Authors: Joanne Brothwell
#
We left the institute, the humiliation of every scientist within its walls readily apparent, especially Dr. McGill. He spent at least twenty minutes trying to convince me that normally, his facility had extremely high professional standards, and that this situation had never happened before, and would absolutely never happen again. I could tell by the way his skin was flushed red and blotchy and the perspiration that dripped from his temples that he knew he had yet to answer to the police for wasting their time when the body had been there the whole time. I actually heard the police say something to Dr. McGill that sounded like ‘public mischief’ in a warning tone. I felt slightly sorry for him, knowing he was trying to put the pieces of his professional reputation back together while hoping I would return to the institute and help him do so by going through their tests. I reassured him I would come back, but for now, it wasn’t in the cards.
We flew back to Stonewood that same day. On the flight we contemplated our next move.
Finally, an idea came to me. “You know, I have an estranged uncle. He’s a total asshole child molester… but he might know something.”
“Did he hurt you?” Kalan’s eyes glittered like shards of glass.
“No. Analiese was his chosen victim.” My chin quivered. I covered it with my hand.
Kalan swore under his breath. “Do you know where he lives?”
It had been a long time, but Les’s dingy apartment was still firm in my memory. “Yes. I’ll never forget that creepy little dungeon he calls home.”
“I have an idea about what to do with your uncle Les,” Kalan said. With the light coming in through the window beside him, his satiny eyelashes were lit up.
“Mind-fuck?” I said. My stomach somersaulted at the thought of exacting revenge on my predatory uncle.
Kalan glanced at me. “Yes. Is that okay?”
I sniggered. “Do it.”
“Good. But I want you to know, it won’t harm him long-term.” Kalan’s silvery gaze momentarily locked on mine. A strange stirring built deep in my stomach, like thousands of butterflies had been released.
“Thanks.”
After we touched down in Stonewood and retrieved Kalan’s car, we drove in silence toward the suburb where my great-uncle lived. It felt like a lifetime ago that Analiese died, like I’d been without her forever. I yearned for the past, before her accident, before I met Kalan or learned I was… different. Now, everything had changed, and I no longer knew which way was up.
Kalan’s gentle voice broke into my thoughts. “Hey. You’re pretty quiet over there. Is everything okay?”
How should I answer? Was everything okay? Had I come to terms with the myriad of strange information I’d learned in the past several weeks? With the death of my twin?
No. I’m not okay
.
I will never be okay again.
“I don’t know. It’s a lot to take in. No.”
“It is,” Kalan said. “Are you bothered by what I am?”
The words hung in the air between us. “I’m not bothered, Kalan. You are what you are. You’re a good person. You’re thoughtful, caring and considerate. It isn’t our DNA that determines who we are, it’s our actions.”
“Are you willing to overlook all of these… things?” Kalan asked. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“I could ask you the same question,” I said. I wanted to reach out and touch him right now, touch the angles and planes of his alabaster skin. I clasped my hands together.
Kalan pushed his fingers through his silvery hair. “There isn’t a single thing about you I would change. I’ll take you, extra rib and killer blood and anything else that makes you, you, Adriana. I only wish Analiese hadn’t died.”
“The only thing we have going for us is this lead,” I said.
Kalan pursed his lips together, and when he parted them again, they’d turned white, the pink returning to them slowly. I looked away.
“You’re right,” Kalan said. “Next stop, Uncle Les.”
The remainder of the drive I drifted in and out of an overwrought sleep.
Marcus stood before me, his body morphing first to shiny black stone, like a statue made of obsidian. He shattered apart into grains of black sand and then to smoke; a whirl wind spinning, slowly at first but growing faster and faster. Kalan appeared to my right, and he seemed to glow, as if lit up from the inside out. The whirling blackness of Marcus inched toward Kalan, the tendrils of smoke whipping out like talons. Each time there was contact, Kalan was sliced horizontally, his pale body oozing crimson blood. Kalan held out his hand, as if extending it for a handshake. One black wisp stretched and Kalan grasped it, and in a flash of blinding white light, the whirling blackness that was Marcus was gone. Kalan stood there, slices ringing his body every half inch, blood dripping onto the floor. Four round dots of blood on the floor, evenly spaced…
A piercing scream woke me up. Sitting bolt upright, I opened my eyes to see highway stretched out in front of me.
