Chapter 8
Luke
Getting out of a rehab I checked myself into as a lie is proving more difficult than I previously thought.
The fact that it seemed like a good idea to come here in the first place is possibly an indication that I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I first imagined.
But I’m ready to get the hell out now. My plan is to tell Leo what my initial plan was, and have him spring me.
I haven’t seen Leo in five days. Not since his first visit. I really thought he’d be dropping in more often, but maybe something distracted him. Leo gets into his own trouble more often than I do; he just pretends to be normal.
“Luke? There’s a guy here to see you.” My roommate is now a veteran in his fifties. The kid went home two days ago after promising not to crash his stepdad’s car again. The veteran keeps to himself, but he likes a job to do.
“Oh, yeah? Thanks.”
I get as much of my stuff as I can fit in my pockets. I’m still not allowed shoelaces because Clipboard is on my case, so I flip-flop my way to the Friends and Family room.
“Where the hell have you…”
One look at Leo, and I change the question.
“What the hell happened to you?”
He looks rough as hell. He looks like he should be put in here, rather than me.
He has the dark circles and that indescribable strung-out look everyone here gets when they have to confront something they would absolutely rather not.
He looks like he spent forty days and forty nights in the desert of his own soul.
“Had a run-in with an unsavory character,” he says.
I sit down on the other side of the table and frown at him. I’m getting angry, actually. First Teddy dies, and now someone got to Leo?
“What kind of person gets the better of you? What’s happening to our family? We used to be untouchable!”
Leo gives me a long look, and I see something shift behind his eyes.
“We got touched, Luke. We got touched real fucking bad. We lost Teddy, and frankly, I don’t think anything is ever going to be the fucking same.”
I’ve never heard Leo speak with that much emotion. Usually he is as stoic as it is possible to be. So much so, that it feels like he’s made of ice. He’s been called a psychopath more than once in his life, and there have been times I believed it too. I don’t now.
I lower my voice and lean in. “What happened to you? Tell me.”
“I got dosed with my own supply of ketamine and a few other things, and met God,” he says.
I let out a laugh of surprise and deep fucking amusement.
“You fucking what?”
A lot of eyes are turning in our direction now. It’s hard to have a private conversation in a place like this. All anybody has is the time to be really fucking curious, and Leo and I tend to draw attention anyway at the best of times.
“I have blends,” Leo says. “To deal with people. Dissociatives, sedatives, the works. You know.”
I did know of Leo’s penchant for chemistry, yes. Can’t say I ever approved of it, but he always promised that he was using his skills for good. Never really believed that either.
“I had someone I thought might know about Teddy, and they got the syringe, and I spent the next three days meeting every fucking deity that ever existed, and some that never got to,” he says.
“After that, I went to a fast food place and ate my weight in their menu. It was the only thing that brought me back to my body. Fat, carbs, soda. Lifesavers.”
He’s talking in a slow drawl like he’s still trying to put himself back together.
I can’t help but chuckle. Poor bastard must have been miserable.
Most people I know who have those kinds of psychedelic breakthroughs do so under the care of shamans in some kind of special South American facility, and they generally come back pretentious rather than changed.
“You couldn’t get out?”
“I was shackled to a bed in the cabin I brought for the purposes of breaking the mark.”
I laugh again, and it feels so fucking good. Pure amusement and fuckery and joy flood through my veins. “You could have fucking died, man.”
“I’m aware,” he says grimly. “Glad it entertained you, though.”
“We have to go and get the person who did that. Who was it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, suddenly cagey.
Okay. That’s a problem to solve later. I can interrogate his newly plastic brain once I’m not wearing grippy socks and slide-y sandals.
“Alright, well, it’s time I got out of here. I thought going through rehab would give me a clear shot at the person I was looking for in connection with Teddy, but all it’s got me is forced sedation and institutional tacos. Tell them you’re taking me out.”
He looks at me dubiously. “This isn’t a fucking hotel. I can’t just check you out.”
“It’s not a prison, either.”
“You got committed here, brother. I think at this point, it basically is.”
Now he’s fucking with me. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to the whole being shackled to a bed high on his own drugs thing, but if there was ever someone who deserved that to happen to them, it’s probably Leo.
