The Temptation (Kindred) (12 page)

“This isn’t happening,” he said to himself, making the sign of the cross on his chest. “God help us.”

Travis began to recite the rosary, and stepped out of the car, jogging over to where Randy stomped through the rain, and standing behind him. I floated alongside him, watching as Randy strode powerfully, methodically to the thin metallic front door, and kicked it in.

Randy stepped in, holding the gun in front of him. It was now that I noticed him trembling a little. Randy, for all his bravado and anger, was afraid.

In I floated, alongside Travis. The living room was filthy, piled high with trash and dirty clothes. It smelled rancid. Drug paraphernalia and pornography littered the floor. The walls were the only neat thing about the place, and this only because they were plastered end to end with news stories about the murder of Gregory Hartwell. This man celebrated their father’s death.

“Believe me now?” Randy asked his brother, as they took it all in.

“Jesus,” Travis answered, horrified by the scene. “What
is
this place?”

The man with the mustache sat calmly on a trashy plaid sofa, minus his shirt, polishing his gun as though he didn’t have a care in the world. When he looked up at the brothers, he had a filthy smile on his face, his green eyes twinkling with sadistic delight. It was now that I saw how clearly his eyes resembled Randy’s.

“So glad you came,” he said, and I recognized the voice instantly. It was the same voice that had growled and panted at me on my cell phone in the Vortex, the same voice that had threatened to “git” me. I was struck numb with horror.

“Before I blow your freakin’ head off, you wormy coyote, tell me your name,” Randy demanded, pointing his gun at the man’s head.

The man seemed unconcerned, and did not point his own gun back. He kept polishing it. “You don’t have the cojones, Randy,” he said, as though they were old acquaintances.

“How do you know my name, loser?” Randy roared.

“News stories,” said the man, jutting his dimpled chin toward the stories taped to the walls. “I’ve been watching you.” The man looked Randy up and down. “Keeping tabs on my experiment.”

“What experiment?” Randy asked.

“Don’t fall for it,” Travis told him. “He’s manipulating you. Don’t talk to him anymore.”

“You know what’s struck me the most?” the man oozed in a sleazy tone, smirking at Randy and winking at him in an almost seductive, sickening way. “I could never get over how different you two boys were. How you gave up, Randy, and lost yourself in whiskey and dope. Probably blamed yourself for me shooting your ole man. Like you should have saved him, right? You were the big boy, after all.”

Randy’s face fell in devastated recognition.

The man kept talking. “
Travis,
though. You’re a chip off the old block.”

Randy’s shaking escalated. “Don’t you talk about my daddy,” he cried. “Don’t! You’re not fit to speak my father’s name. You’re nothing. You’re lice. You’re scum. Or you were scum; you’re dead meat now.”

Randy cocked the gun, and the man just smiled placidly.

“Oh, I’ll talk about Travis’s ole man. He was the worm who took your mother away from me. Your mother, boys, now there’s a beautiful woman.” He made a big show out of licking his lips. “She shoulda picked me, you know. She didn’t. I’ve been watching her ever since, figuring ways to break her, and she never broke. That’s why I killed him, if you wanted to know. To break that damn woman he took from me. It didn’t work. She’s rawhide tough, your mama, but juicy, delicious.”

Randy and Travis exchanged a look of sudden confusion, and then hideous understanding that this man had somehow been involved with their mother. That was when Travis snarled two words to his brother, very clearly and calmly: “Kill ’im.”

“He can’t,” the man said smoothly to Travis. He turned his eyes to Randy. “Not if your daddy was a Hartwell.” He paused and smiled. “But if you were
my
boy? Ah. A different story.”

With that, Randy, gnashing his teeth, his eyes open wide in fury, pulled the trigger. The bullet entered the man’s shoulder, a bit off the mark. Surprised, but in a delighted sort of way, the man looked at his wound and seemed to feel no pain.

“Well, well,” he said with a calm chuckle. “Would you look at that. Maybe you’re not a complete embarrassment to your father. But you can’t aim for crap, drunk as y’ are, you goddamned wuss.”

“Screw you!” Randy screamed, firing off another round.

The bullet entered the man’s belly this time, and again the man smiled, still unworried, and newly impressed, touching the gushing blood with his hands as if it were nothing but water from a lazy faucet.

“You have terrible aim, Randy,” he said. “But I do commend you on your ambition. And for the record, because you asked, and because you’ve earned it now, my name is Victor. Victor Velarde. But my friends call me Green Eyes. You look like me. I’m proud of you, Randy. Son. It will break your beautiful mama’s heart to know you did this. I broke you, and now you will break her for me.”

