She hadn’t cried since she’d left home, but suddenly it was all too much: her father, the corruption, her siblings. Harper tucked her knees up to her forehead, her residual limb aching, and let the tears come.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Isaac could not remember the last time he’d been drunk like this. He’d started after he got home from the archives, with the dusty bottle of whiskey under the sink that he and Justin had paid a college student to buy for them. Just a shot to stop his hands from shaking and dull the knife’s edge of his memory. But one shot had turned into three had turned into cradling the bottle like a baby while blaring music from his phone in a pitiful attempt to stop thinking.
The dagger at his throat. Gabriel’s ambivalent stare. Blood dripping down his neck as he staggered through the woods, unable to scream for help.
The whiskey turned into a red Solo cup, the apartment turned into the forest, and finally Isaac reached a sort of intoxicated equilibrium. He floated outside his body still, but it was almost peaceful, as if he were watching himself play Monster in the Gray and down far too many Justin Shots from behind a movie screen. He was the eye of a storm of his own making.
He’d come to the Hawthorne house with May and Violet, but he’d lost them somehow on the way back. The clearing was close, he knew it was, if only he could find it. Unfortunately, all the trees looked the same at night and the world around him had started spinning a little while ago, blurring in and out of focus. Isaac knew he couldn’t be lost. He’d lived in this shithole his entire life. Even wasted out of his mind, the forest was as familiar to him as his own bedroom.
The smell of charred flesh. Hot, thick panic in his chest. Gabriel’s eyes like dark coals burning in the night—
A hand clamped down on his shoulder and Isaac whirled, heat buzzing in his palms.
Justin’s blond hair shone ashen in the moonlight. Isaac blinked, trying to focus. Justin was speaking, he realized, but the words were fading in and out, disappearing beneath the shrill, distant sound of screaming.
He knew those noises weren’t real. He knew because they were Isaiah’s and Caleb’s screams from the night they’d died, forever echoing in his memory.
“What?” he croaked.
Justin’s grip tightened. “I said, are you all right?”
Isaac’s palms fizzled. His Solo cup was half-melted, plastic and alcohol oozing between his fingers. He opened his hand and let it fall into the dead leaves.
“Yeah.” The word did not feel like it was coming out of his mouth. “Just drunk.”
“I’ve seen you drunk,” Justin said, an urgency in his voice that Isaac had spent so many years latching on to as a form of affection. “This is different.”
“Fine,” Isaac drawled. “I’m really drunk.”
“Isaac,” Justin said softly. “You’re shaking.”
Justin’s hand burned on Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac’s stomach twisted painfully. He wanted nothing more than to lean into his grip and tell his friend what was happening to him. It would be so easy to implode and let Justin put him back together. It had been that way ever since the first time Isaac had come to after his ritual, his wrists and ankles still manacled. Justin had been sitting next to him, two fingers pressed to his neck, his eyes wide open with shock.
“What happened?” he’d whispered, and Isaac had closed his eyes and pretended not to hear the question.
After his ritual, Isaac drew attention like a beacon wherever he went. But when Justin was there, the tone of that attention changed. And as the town grew used to seeing them together, Isaac grew used to it, too. Justin was always there when Isaac needed him, and it had all been fine and good until the day Isaac realized that he was completely in love with him.
He’d always known Justin didn’t feel the same way about him. Couldn’t feel the same way about him. So Isaac had done his best to get over his feelings with people who thought he was a bad boy, who wanted to do something thrilling and dangerous so they could whisper to their friends about it the next day.
None of it had worked, because the problem wasn’t physical intimacy. It was all those different kinds of need twisted together, a dependency that had taken every ounce of Isaac’s willpower to walk away from.
Now, drunk and exhausted, he wanted to take it all back. Instead, he forced himself to shrug Justin’s grip away.
“I told you that I’m fine,” he said brusquely. “So leave me alone.”
His hands buzzed with power again, and he felt something loosen in his mind. He’d lost focus. The memories were pressing in on him, his brothers’ screams growing louder. The scar on his neck throbbed. He could feel his legs trembling beneath him, his heart thumping, and suddenly he was fourteen again. Lanterns flickered in the trees, his family’s solemn faces moving in and out of focus. His bare back chafed against the altar’s rough stone, and he could not move, not even when he saw the glint of the dagger in Gabriel’s hand and understood it was for him.
S for sacrifice.
A surge of panic roared through Isaac, and he stumbled away from Justin, crashing through the underbrush as his power shuddered to life. And just as he had the night of his ritual, he surrendered to its crushing embrace.
It started as it always did, with a rush of pain Isaac could not fight and a rage he had to let free, and it ended as it always did, too. He was lying prone on the ground, coated in soot and ash, surrounded by the evidence of his destruction.
When Isaac had first come into his powers, the meltdowns had been far more frequent. He’d lost control in public a few times, but he had fought tooth and nail to keep his hands from shimmering, to keep the people around him from looking at him as if he were a time bomb instead of a boy trying desperately to keep it together.
Then there had been the Diner, where his reputation had gone from bad to worse.
Now there was this: Another disaster. Another mistake.
Isaac rolled over on his side and groaned. The last he could remember, he’d rushed into the woods—away from Justin.
Justin. Shit. There had been people nearby—had he hurt them? He felt for his phone, but it was gone, so he rose into a crouch, squinting into the darkness and hoping his eyes would adjust. Slowly, shapes loomed out of the darkness. Every tree within ten feet of him was dead, burned down to sooty stumps and scattered branches, but there were no bodies. Relief and nausea rushed through him, because he knew what Sullivan powers did to a human. The smell of roasted skin and burned hair, the bits of clothing and bone shards left behind. There was none of that here.
“Fuck,” he whispered, guilt rushing through him. He might not have killed anyone, but he’d still charred an entire clearing into oblivion. He’d destroyed part of the forest for no other reason than his inability to keep his memories where they belonged, inside his head.
It was still night, but he wasn’t drunk the way he’d been before. Time had passed; hours, maybe. Isaac’s stomach twisted. He’d never come out of a meltdown alone before. Justin had always been there, waiting for him.
“Hello?” he called out, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Is anybody there?” His words echoed uselessly through the clearing. Isaac tried to think. Surely he couldn’t be that far away from the Hawthorne house. He gazed up at the moon, mentally orienting himself—if he headed west, he’d either hit Justin and May’s home or the main road.