Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (68 page)

“Who am I?”

“To who?”

Jack was confused over that response. “What do you mean?”

“You are many things to different people, Jack,” Elish responded. “Are you asking if you’re worthy to be in the family?”

Jack nodded slowly.

“As of right now? No.”

Jack felt his heart crush inside of his chest, the sting made him start to get up off of the bed. With a tightness in his chest he started walking towards the bedroom door.

“Only you can change that Jack,” Elish called after him, his frozen words slicing Jack with the indifferent frost that was Elish through and through. “And it is time you change. The family has been patient with the lower, less successful of the second generation but that time is coming to an end. Silas grows tired of the chimeras who are not living up to their potential. I will only warn you once, because I still hold hope you can become the man we created you to be: change now and change quickly.”

Jack stared at his hand grasping the door knob; he felt his eyes start to burn under the shame of his own cowardice. Never more than in that moment did he hate himself for what he had become – and never more had he wanted to change.

“I will,” Jack said, though to his humiliation his voice cracked. “I’ll change.”

“Time is running out,” Elish said back. There was something in the way that Elish said that that made the hair on Jack’s neck prickle. “Jack Anubis – time is running out, and it may already be too late. Do not forget this conversation and do not forget my words. You will sleep on my couch tonight, good night.”

A single tear dripped down Jack’s face. He let it fall to the floor, the silence that fell on the room so prominent he heard it patter against his foot.

“I… I won’t,” Jack replied quietly, and without another word, he opened the door and left Elish’s bedroom.

I placed the small white rock onto the burnt piece of tinfoil, my fingers trembling and stained yellow from smoking cigarette after cigarette. I centered the little piece of meth and popped the glass pipe into my mouth. Then with the glass firmly clenched between my teeth I focused my burning touch onto the bottom of the tinfoil and made it as hot as I could.

As the smoke rose from the tinfoil I sucked it through the pipe, and when my lungs were filled with burning hot, rancid-smelling smoke I put the blackened tinfoil down and got up.

Not too soon after I felt the intoxicating rush blast through my body, setting my blood aflame and exploding every organic fiber. It covered me in its energetic haze and soon I was pacing the entire house with my hands rapidly moving from my pockets, to wrapped around my chest, to picking at my face.

I walked to the boarded up window which I had partially pulled down and looked outside. There was a fresh layer of prints going down the worn path that led to the alleyway. The chain-link fence had permanently been pulled back to make room for Mouse and Julia coming in and out when they came home from work. The two of them lived with me, or maybe I lived with them. I never did ask.

I scratched my face and shook my head back and forth. I was happy to be awake after sleeping for a long time. That was the routine but I hated my sleeping days, because when I slept I missed things and when I missed things, things happened. Bad things happened that Mouse told me about, like rumours in Cypress about the Dekker family coming closer to finding me out so they could send me back to Jasper’s.

Back to Jasper’s… they had been working with him the entire time. I hadn’t realized it at first but this drug had opened up my mind and had made me start to pick up on things I had previously ignored. It was mind blowing the first time I had smoked meth. I had never realized that Jasper had been spying on me this entire time, and that the family I had once belonged to had been letting him. My close-knit, royal family wasn’t who I thought they had been, no not at all.

I walked into my bedroom and looked around at all of the newspaper bulletins I had put on the walls. All of them streaked with shining oil, and filling the room with the smell of pub grease and meth smoke. When I realized the messages in the newspapers I had started taping them to the walls. I knew if I just read them close enough, analyzed their words… I would be able to crack the code. They communicated with each other and with Jasper through the bulletin.

It made sense… fuck, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I started putting it all together.

The family couldn’t communicate directly with Jasper or else I would know. They knew I was smart, see? So they put in these hidden messages in the bulletins and wrapped the pub food in the bulletins and sent it off to the Dead Islands as Jasper’s food.

I ran my finger along one of my most read articles. It was about King Silas waking up soon and how the family was organizing a party for him. I wrote down how many letters of which were in that article. How many A’s, how many B’s, and so on. Then I took those numbers and assigned them their own letters based on their number in the alphabet, except when they repeated then I assigned them twice, and used the remaining number for a new letter.

