Breathless (4 page)

I was jealous of my brother.

I tried to be a good son.

Mainly because I screwed up Lucien’s life so much. I tried to make it right.

That worked out well for me, didn’t it?

I go up the creaky old stairs to the second story. There’s literally no one home, and I have to wonder why. Did Seth do something to them? Because I can see that happening. I know I saw light coming from this house when Lucien and I were outside in the storm. I know it. And then for Seth to come in and everyone be gone…

At first, I thought it might’ve been my house, the house we lived in growing up. I see it in my dreams. I see it in Gracen’s dreams.

We had a little farm outside town. It had a pond and one old, dead tree. I remember when it got struck by lightning. It wasn’t my finest hour, and that’s saying a lot.

Lucien and I used to play outside by the pond, and when our mother needed us, she’d come outside on the porch and yell.

She yelled a lot.

Mainly for Lucien.

Because she always wanted his help with something. Or maybe it was to get him away from me. I don’t know why, and I guess it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the first thing I thought of when I saw this house was my childhood home. It’s built about the same—same porch, same floor plan if I want to be honest—but there’s no way it’s the same house. Lucien and I didn’t die that close to home. Certainly not within a few minutes walk. So not the same house—it can’t be the same house.

Unless it
is
the same house.

That would be my luck.

In any event, it has been remodeled. Very recently by the looks of it and based on my affinity for HGTV. I go into one of the rooms upstairs—if it had been my old house, it would’ve been my parent’s room—and find the closet open and clothes strewed around the room. Obviously, this is where Seth and Lucien got their clean clothes.

I set the lamp I’ve been carrying down and head for the closet. Part of me wants to search the room to find out where the heck everyone is, who lived there and, maybe, where they went. They couldn’t have just disappeared, and it would be really ironic if they just disappeared without a trace. Unless Seth had something to do with it. I can so see Seth having something to do with it.

But because my brother is downstairs moping, and Seth has gone to do something I’m afraid of, I stop trying to figure out the mystery of the house and instead look for some clean, dry clothes that might fit me.

All the jeans are too short for me. They remind me of what people used to call high waters.

That’s what I need when the world ends. To be wearing high waters. Hell, then I might even be okay with it. If I must wear high waters, I might as well die.

Yeah…

Anyway, I finally find some old jogging pants on the floor. They are black, which gives them instant awesomeness. And they are stretchy, which helps. And for the most important part, they are warm, dry, and not made of that terrible material they made our uniforms out of. I find a white t-shirt, because I don’t want to look like Lucien, and throw it over my head. Shoes and socks are next. The shoes are a little too big, but my uniform ones were a little too small, so I’d take big any day.

That’s what she said…

I’m sorry.

So. I get all my clothes on and throw on a black jacket, which is super warm. It’s funny how new clothes make you feel better about yourself, even when you shouldn’t.

And I do feel better.

Until I look in the mirror.

And I see myself.

Not Willow.

Not Sam.

Hart.

Jessup.

In the same body I’d worn for twenty years.

It’s me staring back at me.

The human me.

I stare.

And I look into my eyes.

And I throw a vase at the glass.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hart

I
’M SITTING ON THE BED WITH
my head in my hands when Lucien finds me. I guess he heard the mirror shattering and thought he might need to come up here. I don’t know. Maybe he thought something was going on, something supernatural, like a ghost or something. Although, how could we be afraid of ghosts? Were we not technically ghosts… or zombies… or something not normal? Para-normal.

I hear the old stairs pop and creak as he runs up them, and I hear him call my name. I don’t say anything to him. What is there to say? Oh, there’s plenty to say, but I’m not sure I can even form words right now.

I just saw myself.

Me.

The real me.

The real me in the flesh.

The flesh that hurt Colleen.

The flesh that disappointed my father.

The flesh that killed my brother.

The flesh that can’t forgive itself.

Being a demon, even a demon with humanity, was better than this. I felt, but I didn’t feel like this. I hurt. But I didn’t hurt like this.

Dear Lord, I sound like a whining baby. I need to stop all my bellyaching and move on with my life—or what’s left of it if I don’t stop Gracen. I’ll stop her, but in my own way. I promised her after all. I won’t let her become a true monster. I owe her that much.

