Through the fire, p.21
Through the Fire, page 21
"Chris, I said shut up!"
"Too bad about the boots, though." They were solid brown workman-style winter boots, not unlike the ones Chris owned. But Chris's snow gear was brown and black, not neon blue shot with florescent purple and orange skyscapes.
"Chris, I swear to God…"
"At least I won't lose you in the woods," Chris said cheerfully. "Or in the dark. Or in a cave. Or—"
"Caves are dark! And it's not my fault this is all they had that would fit me!"
"Oh, no, it's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault. It's a gift."
"Ugh! I hate you, man!"
"Yeah," Chris said happily. "I know. Now get in the van, we've got another hundred miles to drive." He headed around to the driver's side, singing True Colors, and the snowball he caught to the back of the head was absolutely worth it.
CHAPTER 15
Technically, Nick guessed, technically you could drive most of the way to Upper Priest Lake. In summer, anyway. In winter you had to park at a comparatively nearby park'n'ski, which hadn't even been something he'd known existed, and then hike a couple miles up to the campground you could drive to in the summer.
Then you got to hike another couple miles, or take a boat, up the still-water thoroughfare to the actual lake, but there were no boats in the winter and Chris gave him a filthy look when he suggested ice skates. Nick kept grinning about that, even if it made Chris pissier. The thoroughfare wasn't kept clear, so there'd be too much snow for skating, but Chris's expression was funny anyway. He had not been happy about driving Lucille up increasingly blue roads to get to the park'n'ski in the first place, and having to get up and hike four miles before he even got to the lake that he also had to hike halfway around to get to his quarry was not improving his mood.
Nick had to say his morning, on the other hand, was going pretty great. Even the potshots about his ski suit—Chris kept calling him 'Sunset Boulevard' weren't landing. He did eventually say, "Shut up, Chris. Look around and enjoy being outdoors," which surprised his brother into silence for a few minutes.
Just a few, though. After a bit, Chris started muttering again about soft California lifestyles and how he got plenty of time outdoors and a bunch of other shit that started to get on Nick's nerves. Something—not anger, exactly, but something dark started crawling up his spine, like oil seeping into his thoughts and blackening them. It followed his nerves and blood vessels and spilled gradually through his whole body, filling him with—not Saboac's voice. Not again. Flashes of fire, of wings, like if he extended his hands he might see the flames in his palms, or fiery feathers if he hunched his shoulders. "Chris, stop."
Chris, obviously satisfied he was finally getting under Nick's skin, didn't stop, of course, because bitching about being inconvenienced by the hike and half-blinded by the snowsuit was—well, it was a way to take his mind off a hard, sweaty slog through a couple feet of snow, really. Nick knew that, but it didn't help, any more than trying to focus on a step at a time was helping. Inverse color kept switching in, outlining the shapes of their steps in the snow, or turning trees into white shapes against a black sky.
After a while, Chris fell silent, more, Nick thought, because breaking trail was difficult work than out of any concern for Nick's feelings. It helped less than he'd hoped, the sensation of filling with darkness and the flashes of inverted colors still plaguing him. "Chris, I don't feel right."
To his brother's credit, he stopped immediately, bitchiness fading into concern. "Talk to me, Nicky. What's up? Is it Saboac?"
"Maybe? I feel wrong," Nick said miserably. "Color keeps going inside out and I feel like I need to—hit something? But not with my hands, with…" He made a short motion with one hand and watched a blur of power, like sticky black tar, smear after it. "Did you see that?"
To his surprise, Chris said, "Yeah," in a low voice. "Yeah, it looked kinda like cutting a hole in the sky. There were stars inside. Nick, maybe you better go back to the van."
"I don't want to be alone." Nick could have swallowed his own tongue, but an awful look of grown-up weariness shadowed his brother's face.
"Yeah, no, that seems legit. All right, look, why don't we sit down for a while? Wait it out. And I'll stop being such a dick," Chris conceded grimly.
"You already did. It didn't help." Nick did sit down, though, just straight into the snow, which was heavy enough to make a stab at supporting him before it gradually gave way to his weight. Chris sat, too, but didn't sag so much, so he was surrounded by it like the back and arms of a throne.
