Aaron #2
He waves a hand off into the dark. “There’s a market for that, for men with coin and no conscience.
An auction house, way out past the edge of everything, where they trade the dark relics and the stolen power.
And there he was, front row, bidding on somebody else’s strength like it was a glass of wine, dressed up fine and pretending he wasn’t rotting under the suit.
” His smile thins. “Alone, too. No Henry in sight.”
I don’t have anything to say to that.
“Henry used him up and threw him out, Aaron. Whatever Eric was to him, it’s over, and that auction was a cast-off man scrambling to buy his way back into mattering to anyone who’d have him.
” He looks down at him with no pity. “He spent a lifetime sorting his own children into the ones he’d keep and the ones he’d leave to rot, and now he’s learning how that feels from the bottom of it.
I can’t say it troubles me.” He nudges him with his shoe, and Eric groans into the grass.
“I walked in and collected him. He didn’t come easy. ”
Eric drags himself onto his hands and knees. When his head comes up and he gets a look at Josiah, real fear breaks over his face—handsome once, a ruin now, swollen, split, dark with blood.
“Didn’t he stomp your face once?” Josiah grins slow and lets his fangs show. “I wanted to return the favor.” He licks the blood off his fingers one at a time. Then he straightens his suit and scrubs the backs of his shoes on the grass like he stepped in something.
“What—“ Eric’s voice comes out wet and broken. “What the fuck is he?”
“Your worst nightmare,” I tell him, and catch his arm.
He tries to pull away, weak, his fingers scrabbling at my wrist, but there’s nothing behind it.
I barely have to hold on. His dark magic comes loose the moment I reach for it and floods into me, warm and oily and wrong, draining out of him in one long steady haul he can’t fight.
Right in front of me, he changes. His skin goes slack and gray, the stolen youth bleeding off him until there’s nothing left but the worn-out old man he should have been all along.
I let go, and he drops back into the grass, coughing, hollowed all the way out.
The cabin door bangs open behind me, and my mother comes down the steps fast. She pulls up over Eric, looks down at him with a smirk, then lifts her eyes to Josiah. “Thanks, Jo.”
Josiah actually ducks his head, color rising in his face. “It was nothing.”
I’m still down in the grass beside him, and I look up at Josiah. “I don’t know how to—“
He holds a hand up before I can finish. “You owe me nothing, Aaron Blackwood.” Then he lifts one finger, and the play goes out of his voice. “But. If you wanted to make me happy, truly happy, you’d try to understand those witches and warlocks back in that realm instead of throwing them away.”
He lowers his hand. For once he isn’t performing for anyone. “That place reminded me of who I used to be. And how far I’ve come since.”
Layla’s behind him before any of us hear her come, that long blade still loose in her hand. “You’ve got a long way to go, honey.”
Josiah clears his throat and doesn’t quite turn around. “Beautiful Layla. I got home as quickly as I could.”
She lifts the blade between them, fangs out, wearing that same sweet, sinister look from before. “You know what they say, Jo. Those who keep the ones who love them waiting always come to regret it.”
“That one isn’t in my book,” Josiah says.
“I know, honey.” Her smile spreads wide. “It’s going on your gravestone.”
He turns to me and my mother, smooth as ever, like there isn’t a blade at his back at all.
“I really must be going. I had a wonderful time tonight, Aaron. Make sure you have your fun with Eric. It’s what I’d do.
” Then he’s gone, a blur off the edge of the lawn, and Layla goes right after him into the dark.
My mother sets her hands on her hips and looks out at the empty place where they were. “Good ol’ Jo. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.”
She turns her smirk down on Eric where he lies in the grass, gray and gasping. “And what are we going to do with you?”
“Nothing.” I get to my feet. “I know exactly where to put him for now.”
I open a portal in the ground right under him, a black drop with no bottom I can see. Eric barely gets a hand into the grass before he goes through it. I close it over him and seal it shut. My mother lunges a step too late.
“Aaron—what are you doing? We could have used him to find Henry.”
I look at her like she’s lost her mind. Eric isn’t something to be passed around and traded off to find Henry.
He’s the man who looked at his own son and decided I wasn’t worth wanting.
Whatever happens to him from here is mine to decide and no one else’s—not Amir’s, not hers, not the whole grieving Glen’s—when I’m good and ready and not a moment before.
She reads it off my face and doesn’t push it.
“Fine.” She drops her hands off her hips. “If Jo found him in under an hour, I’ll tell you right now, a little faith in that man and finding Henry won’t be any trouble at all.”
That’s the thing that does it. Not Eric, not Hella, not the power sitting heavy in me now, but my mother standing in the dark telling me it’ll be alright.
I pull her into me before I can think better of it.
She stiffens in surprise, and then it all just comes up out of me at once, and I start to cry.
She wraps both arms around me and holds on. “Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
It all pours out of me, every year I’ve carried since I was a boy who knew his own father didn’t want him. My mother holds me through it and doesn’t tell me to stop. She just lets me.
I finally let him go.