Ember Boys (Flint and Tinder Book 1) Page 4

  It wasn’t a hard hit; more like a flick, but a really good one, and straight to the balls. The pain was so sharp and so intense that I felt, at first, like passing out, and then like I was going to puke.

  “You’re a real asshole,” Chloe said and left.

  I rolled onto my side, cradling my injured boys, and tried not to be sick.

  Then, crying didn’t seem so far away, and I pressed the pillow into my eyes and felt myself coming apart. Some of it was my balls, sure. And my ego needed that excuse. But most of it was for Jim. He was gone, and we were never going to have steaks at Claude’s or sit on his balcony—a lie, he never had a balcony—and watch the stars. And there was never going to be that perfect moment when he turned to ask me something, and I took his coffee, and I kissed him and told him that I never would have made it if not for him.

  I cried for a long time.

  When I’d finished, my balls still ached, but I didn’t feel quite as shitty. Mostly I felt empty. I got off the bed, went into the bathroom, splashed water on my face. I still wasn’t used to the scars, the neat division of my body into two halves: the old me, unmarked, and the new me, a monster.

  I went out into the hall and walked down to Chloe’s room. I owed her an apology. I owed Jim one too, but I wasn’t ever going to get the chance.

  When I got to Chloe’s door, though, it was shut, and the strip between the door and the floor was dark. I turned toward the rec room; with my luck, she was probably busy pushing the pool table into the ocean, or something like that, and she’d be locked up for a month. I knocked.

  “Chloe, it’s Emmett. I’m sorry I was an ass.”

  Silence.

  “Can I come in?”

  Nothing.

  I headed back to my room, and I was grabbing the handle when I heard a noise on the other side of my door. The strip of floor under the door was dark; the fluorescent tubes overhead buzzed so loudly that I felt dizzy, and all of a sudden I realized I was alone. The hallway was empty. My heart picked up.

  “Chloe?” I still had my hand on the door. “Is someone in there?”

  Still nothing.

  For a moment, I thought about leaving. Heading to the rec room or the cafeteria. Anywhere but here. But then I thought about the monsters, and Wyoming, and the old me, who had been brave enough to face nightmares.

  I tried the handle, and it turned.

  When I pushed open the door, the lights inside the room were still off. A man stood at my dresser; the drawers had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, and it looked like the guy was trying to stuff everything back into place as quickly and as quietly as he could. He wore one of the patient care tech uniforms; he was short and wiry, with a head of black hair like he’d stuck his finger in a socket. Harry? Harvey?

  “Well, hey there, buddy,” he said with a shooting-the-shit grin. “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Looks like somebody made a mess in here. Just got to get everything cleaned up.”

  “With the door closed,” I said. “In the dark.”

  His grin faded but didn’t disappear completely. “You ought to be down in the rec room, don’t you think? Better get going.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sure, little buddy, sure. But wouldn’t want you to get in trouble, right? Wouldn’t want to have to report you for messing up your room. You might get quiet time for making a big mess like this one.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ll tell them what I saw too.”

  “Oh,” he said, laughing. Chortling—that was the book word for it. He laughed in a way that turned that oh into oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, like it was one big fucking merry Christmas. “You’re really a tiger, aren’t you, little buddy? But you know what? Around here, at night, a tiger in a cage is still in a cage. And you wouldn’t want anybody to come by and bother you in the middle of the night? Wake you up? Ruin a good night’s sleep? Come on, little buddy. Nobody around here wants that.”

  “If you think—”

  “Course,” he continued in that some tone, and I could still hear the echo of that oh-ho-ho-ho-ho fucking chortle in his words. “Course, even a tiger’s got to have his cage cleaned every once in a while. And you never know.” He rattled one drawer. “Maybe somebody gets careless, leaves something behind. Just on accident. What do you say to that, little buddy?”

  The chill in my gut bloomed outward so fast that I couldn’t draw a breath. Tattling to the doctor? Fine. Threatening night-time violence? Bring it the fuck on; I couldn’t get much more fucked up than I already was.

