Breathless (26 page)

I was stunned and scared. What?

I heard them then. They sounded like muffled missiles, tearing through the air. Gun shots. From guns fitted with silencers. They were swift. Efficient. There was no time to think. No time to evaluate. Just the images, one after another, burned into my brain.

My mother—blood trickling between her eyebrows. My father—his left ear exploding in gore. Toby—his face going blank, blood seeping out of his mouth—dropping to the ground next to me. All of them—Sheriff Damon, his wife, my aunt's servants, the rest of the coven.

All dead. In a matter of seconds.

And then they were swarming in through the window. Five men dressed in black, carrying guns. They stepped over the bodies like they were old pieces of furniture.

One knelt behind Jason to untie his bonds.

"What about the girl?" asked one of the men, who had a British accent.

And then I understood. The Sons of the Rising Sun. They were here.

The man came for me, his gun raised, waving it in my face. Maybe I should have run.

I was frozen.

Jason was free from his ropes. He moved so fast, he looked blurred. He elbowed the man who had freed him in the face. Kneed him in the groin. Wrested the gun from the man's hands. And pointed it at the man who had pointed a gun at me.

During all this, another man was answering the first man's question about me. "Waste her," he said.

And Jason shot the man who was pointing his gun at me.

His shot was eerily similar to the shots the Sons had inflicted on my family. The man's temple erupted, blood pouring out. He crumpled to the ground.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to be horrified. But . . . maybe it had just been too much.

Maybe there was nothing left inside me to horrify. Or maybe I was in shock.

"Get his gun, Azazel," said Jason.

And it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach down over the body of a dead man and take the gun out of his hand.

I held it up, staring at it. I didn't know how to use one.

The other four men were on guard now, shifting their guns back and forth between Jason and me. My brain was still working somehow. I didn't know how. It should have turned off a long time ago, but it hadn't. I was thinking that I was in more danger than Jason because they wouldn't seriously hurt the Rising Sun. They needed him. I was, however, expendable. It was important that I figure out how to use the gun.

Jason was still shooting. I wasn't paying attention. I was looking at the gun.

Since the man had been shooting before I'd taken it from him, that must mean the safety wasn't on, so I shouldn't have to worry about that. It should be as easy as pointing and shooting.

I held it in both hands. It was a little heavy. I leveled it at the man in front of me. I rubbed the trigger with my forefinger.

And Jason shot him.

Jason had shot all of them.

Jason had
killed
all of them.

I surveyed the dining room, now littered with bodies. Jason came over to me. "You all right?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. I felt very, very calm oddly.

Jason also seemed calm. "Good," he said. "Go back to our rooms and pack us some clothes. I'm going to find some cash and the keys to a car."

I guess it wasn't really stealing since my aunt was dead.

"Meet back here in five minutes?" I asked.

"Seven," he said.

We parted. I changed out of my nightgown. I didn't think about how sad I was to be leaving this huge closet full of clothes. I definitely didn't think about how Aunt Stephanie couldn't ever get any more clothes. Or how I'd never even talk to Aunt Stephanie again. I didn't think at all. I just pulled clothes out of my closet and then out of Jason's. I couldn't find anything to put them in, so I shoved them in an empty garbage bag that I found in a trashcan.

Jason was waited for me when I returned. We didn't look at the bodies. Instead, we went directly to the garage and slid into the Beamer we'd come into the house in earlier that day. Jason pulled out, and we drove. I watched the huge, million dollar houses go by our windows. Alpine was a beautiful place. The homes were absolutely gorgeous.

When we were finally out of Alpine, I stared straight ahead. Neither Jason nor I spoke.

From: Renegade Son

Subject: Risky business

Jason,

You probably don't even check this email anymore, but I have no idea how to get in touch with you. And it's not safe for me to be exposing myself in this email to you.

We're both on the outs, if you know what I mean. Listen, there are things you need to know. Things that I've figured out. I need to show them to you.

Bethlehem. As soon as you can.

