Chapter Thirty-One
Back at the Wheel, Allhan stepped over the threshold of Vishous and Jane’s residence and shut the door.
Then he just stood there, his hands loosely linked, his eyes moving around until they settled on a duffle bag full of guns and ammo.
The jumble of grips and muzzles and boxes of bullets was such a commentary on how the Brotherhood handled conflict.
Did one of those lead slugs have his name on it?
“Allhan.” Doc Jane’s voice was smooth, but in a grim way. “V and I want to check in with you about how you’re doing.”
Not at all well, thank you for asking. But hey, at least they weren’t making him back up against the wall and stand on some plastic tarping.
“I-I’m okay.” As they seemed to be waiting for more, he put his hands in his pockets and felt his two phones. Not the kind of reminder he needed. “Is there something y-you wanted—”
“We know what you did.”
As Vishous cut in with the conversational equivalent of a haymaker, Allhan jerked back and felt all of the blood drain out of his head.
Holy… shit. So this was a death sentence falling on him—and through the panicked chaos in his mind, there were only two things that survived in the cognitive tornado.
Carmen.
And the beautiful Shadow he had met by accident—
Doc Jane put her palms forward and shot a glare at her mate. “Allhan, you’re not in trouble.”
… Say what? He must have heard that wrong. “I-I’m not?”
As Doc Jane started shaking her head, Vishous spoke up again. “You had to know I’d catch you. You didn’t even try to hide it—”
“Allhan, we can work through anything together. The three of us. You can trust us—”
“All you had to do was ask me—”
The two of them were speaking over each other, the syllables weaving in and out, the male and female voices merging into a single communication that ended with:
“I’m not mad at you.” Vishous’s diamond eyes were as direct as ice picks. “You’re just trying to figure out how to get past what you had to do. What you saw. What lingers.”
Between one blink and the next, he pictured blood on the ivory keys of his sire’s grand piano, blood on the flagstone floor of that conservatory, blood on his face and suit and shirt that his sister had noticed before he did.
Tears speared into his eyes, riding a rush of emotion. He’d had to keep what had happened back with his father to himself for so many obvious reasons, and the necessity of secrecy was a prison he’d always assumed he was going to be in for the rest of his life.
“It’s all right,” Vishous said in a low voice. “We gotchu.”
Was it possible there was a key to let him out?
“But I don’t think looking at all those scene reports is your best call. It’s going to trap you in a loop that’ll start like you’re just doing it to understand shit, but in the end becomes a whirlpool that sucks you down.”
Allhan rubbed his face and tried to recalibrate what they were talking about. So much death to choose from, wasn’t there.
“I would have shown you anything you wanted to see.” Vishous took a draw on his hand-rolled. “But context is critical. I’d rather have been there with you as you read everything.”
Doc Jane nodded. “And we’re just bringing this up because we’re worried about you. Not because you did anything wrong.”
As they both seemed to want him to say something, he forced his head to nod. Then tacked on, “Th-thank you.”
What else could he say? He was crushed by the parallel realities they were all living in, to the point where he had to rub the center of his chest, the ache there so acute, he couldn’t draw in a breath. He even glanced down to check that he didn’t have a black dagger sticking out of his sternum.
Not yet, he thought. That was coming later.
“Do you want to talk about what you read in the incident reports?” Doc Jane prompted.
Allhan took in a deep breath. And then the words came out in a torrent, the pressure created by so many things he couldn’t talk about transferring to what he could.
And he didn’t stutter.
“I just never had any idea about what it really is like for you.” He looked back and forth between them.
“Both of you. What your nights are like, what the days must feel like. What has to haunt you. That alley and passageway by Bathe are permanently in my head. It’s as if they’ve changed something physical inside me.
And when I was reading the reports, I was able to understand what I couldn’t before.
I can see things now. In a way I couldn’t have otherwise. ”
The stillness that came over the pair of them was remarkable, and Allhan realized that they were both always in movement.
Even if they were sitting down, their minds were so powerful, so engaged with what they did for the Brotherhood, for the species, that there was a perpetual distraction, always simmering below their surface.
“I don’t want anybody to go through what I did with those males,” Allhan continued. “But I wish other people could understand, as I do now, how it is to be you. Out in the field, facing the enemy, getting hurt, seeing what happens out there. And then in the clinic, treating the aftermath.”
His body started pacing, not because he told it to, but because the emotion swelling in him was too much to contain. Putting his hands on his head, he pushed into his skull, some part of him feeling like an explosion was imminent.