  But if they stashed a needle? An eight-ball?

  Three months wouldn’t be three months anymore.

  How long would it be? Six? Nine? A year?

  My parents could keep paying. Hell, they might be happy to keep paying if it kept me out of the country club, away from their friends.

  “What do you say, champ? You going to the rec room now?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s right, champ. That’s right.”

  6 | JIM

  I did blow up one thing. Just one. A small thing. I was walking—just walking, no direction in mind, so angry that I couldn’t really see where I was going. I tripped over a weed whacker. And then I was swearing, kicking the damn thing across a stretch of manicured lawn, screaming. I was all alone on the street, thank God, because I didn’t even check to see if anyone was watching. After a few more kicks, I bent down, grabbed the small engine, and let all my rage come boiling up. The metal turned red; plastic cracked and then melted. I tossed it down, stalked a few paces, and tuned in my anger. The weed whacker exploded with a large boom and then a series of smaller ones. A few pieces of metal clattered into the street. On the lawn, flames licked their way over black spots on the grass.

  It was enough of a shock to bring me back to myself, and I ran.

  I was always running; that was part of what had hurt so badly. Emmett was right: I was a runner. I had run at the end, when I couldn’t handle the monsters in Wyoming any longer. And I was running now. Running away from the only good thing that had happened to me in a long time.

  As I ran, I tried to figure out why, but my mind had gotten squirrelly. I’d force my attention on the problem, and I’d think I could see the outline: Rosie calling him ‘your boy,’ or the memory of tan skin, dimpled ribs, the hollow of his shoulder. And then my brain would shut down. I’d try it all over again, and I’d think about that clipped smile, the one I thought was just for me, that made him look like a kid—and the simultaneous knowledge that he would hate being told he looked like a kid. Or I’d be thinking about sitting out in the garden, and how he’d look at something, a sparrow, and say, “In flying, is gravity more important than lift? Or is it the other way around? I’m talking about life, I guess—is it living or dying that makes things meaningful?” And I’d remember that he wasn’t a kid, not really. He was smart and brave and stunning, but not a kid, not anymore. And that was a dangerous path to go down.

  San Elredo didn’t have a boardwalk; the rocky coastline meant difficult-to-reach beaches, few surfers, fewer tourists. But it did have a nice section of town built up on the cliffs, where microbreweries and gastropubs and coffee shops and an old, converted lighthouse—now Claude’s, the only uppity place to eat in the whole town—looked out over the surf and chop. I found myself wandering between the shops, looking in the windows. Saltwater taffy. A bookstore. In a low, long structure, the abandoned aquarium, from San Elredo’s brief boom in the 70s.

  I retraced my steps and entered the bookstore—The Quill and Quaff. I’d been here before; in another life, I’d been an English teacher. They had a great selection of used books, they stocked a hell of a poetry section, and they kept a rotating stock of bestsellers that meant people actually came in and bought things. In a front corner, a coffee shop looked out over a blue-gray crook of coast. I ordered a latte, paid with my Mastercard—I could practically hear the damn thing groan—and took a seat. I was alone, except for a little old lady who’d just gotten a perm. She kept reaching up to touch it, and she was watching the sky, clutching a little plastic kerchief as though she might have to cover herself at any minute.

  Here’s the thing, I told myself after the first sip of coffee. He’s too young for you. That’s it, bare bones, sorry buddy. It doesn’t matter what he’s been through. It doesn’t matter that he’s more mature than most of the guys you’ve dated. It doesn’t matter, in fact, that he’s legal now.

  But, the other part of me said.

  But nothing. He’s too young. Case closed. Court dismissed. Pack it up. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

  But, the other part of me said.

