Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
FADE
After I dragged Erez to the gym on Tuesday, I didn’t hear from him all week, and he didn’t answer my texts or calls either. At first, I thought maybe he was actually upset with me, but I’ve dragged him to the gym many times, and he’s never been angry at me before.
On Friday, I cook chicken-fried steak and creamed greens with the intent to bribe him for his forgiveness. I even make a peach crumble for dessert.
However, when I get to Poison Ink, they tell me he hasn’t been at work for several days, and his appointments for the week were all canceled. Could Erez be sick? That would explain why he isn’t answering his phone.
So I head to his apartment and knock on his door for a solid twenty minutes. Erez doesn’t answer.
Okay, now I’m worried.
I head back down to my bike and contemplate where else he could be, but I don’t have any ideas at all. Erez doesn’t go places. To my knowledge, he works and goes home.
“Maybe I don’t know him at all,” I murmur. Maybe he has a secret life that I don’t know about.
Unsure what else to do, I begin scrolling through my phone. I think I have his brother’s number. I can’t remember why now, but I’m pretty sure… yep. Zephyr Deth. Right there.
“Hello?” a voice answers.
Is that Zephyr? I can’t remember what his voice sounds like.
“Hi. Zephyr?” I ask, feeling a little foolish.
He’s amused though. I can hear it in his voice. “Yep. What’s up?”
“This is Fade,” I say, then I add my last name in case that tells him more. “Callum. Uh… Erez is my best friend.” And now I sound like a twelve-year-old.
Zephyr chuckles. “I know. What’s up?”
“Do you know where Erez is?”
All the humor is gone now. Silence answers my question for what feels like a solid ten minutes before he says, “It’s Friday. He should be at work. Or just getting home.”
“I agree. But the guys at work say he hasn’t been in all week and that his appointments were canceled. Unless he’s ignoring me pounding on his door for the past twenty minutes, he’s not at home. Actually, I’m parked in his space, so now I feel a little foolish for knocking on his door for so long.”
Zephyr exhales into the phone. “I’ll find him and call you back.”
“Thanks. I’m just… worried.”
“Yeah. I know.”
He hangs up the phone, and I settle onto my bike, expecting to wait ten minutes at most. Erez is closest to Zephyr. Even if Erez doesn’t want to answer my calls, I imagine he’ll answer Zephyr’s.
Ten minutes pass. Then twenty. Forty. It’s just over an hour when my phone finally rings. It’s not Zephyr though. My stomach rolls when I see Erez’s name flashing on my screen.
“Erez,” I greet in relief. “Are you okay?”
He doesn’t answer right away. I hear his breathing, so I know he’s there. The rolling in my stomach stops and squeezes instead.
“Do you know where my parents live?” he asks.
“Yeah. You’ve brought me there a few times.”
There’s another moment of silence. “Can you come over?”
“Your parents’ house? Are they okay? Did something happen?”
“Yes.”
I’m not sure which question that answers, but it doesn’t matter. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I tell him.
“Thanks.”
“I have to hang up now. Okay?”
Erez sighs. “Yeah.”
I don’t want to hang up. So I don’t. Instead, I hit the mute button, turn off the screen, and shove my phone into my pocket before starting my bike.
There’s a chance that I break half a dozen traffic laws, but I don’t care at all.
Something is wrong. I could hear it in his voice.
Fear grips my chest as I park my bike and practically run up the front steps.
The door opens just as I reach it, and I’m looking at one of their fathers—Dadwa, I think.
I’ve only met the Deth parents a handful of times over the past five years.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
The corner of his mouth quirks just a little, but it’s not a real smile by any means. There’s sadness there.
I set my helmet on the floor by the door and follow Dadwa inside. He leads me upstairs, and my feet falter briefly about halfway up. That’s when black canvases start lining each side. Tall, thin ones. Small ones. Wide ones.
The upstairs hall is much the same. The floor is lined with black canvases leaning against all the walls. In some places, they’re stacked two and three deep.
Inside another room, every surface is covered with these black canvases, but in this room, there are people. I recognize Zephyr and his three lovers. The rest of Erez’s parents. Lanzo, the middle brother, is sitting in a chair.
