Seventy-Two
I’m sitting in Maddox’s room again, my guilt clawing at me. Micha is acting like she’s fine, but beneath her act, I know she’s struggling with adjusting back to the normal world. She’s hurting because of me. Because I failed her.
“I should’ve saved her sooner,” I say.
“How?”
“I could’ve stopped Eduardo from leaving with her at the school.”
“How?”
This time, he doesn’t even let me answer. He just leans forward and says, “You’ve had months to think about it, and you still don’t have an answer, do you?” He shakes his head. “There was nothing you could’ve done.”
“I –”
“No,”
he cuts in, but if I’m being honest, I didn’t have any other thoughts lined up besides that one word anyway. “You ordered Mother and Rudy to find her, knowing they were the only ones capable of going alone. They failed. I was the only one who could’ve pulled the demon free, and I fucked up. I should’ve closed the summoning circle.”
“Lou could’ve done it. It’s her expertise –”
“And the Prince of Pride would’ve just kidnapped her once she let him out of the circle. Then he would’ve either killed her or dragged her back to his world once he found out she was pregnant.”
“She said she could’ve figured out a better working –”
“She’s lying because of her own guilt. You know that. She’s sixteen. The demon is who knows how old. As smart as she is when it comes to summoning circles, she can’t compete with his experience. He would’ve found a way to take her. And Micha doesn’t want her in this life.”
“She’s my life.”
Maddox’s eyes soften as he looks at me. His empathy is through the fucking roof. It has to be to know how to torture someone psychologically in a way that will actually break them. He steps into their shoes as easily as if they’re his own. He understands them – all their fear and love and desire.
But he can’t understand this.
He can’t fucking understand that I could feel her dying with every passing day. That I felt her agony, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Leaning forward, I drop my head into my hands and say, “I should’ve been able to do something to help my wife.”
“You did. You never gave up on her. You went into hel for her, and you brought her home.”
“She saved herself. She played him like a fucking badass.”
“She would’ve died without you. She almost did die.”
He frowns, looking off into the distance. Then he shakes his head. “She’s here because of you.”
“I should’ve got to her sooner.”
“You got to her when you could. You did nothing wrong.”
“I could’ve stepped through the teleportation circle at the school,”
I say. Like I did at Orpheus’ cave.
“Then you’d both be dead. You needed me and Aleric. You got fucking Aleric to go into a cage on the Plane of Monsters for two months. That’s a fucking huge thing you did.”
“It’s not. He wanted to go in there for a year.”
But I guess he found what he was looking for while he was in Maddox’s shadow because he hasn’t asked to go back.
“What? Why?”
He shakes his head immediately as he holds up a hand, back to being my therapist rather than my curious brother. “Regardless of his reasons, you found out he wanted something and traded what you needed to with the devil himself. You did everything you could’ve done for her, Varius.”
“I should’ve done more.”
“You couldn’t have.”
I frown, and he sighs. “I’m going to give you a game to play.”
“A game?”
“Yes. It’s something people do for fun.”
My eyes narrow. Mother said he wasn’t Aleric’s, but I don’t know how much I believe her.
“It’ll help you.”
He smiles. “Trust me.” His smile tells me I shouldn’t, but how much damage can he do with a game?
I storm into his room a few days later and throw my fucking laptop at him. “The game is stupid!”
I roar. “Every time I jump, a pterodactyl comes out of the sky and fucking grabs me! And if I manage to dodge it, then I land on a bomb! And when I try to diffuse it, it sets off a timer, so I try to run away, only to get hit by a car! Which, if I take the time to try to dodge, the fucking bomb explodes and I’m in the radius! Which, by the way, takes up the whole map! It’s impossible to outrun! So I have to choose how to die – car or bomb. It’s unwinnable! There isn’t a lake to jump in or cover to take! Every fucking thing I try, it just kills me! This is a really fucking, stupid, fucking, dumb, fucking game!”
