More tears flood my eyes. “It’s…” I choke, shake my head, cry harder. “She shouldn’t be here, Harlen.” My knees give way beneath me, and I land in the wet mud. “She just…she shouldn’t be here.”
Harlen can’t look at me, and when I see his chest jolt, his throat carving a path for a whimper, I turn away, giving him the same privacy he gave me.
I wrap my hand around my throat, feel my carotid tap off rhythm against my fingertips, whispering, “Hurts, man.”
Harlen chokes on a cry, then coughs it down. His hands are through his shoulder-length curls, he’s shaking his head, pacing back and forth, his Chucks squelching in the mud.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, returning to my knees, then to my feet. I take one step toward him.
“Chase had said that exact same thing.”
A cold chill shrivels me. I wrap my arms around my torso, hold onto myself, whispering, “It feels like I lost him, too.”
And when Harlen doesn’t reply, I speak again.
“At least tell me he’s okay.”
He looks at me and I know by the grim look on his face, he couldn’t, if he valued being truthful.
In the silence that stretches between us, I nod, wet my lips. “Lie to me if you have to.”
A tear rolls down my cheek at the same time rain begins to spit from the sky.
“I can’t do that, Laik,” he says, reaching for me, pulling me into his chest so tight that I can barely breathe.
In the rain, I cry, soaking the fabric of Harlen’s shirt through to his chest. He doesn’t let go of me, until I slip back from him.
I raise my chin, lock eyes with the blue-eyed boy that had also become one of my best friends. “I miss him. I miss her. I missus,” I breathe.
The sky turns angry, thunder rumbles over our heads, a fork of lightning following closely behind it.
I breathe heavier now. “Can you tell him that? Please, Harlen.” I drop my chin, squeeze my eyes. “Please tell him that I miss him.”
It was my final cry.
Two Weeks Later
The concrete walls of Devil’s Tunnel are covered in lichen and graffiti. Every shadow is like ink, carrying on the ghostly wail of a chilling breeze.
I swallow, sweat prickles across my upper lip, and I’m shaking, even though I’m boiling with fury, staring at my mangled fist, the same one I’d just crushed against the concrete beneath.
“I don’t run from my fucking storm, man.”
My words make me feel like a fraud, and the way Harlen bows his head tells me I look like one too. Still, I could only hope we both knew they carried some truth. I was here, after all, in this fucking death chamber, sitting beside the place they had found my sister. But we both knew that when I wasn’t, I was running, blocking,burying,with a little coke in my nose that I’d managed to get from the club, and too much liquor, corroding my liver.
I didn’t know how to move forward without taking ten steps back.
I flex my knuckles, feel my skin peel off the bone. Blood is everywhere, a stream of anger and despair.
It had been four weeks since my sister was murdered, and Chief Wynston was no closer to catching the monster that had done this to Jade, to Laiken, than any of us. Even worse, Skinner had come up empty too.
The town was walking on the razor-sharp edge of what felt to be an endless cliff. Every mother and father that had a daughter, even a son, even the ones that hadn’t cared before, had set curfews.
In the wake of Jade’s death, at night, Devil’s Peak had become what I knew it would, a ghost town.
Harlen watches me as the sticky liquid rolls down my wrist, smearing across the lyrics scrawled in ink.
I’m staring at them, reading them on a cycle when a droplet of vibrant scarlet splatters in the center of the page, webbing outwards, laying a crimson blanket over what is a broken truth.
