Through the fire, p.13
Through the Fire, page 13
"Oh, yeah, that's clearly a great idea. We'll just use—" Chris, too, broke off, struggling for a way to refer to Nick's grendel power without giving everything away to the other two. "No. It's a shit idea. I don't want you doing that."
"See?" Tyler snapped at Nick. "He doesn't think you can make your own decisions."
"That is not what I said—"
"Whose side are you on!" Stephanie yelled at Tyler.
"Nick's! I'm on Nick's side!"
"Then why are you trying to get him to do whatever his terrible idea is that Chris doesn't think he should?"
"Because it should be his decision!"
"It should be his decision, but that doesn't mean you should be encouraging him to make stupid decisions!"
Chris flung his hands up. "I don't even know who I'm agreeing with, but all three of you should just go back to goddamn California—"
"Chris, what if I'm the only one who can find—him?" Nick's voice rose and broke, frustration building like a warning in his chest. He tried to take a deep breath and nearly choked on it as Chris bellowed, "I'm pretty sure he isn't gonna be that hard to find, Nick, given the—"
He broke off for the second time, although his hands finished the sentence, indicating wings and fire. Not that Stephanie or Tyler would understand that, but Nick did, and the ball of frustration inside him grew larger. Beyond frustration into resentment, bordering on anger. "So, what?" Nick yelled back. "You want to go deal with that alone? You think that's going to work out for you?"
"I want you to stay safe!"
"That's all any of us want!" Angry tears were shining in Stephanie's eyes. "Nick, just come—"
"Let the man make his own decisions!" Tyler yelled, and above him, above all of them, Nick roared, "Enough!"
Grendel power smashed out of him with the word, rolling over them, and blew the windows out of the Dodge.
CHAPTER 10
Glass shattered, breaking in chunks and shards that flew outward in a glittering hail. Screams, louder than the fracturing glass, echoed off the cold road as Stephanie and Tyler ducked away, disbelief and panic in their cries. Chris ducked, feeling glass bounce off his leather jacket, and straightened to stare from the Dodge's blown-out windows to his whey-faced brother.
Nick stood rigid with shock, hands spread wide, cords visible in his throat. Of all of them, only he hadn't turned away from the explosion. Bits of faintly green tempered glass gleamed in the folds of his clothing and hair. Stephanie was still screaming, and Chris's own throat was raw from a yell, but Nick hadn't moved or made a sound. Chris opened his mouth to say something—to ask if Nick was okay—but what came out was, "What the hell did you do to my truck?!"
Nick's gaze snapped from the Dodge to Chris, whose fingers clawed like he could pull the question back in. Hurt, then anger, slammed through Nick's expression, before it settled on cold fury.
Stephanie's fury wasn't cold at all. She whirled on Chris, hair flying loose from its ponytail. "What do you mean, what did he do? Nick didn't do anything! How could he have done that? That was a freak fucking accident, you stupid son of a bitch!"
Chris closed his eyes, trying to unknot his hands from the fists they'd become. Trying to relax the angry tension from his face, from how he held his jaw, from his shoulders. He needed to apologize, to make his first, asshole response right again, but his heart was beating so fast and his face was so hot with blood that even breathing steadily seemed hard. He had to get through it, had to man up for Nick, and despite all the bullshit their dad had fed them, manning up didn't mean blaming him for an accident, or refusing to ever say sorry. He just had to do it, so he could help his brother.
By the time he got enough breath in his lungs to speak, though, Nick was saying, "It was a freak accident," in a low, thick voice, full of despair. "Because I'm a fucking freak."
"You're not, Nicky." Chris sounded as thick and slow as his brother did.
Nick turned a look of scathing disgust on him. "Don't be stupid, Chris. I just fucked up your truck."
Chris inhaled. Deep breath, through his nose, bringing it way down into his lungs, like it could wipe out hurt. He wasn't stupid. Not that stupid, anyway. "It's a truck. It doesn't matter. Are you okay?"
Nick's voice broke as he gestured at the Dodge. "Of course I'm not okay!"
Tyler breathed, "What the hell is going on?" and Stephanie gave him a filthy look.
