Brother (32 page)

Michael moved fast.

He dropped to his knees, shoved the switchblade away, and grabbed the kitchen knife Reb had previously dropped with both hands. He whipped around so quickly that he didn't know whether Reb would still be lying there or not, and brought the blade down with such force that he felt the tip of the knife crack hard against concrete. Reb stared up at Michael with a look of surprise, as if stunned that the coward before him had enough guts to go through with one last kill. When Michael finally looked away from his face, he found his hands cupped against his brother's chest. The knife was buried far enough into Rebel's flesh that it was hardly visible from beneath Michael's hands.

Rebel coughed. A faraway grin pulled his face taut. The fingers of his left hand spider-walked across the concrete, searching for the handle of his switchblade or the axe he knew had to be somewhere close. Michael pulled the knife from Reb's chest, ready to stab him again, but there was no need. As soon as the blade came free, a wheezing sound escaped Rebel's chest—like air leaving a balloon. The rush of blood that followed from both sides of the wound left Michael staring in morbid awe. Reb's face went ashen. He looked at Michael with a strange sort of confusion, as if bewildered by the fact that their battle had come to such a quick end. Baffled that Michael had actually won. He opened his mouth to say something, but he coughed again instead. Blood erupted from between his lips and stained his chin. His head dropped to the ground a moment later, his skull thumping against the bare basement floor.

Michael backed away from the body. He swallowed hard, the knife still held fast in his trembling hands. For a moment, he couldn't look away. He couldn't tear his eyes from the man who had been difficult and cruel but who had been one of his only friends in life. What lay before him was falsehood personified. Rebel had never cared, and Michael had never belonged.

But his rage dissipated into the dull ache of sorrow anyway. He couldn't shake the heartsick feeling that overwhelmed him. Regardless of how he had come to be a Morrow, it was impossible to forget his life with them. Despite their insanity, they had still been his family.

Michael crouched down, Reb's blood pooling around his shoes. He reached out to brush his hand across his brother's open eyes. He abandoned the kitchen knife, replacing it with Reb's switchblade. For as long as Michael could remember, that knife was probably the only thing Rebel ever really cared about. But, like Momma, Reb wasn't entirely at fault. He'd been led by the hand by grief, overwhelmed by the sadness he hadn't been allowed to feel, the anguish he hadn't been able to express.

Michael turned his head away, unable to look at Reb's lifeless face any longer. Pushing his heartache aside, he had to focus on the only thing he had left. Alice.

Expecting to see her dead only yards away, his nerves buzzed when he looked to where she had folded in on herself and found that she wasn't there.

There was blood on the steps leading out of the basement. Somewhere overhead in the darkness, Alice was running in the opposite direction of the Morrow farmhouse, slowly bleeding to death.

He bolted up the stairs and careened into the heat of the night. His injured leg tingled, as if half-asleep, red-hot needle pricks biting at the flesh beneath his jeans. The sweltering temperature served up a fresh helping of vertigo. He had to hold onto the side of the house until his head stopped spinning, until the fireworks ceased exploding behind his eyes.

When he finally got moving again, he had no idea which way to go. Alice could have run anywhere. The trees would have given her cover, but the road leading away from the house gave a false promise of salvation. If she had any idea how far they were from the state highway, she would have broken beneath an onslaught of hysterical desperation.

The rutted dirt road was enveloped in shadow, but it wasn't dark enough to conceal the blots of black that dappled the path. She was hard to see—a good eighth of a mile ahead of him on the straightaway. Her black jeans and shirt rendered her nearly invisible, nothing but a pair of pale and disembodied arms floating in the air. She stumbled, her wrists still bound with tape. Catching herself mid-fall, her palms pressed against the hard-packed earth. She tried to get up but only managed to stagger forward a few feet, then ended up on all fours once more.

When she shot a look over her shoulder, Michael slowed his steps. He didn't want to scare her any further, but that didn't seem to matter. Despite his slow approach, Alice began to sob as she rose. Tapping into a reserve of determination, she began to run.

“Alice, wait!”