Randy said nothing. He just fired the gun, calm and steady, this time sending the bullet right between Victor’s eyes, perfectly in synch with an enormous flash of lightning and simultaneous clap of thunder that came from quite nearby. The body slumped to the side, eyes still open, a nasty, sickening smile still writhing upon its lips. Victor Velarde was dead.

In a trance of sorts, Randy walked over to the man, gun still held out, and began to pump another round into his lifeless body.

“That’s for Daddy,” he said, sobbing.

“No,” Travis said, touching Randy’s arm gently. “That’s enough. It’s done.”

“I hate him. I hate what he did. I hate what he said. It’s not true. I’m
not
his son. It can’t be.”

“I know,” Travis said. “It’s not true. Guys like that just talk.”

“May he rot in hell.”

“We gotta get out of here.” Travis pulled Randy’s arm urgently, as the thunder boomed and lightning sliced the darkening sky.

“Why, Travis?” Randy sobbed, falling to his knees now, all his strength drained out of him. “Why’d he do it?”

Travis hoisted his brother up from the floor, dragged the slack and spiritless weight of Randy to a wearied standing position. “You’re my brother. It doesn’t matter what that animal said. Let’s go.
Now
.”

The boys hurried away from Victor’s body, and I was left to watch something that they did not see. A dark, putrid smoke came from the corpse of Victor, and snaked across the sofa, toward the wall, and into the outlet.

I
awoke at dawn,
a scream strangling in the back of my throat. For a moment, I was so disoriented I couldn’t remember where I was. I sat up in bed, my mouth dry as cotton, and looked around me with my heart doing double time. My bedroom. I was in my bedroom.

I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes, which were nearly as dry as my mouth, trying to relax and clear my head from the nightmare. I couldn’t get the gruesome image of Victor’s rubbery, bloodied corpse slumped over on that ugly plaid sofa out of my head. He had deserved to die, but I didn’t need to see it happen. It was too much.

When I looked at the pink beanbag, I saw the pale outline of Travis, near Buddy’s empty dog bed. He glowed a little, his image coming in waves, vibrations, like the fading and reappearing rings on a pond after a stone is tossed in, almost as though he was fussing until he got comfortable.

The sun was just starting to paint the sky beyond the mountains a shade of palest yellow, and I guessed that the stronger the day became, the more solid Travis’s outline would grow. Fifteen minutes later, the shape materialized, and Travis’s body appeared, lounging in my room, his hands behind his head, his feet planted on the white Berber carpet, knees bent and semi-far apart. He was hot, whole, and human again, staring back at me with a melancholy smile that indicated he had no idea how alluring his physical position was to me. Though a little bit sleepy-looking and rumpled, he was as gorgeous as I remembered, and I waved, like a dork, not knowing quite what else to do—or at least smart enough to stop myself from doing all the things I wanted to do to him, in my mind.

“Mornin’,” he whispered. He looked sad and worried.

“Good morning. What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

I waited for him to say more. After a long moment, he did.

“It’s not fair to you,” he said.

“What’s not?”

“This,” he said, pointing to himself and then to me. “Us, all of this.”

I tried to think of an answer, but I wasn’t sure what he was saying, and told him so.

“I’m saying that after I get your dog back—and I will—the best thing for us would be if I just left you alone. I shouldn’t be this far from my spot anyway.”

“Your haunting spot?”

He nodded.

“You can’t just leave me now,” I told him as tears pooled in my eyes.

“After I find the dog,” he said. “I owe you that, at least.”

“Why are you talking like this?” I asked. “I felt you next to me here last night! I know you care about me. Don’t try to deny it!”

Travis sighed heavily, pushed himself to his feet, and walked over to join me on the bed, sitting stiffly on the side, seeming to feel as awkward about the situation as I did.

“It’s because I care about you that I have to leave you,” he said. It looked for a moment as if he might be fighting back his own tears.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” I protested.

He looked defeated and fatigued. “Look, think about it. Since meeting me, you’ve had nothing but problems, Shane.”

“That’s not true!”

“Your mom thinks you’re crazy,” he listed, counting on his fingers, “and your best friend is afraid you’ve gone off the deep end. You lost your boyfriend, and Victor took your dog. I think Victor’s in touch with Logan now, too, which makes that guy even more dangerous to you. It’s not good, Shane. All because of me.”

“The man in the street . . . ,” I said, my eyes filling with fear.