"Chris has lost his goddamn mind, that's what. I don't know what just happened—"
"I happened." Nick's flat tone cut through Stephanie's protestations. "That was me, Stephanie. That's why I wanted you to leave. I told you I was dangerous."
"You said it wasn't safe, not that you were dan—"
"Stephanie." Nick sounded desperate. "Please."
She stopped hard, like it took a lot out of her, which Chris could understand. She tried twice to start again, failing both times, and finally said, "I don't understand," in a thin voice. "How could you have done that?"
Chris watched his brother gather himself, and took a step forward, like he could stop Nick from doing something idiotic. But it wouldn't help. Stephanie wasn't going to understand unless she saw, and Nick's normal was already blown to hell.
"There are monsters in the world, Steph," Nick said very, very quietly. "Monsters like from stories, but some of them are just people with dangerous power. Freaks. Like me."
Chris bit back a protest at the term, and Stephanie, eyes bright with fear and anger, began one. "You're not a freak, Nick, you're—"
Nick didn't say anything else, just turned toward the black-branched trees that stretched away from the side of the road. He glanced at Chris just briefly, like he was looking for—Chris didn't know what. Permission, maybe, but more like absolution. Either way, Chris dropped his chin in a nod, knowing what to expect.
There was no way at all Stephanie could expect Nick to slam his hands together in a thunderclap, though, and for the line of trees straight in front of him to simply…cease to exist.
Branches, splinters, clumps of earth, sprays of snow, all erupted in a thin narrow line, stretching dozens of feet out from where Nick stood with his hands clasped together. The boom reverberated, shaking the earth, making Chris's knees buckle. Tyler grabbed the front of his SUV to stay on his feet, and Stephanie screamed, a clear bright high sound, a perfect counterpoint to the ground-rumbling burst of power that Nick had displayed.
He turned back to Stephanie, who'd fallen to her knees and was staring up at him, snow and dirt clutched in white-knuckled fingers. He drew breath to speak, but she shook her head, short sharp frantic motion, then scrambled to her feet. She ran past Tyler, snatching at his arm, although he stood frozen, staring in something like awe at Nick.
"Tyler, come on, come on!"
"But that was—that was—" A wide-eyed smile of delight formed on Tyler's face, but Stephanie cried, "Come on," again, and he muttered, "Fine, fine," and got into the Highlander. A moment later they disappeared down the road, and only then did Nick crumple, very slowly, to the ground.
Chris didn't get there quite in time to catch him. Didn't matter. He got there fast enough to hold him, fast enough to bend his head over Nick's and feel his brother shaking with rage and fear and frustration. Got there and held on until Nick threw him off, yelling, "Aren't you afraid? You should be afraid! Look what I did to your truck!"
"It's just a truck, Nicky." Chris fell back onto his butt by the roadside, not caring about the ice or cold or snow or the rounded edges of tempered glass that lay scattered like pale green gems across the frozen earth.
"It's not just a truck, it's your—it's your fuck you to Dad! It's—" Nicky doubled over, hands knotted against the snowy ground, forehead pressed against bits of glass.
Chris managed a chuckle. "It's one of them, yeah, I guess." He gazed toward the truck, more or less sightlessly. "I don't know if he ever even knew that, or cared. I didn't know you knew." After a moment's silence, he said, "I don't know if I knew."
"How can you be so calm?" Nick's words bounced off the asphalt and came toward Chris as flat despairing things. "I blew up your truck. I scared Stephanie away. I fucked up, Chris." His voice broke, and he repeated, "I fucked up," through choking tears.
"Yeah, well, it's gonna be a cold drive home," Chris admitted. "C'mon. C'mon, buddy. Get up. Let's get out of here before…"
He didn't even know how to finish that. Before the cops came? Before somebody happened onto the edge of Route 57 at eleven in the morning in the middle of winter? Before Stephanie and Tyler got back to civilization, and told everybody that Nick Cassidy had grendel powers?
Didn't matter. They just needed to get out of there before any of that happened. Before it got any colder, or the wind picked up any, because it really was gonna be a crappy drive home, with no windows in the truck. "Let's see if I've got any plastic sheeting in there. Cover the side and back windows, anyway."