P.S. Sorry about the lack of a clean slate. I tried.

We drove through the morning and the afternoon. Jason asked me once if I wanted to stop for food. I wasn't hungry. We didn't stop. As the sun began to grow heavy in the sky, we stopped at a hotel somewhere in Pennsylvania. The woman at the desk was chewing gum and had teased her unnaturally red hair to heights I didn't think possible.

"We only have rooms with one bed open," she said.

"That's not a problem," I told her.

Jason was standing behind me, but he had apparently decided to leave the negotiation of a hotel room up to me.

"How old are you kids?" the woman asked.

Kids? We weren't kids. We were the vessel of Azazel and the Rising Sun respectively.

We killed people. "I gave you my ID," I said to her.

"It says you're twenty-one," she said.

"That's right," I said.

The woman slid us our key. "Don't cause trouble," she said.

We'd sure try not to. But trouble seemed to follow us everywhere we went.

Inside our room, I dropped our garbage bag full of clothes on the floor. There were orange curtains drawn tight against the large window next to the door. The bedspread on the queen-sized bed was a loud geometric pattern of oranges and reds. It was stained. When I flicked on the light in the bathroom, a loud fan came on that rattled. It sounded like the fan was just going to fall out at any second.

I came out of the bathroom to find Jason standing in the middle of the room, his hands jammed in this pockets, staring blankly into space.

There was a ratty easy chair in a corner next to the bed. I sat down in it.

"The BMW's conspicuous," said Jason suddenly. "We should probably see about getting another car. Maybe tomorrow sometime."

"Okay," I said.

Jason didn't move. I didn't either.

Minutes ticked by. It was too early to go to sleep. I was tired, though, I realized. I hadn't had an uninterrupted night of sleep since Thursday night. What day was it now? Sunday? Three days? That was funny. It felt like longer. Much longer.

Jason abruptly walked to the bed and sat down stiffly. "So," he said. "I shot five people in the head." He looked at me.

"You saved my life," I said. "Again." It had happened. It was over. Thinking about it might make it seem too . . . "Besides, they killed my . . . They killed everybody else."

"I couldn't handle it if anything happened to you," he said.

He stood up again. He was doing everything in jerky movements, like he was a robot.

He came to me on the chair. Held out his hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. I stood next to him, facing him, our bodies inches apart. Jason swallowed.

His eyes looked empty and hollow.

Then his arms were around me. He was kissing my forehead and my cheeks and my neck. His hands slid up my shoulders, tangling themselves in my hair. And between kisses, he was talking, his words tumbling out over top of each other, like he'd unleashed a torrent within himself. "When I knew you were with Toby, I thought . . . I was so worried. I thought—and if something had happened to you, I don't what I would have done. If you were—" He pulled back a second, looking into my eyes, his face so earnest.

"Jason," I whispered, putting my hand to his cheek.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry about your parents."

"Don't," I said. I didn't want to think about that. If I closed my eyes, I could still see their faces, their eyes unseeing and staring and . . . dead. And the images were all that I could process right now. I couldn't process words or emotions or thoughts. I kissed his lips, trying to wipe away the entire incident.

For a few minutes, it worked. Jason's lips and Jason's tongue were all I could think about. He was warm and soft and solid, and it was all I wanted.

Jason pulled back. He needed to talk, for some reason. I didn't want to talk! I'd be fine if we never talked about it, any of it, ever. "When I saw him pointing the gun at you, I didn't really think. It was like something took over. Something I learned somewhere. I just moved. I just pulled the trigger. I just . . ."

I knew what he meant. I'd felt it too. I remembered coldly assessing the gun, figuring I didn't have worry about a safety, leveling it with both hands, my finger tensed against its trigger. I'd been about to shoot someone. But Jason had beaten me to it. I knew that I should comfort Jason. I should tell him he was okay, that he'd done the right thing.

The necessary thing.