“Hart,” my brother says all annoyed, like he’s been saying my name forever. I don’t know if he has. I stopped listening a few minutes ago during my little mental breakdown.

“You back to calling me Hart again?” I try to laugh. It doesn’t come out very strong, but at least it comes out as something. No one can say that I don’t laugh in the face of adversity… or whatever.

“What do you want me to call you? You ready to be Jessup again?” The floorboard—that stupid really old and creaky floorboard—squeaked, which let me know he was fidgeting in the doorway. I wonder how this feels to him, being human again. He got to keep his true form in that weird way Heaven has about it, but to actually be human, in the old body of Lucien Blackwell. To be near me again. I should ask if he remembers Hell because it seemed to do a number on him. Hell, it does a number on everybody. But he hasn’t been out long. Those memories, those times, they haunt you. They still haunt me.

“I don’t know what I’m ready to be.” It’s probably the most honest I’ve been in a long time.

“Yeah, me either.” He sighs and walks toward me. He doesn’t stop until he sits next to me on the bed. This isn’t awkward at all. “Sorry about your jaw.”

My jaw. I’d almost forgotten about it. “Don’t. I deserved it. I deserve a lot more.” Whiny… I’m being whiny.
Suck it up, buttercup.

“Eh, you’ve had a hard day.”

“We’ve had a hard existence.” I counter. “Seriously, Lucien. How can you be okay about all this?”

Cause he sure seems okay. He seems like there’s nothing going on at all. Like this is the most typical thing ever and we are up in my room shooting the bull after bedtime. I miss our house. I miss our life. I hate that I didn’t appreciate it then. I hate that I screwed it up.

He cuts his eyes to me, and his brows pull together so tightly I could probably put a dime between them. “What gives you any indication that I’m okay?”

Well then. “Well, you’re upright. You’re talking. You sound like yourself. You are… I don’t know… not foaming at the mouth. Your eyes aren’t black anymore, which was freaky as all get out, I just have to tell you. God, what did Mother do to you down there?”

He opens his mouth… shuts it… then opens it again. He is still looking at me like I have five heads, which I don’t anymore because… human. “Mother? What does Mother have to do with anything?”

It’s my turn to be confused. “Obviously there’s a miscommunication.”

“Obviously.” He counters. “I didn’t see Mother, Hart. She wasn’t down there with me.”

Ooookay… “Um… Yeah, so Hell can make you see what you want to see, what will hurt you worse than anything. It messes with you. Screws you up. Makes you go insane. And that’s if you are lucky. If you aren’t lucky, you remember everything and feel all the pain. But yeah… Mother. Mother said she was the one who…” I don’t want to say the word tortured because I’m not exactly sure what happened to Lucien down there, but I’d seen the aftereffects and whoa… not pretty. “That she didn’t do anything to you that she didn’t do to me.”

“Then she lied.” Lucien looks at his fingers like they’re the most interesting things in the world. He laces and unlaces them, and his voice cracks like this is difficult for him to talk about. I understand. If there’s anybody in the world who can understand, it’s me. I never told anybody about my time downstairs. I told Gracen some, but not everything. There aren’t adequate words or feelings or emotions that can tell what it was like. So I never talked about it.

I don’t know if Lucien will, but I’ll listen if he does. And I need to know about the whole it-wasn’t-Mother thing cause Mother said it was, or implied it was, and—well, it isn’t like she’d lie about it.

Oh dear Lord.

“It wasn’t her,” Lucien says again when I don’t say anything. I guess he couldn’t stand the uncomfortable silence. For me, I didn’t hear any silence. I heard lots of voices in my head. Totally normal.

“But she said…”

“I was there, Jessup!” Lucien yells, and the way his eyes meet mine—wild, big, scary, scared—I believe him.

I also lean back because he’s so close, and honestly so forceful, that it makes me automatically lean away. I don’t even tease him about calling me Jessup. There are times for everything. This isn’t that time.

“I was there,” he says a little more calmly as he seems to realize that he’s acting like a rabid raccoon and slinks back a bit. I hate seeing my brother like this.