I don’t see Erez at first. My gaze makes several circuits around the room until I find him sitting on the floor, his back against the chair Lanzo is sitting in. His knees are bent, his head in his hands, arms resting on his knees. Lanzo’s hand is on top of Erez’s head.
Dread settles in my gut, though I have no idea why. His entire family is here. I… don’t understand.
Crossing the room, I drop to the floor beside him and scoot close. He doesn’t move, not even when my leg presses against his.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, gently brushing his hair to the side. It’s gotten a little long. Unkempt.
Erez takes a long breath, but he doesn’t answer. Not exactly. “Zeph?”
Zephyr leaves his boyfriends and kneels at Erez’s other side. A minute passes before he speaks.
“When we were kids, Erez found a little girl. She was beaten and bloody and… traumatized. He brought the girl home, and she became our sister. Alice… She grew up happy. She was smart and loved to paint. But maybe she wasn’t as happy as we thought she was.
When she was fifteen, almost ten years ago now, she killed herself. ”
My heart stops entirely for a second. Oh fuck.
“Erez has spent the last decade looking for something that Alice left behind. A letter. A journal. Anything at all. The paramedics called it an accident, but knowing Alice, nothing about her death would suggest it was an accident. It was suicide. There was something she couldn’t escape.
Something she kept to herself. Something she hid while she pretended everything was fine. ”
I scoot closer to Erez and rest my hand along his back. I’m surprised when he leans into me. His head lands on my shoulder, his hand on my leg. I wrap around him, trying to ease some of his grief and pain.
“Erez has always blamed himself,” Zephyr says, and my grip on Erez tightens.
“Last fall, I promised Erez that I’d help him look because I believe he’s right.
Alice wouldn’t just leave without telling us something.
She had to have left something. We just weren’t being smart enough to unravel the puzzle. ”
Erez’s fingers dig into my thigh harshly. Lanzo’s hand settles on his shoulder instead of his head now.
“Tuesday afternoon, he found the door in the dormer wall of Alice’s room cracked open. Inside, he found… the secrets that Alice kept hidden.”
“He found the black paint,” Lanzo says.
His words make my attention turn to the canvas in front of us, the one that Erez had been staring at, and I realize that they’re not black canvases. They’re painted black.
I’d been so concerned with Erez that I hadn’t given any of them attention. Now that I’m looking, I can see that they’re not solid black. There are shapes. The longer I look, I think the paint shifts until I can see… something.
An angry, ugly face. A scratch, as if someone is trying to fight off an attack. The face in the painting is an attack. There’s a shape on the bottom. A figure. Headless. I get a weird, sick feeling that I’m the figure fighting against the face.
My eyes flick to another. It’s the same but different. The sobbing, screaming face of a child in shadows. I can feel the raw pain. The fear. Horror.
Painting after painting is the same but different. Different… attacks. Different messages. Different emotions. But they’re all the same too.
My heart races, and I grip Erez tightly. “I am not an art enthusiast,” I say quietly. “I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”
“Memories,” Matty whispers.
I shudder. I can’t imagine the memories that haunted this girl. My stomach twists with a sick, sour feeling that threatens to come up. There’s something at the corner of my mind when I look at these painted memories. The screams. The attackers. The pain. The fight. The helplessness. The fear.
“Is this the message?” I ask, my voice barely audible.
Erez nods, but it’s Zephyr that answers. “It is, I think. But it still needs interpreting.”
“I think we’re a little afraid to figure it out,” their mom says quietly. “I think they’re all very obvious, but we can’t bring ourselves to see them for what they are. It’s too horrible.”
Erez nods again.
I pull him closer, practically bringing him into my lap so I can wrap around him. Protect him from the horrors his sister lived with for fifteen years.
We sit in silence for a long time. No one moves much. I think we’re all staring at the paintings but not continuously. They’re too horrible. Too evocative. The message too unspeakably clear.
Their mother is right. All we’d have to do is put a name to what we’re seeing, but to do that would mean we’d be plunged into the life of a little girl who couldn’t get away from the demons who possessed her. The devils that hurt her.
A little girl!
So our brains refuse to let the pieces settle together.
No one looks directly at the paintings for any length of time.