Like this… like this… see… there were fifty-eight N’s in the article and N is the fourteenth letter in the alphabet, so in the main message to Jasper there was three N’s which would equal forty-two so there would be a remaining sixteen. Sixteen was P’s place in the alphabet so that code told me there was three N’s and one P in the main message. I did this over and over again until I had the list of numbers and from that it was just anagram solving and I was great at anagrams because in Jasper’s basement I had nothing better to do sometimes I made anagrams of everything just to pass the time.

The first message was telling Jasper they were closing in on me. I had some leftover letters but I saved those because they perfectly rolled over to the next bulletin which was telling Jasper that I was in Moros or Cypress. This had happened during my last stretch of doing meth and that was why I was so upset with crashing. I hated crashing. I wanted to stay awake and the meth urged me to stay awake. When I crashed I slept for days and days and I woke up with bottles around me full of piss just like in the basement and sometimes Mouse beside me doing opium. I didn’t do opium anymore because it made me sluggish and I couldn’t be sluggish right now with the family coming closer to finding me. Would they have Jasper with them? I think they would.

I couldn’t believe they had been in on it the entire time.

They had tricked me, they were smart. I had always known my family was smart but this was complex. They were after me; all of them were after me…

I looked out the window, my hands shaking at my hips. I counted the footprints and made sure they were only Mouse and Julia’s. I had made both of them cut off a tread inside of their boots so I could tell that it was only them. The monarchy-issued winter boots all had the same treads and I had to be certain they weren’t sneaking in when I was sleeping during my downtime.

Even Jack was in on it. I thought he would become my boyfriend but I was wrong, he was a plant, a plant, a plant. I bet even Valen was a plant to distract me from knowing the truth.

It all made sense. It all made sense!

Hours later Mouse came home. Immediately I took the paper bag from him and started carefully peeling the bulletins away from the greasy food. He had suggested he could just bring me home the bulletin everyday but that was such a stupid idea it made me laugh. If he did that then the family would know I was figuring out their messages to each other and to Jasper. Not to mention they could then switch out the bulletin for another newspaper; a fake one that would feed me fake information. No, no, it had to be anonymously given to me and the best way of doing that was wrapped up in food.

I scraped the cheese away and took my notepad and pen from Mouse. I went into my room and started writing down how often each letter occurred and started trying to work everything out inside of my head.

Sometime the next evening I had my list of letters. I paced the house reading the numbers over and over again, before finding a clean space on the walls to help work them out. Behind me Julia was smoking a cigarette and watching Maury. I found myself distracted with it too. I always tried to avoid watching that show. If I watched more than five minutes I became too invested in finding out who the baby’s daddy was. Nowadays we had DNA testing kits, or even better you just grew one in a steel mother. I knew where all of my DNA was from, I had seen my papers and I had seen the papers of others.

I reached into my mouth and pulled out one of the remaining caps on my teeth.

Julia suddenly screamed. I looked at her and saw her froggy-like eyes were wide.

“Jesus christ, Pumpkin don’t pull out your teeth!” Julia hollered, there was a clang of dishes and she ran over to me. She took the tooth from my hand but when she realized I wasn’t bleeding her shock turned to confusion.

So I smiled at her so she could see the pointed tooth hiding behind the cap.

“You have teeth like Jack?” Julia said in an awed voice. She pulled my lip down and I grinned for her so she could see them.

“We were raised in the same tube,” I said. “Though they sent me away. Sent me away as some sort of blood money to Jasper.” I narrowed my eyes and started preparing myself another hit. “I’m starting to think he’s king. I know if I keep checking eventually I’ll catch them calling him king. There are just too many signs; why else would they obey him?”

My thoughts took me away from her. I walked to the window and looked outside. It was dark though so I could only see silver footprints in the snow. My night vision didn’t work with light behind me, no matter how hard I tried.

I should go outside…
I grabbed my black satchel and walked to the door and put a hand on it.

“Where are you going?” Julia was suddenly there. She put a hand over mine.

“Outside, check the prints…” I mumbled.

“Last time you went out we lost you for – for ten hours,” Julia said cautiously. She grabbed my satchel where all of my remaining money was but I tightened my hand on it. “Why don’t you at least leave the bag here?”

I shook my head. “No, my money. My mask is inside of there too. Barry would be lonely. I’ll get him. Barry should come too.”