  And what are you going to do if you stay? Do pick-up work on task apps, scrape by, eat roasted dogs with Rosie for three months? Ok. Fine. You can do three months standing on your head. You get to see him. You get to talk to him. You get to be near him. Great. And every day, things are getting a little more serious. Things are getting a little messier. You’re getting more and more tied up with him. Until the day he leaves the hospital. And then? That little fantasy about steaks and a night on the balcony, the dirty little part you keep to yourself, when you take his coffee and put it aside and touch his cheek, trace the scars, tell him everything you’ve wanted to tell him for months now—when you kiss him, you dirty old fuck—guess what? It’s never going to happen. He’s going to get out of the hospital. Maybe you grab a bite to eat. And then he’s off. He’s going to move on with his life. He’s going to find people his age. Hell, maybe he’ll go back to Wyoming and see what happened with Vie. But he’s not going to stay with you. And he’s not ever, ever going to feel about you the way you f
eel about him.

  The coffee was too bitter now; I pushed it away.

  “Are you all right?”

  It took me a moment to realize Perm was talking to me.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again, rolling the plastic kerchief in her hands.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Then, with the blatant disregard for polite conversation that seems to afflict so many people after a certain point in life, she said, “You look so sad.”

  “Just a hard day.”

  “You ought to go out dancing,” she said. “I used to love to go dancing when I was sad.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “You can’t frown if your feet are smiling.”

  What the fuck was this? Some kind of Hallmark moment?

  The thought sounded so much like Emmett, so clearly his voice, that I smiled in spite of myself.

  “There you go,” she crooned. “And you’re just so handsome. You’ll find another girl in no time.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “I have a granddaughter—”

  “I’m sorry, I just realized I have to go.” I dropped the coffee, mostly full, into the garbage. So much for my liquid dinner.

  “I really think you’d—”

  She was fumbling with something in her purse; the newspaper she’d been reading, which she’d rolled and stuck under her arm, dropped. It flapped open as it did.

  The headline was easy to read; tragedy often boiled down to good copy. PARENTS PLEAD: HELP US FIND OUR GIRL.

  A picture of a man and woman in middle age. A picture, next to them, of a suburban home.

  And below them, with the word MISSING in a banner across the bottom: a picture of the girl with ashy-blue hair I had seen talking to Emmett at the hospital.

  7 | EMMETT

  Being a coward felt shitty. It wasn’t a new feeling; I’d been a coward plenty of times. But I still didn’t like it.

  After my encounter with the patient care tech—Harry, I was pretty sure—I’d gone to the rec room. But I couldn’t sit. I kept replaying the conversation. I kept hearing myself, slowing down the playback, isolating the moment when I turned into a cowardly shit. It was somewhere around the moment when I realized he was threatening to plant heroin in my room.

  I played a really bad set of pinball on the ancient machine at the back of the rec room. I tried to bum a smoke off Minerva, another tech. Eventually, I went to the cafeteria, ate a bowl of Jell-O salad, and felt so sick I had to lie down on the floor. The vinyl was cool; dust and grit stuck to the back of my neck. When I wiped my hand back there, I came up with a Pikachu sticker.

  Ok, I thought. You’re a coward. Big deal. You were a coward with Vie, right up until the end. You were a coward with all the supernatural mumbo jumbo. You were a coward with everything in life, hiding behind a pretty face and a smartass remark. You were a coward with Makayla—first, when she disappeared; then when everyone thought you’d killed her; and then when she came back. You’ve been a coward every fucking time your dad has opened his mouth. So big deal. You were a coward one more time. Add it to the count.

  But the thing was that I didn’t like being a coward; I was a shitty enough person in other ways. And I’d tried, I’d really tried, to be brave. I’d faced Makayla, and I’d almost died doing it. I’d gone undercover, spying on a drug dealer. I’d traveled to Oklahoma, on my own, to face a monster, and I’d come back looking like half of me went through a meat grinder. I’d gone with Vie into the heart of all the evil shit, and we’d gotten out alive. I’d even been brave with Vie, at the end. I’d let him go. I’d looked straight into the pain and the darkness and I’d known he’d be better with Austin, and I’d done something brave then too.

  So what happened to me?

