Chapter Twenty-Eight
Two Weeks Later
The concrete walls of Devil’s Tunnel are covered in lichen and graffiti. Every shadow is like ink, carrying on the ghostly wail of a chilling breeze.
I swallow, sweat prickles across my upper lip, and I’m shaking, even though I’m boiling with fury, staring at my mangled fist, the same one I’d just crushed against the concrete beneath.
“I don’t run from my fucking storm, man.”
My words make me feel like a fraud, and the way Harlen bows his head tells me I look like one too.
Still, I could only hope we both knew they carried some truth.
I was here, after all, in this fucking death chamber, sitting beside the place they had found my sister.
But we both knew that when I wasn’t, I was running, blocking, burying, with a little coke in my nose that I’d managed to get from the club, and too much liquor, corroding my liver.
I didn’t know how to move forward without taking ten steps back.
I flex my knuckles, feel my skin peel off the bone. Blood is everywhere, a stream of anger and despair.
It had been four weeks since my sister was murdered, and Chief Wynston was no closer to catching the monster that had done this to Jade, to Laiken, than any of us. Even worse, Skinner had come up empty too.
The town was walking on the razor-sharp edge of what felt to be an endless cliff. Every mother and father that had a daughter, even a son, even the ones that hadn’t cared before, had set curfews.
In the wake of Jade’s death, at night, Devil’s Peak had become what I knew it would, a ghost town.
Harlen watches me as the sticky liquid rolls down my wrist, smearing across the lyrics scrawled in ink.
I’m staring at them, reading them on a cycle when a droplet of vibrant scarlet splatters in the center of the page, webbing outwards, laying a crimson blanket over what is a broken truth.
You were never a number
A bright spirit of wonder
A soul that should have grown older
An angel I should have kept closer
I gnaw at my bottom lip, drag a trembling hand through my greasy hair, pinching at the bridge of my nose. My heart slams inside my chest when I’m hit with where to take my agony next.
I turn to Harlen, lift my head, eyes wet, smearing more blood across the thin paper where my throbbing hand rests.
I speak in a croak, “Those chords, the ones I showed you at the clubhouse before…before…” I pause, can’t finish, can’t bring myself to get the words out. “The ones Jade helped me with.”
A guitar pick is in his mouth, and he’s flicking it with his tongue when he reaches for his dad’s old acoustic again.
“Yeah.” His voice is muffled around the plastic, then he spits it into the palm of his hand and runs it through a loop.
A shiver trickles down my spine, my thoughts wheeling back to that day in my room with Jade, with my keyboard, with my frustration, her blanket of ease.
I’m reminded of the way Jade had pushed her hand to her chest and said, “And make sure you let yourself feel it right here, too. Because if you don’t…” She tsks, shaking her head. “You’ll never find what you’re looking for.”
Harlen rolls the notes over, and I rasp, “Don’t stop doing that.” And with sticky fingers and a quivering hand, I pen what comes next.
Take me back
To the gun in my throat
Can I go back
And not fucking choke
Weak and spineless
Hand me the rope
Bullet or blade
It’s time for me to go
It’s time for me to go
And meet my sister’s ghost
I close my eyes, hear Jade’s voice again, an ever so quiet reverb at the back of my head, something I hope to never misplace or forget.
“Drag us through your rubble, tough guy.”
My shakes quickly turn into a palsied shudder, sweat dampening my body.
I stroke my hand across the back of my neck. I’m staring at the blood next to me, hers dry, mine fresh, when the phantom of Laiken’s voice, the cadence of terror, barrels through like a tumbling web of steel.
“Ch-ch-chase, help.”
“He sh-sh-sho us, and now…”
It feels as if I’ve been incinerated from the inside out.
I let my chin fall to my chest, my hands now dangling over my knees. I draw back a deep breath.
Harlen sits with me in silence before his phone beeps. He works to shuffle it out of his front pocket, swiping it open.
My breath catches in my throat when I let my eyes trail to the device, seeing a pink love heart emoji and Laiken’s name splayed on the lit screen.
A shiver tangles across my limbs when I think about how many times I’ve sent her to voicemail over the past month.
I close my eyes, remind myself that it's for the best. And still, I find myself asking Harlen the question scraping behind my teeth.
“She alright?” I keep my eyes on Harlen for a moment longer before shifting them away, blindly scratching at my chin.
It’s the first time I’ve asked about her in four weeks. Harlen has passed along a few comments, but I had barely heard them around all the noise in my head.
Harlen turns to look at me, but I refuse to meet his gaze. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him send his phone into darkness.
“She’s heading back to school today, man.”
A thrum of alarm pulses through me, across my arms, down my legs, numbing the base of my spine. A volt of protection, of concern, of fear.
“You reckon that’s a good idea?” I find myself asking like I have any control over what Laiken does, or doesn’t do. And once the words are out, I want to catch them and jam them back down. I had no goddamn right to ask questions like this anymore.
Harlen shrugs. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
I cough, shuffle on the concrete.
When I don’t reply he rubs more dirt in the wound. “Don’t you think Jade would want—” he starts, but I quickly cut him off.
“Don’t.” My word comes with a warning. Dragging my hands through my hair, I tug at the strands to alleviate even just the smallest amount of guilt.
I failed Jade.
I failed Laiken.
I shot my mother.
And I murdered my father.
I’m a fucking murderer.
I will not let Laiken look into my face, only to see the monster I’ve become.
I chew a cuticle off my thumb, feeling the disquiet in my chest deepen.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Harlen exhales, and I feel it like ice across my shoulders.
“Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s still a shit fight out there, everyone wanting their questions answered. I told her to call me if she needed me.”
I hang my head. I hated that Harlen would become the man I promised her that I would be. But there was something inside of my chest that was grateful for it too.
He’d be the only one I could trust in my place.
Harlen shuffles to his feet, then kicks lightly at my shin. “Let’s get out of here. Rusty’s taking the food he cooked to the clubhouse. I’m fucking starving.”
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t, that the last thing I wanted to do was eat, but instead, I rise to my feet.
I shove my notebook into the front of the guitar case and haul it onto my back, feeling my phone vibrate against my thigh.
I slide it out of my pocket only an inch to see another text message light up from Uncle Nick.
Let me know if there’s anything you need.
He’d been the one that had organized the direct burials for not only Jade, but my mother, and the deadbeat I no longer spoke about, when I was completely fucked off my face and told him to ‘just put them in the ground.’ And now, I had to believe that these text messages, the ones that came every couple of days, were his way of dealing with his own guilt for watching the way my father treated my mother and Jade; and not doing a damn thing to stop it.
Guilt was a bitch, especially when the person you felt it against was dead.
He’d have to live with that now, the same way I’d have to live with not protecting Jade and Laiken the way I’d always told myself I would.
Harlen is already at the mouth of the tunnel when I turn and whisper over my shoulder, “Love you, J.”
I drag my dripping nose across my shoulder, choke back a cry, listening to the throb of my own heart when I walk away. “So. Fucking. Much.”