“What’s wrong?” Kalan slammed on the breaks and I lurched forward. He reached out, placing his arm across my chest to protect me from hitting the dashboard as he pulled over to the side of the road, his eyes wide.
I took a deep breath. “A nightmare. Just a nightmare.”
“Are you okay?” Kalan asked.
“I think there’s still something I need answered,” I said. He nodded, so I continued, “I know Marcus can control thoughts, but do you have any personal examples of it? Have you seen him do it? What’s it like?”
Kalan took a deep breath. “When Marcus initially entered my life, I was ecstatic that I had real, flesh-and-blood relatives. It’s a foster child’s dream come true to have a real family. But my happiness was short-lived. Marcus has quite a mean streak. Probably because of how he was treated at home.” Kalan glanced at me. “He was always trying to tempt me to get into mischief with him. It started with pranks, leaving snakes in the bathtub, cockroaches in beds. As time went on, his pranks grew strange and malicious. A dead bird in my foster sister’s bed. His mother’s dog, Muffy, her throat slit from ear to ear, hanging from the rafters of the garage where she parked.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “If he was killing animals and scaring children when he was fifteen and sixteen, what is he capable of now?”
“He’s capable of anything. I believe that.”
Now I understood the tenuous relationship between Kalan and his brother. He may be his only known blood relative, but that didn’t mean he could trust him.
The landscape out the passenger side window brought me back to the here and now. Instantly, I knew by the carefully planted elms staggered every five feet, I was on the street that led to Uncle Les’s senior’s home.
“How is this going to go?” I asked.
Kalan parked the car. “I’ll tell him he has a choice. He can willingly give us the information we want, or I’ll take it.”
I shivered at the way Kalan said those words,
I’ll take it
, so matter-of-factly. He’d always been so gentle, but I was beginning to realize there was more to Kalan than his angelic good looks. “Okay. But I can tell you right now, he’s not going to cooperate.”
“His mistake.”
We went into the senior’s home, and as we neared his apartment, my heart began to stutter. By the time we reached the door, I was certain Kalan could hear the pounding.
Kalan rapped on the door three times. A barking voice answered. “Who’s there?”
“It’s your niece, Adriana,” I called out.
Nasty old fuck
. There was a moment of hesitation before the chain latch was slid across, followed by the dead bolt turning.
The door creaked as he opened the door only wide enough to poke his head out. “Oh. You.”
My palms dripped sweat.
This is the man who molested Analiese when she was only twelve years old
. He opened the door the rest of the way, wide enough to finally see Kalan. Then he froze, stock-still, his mouth half-open.
“I’m here to ask you some questions,” I said through gritted teeth. I could hardly keep my voice from wavering. “This is my friend, Kalan.”
Uncle Les’s brows lowered and he gave Kalan a quick once-over. Then he grunted and opened the door. His near-black hair hadn’t been trimmed for some time, and also clearly hadn’t been washed, the way it stuck up in greasy points around his head. His green eyes had turned a mossy hue from the veil of cataracts that covered them. His teeth were yellowed from years of cigarette smoking, his skin reddened and criss-crossed with wrinkles like boot leather.
Les walked back into his apartment. “Well, are you coming in or not?”
I shoved my sweaty, shaking hands into my pockets and glanced at Kalan, whose grim expression told me he wasn’t impressed. We went in.
My skin crawled. Uncle Les had every window covered, the curtains drawn. The space was dimly lit with one tiny lamp in the corner of the room. It served to highlight the eerie quality of the space with drab furnishings and washed-out colours. The entire palette was in shades of beige and gray. The smell of stale smoke and dirty laundry turned my stomach. The weighted door shut behind us and eclipsed all remaining natural light, so that we were plunged into a dingy, smoke-filled dungeon.
“Why are you here?” Uncle Les asked. No attempt at social niceties.
I drew in a breath. “Genevieve. Do you remember that name?” I waited a minute to see if he’d respond, but he didn’t. “Auntie Bethany and Grandma do. I bet you do too.”
