Chapter 7
Iwoke up on my bedroom floor with a blanket draped over me that I didn’t remember putting there. Hell, I didn’t remember dragging my ass into the bedroom at all.
For a moment, I lay completely still, just staring at the ceiling, while listening to my own breathing. It felt like it belonged to someone else. The room smelled faintly of some medical ointment and clean linens.
What the fuck?
I never bandaged myself after a punishment. I never bothered with comfort either. Most days, I woke up on the tile floor, with a headache covered in the faint stream of blood. My body felt as heavy as my thoughts.
When I shifted my weight, pain pricked sharply and immediately along my side, and I sucked in a breath, reaching down instinctively.
Bandages were scattered on the ground.
What?
I’d push the burn for a week at most before it started to require assistance. I didn’t want to die of a blood disease and leave the people of Monticello to roll in the shame of a suicidal priest.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs.
Did I want to die?
You’re better off dead, False Prophet.
Click.
I pushed myself up on one elbow, the blanket slipping to my waist as I looked down. Neatly wrapped bandaged wound around my chest, velcroed and firm. This was done carefully, not the sloppy, impatient job I always did on myself when I was left with no choice.
The wound beneath, angry and tender, had been cleaned and dressed with salve. Someone had taken their time. Someone had touched me while I was unconscious…
Had Jerry come by and found me passed out in my own shame?
I sat there longer than I cared to admit, trying to reconstruct the night and the events that led up to being here now. I remembered the shower after I gave up my search for the mystery woman. The heat…the counting…I remembered pain so sharp it swallowed every thought whole.
And then—
Nothing.
Except for the dream.
It crept back into me slowly, like a fog slipping under the door and blanketing me in warmth.
Dark straight hair that looked like the night sky, a warm presence at my side, and hands that didn’t hurt but soothed.
Not a face. Just the sense of being watched without condemnation. Like I was being protected from the pain I caused myself, something had stood between me and myself when I couldn’t.
My Mortifera, my half-asleep mind had decided.
Or it was Jerry, you fool.
I let out a quiet, humorless breath.
Guilt would dress itself up however it needed to survive.
Still, the feeling lingered long past my shower and even during my routine of getting ready. It was unsettling, not holy at all.
They chose to help me when I chose to hurt. But why?
I took stock of my inventory, every movement measured as I wrote down my missing items in my journal. At least it wasn’t the mindless scratches. I used to think I could let the ink bleed onto the paper, and I would be okay.
That was what they taught you.
‘Don’t hurt yourself, hurt objects with no meaning.’
I tore, paper after paper, never able to purge the anger. When I swirled the quill pen on the parchment, it was a story of pain. I was no artist, but I kept those silly drawings to remind myself where I had been.
I dared to study my reflection in the mirror. I looked worse than I felt. My gray eyes were rimmed red, making contacts an impossible task. My jaw was unshaven, leaving deep shadows carved into my face. I looked like the man I used to be, before Monticello and before the collar.
That thought followed me all the way to Jerry’s butcher shop.
The bell over the door chimed when I stepped inside, and I sighed with familiarity. The smell of meat, sawdust, and cold metal hit me immediately, grounding in a way incense never managed.
Jerry Cross looked up from behind the counter and smiled.
There it was, solid and uncomplicated.
Exactly what I needed, my friend to bring my ass back to reality, and to scold me for being a moron.
“Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said warmly. “If it isn’t my favorite sinner.”
I huffed a breath that almost passed for a laugh. “Good morning to you, too, Jer.”
He studied me for half a second longer than was the polite way of the town, his eyes narrowing on my glasses and my disheveled hair.
Jerry always saw too much.
I waited for him to yell at me for last night, but instead he wiped his hands on his apron and came around the counter, pulling me into a brief, firm embrace.
“You look like hell, brother,” he said quietly.
“I feel worse.”
“Sit,” he ordered, steering me toward the small table near the back. “You eat yet?”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
On cue, my stomach growled like a demon trying to escape, and Jerry gave me his infamous eye brow.
“Mhmm.”
Behind us, Elias and Maria were on the floor with wooden blocks, building something that leaned dangerously to one side. Elias glanced up at me and grinned with his two front teeth missing.
“Hi, Father Jed!”
“Morning, Elias.” I nodded toward Maria. “Hey, peanut.”
