Breathless (13 page)

I stop. I just stare at him. That’s not… no. “Colleen? I don’t blame you at all for what happened with Colleen. Why would I? She… her death is on my head. Not yours. Never yours.”

“You say that now.” Lucien sniffs, and I’m afraid he’s fixing to cry.

God, please don’t let him cry. Big brothers shouldn’t cry. He’s the strong one. He always has been. I knew it then. I acknowledge it now.

“But I know how you looked at me then. Or rather didn’t. You couldn’t look me in the eyes for weeks after it happened. You blamed me.”

“No.”

“You did, and you should. And you went into the war ready to think the worst about me. Ready to believe anything. Looking for a way to get your revenge.”

“You have no idea how wrong you are.”

He scoffs. “Really? I don’t? Then how else do you explain it, Hart? Huh? Tell me! Explain it to me! You’ve hated me all these years. You believed that I shot you! That I would ever hurt you! You believed it so much… despised me so much… that you kept your humanity in Hell. That’s something I couldn’t even do. I lost myself there, and you kept your soul because you hated me so much you didn’t want to forget!”

“I was wrong.” It sounds almost as pitiful and pointless as I’m sorry. It hurts to not tell him the truth. I should. Colleen’s family is long gone. No one would be around to judge her. To judge us. Maybe it would make Lucien feel better to know that I never blamed him. Never. I couldn’t look at him… not from hate but from guilt. Because of
my
actions, Colleen died and no one could ever know.

Lucien is breathing heavily before he whips the steering wheel to the right, and we hit lots of bumps before we unceremoniously stop by the side of the dirt road. He jumps out of the car and walks into the light of the headlights while running his hands through his hair.

Well, looks like he’s having his own meltdown.

He stops pacing and stares into the darkness.

Might as well have this knock-down-drag-out over with. Truth be told, he has every reason in the world to hate me. I don’t blame him. I deserve it. So if he needs to do this, then he does.

I open my door and head toward the front of the car, but I stay in the shadows. Seems poetic. “You know… I was so excited when Father told me Mother was going to have a baby. So excited. I wasn’t terribly old myself, but I knew I wanted a brother so badly.”

“And you ended up with me.” I bow my head and kick some dirt with my shoe, or rather the shoe of whoever owned the house.

“And I ended up with you. You were so sickly. Took so much of Mother’s attention. Never happy. Always needing something.”

Sounds about right. I feel my chest tighten. I say nothing. He’s earned getting all of this off his chest.

“But no matter how much you needed, or how many times I caught Mother crying because she didn’t know how to help you, I never once stopped loving you. Never. We’d go outside by the pond and play in the old tree, do you remember that?”

I nod. It’s those times I miss the most. They are the times I tried to forget about in Hell because they reminded me that my brother was real, he was human, he was part of me, family. And not something or someone to get revenge on.

He nods back at me. He has yet to look in my direction. He’s leaning against the car with his hands in his jacket pockets. “I was so excited to have a brother. Someone to play with and share secrets with. Someone to play pranks with. Someone to never be alone with. And we were good together. Even through Colleen. We were good. We fought, but we were good.”

He shakes his head. “And then she died, and we weren’t.”

I bite my lip, willing the tears to not fall. He’s not wrong. But I never blamed him for Colleen. I blamed myself. I need to tell him…

Lucien keeps talking before I can find the words to tell him the truth. “Then the war came, and we went our separate ways. I remember thinking that maybe I’d see you on the battlefield. That maybe, just maybe, I’d get to see you, sneak over and talk to you. Hug you. It got lonely, Jessup. I missed my family. I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I want to say. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make words come out of my mouth again.

“Then I saw you. Across the battlefield. You’d been shot, and you were dying. Scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t lose you. I didn’t want to lose you. I remember thinking that, no matter what, I would carry you off that battlefield. Hell, I’d have taken you to the Confederate camp and risked being imprisoned if you would’ve been okay. That’s all I cared about… you being okay.”

“Can we stop?” My voice cracks. I can’t take it anymore. Lucien deserves to say all of this, yes, but I can’t handle it. A tear drops down my nose.