Michael fell into a jog after her. He pressed his hand against his wounded thigh, his jeans slick and warm with blood. Bleeding to death wasn't only a possibility for her. Footfall after agonizing footfall, Michael started to think it was a reality for him as well.

He gritted his teeth and increased his pace, pushing himself into a flat-out run despite the pain. He had to save her. Had to redeem himself so that she'd know, whether he lived or died, that he had never meant for any of this to happen.

When he caught her by the arm, Alice began to scream. She tore out of his grip, her face a mask of frenzied indignation.

“Wait,” he said, his words nearly swallowed whole by her cries. “Alice, please!”

But she wasn't listening. She turned around and around, her eyes impossibly wide, searching the night for some form of defense. Startled by the pool of blood that was gathering at her feet, Michael made another grab for her, but she ran on, her boots clomping against the dirt. She tripped, crashed to the ground. He dropped to his knees beside her as her arms flailed above her head, warbled yelps of refusal tearing from her throat. That was when he realized he was still holding Rebel's switchblade. The knife glistened dark and wet in the moonlight.

Seizing her wrists, he caught the edge of the tape with the tip of the blade and cut through her bonds. Then he dropped his weapon to the road, ashamed that he had been chasing her
with a knife in his hand
all while expecting her to not be afraid.

Her hands flew apart, the strip of tape still clinging to her right wrist. But the fact that he had freed her failed to give her pause. Her hysteria overpowered reason. She continued to fight him off.

“I'm sorry,” he said, struggling to catch her flailing hands. “I'm sorry, Alice, I'm sorry.”

He wanted her to understand, was desperate for her to say something, anything that would assure him that she ­understood—this wasn't his plan, it had never been. But she continued to shriek, her hands fluttering above her head in a tangle.

“Please stop,” he begged. “Just listen to me. I just wanna tell you—”

“You killed Lucy!”

“I had to,” he insisted. “I swear, I never would have if—”

“
You killed my mother
!
” she screamed up to the sky. “You
killed her
and you killed my best friend and now I have
no one
!” Her frantic despair shifted in a way Michael had seen before. Her own words sank in deep, and suddenly she was drowning in an ocean of self-realization and defeat. All the fight drained out of her as she crouched in the middle of the road. She pressed her hands to her stomach and wept.

Michael wanted to believe that she was different from the rest, but she looked just like the other girls as she gave up hope.

“I trusted you,” she sobbed. “I thought you were special.”

He winced at her words. No amount of explanation would ever come close to describing how he felt. He wanted to sweep her up into his arms and hold her for the rest of his life, wanted to apologize a million times in a million different languages, to hopefully strike a chord. And at the same time, he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she went quiet. Because why couldn't she understand? Why did she refuse to listen, to see that he wasn't hacking her to pieces but releasing her back into the world? He had killed for her. He had destroyed his own life to make up for annihilating hers.

He stepped away from her to make it clear that he wouldn't touch her, that he meant her no harm. Turning his back to her, Michael lowered himself to the ground and stared at the bank of trees lining the side of the road. His mind drifted a mile away to Misty Dawn. If he was going to die, he wanted it to be on that hilltop next to her, watching the sun rise over the vista of endless tree-covered hills. Of all the people in his life, he had meant to hurt Misty and Alice least—and yet, he had done them the most harm.

“I never meant any of this,” he said softly. “I didn't know.”

If, on the day he had walked into the Dervish, he had been aware that this was his future, Michael would have let Rebel kill him before he had ever learned Alice's name. He would have killed himself before he would have helped Reb drag ­Alice's mom,
his
mom, out of her home like a sacrificial lamb. He would have killed Reb long ago if he had seen this coming, be it in a dream, or a nightmare, or a flash of divine telepathy.

Sitting in the middle of the road, he twisted to look back at Alice, three words balanced upon the tip of his tongue. But he faltered when she came into view.

Having gathered herself off the ground, she held the switchblade in her shaking, bloodied hands. He pulled in a shallow breath, his gaze flitting between the blade and her eyes.

“I'm your brother,” he whispered.