I turned and walked into my bedroom. I picked up Barry and turned around, but when I did I saw that both Julia and Mouse were there standing in front of the doorway.

“Pumpkin, we both think you should stay inside…” Mouse said cautiously. He looked down at either the black bag or Barry I wasn’t sure. “We – we saw Valen asking around for you at the bar. We overheard him saying that Jasper was in town too. We really think it’s a good idea for you to stay put.”

I stared at Mouse in shock. Immediately I whirled around and raised the pressboard that had been barred against my window.

“Turn off the lights!” I barked to Mouse, and a moment later everything went dark, though in that darkness the outlines of the things outside started to glow blue. I could make out a tall wooden fence in the backyard and the lights of several other houses.

I looked down at the snow but I didn’t see any footprints, the snow was new and clean. I could see several prints of birds though.

Of birds…

“Turn on the lights…” I said. I dropped the canvas bag but I still had Barry in my grasp. Julia and Mouse stepped back as I walked past them. My free hand travelling up to my face; I started picking at the scabs.

“Are there crows outside? Do they come outside and walk around?” I demanded as I finished preparing my meth.

“Sure… Cypress is full of crows…” Mouse said slowly.

“Do they talk?”

“W-what?”

“Do they talk!” I whirled around and snapped. Mouse paled; he held up his hands as he shook his head.

“No, they don’t. Crows don’t talk.”

Yes they do. “Crows talk and Barry talks,” I said, raising Barry up in the air. “He used to talk to me all the time but he stopped. He stopped after Jasper fucked me for the first time when I was a kid. Shot himself right after, his brains splattered on the walls and he never talked to me again. He was gone after that and I don’t know how I’m supposed to get him back.”

I ignored both Julia and Mouse’s jaws dropping and clutched Barry to my chest. I then checked each and every window to make sure there were no footprints I didn’t recognize. The crow ones though; I didn’t like the crow prints.

Because… I remember…

I remember that they used to be able to have cameras inside of their mouths. I remember that, all of that, yes. The crows were recording what was happening and they were going to tell the Legion. So did that mean the Legion was against Jasper? Maybe my only friend was Nero. No, no, I couldn’t trust anyone.

I frowned as I looked at Barry. I put him on the table that faced the living room and made him sit up. Then I sat down on the wobbly chair and folded my arms on the table.

“I wish you still talked,” I said to him with a sigh. “I wish you could talk back to me… like when I was little. I could really use someone I trusted right now, even if you were always telling me I was a demon-monkey.”

Barry stared back at me; I could see light reflecting in his black eyes. They were only little beads but once they were the eyes of a real boy.

‘I’m still here.’

My heart jumped into my throat. I looked around until I spotted Mouse and Julia eating quietly in the living room with Hocus Pocus on. When I knew they weren’t listening I lowered my voice.

“Where did you go?” I whispered. He was speaking inside of my head; I couldn’t see the boy at all. “Didn’t you kill yourself?”

‘I did… Jasper raping you made me sad, but you seem better now. I missed you, Sami
.’

I started picking at my face again, more from nerves than anything. I looked at Mouse and Julia again before dropping my voice even lower.

“How can you be here then?” I asked. “You’re just a voice… a…”

‘My body died… but I can get a new one,’
Barry whispered to me.
‘Me and my friends, other stuffed animal friends that have been forgotten. We can come back… you know how to bring us back, Sami.’

I did…

There was another pull of my heart, a pull that seemed to rip away at the muscle, exposing old wounds and old scars. My heart had been destroyed and stitched together so many times, but scars tore open easily. This one was raw and bleeding, and it was letting more loneliness in.

I looked down at my notebook, full of my anagrams, my numbers, and my drawings. The entire world was against me, everyone wanted to see me hurt, they wanted me back to fuck me, to abuse me, mistreat me. Everyone wanted to hurt me but there had been a few friends who had only wanted what was best for me.

And one of those was Barry, my Barry the boy, now just a voice inside of my head because Jasper had made him kill himself.

Fucking Jasper…

“Hey, Pumpkin, time for food!”

I looked up and saw Mouse holding a dinner plate with a hamburger cut into pieces and potato fries. I shook my head though because I wasn’t hungry and picked up a pen instead.