She met Justin’s eyes and breathed, “Run.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Isaac found his brother at the Pathways Inn, a cheap old house that had been partitioned off into motel rooms at some point and stayed open for business mostly out of sheer will.
Lia Raynes, whose family owned the place, was sitting behind the counter when Isaac walked in, texting and looking incredibly bored. She nearly dropped her phone in her lap when he approached the front desk.
“Don’t know why you look so surprised,” Isaac said tiredly. “You know who’s staying here.”
Lia gulped. “Yeah. I know. Did he come back to help with the corruption? Is the rest of your family coming back, too?”
Everybody always knew his business. It was one of his least favorite side effects of being a founder.
“Which room is he staying in?” Isaac asked, ignoring the question.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Lia, looking disappointed that he hadn’t offered up more information. “He’s out back. He likes to read on the porch.”
“A man of culture, I see.”
Lia’s thumbs flew furiously across her phone screen as Isaac pushed open the back door and ascended onto the porch. In thirty seconds, the entirety of Four Paths High School would know all about the meeting between the Sullivan brothers. But Isaac didn’t have it in him to care.
Facing things head-on didn’t just mean apologizing to Justin. It meant confronting Gabriel about the role he’d played in Isaac’s ritual and seeing what he had to say for himself.
As Isaac approached, his brother looked up from the rocking chair on the porch and flipped his tattered paperback shut, sliding it into the backpack he’d propped up against the railing. It was chilly, but he hadn’t bothered with a jacket. His T-shirt showed off the tops of his tattoo sleeves—the trees that wound across his biceps, roots twisting around his arms that looked eerily like the one that had tried to burrow beneath his skin.
“Isaac.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Is there another emergency you want my help with or something?”
“No.” Isaac crossed the porch in two long strides. “I want the truth, Gabriel.”
“Dramatic.” Gabriel’s mouth twisted. “You know the truth. I’m here about Mom.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Isaac said softly. “I’m talking about my ritual.”
Gabriel paused, and for a long moment all Isaac could hear was the gentle rustling of the breeze in the forest behind them, the slight creaking of the porch’s floorboards beneath his feet. Then, at last, he spoke.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “Good thing I brought reinforcements.”
He grabbed the backpack and raised it in the air, patting the side. Isaac recognized the sound of bottles clinking together.
“I don’t need to drink,” he said, his stomach churning at the memory of his meltdown.
“Oh, they’re not for you.” There was something dangerous in Gabriel’s voice. “They’re for me.”
Isaac heard a noise and turned to see Lia’s face peering through the upper window, her eyes wide with curiosity. At the sight of him, she hastily drew the curtains shut.
“I don’t want the whole town to hear this,” he said.
“Then let’s go somewhere even they won’t follow.”
Gabriel drove them to the edge of the ruins. Neither had mentioned it as a destination, but Isaac had known exactly where they were going from the moment his brother started the car. It was late afternoon as they settled on a fallen tree behind the backyard. The autumn wind whipped at the edges of Isaac’s jacket. Gabriel shrugged on a flannel and pulled two beers out of his backpack.
“You sure you don’t want one?” he asked. “This stuff’s basically water, anyway. Or at least that’s how people treated it at Potsdam. College is wild.”
Isaac inspected the red-and-white label. In another world, Gabriel would’ve bought him this beer for a party instead of trying to hand him one in front of the ashes of their family home.
“I’m sure,” he said firmly. It was easy to forget about the rest of the world when you were in Four Paths. But unlike Justin and May, Isaac was determined to actually get out of here for college—if he could manage to get into a place that wouldn’t send him into twenty years of student loan debt, anyway.
“So that’s what college is like?” he asked, because it was easier than talking about anything else. “People drinking all the time?”
“Not all the time,” said Gabriel. “Depends on where you go to school. And depends on who your friends are.”
“What did you tell them?” asked Isaac.
“Tell who?”
“Your friends. About… this.”
Gabriel looked out at the ashes, his mouth set in a grim line. His profile was sharp and gaunt, his stubble rough and uneven across his chin. “I lied. Told them my family was dead. Told them I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s not really a lie.”
“It’s not really the truth, either.” Gabriel paused and took a long pull of his beer. “I only went to college because I’d applied before everything went to shit. And for the first semester or two, I was just… angry. I didn’t go to class. I drank, I did whatever drugs people gave me, and I got into fights. I had a reputation.”
“I was angry, too.” Isaac was still angry—in a way that he was unsure how to handle, in a place inside of him that still felt too raw to touch. “But you don’t seem out of control anymore.”
Gabriel looked out at the ashes. “I’m not.”
“So what changed?”
“I met a girl.”
Isaac rolled his eyes. “There it is.”
He couldn’t help it—he felt a stab of envy. That his brother had been able to fall for someone who could care for him the same way he cared for her.
But when he turned to look at his brother, Gabriel did not look any happier. “We dated for two years,” he continued. “I went to therapy. I got myself back on track. And then—after letting down my guard, after finally trusting her—I tried to tell her some of the truth. Left the weirdest stuff out, obviously.”
“Did she believe you?”
Gabriel looked pained. “I almost wish she hadn’t. It was too much for her to handle, she said, because she could see I hadn’t actually dealt with it, and she left.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Gabriel’s tone clearly indicated otherwise. He finished his beer, placed the empty bottle carefully in his backpack, and pulled out another. “It made me realize that if I wanted to exist in the rest of this world, I had to come back. Mom needed help, but so did I. Your ritual never really leaves my head.”
His words sparked a deep, unbridled fury in Isaac.
“Oh, fuck off,” he said bitterly.
Gabriel blinked. “Excuse me? I’m just trying to explain my side of things to you. I thought that was what you wanted.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m loving this,” said Isaac. “It’s great to hear about how traumatized you are from that time you tried to murder me in cold blood.”