Except a throne should be metal or wood or something, Nick guessed. Something ostentatious, proclaiming the importance of the person sitting in it. It should have a dais, and light, and stairs rising toward it, so anyone approaching would appreciate their lowliness, how they were inherently unworthy to be in the presence of—
Power flooded out of him, a thick ugly rush of darkness that made him dizzy, and Chris blurted, "What the fuck, Nicky?!" as the snow he sat in reshaped itself. Compacted, almost to ice, with cloudy blue shades in its depths. It crumbled almost as fast as it came together, a throne made of little more than snow and imagination, but it changed enough that Chris scrambled to his feet, brushing its remains away and staring at Nick.
A patch of wet frozen earth, all alone in an otherwise snowy landscape, lay where Chris had been sitting. Not a big patch, maybe about the circumference of Nick's arms, if he made a circle with them. About as big as Chris had been, sitting there in the snow.
"Sure," he said aloud, much more to the damp earth than his brother. "Only the snow you were touching transmuted. To make a real throne it would have taken a lot more."
"What the hell are you talking about, Nick? What throne? What the hell?" Chris waved his hand in front of Nick's face, breaking his locked gaze from the ground. He snapped his attention up to Chris, then crushed his eyes closed, trying not to shudder.
"I thought you looked like you were sitting a throne. And then I think I tried to make one. The…I don't feel as sick anymore."
"Oh, well, that's…" Chris's silence suggested he was thinking better of saying 'good' or 'better,' and after a moment he finished with, "…fucked up," which at least made Nick cough laughter.
"Yeah it is. I think…do you have water?"
"Yeah, man." Chris got a bottle from his pack and handed it over without reminding Nick that he was carrying a couple himself. Nick drank most of it before he remembered, but when he started an apology, Chris cut him off. "You good to go?"
"I think so. Just…"
"Don't be a dick. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Arright, c'mon, Nicky. Let's get you up." Chris offered a hand and pulled Nick to his feet, winced at getting an eyeful of Nick's snowsuit, and visibly checked himself from commenting. Instead, with equally visible effort, he said, "You good?" again.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm good."
"Right, well, I guess if you start building up grendel power again maybe you could blast a path through the snow so we can walk easier instead of building a snow palace or whatever."
"My frozen soul in flying fractals all around, huh?"
"Man, you do not know the right lyrics to anything." Chris shook his head and struck out again, moving faster after the brief respite. Maybe moving faster so they could get the job over and done with, Nick figured. So Chris could go back to figuring out what the hell to do with his fucked-up baby brother. Bleak tendrils attached themselves to that thought, and Nick shook them off almost literally, with a sharp jerk of his head. Do for his fucked-up baby brother, maybe, but not 'with.' Their dad had been the one who didn't know what to do with him.
"Nicky?"
"I'm good."
"Lemme know if you're not." Chris fell back after a while, letting Nick break snow. He squelched the impulse to see if he could draw on the grendel power, more afraid he'd be able to than not, and just did it the hard way, one step at a time, although once he fell and broke through six feet of snow with a thump, leaving Chris laughing in the background. "Dude, if I could just flip you end over end this would go a lot faster."
"Like a cartoon," Nick agreed, grinning as he brushed snow off his suit and kept going. It took longer than either of them wanted to reach the lake, with Chris casting a quick, grim look at the sky, and then the time. "It'll be faster going back," Nick offered. "We won't have to break the trail."
"Maybe they'll have snowmobiles we can…borrow."
"Pretty sure 'borrowing' a bounty's property goes beyond any of the legal grey areas bail bondsmen get to exploit, dude."
"I won't tell if you don't." Chris had taken the lead again, and groaned suddenly with relief. "There's a trail up there, along the lake. That'll speed us up. How far was it?"
"Couple more miles. The whole upper lake's only a couple-three miles long anyway."
"Well, which is it, a couple or three, because if it's a couple miles farther and a two mile lake then we're gonna be off the lake before we find the place."