Les’s eyes narrowed. “It don’t matter if I remember or not. Why would I tell you a goddamn thing?” He pointed at me with his lit cigarette, the smouldering end bright red, a tiny weapon. The round white scar on Analiese’s left thigh flashed through my mind.
Fucking
.
Asshole
.
My voice wavered as I failed to contain my temper. “You don’t say anything about Analiese dying? You can’t call your niece, my mom, to say sorry for your loss? And you can’t answer a simple question, even if my
safety
depends on it?” I was speaking far too loud in the enclosed space.
Les chortled. More of a hoot, really. “You come in here with your damn white bodyguard,” he gestured to Kalan with his cigarette hand, “and try to guilt trip me? You’ve got another thing coming, girlie.”
Kalan’s spine straightened. Uncle Les sat down on the sofa next to the lamp and set his cigarette in an ashtray, a thin thread of smoke rising from it, creating curlicues that rose up into the lamp shade. Once he settled his ass into the sofa, he grabbed the cigarette and took a drag from it, staring straight ahead as if Kalan and I weren’t even there.
I strode across the room and sat down adjacent to Uncle Les. Kalan remained standing, coiled and ready, as if he would pounce across the room at my word.
“Les. After everything you’ve done, don’t you think you owe me this much?”
He glared at me, his eyes slotted, his nose flared. He refused to respond.
“You have inflicted more pain on me and my family than you could possibly imagine. Now is your chance to make things right and tell me what you know. You have no reason to keep it from me.”
“I want compensation. I’m an old man. All I got is my old age security. I want money.” His gruff voice was gravelly, from too many years of chain-smoking. “And don’t you try to guilt-trip me. That little slut of a sister—”
I launched myself from my chair and backhanded him as hard as I could. His face rocketed to the side from the impact, and his mouldy eyes widened in disbelief. “Don’t you talk about Analiese that way you fucking pedophile!” The back of my hand stung and my wrist throbbed.
I could so easily kill you right now, old man.
“Bitch,” Les muttered under his breath, rubbing his bright red cheek. He pointed with his cigarette hand, right at Kalan. “Is he one of ‘em?”
“One of…?”
“Genevieve’s oddball twins.”
My cheeks flooded with heat. He
did
know. “He is.”
“He don’t look nothing like her. I guess sometimes those family genes get all screwed up, don’t they?” Les looked at me, a creepy smile tugging at the corners of his face. “Except for you and Analiese. You look just like your daddy, don’t you?”
My blond-haired, blue eyed dad popped into my mind. He was the ultimate California boy. He couldn’t have been more opposite of me and Analiese, with our nearly black hair and green eyes. “What the hell are you talking about, you old fool?”
Les chuckled and took another drag from his super-heated cigarette. “What? Your mom never told you who your real daddy is?”
My stomach turned to lead, my heart heavy in my chest. He wasn’t implying…
A chuckle erupted from his mouth. He obviously saw something in my expression that amused him. “I think you’re catching on now, aren’t you? You’re pretty smart. Just like yer old man.”
It couldn’t be. The possibility was too vile to consider. Dr. McGill’s words flitted through my mind, unbidden.
“Homozygous, or recessive traits are typically inherited when both parents are carriers of the traits. Their father must have the majority of recessive traits.”
Recessive traits. Homozygous traits. Traits found in blood relatives.
Kalan’s hand on my arm brought me back to the horrific reality of this situation. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
I shook my head, unable to answer, my thoughts racing, my emotions flinging around in my body like a wild ferret looking for a weakness in its cage.
“I have to leave,” I managed to squeak out. My stomach turned and threatened the back of my throat. Bitter bile filled my mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Les guffawed. “You mad at your mom for lying to you all these years?”
With that, Kalan set off across the room, his long legs carrying him to Uncle Les in less than three strides. Les startled and jumped backward against the sofa. He dropped his smoke into his lap, but stared at Kalan for a beat before fishing it out from between his legs.
Kalan’s voice was low and menacing. “I’m not interested in hearing you goad Adriana for
one more second
. The pain you have caused her and her family is enough. I can’t begin to understand what the hell is wrong with you that you have chosen to behave this way, hurting people for your own selfish desires, and I don’t really care to know. But you
will
give us the information we came here for. And if you don’t tell us, I will
take
the information from you. Voluntary or by force. It’s your choice.”