Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (73 page)

“I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t just told me he’s been in that room
all
day!”

“Well, he hasn’t come out in tears either,” I noted. “So maybe he’s just taking it all in.”

David stopped and rested his head against the door.

“Why don’t you go in and talk to him?” I suggested. “Just knock on the door, announce yourself, and ask him how he feels.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?” I laughed.

“I just… can’t.”

“David.” I sat up. “That makes
no
sense.”

“We were just never really like that.” He sat down on the bed beside me. “We never had that kind of relationship.”

“Well,
he
doesn’t know that.” I presented the door, meaning Jason. “What do you think he’ll say if you go in there and say, ‘Hey, bro. Just wanted to check and see how you’re doing’?”

“Go away,” he stated. “He’d tell me it’s none of my business.”

“Maybe the old Jason would—the one you fought with, hurt, the one whose girlfriend you killed.”

David closed his eyes slowly, clearly feeling those regrets sink through.

“You have a clean slate right now, David. Go in there and tell your brother you were worried about him and you wanted to make sure he was okay.”

After a moment passed, where David said nothing, I thought for sure my words had reached him—that he would stand up and go in to his brother. But he looked at me and said, “Can you go? Please?”

I poked him playfully in the arm. “Coward.”

He curled his hand around my finger and pulled it until I landed against him. “Thank you.”

“Thank me if I come back in one piece,” I said, standing up.

As much as I wanted to roll into my cosy bed and sleep this night away, I dragged my hesitant self into the hall instead, closed my bedroom door on the hopeful face of David, and knocked on Jason’s.

“Yo!” he called in a much cheerier voice than I expected.

I pushed the door open and hovered on the threshold, my eyes moving up past his bare feet, over his hairy legs and to the boy sitting propped up on his pillows in nothing but pyjama shorts. “Just wanted to see how you were doing.”

He was surrounded by what I guessed were about a hundred journals, plus the packing boxes they came out of, and the aged paper and rotting spines mingled with the smell of human boy under the layer of cologne, giving the room the kind of smell I remembered my dad’s office having at school.

Jason lowered the book he was reading and studied my face, a smile moving in. “You were expecting me to be a wreck, weren’t you?”

I took that to mean he was okay, and stepped fully into the room, closing the door. “I was worried, yes.”

“This isn’t me.” He held up the book. “Okay, I guess, I know it
is
, and I know all this stuff happened to me, and don’t get me wrong—” he put the book down and sat up a bit, making room for me on the end of the bed, “—I feel bad for my past self. I do. But it just feels like a story I’m reading—about some other guy.”

My face split into a grin of relief as I sat down, closing my dressing gown across my chest.

“I know I’ve got a lot to be sorry for,” he added. “I did some awful things, but the person I was feels so far removed from who I
think
I am.” He touched his chest. “I mean
,
I
would never sleep with my brother’s wife. How could I do that? It feels… out of character for me. So I don’t
want
to remember who I was, because I like who I am a whole lot more. But—” he shrugged, flashing me a toothy grin, “—the fact that I’m here, with you and my brother, means you guys probably already forgave me for all that, right?”

I nodded. “Right.”

“So, then it’s time to move on.” He grabbed a journal and tossed it over his shoulder; it hit the wall just above his head and landed in an awkward fold on the floor in the nook between his nightstand and bedpost. “I’ve got a life to live, and it doesn’t sound like I did a whole lotta that while I was a vampire. It actually sounds like I had it pretty darn hard.”

“You did,” I whispered softly, feeling a surge of pity for the Jason that lived in the tiny bedroom back at the castle.

“And now I’m human again,” he stated, showing his arm, where there once was a black band—the Mark of his oath to the Old King. “And I’m free. I’d say things turned out pretty good in the end.”

“But it’s
the end
that David’s worried about.”

“What d’you mean?” He sat forward and shuffled over on his knees, pushing journals off the bed until he sat right beside me. “What’s he hiding?”

“Jase.” I looked deep into his eyes, hardly able to see him through the tears. “Something horrible happened to you before your head got damaged.”

“Okay,” he said, prompting me onward.

“The person that damaged your brain, well… one of the reasons she did that is because you had this incredible ability to read minds and control objects through telekinesis.”

“No kidding?” he said, his eyes drifting off as he thought about that. “That’s awesome.”

“It was, yes, and you helped me a lot when I started developing those powers.”

“Then I wasn’t
all
bad,” he said, a playful glint in his eye.

“You weren’t bad at all. In fact, you’re the purest soul I—”

“Yeah, I read that,” he cut in with a sarcastic edge to his tone. “And David is all the evil of the world, right?”

I heard David laugh from the other room.

“Something like that,” I said. “But he’s not evil, Jase—”

“I know that,” he said casually, turning so his legs sat over the edge of the bed. “I’ve known the guy for six months, well five, if you don’t count the month I was asleep and—” he shrugged, “—he’s the best friend I got.”

My whole heart melted. “He sent me in here,” I said quickly, hoping David wouldn’t burst in and cover my mouth.

“Why?”

“He was worried about how you’d feel after reading the journals.”

“Why didn’t
he
just come in himself? Oh,” he added, his eyes drifting to the books in a pile on the floor. “We weren’t close.”

“Right. But he
wants
to be—”

“I gathered that,” he said. “Or he wouldn’t have me here.”