"You do," Nick said dully, to the earth. "You know you do."
"Yeah. I know." Chris offered Nick a hand, and pulled him up whether he wanted to rise or not. It took a solid half hour to get the sheeting out from under the seat and tape sections to most of the windows. They were both sweating by the time they finished, and Chris stared at the open windshield glumly. "Think we'd get arrested for driving with a Visqueen windshield?"
Nick pressed one hand against the sheeting they'd put in the side window, obviously judging its clarity. "It's not technically illegal to drive without a windshield, just stupid. So it's probably slightly less stupid to have Visqueen in front of your face so bugs or rocks or whatever don't fly in and hit you in the eye."
"Arright, well, you're the smart one, so that's what I'm telling the cops if they pull us over."
"What the fuck are we gonna tell the cops if they pull us over?"
Chris, pulling a new sheet of Visqueen across the Dodge's broken windshield, glanced at his brother. "The truth. We were out on Route 57 and something blew a line of trees and our windows out."
"'Something?'" Nick's voice cracked, and Chris shrugged.
"They're not gonna believe the details, so why bother with them? We'll tell 'em we're going home to get it fixed 'cause we can't afford to stay overnight in Denver, which they're gonna believe because I'm driving a forty year old truck in the first place."
Nick said, "Chris," and then obviously ran out of steam, because they finished stretching the plastic sheeting over the windshield in silence. It didn't make the best window ever, but it was better than driving a hundred and fifty miles in seventeen degree weather with no windows at all.
"Two hundred miles," Chris muttered to himself a minute later, as they got in. Nick glanced at him, then sighed.
"I guess so, yeah. We're definitely gonna get stopped if we drive through Denver, but if we take the back roads…."
"Yeah." Nick wet his lips and turned his face toward the blurred-out window. "I'm sorry."
"Shit happens, man. Wasn't your fault."
"It's not like it was somebody else's fault, Chris."
"It's not like you can be expected to be in perfect control of a weird-ass new power set like thirty-six hours after you got them, Nick. Believe me, if anybody could it would be you, and you're not, so it's not possible." Chris pulled back onto the road cautiously. He could see, kind of. Well enough to not get in a wreck, if he drove slowly and no bison or deer jumped out in front of them. They might make it home before dark.
No, they had to make it home before dark. No way was he driving in the dark with Visqueen windows, and sleeping in the truck was bad enough with one person and windows. Two of them without them…
They would make it home before dark. Simple as that. They just had to. Chris concentrated on the road, driving slowly, and forgot about most everything else.
"Why would it be me?" Nicky's voice cracked like he hadn't spoken in a long time. Maybe he hadn't. Chris's shoulders ached from hunching over the steering wheel, like being six inches closer to the plastic window would make it easier to see through. The odometer said they'd only driven about thirty miles, deeper into the mountains, but he had no sense of how long it had taken.
"Because you're—" Chris coughed on the answer and made himself sit up straighter, trying to loosen his spine. "Got any water?"
"Yeah, there's a…" Nick reached for a water bottle, opened it, and handed it over.
Chris took a couple of long gulps, swallowed hard, and handed it back. "Thanks. Jesus. How long have we been driving?"
"About an hour, but you're going slower now than when we started."
"More snow." Chris puffed his cheeks and sighed the air out. "Because you're good at everything you do, Nick. You study hard, you fight hard, you work hard on…relationships." Even he thought he said that last word like it had a bad taste. "So if anybody could figure out how to use grendel powers in a day and a half, it'd be you. Me, I'd be fucking it up all over the place for years, but you…."
"You wouldn't. You learned how to rebuild an engine in a weekend when you were about twelve. You could do this." Nicky wasn't really arguing, though. He thumped his head against the headrest and fell silent again for another long time as the truck crept up mountain roads, hugging the white line all the way in case they needed to ditch. There wasn't much traffic, and what there was didn't seem to care that they were going like nine miles an hour, as long as they stayed out of the way. "I can still feel…it. Him. Saboac."
"That's not creepy at all." Chris forced himself to straighten up again. If he only did that when Nick spoke, he'd be permanently hunched by the time they reached Sterling again. "Seriously, man, is he like…watching you?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I think I can watch him, too, though. If I keep my eyes closed it's almost like I can see through his eyes."