“People need to know what you do. How much—” His voice cracked. “How much they owe you. And the Brotherhood.”
Tears tangled in his lashes, and he slashed them away. “I just hadn’t thought about it. Until now. I didn’t know.”
All at once, he stopped. He was getting too close to the edge of no return if he kept talking, and as he felt both of them staring at him in shock, he had a thought that he wasn’t going to be able to bear seeing hatred and anger contort those familiar faces.
Slowly lowering his eyes, he spoke to the carpeting under his feet. “Smart people can be stupid. They can be so stupid. I am so stupid—”
“No, you’re not.”
He wasn’t sure which one of them said it. But all of a sudden, he sensed them around him. Vishous on his right, Jane on the left.
They were talking to him, their words once again overlaying until the syllables became like music, the individual components nothing to be teased apart, the totality something that both eased him and increased his torment.
In the same way a piano chord could both touch the heart and warn the soul in a straddling of sharps and flats.
Their expressions, of caring, of concern… of love… gutted him.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he whispered. “But I am very certain… that you both have been better to me than I deserve.”
As Vishous muttered curses, the lies that had been constructed and that supported Allhan’s stupid, fumbling attempts to mastermind all that he had were an ugly contamination in his mind, choking out everything good that he could have felt at a moment like this.
“I’m so sorry,” he choked out as Doc Jane wrapped him in a hug. “I don’t know why you’re doing… any of this.”
Clearing his throat, Vishous broke off and went over to stab his hand-rolled out in the ashtray he’d put on the coffee table. Then he straightened and pulled up his leathers like he was trying to find some self-control.
“I’ve wondered the same thing, Al.” As his mate gasped, Vishous shrugged and turned around. “It’s the truth. You and I decided never to have young, but here we are. With a son.”
While Allhan recoiled, Doc Jane all but threw up her hands and bugged her forest-green eyes at her mate. “Ah, listen, Allhan, what he means is—”
“You… think of me like that?” Allhan whispered.
Doc Jane pumped the proverbial air brakes again. “We’re not trying to replace anybody. You haven’t talked a lot about your mahmen and sire, but we are not looking to—”
“Those parents of yours didn’t fucking deserve you.
” As Doc Jane’s mouth fell open, Vishous’s shoulders rolled again with dismissal.
“I said what I said. Who the fuck deserts their pretrans son, leaving him to wait like a fucking dog at a house with no food, no running water, no electricity, and a cell phone with one bar of service and no battery left. Oh, and without any money. Who the fuck does that.”
“Holy shit,” Jane groaned. “It’s so not okay to lay it out like that.”
“Why, it’s the truth. Al not only knows it, he’s living the shit.” Vishous picked up another hand-rolled and lit things. “Reality is what it is.”
“Annnnnnd not everything needs a bright light. Especially right now, okay? Thanks.”
“My point is—”
“Maybe best made some other time—”
“All we want you to know, Al, is that you can ask for help.” Vishous looked at his mate pointedly. “Right? That’s the bottom-line message. You can come to us for help. About anything.”
“Ah, yes, that’s right,” she rushed in. Like she was worried the Brother would get off track again.
“You can absolutely ask us for anything. And you don’t need to look at us as parents, or anything, if that makes you feel uncomfortable.
We can just be resources for you, however you choose to define that, in whatever way you think we can be helpful. ”
Vishous regarded the glowing tip of the hand-rolled.
Then his shrewd, diamond eyes returned to Allhan.
“I’ve never been a parent, so I don’t know how to do that shit.
But I promise that I can help you, and even if I can’t, I’ll find someone who will.
Jane’s the same. You can always trust that we’ll be there for you.
Wherever you go. Whatever time of day or night. However far off into the future.”
“That’s correct,” Jane agreed in a gentle voice. “That’s… exactly right.”
Allhan went back to staring at the duffle with the guns and the ammo. “I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“That makes two of us,” Vishous muttered as Jane groaned. “But like I said, reality is what it is, and I wouldn’t change a thing. This is where we are, true?”
Doc Jane put her hand on Allhan’s shoulder. “I do think that the right people come into our lives at the right times for the right reasons. And what happens next is… fate.”
“I had the exact same thought not long ago,” Vishous murmured.
Allhan forced himself to nod because he did agree with them. The problem was, fate could be good… or bad.
He knew that he was the latter for them.
And that was a one-sided reality because only he knew it.
For now.