“Then you need to break me the fuck out. Or, better than that, tell them you won’t be paying the bill. I’ll be out the back door with the garbage cans before we know it.”
“I think Aiden is the one they deal with,” Leo says. “I’ll call him.”
He goes off to make the call. All the way outside the front door where I am not supposed to go. Two big burly men in tight white shirts are standing guard in case any of us try to make a break for it. It happens more often than you think.
Clipboard comes over to me. “You’ve been making a rather loud scene, Mr. Levin,” he says, his eyes narrowing at me. He really hates me, which is an excessive response. I’ve been the model patient the last few days. He just doesn’t like my attitude, or my height, or my face.
“Because I laughed?”
“There will be a test when your brother leaves,” he says. “I suspect you’ve been slipped something.”
The man is begging to be punched in the fucking face. He knows I haven’t been given anything. This place has cameras all over it. We should get hold of them and wipe them if we don’t want Leo’s story getting out.
“I’ve tested clean every time I’ve been here,” I tell him. “There’s not been one fucking test that I’ve failed and you know it, you fucking piece of shit.”
I’m more aggressive than I should be, but I’m also very bad at managing my emotions in times of extreme stress, so I’ve got that going for me.
“I’m just here to help,” he says in the smirkiest, smarmiest tone ever.
I can feel darkness rising in me. The kind of darkness that gets things done.
Leo’s gone to call Aiden. As if Aiden is in charge of everything.
As if Aiden gets to decide what happens to me.
I love my brother more than anything. But I hate the way I am always treated as the family problem just because I have a lot of problems.
“You can do it now,” he says.
“I’m waiting for my brother to come back.”
“Your brother’s visit for the day is over,” Clipboard insists. “He can come back tomorrow, or not at all if you’re going to make trouble.”
This fucker has an impeccable instinct for pushing my buttons at the worst possible time.
I am going to make trouble.
Leo
My head still feels like it is half-full of sand and half-full of angels.
I haven’t spoken to Aiden since I left the city.
I didn’t want to chat to him with a captive in my trunk, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to him once I’d been drugged and left to have a spiritual experience that left me wrecked.
The embarrassment of admitting to him that which I just confessed to Luke would have been too much.
Luke fucks up enough that telling him wasn’t really so bad.
But there’s more.
Things that I will not tell either of them. Things that I will probably never tell anyone.
I saw things in that state that I know weren’t real, but that felt as though they certainly were. I saw Teddy. I saw him as a baby. And then as a man. And then as a corpse.
I saw our family. Our mother and father. The darkness that took them. I saw all of it poured into Aiden. I saw him, as a teenager, filled with that darkness, and I watched it inhabit him as he grew.
Then I saw it come for me. I saw dark tendrils wind through the room and when they found me, touched me, that same darkness seeped through me. It felt like it was part of me, something coming home rather than infecting me.
My ordeal under my own cocktail has given me some pause. I never imagined we were the good guys, per se. Now I see how the loss of our parents, one evil act a long time ago has shaped who we all are, and why we lost Teddy.
I’m not naive enough to think that I’m going to change as a person. But I understand myself a little better now, and what the girl might mean to us.
I make the call to Aiden, because this mess, like most of the messes Luke gets himself into, is going to need him to help clean up.
“Yes?” Aiden answers almost immediately.
His voice is smooth and calm. He sounds absolutely unbothered.
I imagine that darkness, him as the first receiver of it, absolutely filled to the brim with it.
Aiden drank the most poison in an effort to spare the rest of us, and now the best of us, the one we almost managed to shelter, is gone anyway. Fate is a bitch.
“Luke wants to come out. Says he only went in so he could track someone without questions being asked.”
Aiden pauses. “If that is true, then he pretended to have a drug-fueled meltdown in order to get us to put him there, and I, for one, do not appreciate being manipulated.”
“You’re right,” I say. “He’s been pulling some shit. But I think we need to get him out. We’re up against something bigger than we’ve ever been up against before.”
Aiden’s voice is like silk. “Is that so?”
Fuck. He knows something. I don’t know what, but something. I hate talking to him like this. It’s like talking to a human trapdoor. You never know when it’s going to spring open and take you to hell.
Bam!