inhabit him as he grew.
Then I saw it come for me. I saw dark tendrils wind through the room and when they found me, touched me, that same darkness seeped through me. It felt like it was part of me, something coming home rather than infecting me.
My ordeal under my own cocktail has given me some pause. I never imagined we were the good guys, per se. Now I see how the loss of our parents, one evil act a long time ago has shaped who we all are, and why we lost Teddy.
I’m not naive enough to think that I’m going to change as a person. But I understand myself a little better now, and what the girl might mean to us.
I make the call to Aiden, because this mess, like most of the messes Luke gets himself into, is going to need him to help clean up.
“Yes?” Aiden answers almost immediately. His voice is smooth and calm. He sounds absolutely unbothered. I imagine that darkness, him as the first receiver of it, absolutely filled to the brim with it. Aiden drank the most poison in an effort to spare the rest of us, and now the best of us, the one we almost managed to shelter, is gone anyway. Fate is a bitch.
“Luke wants to come out. Says he only went in so he could track someone without questions being asked.”
Aiden pauses. “If that is true, then he pretended to have a drug-fueled meltdown in order to get us to put him there, and I, for one, do not appreciate being manipulated.”
“You’re right,” I say. “He’s been pulling some shit. But I think we need to get him out. We’re up against something bigger than we’ve ever been up against before.”
Aiden’s voice is like silk. “Is that so?”
Fuck. He knows something. I don’t know what, but something. I hate talking to him like this. It’s like talking to a human trapdoor. You never know when it’s going to spring open and take you to hell.
Bam!
I startle as behind me, the double doors to the rehab fly open. They’re double glass doors, but Luke makes them slam back and forth like saloon doors as he comes charging through them. They shatter into a million pieces on the second swing as he walks toward me in a long, but largely unbothered stride.
“Oh.” I say on the phone. “Never mind.”
“Why, Leo?”
“Gotta go, Aiden. Luke’s out. Don’t worry about any of it. I’ve got it.”
“Leo…”
I end the call.
That’s going to piss him off, but I have no desire to explain any of this to Aiden. I wish I hadn’t called him in the first place. That feeling of being in trouble annoys me greatly. I am a grown man. My older brother does not have the right to make me feelas though I’m ten years old and just got caught doing something criminal.
Luke looks slightly disheveled, but otherwise unharmed. His hair is a little mussed up. He is wearing jeans, a black sweater, and the institutional socks and sandals.
“Let’s go,” he says. “They’re definitely going to call the police.”
“What did you do?”