"Pedant," Nick muttered. "Lake's about three miles on this side, the other side's longer, so it's a couple miles."
"I'm not a pedant!"
"A pedant, dude, not a pedo. A pedant nitpicks irrelevant or boring details."
Chris said, "Oh," sullenly, and Nick grinned, betting Chris couldn't decide which was worse, that he'd gotten the word wrong or Nick had known what he actually meant. He didn't ask, though, and another forty minutes of less-hard slogging along the already-broken trail brought them to an A-frame house just about literally a stone's throw from the water's edge.
They slowed on the approach, sticking to the cover of trees, although the land had only been cleared enough for the house, and had no significant yard space either in front or behind it. A broad deck—the site of the hot tub—covered what might have otherwise been the front yard, with stairs down to the ground and a mostly-cleared pathway to the frozen water, where a skinny iceboat was lashed to a dock. Chris said, "Oh, I am definitely taking that," and Nick couldn't even blame him.
"Yeah, I'd take the house, too." Warm yellow light blazed through every window, and the front of the house was all window, casting gold shadows on blue-white snow. Open stairs swept up from a huge living-dining area, with a professional-grade kitchen gleaming under the interior lighting. The front half of the house didn't have an obvious second floor, just an open, partially floored area the stairs swung through on their way up to what had to be the master bedroom overlooking the lake.
"I mean, it's not too late," Chris said. "We could just go propose to Dumb and Dumber in there and live the rest of our lives as kept men."
"I'm having a hard time seeing the downside of that, yeah. What if they say no, though?"
Chris shrugged. "Then I guess we arrest them. That's a totally reasonable response to rejection, right?"
Nick laughed. "Yeah, maybe it's no surprise you don't have a girlfriend. All right, what's the plan?"
"I was gonna go knock on the front door and get down on one knee and ask the first person who answers to marry me."
"Uh-huh. And what am I gonna do?"
"You're gonna go around to the back door so when they run, it's straight into your arms. You can propose if you want, that's cool. We'll be brother-husbands or something, it won't be weird at all."
Nick ducked his head, trying to keep his laughter quiet. "You don't quit, do you, man."
"And that's the actual reason I don't have a girlfriend. They just can't keep up with me. We ready?"
"You know they're gonna flip out," Nick said. "They think they're all alone up here."
"Which is why you're taking the back door," Chris said patiently. "I give it seventy-thirty odds they don't even open the front door."
"Pretty sure their only getaway vehicle is that skimmer."
"Dude, this girl has been arrested like eight times as a drug mule. I don't think unbelievable genius is one of her selling points."
"Must be nice to be rich," Nick said under his breath as they stepped out of the tree cover and split up. Chris gave him a moment to get halfway behind the house, then jogged out of sight, although his footsteps creaked audibly on the snow-covered deck stairs for a moment.
Somebody—Chris was willing to put a small bet on it not being the two rich kids in the house—had been shoveling the walk and deck regularly. Not all of it: a couple feet of snow lined the way to the hot tub, the door, and the path. But enough that either there was a third or even fourth person at the house—cook, groundskeeper, maybe somebody who did both—or someone came in regularly to do the dirty work. Better if it was the second one, and he probably should have talked it out with Nick, done some more recon to see if there was evidence of a third party around the place before they split up.
That kind of reckless shit had gotten their dad dead.
Chris hit the door probably harder than he needed to, trying to shove that thought off. The triple-paned glass, good for keeping the place warm when the front was all windows like that, rattled under the force of his blows. Somebody inside shrieked and he tried the door, finding out after he'd announced himself that it was unlocked and he could have just gone right in. Dammit, he sucked. This could've all been over with his bond in handcuffs before she even knew he was there, but instead he was making a hash of things, just like always. Guilt rose in a tidal wave and he buried it, as always, with the anger, crushing the doubt and fear as best he could.
By that time he was inside, yelling the usual bullshit about being a bail bondsman and how it'd be better if she didn't make things worse and just came with him. Instead her stupid brother came charging out from the back of the house and actually tried to tackle him. Chris waited until he was almost on top of him, stepped aside, and stuck his foot out.