  Easy. They took the heroin away. And then they took my freedom away. And then they took reality away. Every day, they chipped a little bit more away. I could hear myself parroting back the lies: No, I never went to a place called Chapee; I made it up. No, I could never make a magic shield. I was just high when I said that. No, I never dated a psychic. No, I never saw a monster. Every day. Every goddamn day. I rubbed one finger over the blister on my palm, the throb of pain like a signal fire. They were taking it away, every bit of it. And when it was gone, all of it, when I’d said it enough times that even I started to believe it—what then? Would I be the same old shitty Emmett Bradley who had hidden in a tent while his girlfriend was kidnapped?

  Christ, no. Please, no.

  I rolled onto my knees. I got to my feet. I walked over to Minerva, who was forty-five, smoked two packs a day, and used a hair dye that was probably called Rugged Oak or something like that. She raised one heavily penciled eyebrow.

  “I used to have a psychic ability,” I said.

  “Oh boy.”

  “I could make this shield with my mind. Nothing could get through it. Not even other psychics.”

  “What about divorce paperwork?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I saw monsters, real monsters. And my friends and I, we fought them and won.”

  “Hold on,” Minerva said. “Let me call the president.” She frowned. “Unless you’d rather have Batman.”

  “Definitely Batman.”

  “You know I’ve got to tell all this to a nurse, right?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “And they’re going to tell the doctors.”

  I felt a little jittery, like when I’d had too much coffee. Or when I was about to see Vie. “They don’t have to.”

  “You were doing really good, kid,” Minerva said. “Why don’t you sit down, take a few breaths, and we pretend this didn’t happen?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m done pretending.”

  I left her there; she was fumbling with a smoke, unlit, like she wanted a drag bad.

  I wanted to find Chloe and tell her, first, that I was sorry, and second, about Harry. So I roamed the halls. The hospital was huge, but unfortunately, our portion of it wasn’t: the garden, the cafeteria, the rec room, and a few different residence wings—that’s what they called the hallways with our bedrooms. I checked her room again. Part of me was aching for a confrontation with Harry, but the room was empty. I walked up and down the halls, listening for her voice, wondering if she was visiting somebody else. It didn’t seem likely; some of the patients here were lucid, like me and Chloe, but most of them were so tranqued they were the conversational equivalent of potting soil. After each lap, I checked the cafeteria and the rec room. Nothing. No sign of Chloe. She might have been with a doctor, but it wasn’t likely—not after dinner, not unless it was an emergency.

  I went back to Minerva, who was reading Cosmo, “Thirteen Ways to Bring a Man to His Knees . . . with Your Tongue.”

  “That one is bullshit,” I said, pointing to number seven. “And that one has never worked for me.” Number eleven.

  She tapped number eleven. “It’s bullshit; I’ve tried it too.” Then she looked up. “You back with us?”

  “Where’s Harry?”

  “Who?”

  “Harry. He’s one of the techs.”

  “Harold?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hair like this.” I mimed a big, Bride-of-Frankenstein shock effect.

  “Ok, that’s Harold. Mr. Vleck. He’s new. I haven’t seen him today.”

  “He was here earlier.”

  She pushed her chair back, rolling across the vinyl, and checked a calendar pinned behind the workstation. “He’s not working today. Don’t worry about it, sweetie. The days all run together in a place like this.”

  Nodding, I thanked her and made my way back toward my room. Harold had been here. I’d seen him. He’d threatened me. And my little balls had tucked up and I’d run.

  But I wasn’t running now.

  He had been here, but he hadn’t been scheduled to work. He’d been in my room.

  Why?

  He’d been looking for something.

  What?

  Fuck if I knew, but I wanted another brain to work on this problem. I’d probably never see Jim again, so that left Chloe.

  As I headed back to my room, one of the other guys in here passed me. You probably would have needed three or four of me to make one Roy. Big and bald, he might have been scary except he walked with his shoulders hunched and with a look on his face like a whipped dog. He always smelled like he’d been skipping baths. When I tossed him a wave, he smiled a little and waved back, but he still looked like he thought I might crack him one across the face. As he passed me, I realized I had an opportunity.