I can’t…

“And the next thing I saw was you with a gun. Pointed at me. And I remember thinking at first that you must be pointing at someone behind me. Surely you wouldn’t come after me. Surely… I was your brother, and I knew you hated me, but…”

“I never hated you.” He has to believe that. If he can’t believe anything else, he has to believe that. “I didn’t… I mean… I did when I thought you’d shot me, but I didn’t before then. I didn’t hate you. I hated myself. I hated everything about myself, Lucien. I wish you could see that. I wish you could see how sorry I really am. For Colleen. For all of it. You need to know the truth—”

“You never gave me the benefit of the doubt.” He shakes his head like I haven’t spoken. He’s lost in his own story, his own memories. Maybe he’s snapped. Maybe he’s just reliving it all over again. It isn’t like he remembered it the first time. He’s not had to think about it since that day. He lost his memory when he became an angel. I never forgot. Ever. “You just believed the lies.
His
lies. Believed that I’d actually shoot you. And you shot me back. Just like that. Just… like that.”

These tears need to stop. They aren’t doing me or him or the world any good. I can’t tell him I’m sorry anymore. There’s no need in it. I’ve said it. It doesn’t cover all my sins. It never will. “Lucien, I can’t take back what I did no matter how much I wish I could. If I could redo it, I swear to God that I would. Believe me. I will tell you everything. I swear it. But right now… right now, I can’t change it. If by the grace of God we actually survive and the world doesn’t end, you can do whatever you want to me. Beat me up. Kill me. Shun me. I don’t care. Whatever it is, I deserve it. But for right now, we have to get back in the damn car and get to Crimson Ridge to find Gracen before Seth does and—”

And… What is that?

He finally looks at me. I can see him out of the corner of my eye. Of course, my brother isn’t my primary concern at this very moment. It’s that incredibly bright ball of light coming toward us like a massive, fast moving storm cell. “Lucien…”

“Get in the car.” He’s around to the driver’s side before I can even process what he’s saying. I’ve seen that light before. It’s the same light that shot out of Gracen that kept us safe during the wreck. I don’t know if this light will protect me or hurt me.

“Hart! Get in the damn car!” Lucien doesn’t seem to want to find out.

I don’t either.

I slide in and don’t even have time to shut the door before Lucien has his foot on the gas. We are heading backwards, and dirt is flying from our tires and fogging the windshield.

It doesn’t shield it enough from the light.

We can still see it.

It’s coming.

And coming fast.

“Hold on…”

It’s the last thing Lucien says before we abruptly stop.

My head hits the dashboard, splattering blood all over it and me.

The sound of glass breaking fills the car. Sharp, painful shards pelt the back of my head. Lucien moans, slumped over in his seat, unconscious. His window is shattered, and there is red dripping from his cheek to his shirt.

“Lucien…” I grab his shoulder and shake him. He has to wake up. We have to get out of here before the light gets to us. “Lucien, come on man, hold on. It’ll be okay… just… don’t leave me.”

The light is right over the ridge from us, moving faster like a tsunami of white and, probably, death.

This is it.

Blood flows down my nose and onto my lips.

My head is pounding.

I hold on to Lucien and try my very best to make whatever sort of peace I can, since this is the end.

This is where I die.

Forever.

The light moves through the trees and covers the front of the car.

“I love you.” Lucien’s head is heavy on my shoulder. I hug him tighter. “I’m so sorry I did this to us.”

Like a coward, I shut my eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Gracen

“
S
TOP IT!”
I
SCREAM AT HER
… at me… at the Abomination who is crouched down in the middle of the road with her hands over her ears. The light, the horrible bright light, is still coming from her like a pulsing energy. I remember that light. I did the same thing in the car on the day of the wreck. Only it wasn’t this long or this bright or this… deadly.

I run over and try to shake her shoulders. If I could just get her to listen. Get her to stop…

“She can’t hear you. No one can hear you. No one alive anyway.”