But comfort wasn't something I could really do right now. It was too warm. There wasn't anything inside me except a cold, stiff hole. If I tried to let warmth in, I'd fall apart. I'd have to
feel
things. I didn't want to do that. I needed to stay in control.

So, instead I said, "You've never killed anyone before?"

"No," said Jason, his voice ragged.

I kissed him. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have words to say. I didn't have anything for him.

When I kissed him, I realized his face was wet. Jason was crying.

The right thing to do when someone was crying was to comfort someone. I tried to remember things you said to comfort someone. "It's okay," I said.

And Jason started to sob. His body shook. His strong, huge shoulders, his muscular back. I held him. Rubbed his back gingerly. But I couldn't quite connect. I was there physically, but this outpouring of emotion was foreign, frightening to me.

Maybe Jason could tell that I was holding back. Maybe it made him angry. Maybe he wanted to force a reaction out of me. But he started kissing me then, kissing me through his tears, kissing me fiercely, as if he had to throw the force of his emotion into something else.

He threw me back on the hotel bed and he was on me like a wolf, his mouth on my mouth, on my neck, my throat. His hands were inside my clothes, thrusting them out of the way, exposing me. He ripped at the bra I was wearing. I heard the fabric tear.

Felt the air against my bare skin. Felt Jason's hands on me, squeezing, twisting, and . .

. it
hurt
.

It was the pain that woke up the human part in me. The pain forced me back into my body, forced the flood of feelings to wash over me. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I put my hands on either side of Jason's face and made him look at me. "Not like this," I said.

Jason flung himself away from me. We lay on our backs next to each other, not touching. I listened to Jason's rasping breath.

My parents were dead. They were gone. At the end, they'd been tyrannical. They'd put me in situations that I should never have had to face. They'd introduced terror into my life. But at one time, I'd loved them. And I think, in their own perverse way, they'd loved me too. And they were gone.

I reached for Jason. "You can cry," I whispered. "It's okay to cry."

He propped himself up on his elbow. Looked at me. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You did what you had to do," I said, not sure if I was talking about killing the men or the way he'd attacked my body. In some ways, I guess I meant both.

"The right thing to do was to—"

"Sometimes there isn't a right thing," I said. "Sometimes there are only wrong things, and you have to pick whichever one you think is the least wrong."

His eyes were filling back up. "You sound like your parents."

"They're dead," I said helplessly, feeling my own voice fill with tears.

And so we clutched each other and cried. We lay on the stained hotel mattress and stained it with our tears. And when we couldn't cry anymore, we both fell asleep, our limbs entangled, half on the bed, half off.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up, uncomfortable because my legs were hanging off the bed. The lights were still on in the hotel room, and my clothes were in disarray. I rearranged my shirt and shook Jason awake.

He was alert immediately. "What happened?" he said, sitting up straight.

"Nothing," I said.

He let out a breath.

"I just thought we should get under the covers," I said. "Maybe put on pajamas."

He laughed. "Yeah. Okay. Pretend we're living actual human lives?"

I smiled. "Yeah."

I went to the garbage bag and began going through it, but it was difficult to find anything in it, so I just dumped the clothes on the floor, and sat on my knees, sorting through them. I looked at Jason apologetically. "I seem to have forgotten the pajamas," I said.

"It's fine," he said. "I can sleep in jeans."

"No," I said. And I took a deep breath. "But you could . . . take them off."

Jason raised his eyebrows. "After the way that I . . . After what happened earlier, I wouldn't think you'd really want to touch me again."

He was stupid. He was so stupid. I'd already forgiven him for that, or had he missed that? I got up and walked to where he sat on the bed. I kissed him. "I was sleeping in your arms, you idiot."

He touched my face. "Azazel, I don't know what I'm doing," he said.

"And neither do I," I said. "But look, Jason, this can't be the day that I lost my parents, and you killed someone for the first time. That can't be why we remember this day.

So, let's make it the day that we . . . made love for the first time."

I kissed Jason again, lingering on his full lips.

"You're sure?" he breathed.

I nodded.

We fell back on the bed.