The brother tripped and smeared himself face-first across the hardwood floor. Chris clicked his tongue. "Now, see, you're not gonna be able to do a video for your followers for days, dude, you messed up your pretty face. Although, I dunno, I guess you could film yourself from the neck down or something, they'd probably be into that? You look pretty stacked, not that I'm checking you out or anything." He shook himself, trying to break the flow of verbal diarrhea. He was usually mouthy, but this felt like he couldn't stop himself from verbalizing every feeling that ran through him. Nick would probably say he needed therapy. "Anyway, where's your sister?"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" A woman's voice, breaking over his shouting, although he hadn't meant to be shouting. He turned away from the guy sprawled on the floor to find the bounty on the stairs above him, her hair wild and fury radiating off her in almost visible waves.
"Kayleigh Dawn Parker? I'm here to bring you to justice." Damn, all he needed was a ten-gallon hat and bow legs and he could walk right into a Western. A twist of something that bordered on laughter spiraled through him, pulling his veneer of anger with it in corkscrew turns. He clawed back at it, preferring the anger to everything underneath, and snarled, "Come on, bitch, this is gonna end with you in cuffs anyway so why don't you just come down here.” The words tasted bad, bitter and wrong in his mouth.
She smirked. “Your mama know you call women names like that?”
“I don’t.” He didn’t. Cheyenne would clock him. All the Geography Girls would, and he’d deserve it. But he didn’t, even if they wouldn’t belt him one.
He didn’t, because his dad would have.
“Sure you do,” Kayleigh said. “I just heard you. What are you, some kind of scared little dick who can’t control his temper and has to hunt women down to feel big? Fucking pathetic. Get out of my house.” Her eyes blazed with righteous fury, and Chris buckled under the overwhelming sense that she’d nailed him, she knew him inside and out, that there wasn’t anything under his shield of anger but more anger. She knew he carried that shield so he could hide behind it, so nobody could see there wasn’t anything else to him. Chris Cassidy, anger machine.
“No…” Well, he sure as shit didn’t believe that protest. Miss Kayleigh with her frothy hair and big eyes wasn’t gonna, either, much less her brother, who was groaning now and trying to get to his hands and knees. Chris put his foot in the small of the brother’s back and flattened him again. “Stay down.”
“Kayleeeiiiigh.” The brother’s whine could set a monk’s teeth on edge. Chris drew his foot back, ready to kick him, then forced himself a couple of steps backward instead, lifting his hands to his temples.
His mind was boiling. His head actually felt too hot, like a shitstorm of conflicting emotion would explode through in a mess of blood and brains and shards of glass, every one of them carrying some fucked-up bit of feelings, so regret could pierce its way into fear that would slice into uncertainty that would cut so deep that the anger would start to bleed until he couldn’t risk anything more being exposed because he might just die of it. He should have just fucking called Nicky, but he’d been, he’d been scared, so scared he wouldn’t come to the funeral that trying to drive him away was safer, yeah, even if that cut at him as bad as it did Nick, he should have been there for their dad, shouldn’t have let him get killed in the first place, should never have helped Nicky go to goddamn California, shouldn’t have said no back when Jake asked him t—
Somehow he’d dropped to his knees, still holding his head. His scalp was so hot his hands felt cool against it, but somewhere in the cacophony of guilt and anger he heard himself say, “No,” out loud, in a voice that sounded almost normal.
No, he definitely should have helped Nick get to Cali, to get out of this stupid fucking awful life. He hated it. God, he hated it, he missed Nick like he’d miss his own heartbeat, but if there was one right thing he’d ever done in his own disaster of a life, it was getting his little brother out of it. Yeah, he still wanted him back more than just about anything, he hated not talking to him, but that was on himself, too, he could have sent a fucking text instead of trying to suck it up and be a man about it all, being a man about this kind of thing was their father’s bullshit, not—
“Oh, it’s you,” Kayleigh said from up close, and there were fingers in his mind, trawling for those easy spikes of emotion. Dragging them up, tangling them together, until the world went white with pain and confusion.