I nodded. “It’s just gonna take time for him to… open up to you.”

“He’ll get there. I was pretty hostile to him—in the past.” He motioned down to the books again. “Maybe when I’m a bit more receptive, he might feel a bit safer to get close.”

He sounded just so much like the old Jase then that I had to laugh. “Yeah, sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”

“I’d like to think so.” He patted both knees and leaned forward, looking at me with his brows raised. “So? This woman damaged my brain to stop me using my powers?”

“For one, but she mainly did it because you were hysterical after a man, who was more powerful than you, used that power to hold you down while he…”

“He?”

“While he extracted…” I cleared my throat. “While he molested you.”

Jason’s face sunk and the wind left him. He swallowed hard, looking away.

“Jase, you okay?”

“That’s pretty awful, I gotta say.”

“Jase?” I whispered softly, my whole body screaming to comfort him.

“But… it didn’t happen to
me
. It happened to the other guy.” He squinted for a moment as if he was
trying
to remember it, then he just lifted one shoulder and dropped it again, laughing once. “And all I can say is I’m
glad
I don’t remember
that
.”

“But you might,” I said. “And that’s what David’s worried about.”

“Because he doesn’t know how
he’ll
deal with it if I do?”

The way he said that sounded like an attack, but he was right. That
was
David’s biggest fear: how would
he
handle the situation—what would he say to make Jason better if he remembered? What would he see in his eyes in those moments before he erased it all?

“I’d be the same,” Jase admitted. “If it were him. I’d be more worried about what
I
was gonna say than how
he
might feel.”

I sighed. “He loves you, Jase. So don’t think for a second that he doesn’t worry about how you’ll feel—”

“I know.” He put his hand on my knee, then looked at it and drew it away quickly. “But I’ll be okay. I’m alive, I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and I know I’ve got a brother that cares—if I ever
do
remember.”

“So you won’t try to deal with it alone?”

“Or take your own life?” David asked in a stern voice, standing suddenly in the doorway.

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Jase stood up.

David looked at the ground, keeping his arms folded.

“Bro?” He moved closer. “If you’re worried I’ll take my own life, I can tell you now, that’s the
last
thing I’d do. Why would I do that?”

“Because death may be more acceptable than living with what Hans did to you.”

Jase’s face softened and he shook his head. “This is because of Arthur—our uncle, right?”

David didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

“You’ve never had to face losing him before—or me, because vampires couldn’t die?”

“It was a shock,” David admitted, leaning against the doorframe, running one hand through his hair. “I still can’t believe he’s gone, and I don’t know what I’d do if I…”

The pause lasted so long that Jase laughed. “If you lost your brother—your
only
brother.”

David nodded, averting his eyes.

Jason just stood there in the middle of the room, grinning, and held both arms out wide. “This calls for a bro-hug. You know that, right?”

The awkwardness coated David like gravity. He looked at me, his mouth popping, and then looked at his brother, softening as he took in the wide, human smile. And they hugged—Jason wrapping his arms around David a little tighter than David did him, but as the seconds passed, free of back patting or manly grunts, David held on a little tighter too, and let himself love his brother the way brothers should.

When they broke away, Jase winked at me, coming to sit down beside me again.

David moved back and sat on the floor, his back against the wardrobe wall. “How far through the journals did you get?”

“I started at the most recent,” Jase said, toeing one of the books on the floor. “But it was all scientific mumbo-jumbo. I barely understood a word of it.”

David and I laughed.

“So I went back a bit,” he added, “about two years.”

I nodded, knowing what he would have read.

“I couldn’t find anything on what Sam was talking about—this… whatever it was I did to you.”

“That journal’s still back at the castle, I think.”

“What would it have said?”

“You reference it in your later entries,” I told him. “The masquerade.”

“Oh. That.” He nodded to himself. “And that was all? I didn’t… do anything…
else
, did I?”

“No.” I patted his knee. “And we made amends.”

“No kidding,” he scoffed, his wide eyes landing on David. “Sorry about that, by the way. Not sure if I ever said it but… I’m sorry I slept with your wife.”

David tried to hold it in, to straighten his face and take it seriously, but a smile broke through and he covered it with the back of his hand, losing it then to a short burst of laughter.

Jase and I laughed along with him, finally feeling enough distance from the whole situation to see the funny side. Part of it was in the way Jase just so casually said it, too.

“I do have to add…” Jase looked down at the distance between our legs and moved away an inch. “I don’t feel anything for you—as the person I am now. I mean…” He nodded at the books again. “The old me did—he admitted it in his recent journals—that he’d never stop loving you. But…”

“That’s a good thing, Jase,” I said, cocking my head. “I’m glad you’re free of it now.”

“Me too.” He blew a breath out through the corner of his mouth, wiping his brow. “What a sad, pathetic ending that would’ve been.”

We all laughed again, and as I looked at David I could see his spirits lifting with relief. He’d never really known this version of his brother—the version I knew. And I could tell that, with time, maybe just a short amount, he and Jase would be really close. David wanted it, and Jason was an easy person to love. It was the perfect recipe for a good relationship.

“I do have just one question, though,” Jase added.

“What’s that?” David said.

“The baby.” Jase looked out through his door into my bedroom. “She’s not mine, is she?”