I note that no matter how many times I look at the same painting, after I’ve looked away and returned to it, I see new details.
The cruelty in the eyes of the monster. The sweat on their forehead. The subtle upturned tic of his mouth.
Limbs. The monster’s limbs and the victim’s. One set much smaller than the other.
I press my face into Erez’s head and try to force the image out of my head. I don’t want to see it, but somehow, it feels disrespectful to look away. The victim survived their abuse. The least I can do is bear witness.
I’m not strong enough.
Instead, I hold Erez and try to offer him as much comfort and strength as I can muster. I didn’t know Alice. Erez did. He knew her. He loved her. And he lost her. If it’s this hard to face as someone who never knew her, I can’t imagine how awful the family who loves her feels.
“What can I do?” I ask.
Erez doesn’t answer. One of his hands is gripping the front of my shirt. The other is still digging into my thigh. His face is pressed into my neck, and I think I feel moisture.
His chest isn’t heaving from sobs or anything. That doesn’t mean he isn’t crying though. I think he’s lived with the pain of knowing that something awful was lurking in the shadows for so long that it’s going to take him some time to truly feel the emotions of these paintings.
“I killed a man,” Erez says, and I feel the entire room shift to look at him. “The man I found beating her. I shoved him onto the highway into traffic, and he died.”
“You found her being beaten,” one of their fathers says.
Erez nods into my neck. “In an alley. When I snuck out to wander around. I heard her crying, but no one was listening, so I followed the sound. He kicked her in the gut. He pulled her up by her hair and hit her so hard that she slammed into the ground. I didn’t think. I just ran. Then I stole her away.”
“Oh my god,” their mom whispers.
“Zephyr looked into the dead man recently, but it’s hard to follow around a dead man. He has no new stories to tell. He’s confirmed that Alice wasn’t his child, though. From what he can find, Alice wasn’t his relation at all.”
“My focus has been trying to find out where he took her from. Was it an abduction? Something uglier?” Zephyr says, and I don’t think I’m the only one who glances at the paintings at his words.
“With both Alice and the man dead, it’s not easy to follow a trail that’s twenty years in the past. Wherever he got Alice from, if it’s illegal, that trail has long since been covered and erased. ”
“There’s going to be something in the paintings,” Lanzo says. “Alice’s answers are there.”
“I think so too,” Zephyr agrees.
“Alice loved puzzles,” their mom says. “She left us one. A very big, complicated one.”
“It’s going to be bigger than just unraveling her memories,” Matty says. I can barely see him. His fingers are hovering just beyond the edge of a painting. “I don’t think the memories simply end.”
“What does that mean?” a dad asks.
Matty shakes his head. “Alice escaped.” He finally touches the painting in front of him.
“This person didn’t. That one over there has Alice as the victim.
This one she’s a witness. That’s what the different perspectives are telling us.
One she’s experiencing. One she’s watching.
Alice was removed from this… place… The others probably remained. ”
“I hate everything about this,” their mom says.
“If you follow the path, you need to follow it to the end,” Matty says. “No matter how ugly the truths are. That’s what Alice is telling you. Find her past and destroy it.”
Chills cover my body in a wave from my scalp to the soles of my feet. Erez takes a deep breath.
“Her ghost?” Erez asks.
“No,” Matty says softly. “I don’t know if she has a ghost. But you have dead here. I think one of them was a victim in this particular painting.”
“Then ask them,” Lanzo says.
“Zeph said Alice was mute at first,” Matty says. “Am I remembering that correctly?”
Erez isn’t the only one who answers with a nod.
“I think that was part of their… abuse? They weren’t allowed to speak.
If you can’t speak, you can’t tell anyone what you’re the victim of.
Alice was rendered mute by trauma, but that trauma probably still hung around and wouldn’t let her speak of her abuse.
This dead is muted by trauma too. They died as a small child,” Matty says.
“Do you want to continue looking into what Alice left behind?” Zephyr asks Erez.
Erez doesn’t hesitate. “Yes. I need to find the people who began Alice’s abuse, and if they’re still alive, I’m going to kill them. Intentionally this time.”
My breath catches, but I don’t speak. I’m not sure I’d feel any differently if Alice had been my sister. But could I kill people? I’m not sure.