"Yeah, don't do that."
"We gotta find him somehow, Chris."
"Yeah, okay, sure, but how about you don't give him a direct line to blowing up your brain or whatever when we're on a twelve-inch wide mountain road where a bunch of truckers wanna drive ninety miles an hour?"
Nick rotated his head like his neck was an iron bar, and stared at Chris for a couple seconds. "I haven't seen any truckers out here."
"I swear to god, Nick, the Iranian yogurt is not the issue here."
"What?"
"The Ir—" Chris risked a glance at his brother. "Never mind. You have the internet. Look it up. The point is not the truckers, that's what I'm trying to say. Do not invite the reprobate angel into your head."
"Reporbate."
"Man, is there actually a difference? You've got the internet," Chris muttered again. "Look it up."
This time Nicky did, and a minute later he shrugged. "Means rejected by God, either way. That's the second definition. Rejected by God and beyond hope of salvation. Wow. That's…wow."
"So that's the difference between a fallen angel and a reporbated one? I mean, you said that God desanctified the reporbate angels, but, I don't know, rejecting them seems even bigger than desanctifying them. Maybe it's the same, if you're God. I'm not," he added, in case that wasn't obvious. "Does that mean like, Lucifer or whatever has the hope of salvation, and our new buddy Saboac doesn't? That's…" Chris grimaced, unable to do better than Nicky had. "Wow."
"Yeah." Nick went quiet again for a long time, and they crept through a stretch of road labeled as the Peak to Peak Highway. Chris had driven it at least a dozen times, and never felt like it was trying to kill him until now. It took almost two hours to get to the other end, but at least they were heading out of the mountains then. His hands felt like ice clubs, wrapped thickly around the steering wheel, never to come off. Nick finally muttered, "You should let me drive," and Chris, to his own surprise, muttered, "Yeah, okay," back without any argument.
They pulled over at a gas station, refilled, got some snacks that were mostly jerky, sugar, or coffee, and switched places when they got back in the truck. Nick sat in the driver's seat, gazing blankly through the plastic sheeting. "I think that's what it means, yeah. I mean, we read that they were pure evil, nothing redeemable left in them, but…rejected by God without hope of salvation, that seems worse somehow, you're right. So, yeah. The Devil himself has a chance at redemption but Saboac doesn't. And he's in my head."
"We're gonna get him out," Chris said flatly. "Just don't give him any more air time than you have to. Don't try to find him, Nicky. I'm pretty sure he's gonna come find us anyway."
"Me," Nick whispered. "He's going to come find me."
"Yeah. And I'm gonna be standing in the way. Now shut up and drive, okay? At the rate we're going it's gonna be another five or six hours before we get home already."
"Should be a little faster once we get out of the mountains," Nicky said, but that was all. He got them most of the way back to Sterling in silence, but Chris kicked him back out of the driver's seat about an hour out of town, knowing his hands would be blocks of ice like Chris's had been. Nick didn't object any more than Chris had, and hunched in the passenger seat with his hands stuffed in his armpits as Chris drove them home.
"Can you let me out here," he said in a low voice, as they hit the edge of the property. "I need to walk for a while. Get out of my head."
Chris crooked a grin at his brother. "Just keep that angel out of your head, man."
"Yeah." Nick slid from the truck and tucked the plastic window back into place. "I'll be home in a while."
"Arright. Call if you want me to come pick you up."
"Only if you find a car with windows," Nick closed the door carefully and trudged ahead of the truck. Chris passed him a couple seconds later, and rumbled up to the trailer twenty minutes after that. He was half frozen. Nicky would be better off having walked. At least it would get his blood going.
A thousand degree shower and twelve hours of sleep would get Chris's going. He staggered into the house, feeling thick and clumsy, and a blade of fire pinned him to the wall.
There had been nothing wrong around the trailer. Between bouts of pain, in moments of coherency, Chris kept coming back to that. He couldn't have known. There were no footprints outside, no windows broken, no lock jimmied. The door had been closed, the lights off, no new tracks anywhere to clue him in. Just his own stupid thick self walking into home territory like it was safe.
