Page 75 of Ashes to Ash’s

“Does he… does he make the things dead first?” Wilma warily asked Nix, who’d started humming merrily again.

“Nix, your mum asked you a question.”

Nix shrugged, focusing on his phone until Gray swiped it, and held it away from him.

“Nix?”

The boy sighed, reaching for his phone as he spoke.

“He likes them better when they look dead. That’s what he said. He doesn’t hurt them. He finds them dead.”

Ew. Okay, this was not the place for Ren right now. The kid was too fragile and suggestible for these people to be his influences. He likes things that look dead? That was another level of creepy for me.

“Ash?”

He nodded, standing up with me. “We should get Ren home, but thanks for breakfast. If uh… Pyro needs to talk, he can ring me and I’ll come see him. I uh…” he glanced at Ren, and everyone seemed to get the message pretty fast, including our kid, who groaned.

“I’m not going to start killing things just because of a conversation!”

“No, he’ll do that because he watched us kill people,” Ethan offered cheerfully.

Fucker. I think he’s worse than all of them put together at this point, and yet he’d apparently started out like me. A ‘normie’ as they called it. Was I destined to end up just as bloodthirsty and twisted, or could I halt my devolution before it was too late? And what about Ren?

Ren went to his room, with his phone and the laptop we’d given him, because apparently that stuff is just available in abundance in this damn family. The kid was old enough to get into real trouble with that stuff, and that bothered me. Kids needed boundaries, even while we were trying not to wave rules and orders over his head.

“That laptop has controls on it, right?”

Ash stared blankly at me as he passed me a coffee, and we headed over to the sofa to sit down.

“Controls?”

“Yeah, like protections to stop him getting into adult stuff. It’s safe for a kid, right?”

Ash still looked confused as hell. Was this that bizarre a concept for these people? Had none of them wandered into sites they shouldn’t see as kids? I found that really hard to believe.

“Ash, he’s eleven. He’s too young to get into porn, or the kinda shit your family’s into!”

Fuck me. I had to go get that damn laptop back. I stood up, but Ash caught my arm and dragged me down to sit beside him.

“He’ll be fine. We never had boundaries like that, and we’re fine. If he gets into trouble, or attracts pervs, we’ll handle it. I was naïve once and my parents solved it. It’s what parents should do.”

He met my stare, while I wondered how the fuck he thought any of that was a good argument, while he probably pondered something sexual, having moved on already. He was a deviant to the core, but he was my deviant now.

“Ash.”

Finally he shrugged. “Kids make choices, Cal. They do the right thing or they do the wrong thing, but their parents are there to back them up, and protect them. That’s us now. And look, Ren’s had choices taken away from him his whole life. Let’s let him make some for himself right now.”

I hated it when Ash made sense, because how the hell was I supposed to argue with that? I’d sound like a prick who wanted to control away all Ren’s decisions and wants.

“I just think there are harmful things on the internet he probably shouldn’t see at an impressionable age.”

“Like?” Ash raised his eyebrows at me, a challenge he knew I’d accept.

“Porn!”

“Sex is natural. How’s he supposed to know how it works if he can’t watch some and learn?”

I’d watched a little porn while I was out of the range of my parents’ reach, and some of it should never be learned, in my opinion, but was that simply the judgement of my upbringing speaking again?