Something about saying that aloud made him feel at peace. He hoped it would bring her some comfort, some assurance that he was on her side. But rather than rocking back on her heels and letting the switchblade slip from her hands, she leaned into him—as if to give her long-lost sibling a hug—and buried the knife deep in his gut.

He gave a quiet grunt as a searing pain spread just beneath his ribs, but he didn't jerk away. Rather, he eased into Alice's arms, his own blood-sticky fingers drifting across the slope of her milk-white cheek. Gazing up at her, he admired her beauty, so strong it refused to wither beneath a veil of horror and pain. Her bowed mouth. Her big eyes. The way her skin seemed to glow in the moonlight. She was his Fate, delivering him from a life of horror, saving him from himself.

He tasted copper and winced when she pulled the blade free. She pushed him away and he fell back to sit slouched in the road—nothing but a broken-down Tin Man, wishing he had a heart
.
The knife fell from Alice's hand with a soft
clink
into the dirt. She lurched to her feet, the palms of her hands pressed over her own wound.

“I was going to run away with you,” she said. “Now I'm just running away.”

Michael tipped onto his side as she left him behind in the darkness.

Pain metastasized from the center of his torso outward to his limbs like a fast-moving cancer, but he hardly felt it. He was too busy watching Alice limp her way down the road toward the Delta in the distance, leaving him to wonder what it would have been like to have been an older brother. How ­different things would have been if he had spent mornings around the kitchen table, laughing with his parents and his sister over bowls of Apple Jacks and stacks of pancakes. How it would have felt to watch movies in the living room, lying on the carpet with his chin propped up in his hands and a golden retriever or collie sleeping next to him on the floor. He imagined tearing into Christmas gifts, surrounded by his true family. Imagined how it would have felt to lie on a blanket in the grass and stare up at the fireworks every Fourth of July; a million fractured sparkles drifting back down to earth like falling stars.

But mostly he wondered if, growing up, Alice had been the type of girl to dance and twirl in her room just like Misty Dawn had.

Dancing and twirling despite the madness.

Despite the darkness.

Despite it all.

His eyes momentarily fluttered shut, but he fought the sudden urge to sleep. Opening them again, he saw Alice in the distance. She was only a few hundred feet from the car now, but her steps had slowed. She doubled over, pulling her hands away from her torso to stare at her palms. They shimmered wet and slick in the moonlight.

Michael willed her to keep going. To not give up. To fight.

She had to make it, or it was all for nothing.

She had to get to the car, or Rebel would win, even in death.

The world began to go dark and soft around the edges. For a moment he was sure that the shadows around the trees had come to life, slithering outward to consume them both. The night blossomed into grays and whites, like an overexposed photograph. The trees glowed niveous and pale. Alice's ghostly skin shone ethereal as she desperately lumbered on toward the Olds­mobile, her arms wrapped tight around her waist. He could hear her distant, muffled sobs. He closed his eyes and imagined it was joy instead of sorrow. Him and her. Hand in hand. Laughing like kids.

And just as the world was about to fade, he felt his heart stop. Felt the world collapse. Felt himself dying as the hard bite of an eight-ball dug into his hip.

Because the keys to the Olds were still in his pocket.

They were still in his fucking pocket as Alice's fingers drifted across the handle of the Delta's driver-side door.

My thanks go to all of the people who made this book possible: To my rock-star literary agent, David Hale Smith, who believed enough in this manuscript—and, I suppose, in
me
—to pitch
Brother
to “the big boys.” There aren't enough clever T-shirts in the world to express my gratitude. Carpe grillem, good sir. To my fabulous editor, Ed Schlesinger—I'm now absolutely convinced that I'm in the company of a pop-culture expert. To put your mind at ease, I really
do
know the difference between an LP and a twelve-inch single. But details, right? To my husband and partner in crime, Will, thanks for getting frustrated at the powers-that-be when it felt like I was putting in twelve hour days, and for reminding me to stand up for myself (and my sanity) when I was on the edge of the edge. Don't hassle me. I might smash some plates.