Chapter 42 Emory
FORTY-TWO
EMORY
With blind wrath closing in, Emory sprinted after the shadow. His legs, faintly numb, moved of their own accord, propelling him forward as he followed the shadow into a room off the hall. Once inside, the door slammed shut and delivered him into the darkness.
What did Emory know of the abyss? Everything.
He knew how it consumed with an inexorable hatred that ripped at the soul. He knew its violent allure, the gruesome promise it made. And, as the shadow approached, he knew the internal fury it provoked.
Emory’s hands shot out in front of him but groped dead space. A maddening silence devoured all sound, all but the frantic beat of his heart, until a heaviness slithered up next to him.
“Little brother,” Ivan whispered, his fetid breath warming the shell of Emory’s ear. “You can’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
Bony fingers gripped Emory’s shoulder, the sharp nails digging in. Emory whipped around. Blacker than black, the shadow moved through the void again.
“Where is she?” Emory bellowed and charged forward, colliding into a table and upending items that clattered to the floor. His knees locked, suddenly stiff and ungainly as he righted himself.
Ivan issued a horrid laugh, unchanged after all these years. The same laugh had taunted Emory through his childhood and in the nightmares since. Pressure built in Emory’s chest, and his throat ached.
“You brought Amelia into your world,” Ivan said and cast a circle around Emory as he spoke. “You knew this would happen. I think you wanted it to.”
“No,” Emory whispered.
With his heart in his stomach, he spun around to keep up. Images of Amelia flashed in his mind—her smile, her touch, the other ways he might’ve kept her safe without going so far. I can’t do this.
“You never take me at my word. What did I promise you?”
Another taunt, Emory couldn’t keep up. Winded and dizzy, though they had only just begun, his breaths came ragged.
“Stop,” he commanded but lost his nerve as he fired a shot. It buried in the wall somewhere behind him. Make it count.
As ever, Ivan remained one step ahead. “Piece by piece, limb by limb, I tore her apart, just like you knew I would. You set ‘em up. I knock ‘em down.” Ivan shuffled to a stop and spoke again. “Another life we destroyed together. I wanted to be close to you. Deep inside, you wanted it too.”
Emory inched forward until the tips of his boots met another pair of feet. In the darkness, he stood face-to-face with his brother.
“You’re lying,” he said hoarsely and licked the sweat from his upper lip. “Tell me where she is. I’ll give you anything you want.”
“Anything?”
“Yes.”
Ivan hovered close to Emory. The noises beyond the door dampened, and silence grew as thick as the darkness until Ivan spoke again.
“I want you,” he whispered, “because your soul is wrecked, just like mine. You and I are kindred in that way. You bury your instincts, but it keeps you up at night, never knowing when you’ll lose control.
You took your little blood oath, but when you’re burning up for all the wrong you’ve done, you know who you’re bound in blood with.
It’s not them, Emory. It’s me. Bloodlines will always trump blood oaths. ”
Don’t let him in, self-preservation warned, but it was too late.
The reckoning had begun; sins weighed and evil doled out.
Emory backed away, groping in the dark for something to hold on to and guide him out of there.
His chest constricted, each inhale more labored than the last, and he faintly registered the wetness of tears on his cheeks.
A click ushered in the light and Emory squinted against a single bulb swinging from the ceiling. He studied his brother’s face up close for the first time in years. He’d committed it to memory, searched for it around every corner in waking life and in nightmares too.
Only then, Emory barely recognized it. Hollow cheeks and sharp bones protruding from thin skin gave a skeletal effect, but the black of his good eye was the worst of it. With placid lunacy, it housed the knowledge of his wicked deeds but none of the burden or anguish.
“You look like our father,” Ivan said and contemplated the tears on Emory’s cheeks, “cry like him too.”
Ivan approached, his hand lifted in a mockery of tenderness. Muscles tensing, Emory flinched when Ivan’s palm met his cheek and collected the tears there.
“On his dying breath, he begged for my help. He didn’t want to die, didn’t want to leave you and Mirabelle alone with me. So, he cried and he begged. They always do.”
A ghastly smile unfolded on Ivan’s thin lips. Forgotten pain burned in Emory. He’d always believed his father died alone. That would’ve been a kindness.
“You left him to die?” Emory asked, incredulous, as he steadied himself against the wall.
Ivan stood several inches shorter than him and was noticeably much thinner than Emory remembered. Why then did he seem so larger than life and impossible to defeat?
“No. I watched then left. Later, I came for you, but you’d packed up our sister and sought sanctuary in false brotherhood. It can’t protect you or her forever. You know that.”