Her voice comes from behind me, and I turn as quickly as I hear it. She’s wearing a long white lacy dress with long sleeves and a high neck. Her dark hair is falling around her shoulders. Part of it is pulled back and little ringlets fall around her much too white face. The strangest thing of all is that she has yellow flowers in her hair. She looks like someone out of Hart’s time.

“Are you Colleen?”

She smiles. “Jessup talk about me much? I mean… did Hart?”

“Once. He took me to your grave.”

I flinch after I say it because no one wants to be reminded they have a grave. That’s one thing I’ll never have, a grave or a tombstone or anything like that. I’ll just be… here. Until the world ends by this bratty girl who is having a breakdown in the middle of the street.

Colleen doesn’t flinch like me. Instead, she smiles again. “That’s nice.”

That’s one way to think about it.

“After I died, both my boys lost their way.”

It’s hard to take my mind away from the blinding light that’s killing the world, but her speaking of her boys does the trick. “Your boys? As in both of them?”

“As in, I had feelings, very real feelings for both of them, truth be told. And those feelings ending up setting things in motion that I could have never seen coming.”

I watch the light coming from my body, and I have to say that’s an understatement. “You played them against each other.”

“No.” She’s very clear about that. “I didn’t.”

The Abomination stops screaming and falls to the ground. The light is gone. The world is black.

All I can see is Colleen, but I feel all kinds of eyes on me, though. All those souls. All looking at me like I did this. Like I killed them.

“Let’s get you inside.” Colleen reaches for my hand.

I’m actually all for that. I can’t take the eyes, the looks. I didn’t do this… she did.

But when I look down, I see my mom. Amelia in my mom’s body, I suppose.

She smiles.

She’s gone.

Disappeared.

So is the Abomination.

“Come on.” Colleen takes my hand, and the next thing I know, we are in my bedroom in my apartment. The door is shut. Everything looks the same, just like I’d left it when I left with Hart. “How did you do that?”

Colleen simply smiles.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Hart

W
HEN MY EYES OPEN,
I
’M NO
longer in the car. I’m no longer in the woods. Hell, I’m no longer sitting. I’m just sort of plopped there. Standing in the middle of an old rundown room that looks vaguely familiar, but not really.

A few candles light the room, candles are much more welcome than the bright light of death. I mean, I guess it would’ve lead to our death. It didn’t kill me before, but then again, she wasn’t as powerful then as she is now. Who knows what sort of damage it did?

Honestly, I bet HE does.

Seth Mitchell, aka brother of Cain and Abel.

Backstabbing angel to the fiftieth power.

He’s leaning in the doorframe with his teacher wear on. His arms are crossed over his chest, and he’s glaring at me.

I’ve got news for him. I can glare too.

And I’d glare longer if I didn’t hear Lucien moan from the sofa beside me.

He’s holding his leg, and his face has blood on it. The blood makes me remember mine, and I put my hand to my head. Instantly, I regret it. There’s a knot as big as an egg to the left of my temple, and blood is still oozing down my nose. I hate life.

“A thank you would be nice.” Seth looks at me when he says it. He must’ve hit his head incredibly hard too because there’s no way on Earth that I’d ever tell him thank you for anything. Except for maybe dying. I’d thank him for that. His death. Not mine. I have too many things to do before I reach my end. Young and bucket list and all that.

“When Hell freezes.”

My comebacks always sound better in my head.

“If it weren’t for me zapping you two idiots out of the car, the Abomination’s light would have destroyed you, just like she has destroyed everyone else in Crimson Ridge, in Muller County, in damn near all of Middle Tennessee.”

I was afraid of that, but I try not to let Seth know. “Before the white light didn’t hurt me or her. It protected us.”

His brows rise very high on his already incredibly big forehead. “You thought that light was going to protect you? How hard did you hit your head?”

Hard enough to feel woozy, that’s for sure. I stagger back until I find a chair, a moldy, musty, old leather chair that has seen better days, and I don’t care. I fall into it and cringe when layers of dirt come flying out. That does it. This chair will kill me. Kill me dead.

I’m a goner.

Not going to get the I-survived-the-current-Apocalypse t-shirt this round.

“Where are we?” Lucien asks the logical question, cause he’s all logical and smart and stuff.