27. Micha #2
But she’s dead.
I killed her.
He doesn’t even look at me.
The blade dives into the back of his neck, in and out, in and out. The noises fall on my ears, making my lips drag up in a smile. I’m protecting Arlo. Poor, little Arlo, who I want to destroy, to keep, to build back up, to love.
My father is yelling. Screaming in a way I’ve never heard before. Not when my mother died. Never.
He’s pointing his finger at me. There’s red flushed across his entire face, and it meshes into the red surrounding my vision as I stalk forward, blood dripping from my knife, my hands, my face.
His eyes are full of fear and fury, but the fury drops as I keep taking steps forward. My knife inches towards his chest, and he backs into the wall, blocking himself in.
I see all the times he held my face still and forced me to watch grainy films of death so pure and terrifying that I sobbed.
I see the times he pinned me to the floor and made me take his fists to my face until I stopped reacting.
I see those clowns, circling that convulsing body, laughing, mocking, smiling.
My own father. A beater. An abuser.
“Micha? Son! No!”
I dive in.
Again.
And again.
I can hear Arlo crying and screaming.
I keep stabbing.
My father’s gurgled noises fall on deaf ears.
All I can hear is Arlo’s sweet screams.
My father drops to the floor.
I step back, panting, my knife following in suit to clatter against the wooden panels beneath my feet.
Sound and vision, previously muffled and blurred, ram into me with the force of a truck. I stagger back into the recliner my father had been sitting in moments before.
Before the massacre.
Arlo has stopped screaming.
I turn to look at him, huddled in the corner of the room.
He has blood on his face, on his hands, in his bright, white hair.
Why? I didn’t hurt him?
“Pipsqueak,” I whisper, dropping to my knees.
My bloodied hands stick and squelch against the floor as I slowly crawl forward, and Arlo’s pretty face becomes more and more terrified as I approach.
He’s leaking tears, unable to choose between looking at me and looking at his mum’s corpse behind me. “Eyes on me.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply.
“Hey.” I sit on my heels when I’m a foot away. “You’re safe now.”
“Get away from me,” he weeps, feet pushing against the floor like he can back up further into the wall, but he can’t go anywhere. I reach for him, and he starts screaming and kicking. “Get away from me! You monster! Get away!”
I let him kick my approaching hands, and I let him curl into the wall like it’ll save him. He’s right; I’m a monster.
But someone could have heard the screaming.
Someone could have called the police.
We can’t stay here, surrounded by dead bodies.
“We need to go.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he spits, and I see the fear morphing into betrayed rage.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“You killed my mother, you… you… you sick freak!”
My stomach twists, and it feels like he’s taken that very knife I used to slit his mother’s throat and stabbed it into my chest.
“They were selling you, Arlo. It needed to happen. Now come on. Quickly.”
Why am I so calm?
I stabbed my own fucking father. I shouldn’t be this calm.
My little stepbrother is still crying and trying to get away.
“Please, Pipsqueak. Let me clean the blood off you.”
I reach to swipe my fingers through the thick coating of blood on his cheek, like he pressed his face up against his mother’s bloody body. He slaps my hand away with a force that surprises me. He kicks his foot out, and I catch it quickly, not letting him fight me anymore.
I can hear sirens in the distance.
“We need to go. Now.”
He shakes his head quickly, and I release his ankle to stand. It takes almost no effort to sling him over my shoulder. His fights and protests are weak. He’s still malnourished and partially drugged up from dinner, which makes it easy to manoeuvre him.
The sirens are getting louder.
“Let me go, Micha!” he shouts, kicking his feet to hit my stomach, but I push forward.
I step over his mother, over the suited man and the dead woman aside him, and run towards the back door, purposefully avoiding the man I was biologically related to. Arlo stops fighting and starts crying at the sight of his mother’s lifeless body getting further and further away.
The police sirens blare outside the front of the house, and I kick open the weak back door that’s always locked. I don’t know where the key is, and there’s no time to waste.
I have no plan.
I just need to get Arlo out of here.
I run into the back yard, and my boots crush the dying grass as I head into a sprint.
We have nothing—no clothes or food or water.
But as I jump the fence into the neighbours’ garden and sneak out their gate into the woods behind the row of houses, I keep reminding myself that Arlo is safe, alive, and with me.