Ivan circled to Emory’s side and forced him to retreat from the wall. Emory lifted his gun that wavered in trembling hands.
“Where is Amelia?” he demanded tremulously.
“She was the wrong kind, but I made do,” Ivan said and leaned in close, his lips brushing Emory’s cheek. “My God, she was sweet.”
A familiar scent wafted from Ivan’s shirt. Something floral. Something sugary. Ice cream in a rose garden. It shattered the spell.
In a savage eruption, Emory launched himself at Ivan and slammed hard into his bony frame.
Together, they collided to the floor. Emory’s shoulder padded the fall but screamed with a sharp, splintering pain.
A struggle ensued of thrown elbows, knees, and fists, but neither gained anything as strength met strength in an entanglement of limbs until Ivan flipped on top of Emory.
Emory adjusted the gun in his sweat-soaked palm.
He tried to lift his arm, but Ivan’s fist cracked across his face.
The hit stunned. Emory’s eyes watered, and the iron bite of blood filled his mouth with another hit.
Arms raised, he shielded himself from the assault, but, with the heels of his hands, Ivan clamped Emory’s temples and squeezed hard until his vision blurred at the edges.
Ivan slammed Emory’s head against the concrete floor, once and then twice.
The black vignette tightened as Ivan lifted Emory’s head again.
One more smash, and lights out. With his last bit of strength, Emory thrust his hips and thrashed his legs.
Blood pooled in his nose, making it hard to breathe until Ivan’s grip slipped.
Emory toppled Ivan and climbed on top. His hands coiled around Ivan’s throat. Rage commanded his grip until he felt bones pop. His teeth gnashed with the satisfaction. More. He squeezed harder with primal instinct coursing through him. Kill or be killed. Do it.
“Where is she?” he raged and smashed his fist into Ivan’s mouth. Another brutal hit shattered his front teeth. The broken bits sliced Emory’s knuckles. Ivan choked on the blood filling his mouth as he squirmed out from underneath.
Emory grabbed his gun and sprung to his feet.
When Ivan dove into him, they collided through the door and into the hall.
The spindly lunatic had no right to his strength, and each of Emory’s punches seemed to register no pain, only grunts.
They wove around one another, slower and panting as they swung their weight into each other.
Ivan hurled himself at Emory again but crashed into the wall as Emory darted out of the way. End it. He trained his gun on Ivan. Panting on the floor, Ivan stared up at Emory but made no move to defend himself, so his hands fell to his sides.
“You can’t do it, can you?” Ivan spit out a mouthful of blood at Emory’s feet. “If you kill me, something dies in you too, the part of yourself you cherish the most; the hatred that’s become your purpose.”
Emory squatted in front of Ivan and, like a serpent’s strike, violently seized him by the throat. He pressed his gun to the middle of Ivan’s forehead.
“Where is she?”
Are you ready for this?
Emory swallowed hard. He’d spent so many years hunting the wrong answer to the question. Delighting in the hesitation, Ivan laughed as shouts sounded from a room farther down the hall.
“Amelia’s getting away!” Richard Dauer yelled. “Someone come get her!”
Emory hopped to his feet and blindly started down the hall but stopped halfway. He lifted his gun and spun around. Ivan limped along the wall. Another glob of blood filled his mouth, and he flashed a crimson smile.
“Me or her?” Ivan rasped and edged farther away. Behind him, the open area had cleared out, all but a few dead bodies sprawled on the floor. “You can’t have both.”
Their eyes met with common knowledge passing between them and the only thing they’d ever agree on—it ended when one of them was dead.
Emory didn’t move in either direction. Time slowed as Ivan shuffled backward. Gun lifted, Emory followed, unable to look away or change course. If only a handful of moments in life truly defined one’s fate, this was surely one.
“You hate me more than you’ll ever love her,” Ivan said as he stood at the far edge of moonlight streaming across the floor. Shadows gathered at his back. With another backwards step, he beckoned Emory to join him, drawing him once again into the darkness.
Emory could follow him there and into the depths of depravity. Perhaps it was where he belonged. He strode toward the edge of madness, closer to his brother who looked in raptures as the gap closed between them.
End it.
Stopping short of the shadows, Emory pulled the trigger. The recoil ripped through him, sending a shockwave of pain through his shoulder. He ran for the room down the hall and looked back the moment before he careened inside.
Blacker than black again, Ivan’s silhouette hobbled around the corner, not dead but evidently injured. Like a phantasm, vaporous in the way he evanesced back into the abyss, Ivan was gone.