“Declan, open this door or I will cut you,” she said. I’d forgotten how literal she was when she was drunk.
“Fuck the fuck off!” I yelled at her.
There was a pause, maybe she was in shock that her young son had used such profanity. Then it started again. The pounding. Her slurring. The doorknob rattled.
This was a house of horror, one created especially for me. But I wasn’t the only one in the house, I knew that. The last thing I remembered was running up the stairs, sure that Michael was there, hiding, and that I needed to see him. I had left Perry and everyone else down below, hopefully where it was safer and there wasn’t some annoying dead French woman trying to speak drunk to them.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I needed to go back downstairs. I needed to get everyone out of this house. I didn’t even know what I had been thinking when I brought everyone here – clearly my thoughts had been compromised.
Then I remembered Perry’s neck, the way her tender skin had submitted under my hands.
It wasn’t just my thoughts. Everything about me had been compromised.
I got up and started for the door, prepared to see my mother again in her most violent form. The last time I had seen her had been in a dream and it went well. She had been sober, coherent, even loving. It would be a shame to fuck that all up again.
I was halfway across my room when I heard a whisper. It was coming from the closet.
I turned and faced it, looking around my room for a baseball bat. I spotted one in the corner, a kid’s version, and picked it up. It was better than nothing. I gripped it hard in my hands and took a step toward the closet.
The closet door slowly creaked open.
The whispering started again.
“You don’t want to go in there,” a voice said from behind me and I whirled around.
Sitting on my bed was a man in a suit. Though I’d never seen him before, I also knew that I had.
I knew it was Michael.
My brother, all grown up.
He was staring up at me with an impish smile on his face. “You really don’t remember?” he asked. “I thought we really bonded the last few days. I mean, literally, bonded to each other.”
I stared at him, momentarily dumbfounded.
Then the bat dropped from my hands as all the memories came crawling back in.
I remembered him showing up in Portland. I remembered that god awful feeling that he was there to kill me. I remembered telling Ada to go and get Perry. Then he did something to her with just a flick of his eyes and she was out cold.
And I, I couldn’t do anything at all. He reached into my brain, into my soul, into my existence and made me move, made me breathe, made me act.
He got me from Oregon to New York without me having a singular, autonomous thought. He controlled me from the inside out.
Then I came back just in time for him to interject himself again. This time, he was just along for the ride, taking over when he saw fit.
Like last night, when I’d nearly killed Perry. It had never been me. It had always been him.
“Very good, Declan,” he said. “Then I guess you know that I was quite pleased you brought them here. You won me some favors.”
I grinded my teeth together. “I had no idea and you know it.”
He cocked his head. “Oh, you must have known that your reasons for coming here were not of the most unselfish nature. But that’s you, isn’t it? A selfish boy. So obsessed with your past and the love you thought you never had, that you were willing to risk everyone’s lives and happiness to come here. That wasn’t me, you see. That was all you. That was just you being Dex Foray, a total, selfish asshole. Just being yourself.”
I quickly bent down to pick up the bat again but instead all I got was a snake, a black, writhing python that I immediately dropped, leaping backward out of the way.
Michael laughed, then grew serious. “Of course, it would have been best if they had been able to stay longer. Your fiancé, her mother, her sister, your friend. If they hadn’t been helped by your actual brother, the conniving little worm, we wouldn’t even be having this little chat right now.” He got off the bed, all elegant, like he was some fucking billionaire playboy. “Having them all here in this house, so close to the gates, enabled me to open the door just wide enough. They were easy to feed off of, all that energy, all that ability, all that fear. They got our foot in the door. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to do the rest of the work.”
I shook my head slowly. “I am not doing anything for you,” I said, my jaw stiff, my eyes trying to murder him. Now that I knew it wasn’t my brother at all, all bets were off.
His smile was quick like lightning. “But you must. You know you must. You know you have no choice.” He took a step toward me, the python slithering out of the way and to the closet. I eyed the little sword I had on the wall, the one that I took fencing lessons with. It was the real deal and I had never been allowed to touch it and could only practice with the longer, bendy ones, but my father bought it for me just the same.