And nothing will change that.
Present Day
Arlo walks in time with me as we head back to the apartment.
He’s holding the little white bag with a cartoon dog printed on either side, and I bite back a laugh at the thought of what Soren might have in mind for the use of its contents.
Whatever it is, I’m glad its purpose is for Spiral and not me.
Although I wouldn’t mind seeing it on my brother.
I can tell Arlo’s been in his head since the situation with Karma in the late hours of the night—or early hours of the morning, depending on how you look at it.
I had a feeling all the blood and violence would get to him and bring up the past at some point, and despite how hard he’s trying to act, I see through him clearly.
When I shut the door behind us, Arlo’s already putting the bag on the counter and heading to his room. I grab his wrist and tug him back to me, and his hands find my chest in the rush. He looks up at me beneath his platinum and pink curls.
“Talk to me, Pipsqueak.”
He swallows, shaking his head. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“I know.” Despite how hard I can be on him, it’s only ever because I want to protect him from the world.
I made him feel like he couldn’t talk to me once before, when I was a teenager trying to forget about the murders I’d just committed, but that pushed him away, and I know that made it harder for him to trust me.
We’ve come a long way since then. “But you need to tell me what you’re feeling. I can help.”
I lead him over to the couch and pull him down to sit on my lap.
It’s finally time that I let him in and we put the past behind us.
He comes willingly, but he doesn’t look at me, sitting sideways on my thighs. This couch will always remind me of the time I nearly kissed Arlo and rejected him, of the time I licked Karma’s surprisingly sweet pussy as I fucked her throat. And now we’re talking. That’s the scariest one.
“What’s going on in your pretty little head?”
“If I speak about it, I have to properly think about it, and it still makes me sick. I know why you did it. I know you were protecting me. I know—”
I press a soft kiss to his lips, effectively cutting off his mindless, panicked rambling.
“Everything I did, I did for you. I wish you hadn’t seen it.” I bring my hand up to hold the side of his face so that he knows I mean every word. “If we’re going to stay with Karma, we need to move past what happened.”
“When you killed our parents.”
I nod once. “Yes. When I killed my father, your mother, and the people who planned on taking you from me.”
He looks away and cringes. I’ve always been desensitised to it.
Maybe because my father forced me to watch so much death through a screen, or because I was forced to wrap my head around the murders on my hands so I could focus on looking after Arlo.
It took me a long time to regain his semi-trust—trust that I wouldn’t kill him, that I would protect his life, but not trust that I wouldn’t hurt his heart. I have hurt his heart.
I kept him at arm’s length when he needed me most, so terrified that the darkness I live in would get to him. But he can take far more than I ever anticipated.
“Does seeing the violence from Karma remind you of the violence I caused?”
He nods slowly, like he’s afraid of hurting me by telling the truth. I grab the sides of his face and force him to look into my eyes. His deep greens stare intently, searching for something.
“Say the word, and I’ll make sure you never have to see it again. You come first, Arlo. I’ve taken you away before. I can take you away again.”
He shoves my hands away, and his face looks more pained than before. “How can you say that, Micha? How can you so easily leave her? And Soren?”
“I couldn’t. Not Karma. I don’t know Soren well enough,” I whisper.
I like him—he’s internally fucked-up despite his well-mannered and stoic exterior—but Karma has ingrained herself deeply into me.
“I know she’ll survive anything. We don’t know if she can die.
But you, little brother? You can, and that’s a terrifying thought. ”
“You’ve kept me hidden for years, Micha.
You don’t let me work. You don’t let me have friends.
” I part my lips to defend myself; he cuts me off with a soft palm over my mouth.
“I know you did it for good reason. I didn’t exist to the world.
I only existed to you. And now I exist to Karma and Soren.
Please, help me figure out a way to get over my fears. Don’t let me stop existing to them.”
The plea in his voice cracks my heart, and I gently pull away his wrist.
“I don’t want to take you from her, Arlo. The way you are around her? I’ve never seen you like that. Happy. Depraved. You’ve always been a sweetheart. Hell, you’re sweet to a cannibalistic monster. I don’t want to take any of this from you. But I can’t— I won’t lose you.”