My chest heaves with all my anger. I want to throttle him for being an absolute little shit.
“Did you try –”
“I have tried everything!” I yell.
“How many times?”
“Fucking hours! You are the worst therapist!”
I storm over to grab my laptop just so I can throw it at him again. “I bet you couldn’t even do it!”
“No, I couldn’t,”
he says as he ducks under the flying computer. “I could get past the bomb; there is a little pixel of the screen that’s safe, and you can get past another thirty levels that are just as hard. But you can never get to the end because it’s impossible to win.”
My mouth drops open. He admitted it! “Then why give me it? Why make me play it, thinking there was a way to finish?”
“Because you needed to know that sometimes the world sucks, that there is no right choice.”
He smiles, but it’s not his normal cocky grin. It’s one too knowledgeable for his years. “And when you played, did you blame yourself for making the wrong choices? Or did you blame the game?”
I stare at him, annoyed to all hel. “I blamed the game,”
I admit through clenched teeth.
“Exactly. Because it was the game’s fault. All we can do is control ourselves,”
he explains. He flashes a sly grin I do not like. “But if you don’t see that yet, you should play the game some –”
“Fuck you,”
I snap. “I’m going to bed. That’s the only reason I come here.”
He laughs, and I flop down onto his bed.
The nightmares still come… but the weight in my chest lifts just a little.
My talking sessions with Maddox get shorter even as the length of time I spend in his room gets longer. Ten minutes to chat; four hours to sleep.
I’m slowly starting to feel more human as the days pass, but the nightmares stop me from feeling refreshed. I still haven’t managed to talk to Maddox about what I see when I sleep. What I remember… But we talk about other things. The guilt I have in taking so long to save her. In failing Leno and Krypto and Rudy.
I rise from Maddox’s bed two and a half weeks later, my head filled with another nightmare. “Where is she?”
“Downstairs with her sister.”
I head down to see her so I can ask if she wants to go to the portal with me in an hour, which is why I’ve cut my nap short today. We’re getting a new shipment of alexandrite, so I want to be there myself when it arrives. The stuff is not just fucking expensive, but it’s rare as all hel, and I don’t even trust my allies to keep their fingers to themselves.
The memory of my nightmares clings to me as I walk though, whispering dark secrets, filling my thoughts with things I would rather not remember. I need to focus on the incoming shipment, on my duties as Boss. I shake my head to try to free myself of them, but then I realize there is something wrong. The pull to my wife isn’t leading me in this direction.
Yanking the door to the basement open, I try not to panic when I only see Lou. “Where’s Micha?” I demand.
She jumps to her feet, her eyes widening. “Um, in the bathroom.”
My stomach drops. I push out with my senses, searching the heartbeats in the house, not wanting to use up the little amount of blood we have left in the bond in case I need it to find her; we haven’t exchanged any more blood since I fed from her on the super yacht. I can’t even feel her emotions anymore, not unless I really concentrate, and there’s only a couple more times I can do that before it’s gone. So I search for her with my senses.
But her heartbeat isn’t here.
“Where is my wife?”
I ask again, and her face pales.
She takes a step back, and I try to control my rage so my Craving doesn’t break free. The last time I fed was when Maddox forced his blood in me to save my life, and it has become a constant hunger. I’m going to have to feed soon. I know it, but I want it to be with Micha, and she isn’t ready.
“Shit,”
Lou says. “She just wanted some fresh air. She said she’d be back before you woke –”
“Where is she?”
She swallows. “I don’t know.”
I turn for the door, pulling on the blood bond to lead me to her. The urge to reach her isn’t strong, which means she isn’t far. And when I search to see what she’s feeling –
My heart breaks as I close my eyes for a single step. I know where she is even without the blood bond leading me to her.
“Don’t be mad at her!”
Lou shouts after me as I climb the stairs.
“I’m not,” I say.
I’m just terrified.
Because I know she’s snuck out to get high.