As much as I loved him, as much as I hated him, as much as I envied him when we were alive the first time, I never saw him as anything but strong. He was, he
is
my big brother. He’s always been larger than life to me. Even though I’m a little taller than him, he was never short to me. He always seemed so much bigger, so much older, so much of something that I wanted to be.

I always wanted to be like my big brother.

When I didn’t hate him…

When I didn’t kill him.

But now, I can barely recognize him. Not because he looks different. He doesn’t. Nothing has changed about his appearance since we were younger. But his mannerisms have. The way his shoulders slump and round, the way he shrinks back into himself. The way his eyes are hollow under them, which one would think would be expected from a former corpse, but this is different. This isn’t normal—and yeah, I get the irony of saying that. This is something that is mental, emotional. He’s changed. I’ve changed. I’m not sure all of it is for the better.

My big brother, the one I’ve looked up to all my life, is sitting next to me like he has the weight of the world on him. He has ghosts in his eyes. I’m sure his mind is going a mile a minute, just like mine. I want to hug him, which is a strange feeling to be honest. I want to actually hug him and tell him that everything will be all right. Then I remember the blood and the hole in the uniform he crawled out of his grave in. I remember the way he looked when he fell into Hell for me. I remember. I hoped he hadn’t.

I can tell I was so wrong.

It breaks my heart.

I wish I didn’t have one.

“I was there, Jess.” We’ve gone past the Hart stage. Then again, I figure Hart never really was Lucien’s brother. Hart was the demon Lucien hated. Jessup was Lucien’s brother. I guess I’ll answer to either. Lucien’s voice is low, and his fingers again have become very interesting to him. “I was there. I remember Hell. The fire and the pain and… the room. I remember it. I wish to God that I didn’t, but I do.”

He let out a shaky breath. “I broke quick, Jess.”

“No…”

“Yes. I broke quick. I wasn’t strong enough to fight it, to fight her. I wasn’t strong. I just wanted it… I just wanted…”

“The pain to stop,” I say because I remember. I was the same way. All I wanted was the pain to go away and everything to stop. For the briefest of minutes, seconds even. Something to take the pain and the anger and the fear away. But then again, that’s Hell for you.

He nods and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Just stop. I thought I could hold out longer. I was an angel. I should’ve been able to be stronger. But I wasn’t. I broke, and when I broke, she laughed.”

“Who? Who laughed?” If it wasn’t our mother, then I can’t imagine anyone who would’ve been able to break Lucien so quickly.

Lucien’s bottom lip quivers, breaking my heart further. Big brothers shouldn’t cry. They shouldn’t. It isn’t something that should ever be made to happen. If I have my say in it, it’ll never happen again.

“Jess—Hart. It was Gracen.”

CHAPTER NINE

Hart

“
G
RACEN?”
I
HAD TO HAVE HEARD
him wrong because… “Gracen? My Gracen?”

In the scheme of things, maybe my Gracen is pushing it, but still, I’ve been with her since before she was born. She’s mine more than anybody else’s, and I’m tired of feeling guilty over it. I took care of her. I loved her. I still do, and I refuse to feel bad about it anymore.

Especially now that I’m human.

Or whatever it is that I am.

“Yeah. Gracen. It was her, Hart. I swear it. I know what Mother said. I could hear her in the room before I attacked you… I’m sorry for that, by the way.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing. Ever. I’m the one who did this to us. I’m the one who will fix it. I promise.”

“I don’t know if it can be fixed.”

“Yeah, well, I do.” I stand and run my fingers through my hair. I’m in need of a shower. I still have mud in my hair. I should’ve done that before I changed clothes I guess. Hindsight and all.

“So… Gracen, huh?”

“Yup. It was her. And I know what you mean about Hell messing with you, but I’m telling you, man, it wasn’t Mother. It was her. She was… I can’t even explain it.”

“Maybe it’s like you said, just what Hell thought would torture you more.”

“If Hell wanted to torture me, it would’ve shown me Colleen.” He scoffs.

He has a point. It hurts and it makes me cringe, but he has a point.