She waved solemnly, clutching a block in each hand like her own precious cargo, while she shook her head and let her curly blonde hair bounce.
Jerry poured coffee without asking, making it exactly how I liked it, sliding a plate of summer sausage and toast in front of me.
“Black, just like that heart of yours, Father.”
The man knew my habits too well.
He sat across from me, his forearms braced on the small counter. “Alright,” he said. “Start talking. What is it you always called me? Gouda?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Goda. Ya know, like Yoda, because you’re old as hell and wise?”
Jerry smacked my chest, and I winced slightly, brushing it off with a laugh.
“Hey now, I ain’t much older than you. I got maybe six years on you, asshole.”
I stared into my mug for a moment, watching steam curl upward. “Yeah, whatever you say, oh mighty, old Master Cross.”
Jerry laughed, feeding Maria little bites of his own food. I hardly saw Dawn or him eat their food. They always sacrificed it to their little gremlins. Having kids meant giving them the life they deserved, and sometimes that meant giving them every little bit of happiness you had.
I didn’t know if I would ever be a dad, but I doubted I could ever be like Jerry Cross. He was unattainable as a man, husband, and friend. He may not be much older than me, but I looked up to him more than anyone else.
“I’m…not doing well,” I said out loud, but my voice was so soft and broken I wondered if he heard me over the kids playing.
“That’s obvious, my friend.”
I swallowed. “I had a dream about her.”
Jerry didn’t interrupt while I tried to collect my thoughts. He never did. He always listened with his big, bright eyes and caring heart.
“It was weird. I saw someone standing over me. A woman. She had this long, really dark hair that tickled my face, and she was—” I shook my head in frustration. “She wasn’t speaking to me. Just sat there. Like she was…guarding me? Protecting me from something, I don’t know.”
Jerry leaned back slightly, his eyes thoughtful. “Maybe she was protecting you from yourself.”
I frowned, but he kept going. “How’d that make you feel?”
“Worse,” I admitted. “And better? I don’t know which feels wrong anymore.”
He nodded slowly. “Sounds like guilt trying to give you mercy you won’t give yourself.”
The words landed heavier than they should have.
He was the only one who knew the truth. The only one who knew I hadn’t just wandered into Monticello by accident. The only one who knew I’d run like a bitch and worse—who made me run.
Jerry had found me bleeding in the street ten years ago, half dead and feral, shaking like a Mortiferal cornered by its own sins. He and Dawn had taken me in without question, fed me, let me sleep on their couch while I tried to remember how to even be a fucking human.
The gang had been in a chaotic mess when I got back to them that night, bleeding from the knife fight. But it wasn’t me they were focused on.
The king has fallen! That motherfucker is dead. Someone killed him, and now I will fucking rule the streets.
It didn’t take me long to realize the ‘king’ was none other than Jayce Kayuzi, the leader of The Crimson Carrion. If anyone found out I killed him, they’d come for me. I couldn’t stick around for that to happen, so I stitched myself with my mother’s sewing needle and thread and stole the car.
I didn’t know how I even ended up in Utah. I just kept driving and driving until there was nothing left, and no money in my pockets. That month I was with the Cross family was the month I needed, and it saved my life.
The memory pulled me under before I could stop it.
I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing until Jerry clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“You with me, Jed?”
I nodded, but the truth was I wasn’t in the shop anymore. The smell of raw meat and coffee had bled into something colder, something damp and metallic, and the sound of the refrigeration unit turned into the lull of traffic humming over wet asphalt.
I was sleeping behind a closed-down laundromat when Jerry found me.
Not sleeping…folded. Curled inward, as if I took up less space, the world might pass me by without finishing the job my gang hadn’t had a chance to do.
The cardboard under my ribs, and the concrete seeping cold straight into my bones, was my reminder that I was alive. My jacket was someone else’s, stolen or given, I didn’t remember which one. My hands were cracked, my knuckles split open, with dried blood under my nail beds.
I hadn’t eaten in two days…maybe three. Time seemed to stop having any meaning when you’re measuring it in hunger.
This was it.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just factual. This is where men like me end up when they finally run out of road. And I was at my last stop.
Boots stopped near my head, and I lay down, waiting for the steel-toed edges to crack my skull.
I didn’t look up.
I didn’t have the energy to pretend I wasn’t already dead.
“You alive?” The voice wasn’t cruel, and that was what confused me.