“Demons like Victor look for weak souls to use in this world. He’s watching everything you do. Trying to find a way to get to me. It can only get worse, unless I disconnect from you.”

I shook my head, and a tear fell.

He looked at me with a deep and agonized apology in his eyes.

“I can’t do this to you,” he said. “It was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have come for you.”

“No!” I said in an intense whisper, worried that if I yelled at him like I wanted to, I might wake my mother. “You should have! You should have come for me! We belong together, and you know it.”

He nodded. “But maybe not right now. Maybe in another place and time. Maybe we were already together in some other dimension. I don’t know. But what I do know is that you’ve lost too much because of me, and I can’t stand it. I want you to be happy, Shane. And safe.”

“I am happy with you,” I told him. “And I don’t care about losing Logan. We were bound to break up anyway.”

“But Kelsey,” he said.

“She’ll come around. She always does.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, though.

“Buddy,” he suggested.

“You said you’d get him back.”

Travis sighed, and looked down at his hands. We stayed quiet for a while, thinking, and then I remembered the dream from last night and tried to change the subject, hoping he wouldn’t bring it up again or follow through on abandoning me.

“Randy killed Victor,” I said.

Travis turned his eyes to me, the sadness still in them, and nodded. “I thought I owed you an explanation of all this,” he said. “I had to show you. I didn’t want you thinking we were terrible people.”

“That’s the bad thing you did,” I said, and felt tears stinging behind my eyes. “Being there when he did it?”

Travis nodded. “I told him to do it,” he said. “I knew it was wrong, but I was so angry and filled with hate. I didn’t stop him. That’s how I ended up in the Vortex.

“Victor hasn’t stopped trying to destroy us just because we’ve all died. If anything, he’s worse now. He’s doing everything he can to make sure we don’t get to the Afterworld, because if we do, then there’s a chance our mama will see us again someday. That’s his mission, to punish her through us, to ruin her for all eternity.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, feeling sick and sorrowful, resisting the overwhelming urge to embrace him and cover his face with kisses. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

Travis’s eyes met mine, and he blinked, slowly, seeming to work hard to keep his composure. “I want you to know that Randy’s not a bad guy,” he insisted. “I know some people, all they see is the drinking and the drugs, they might think he’s bad, but he’s not. Deep down, he’s a good guy. He used to be a happy kid, before all that. He blames himself. I know he does. He thinks he could have stopped it.”

“He’s got a lot of pain,” I offered. “I can understand it, I guess. But still, he killed a man.”

Travis’s expression grew bitter. “If you can call Victor a man, sure he did. Victor has no conscience. He’s pure evil. My brother killed a monster.”

“It was premeditated murder, Travis.”

“I realize that. But he was drunk, and he wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Why did you tell him to do it?” I asked.

Travis shook his head and buried his face in his hands, an uncharacteristically desperate and childish gesture for him. He looked up, tortured. “I wish I didn’t. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret it. But when he started talking as if he should have been our father—or was Randy’s—I couldn’t take it.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I would have probably done the same thing.”

“It’s hard for me to talk about. It was easier to show you,” he said, looking down at his hands again.

“You think Victor has Buddy?”

Travis nodded. “Of course.”

“Do you think Buddy’s alive?”

Travis nodded. “Buddy’s bait. Victor wants to make me screw up somehow. He wants to tempt me into messing up so badly I end up where he is.”

I felt incredibly torn now, as though I had to choose between saving my beloved dog and saving Travis from Victor. Travis seemed to sense this.

“I’m going to get your dog back, no matter what you say,” he told me. “It’s my fault Buddy ended up there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“I think he’s probably got him out at the trailer where Randy shot Victor. He haunts it. I’m going to start by checking there.”

“That will be dangerous,” I said.

Travis tried to shrug it off. “I’ll take Randy with me, and a couple other guys we know from the Vortex. We’re a lot smarter than Victor. Don’t worry.”

I began to cry, and he held me. His touch felt insanely good.

“What happened after you guys left the trailer that day?” I asked.

“We died.”

“I know. But how? What happened, exactly?”

“I didn’t show you our own deaths, Shane,” he said, “because I didn’t want you to see that.”

“Oh.”

“But I can tell you. A few minutes after Randy killed Victor, we were trying to get out of there. I was driving. We came around a bend in the dirt road, and there was Victor, plain as day, without a scratch, just standing in the middle of the road. I swerved on instinct and lost control. The truck and horse trailer—we all sailed off the road, over a little cliff there. We had propane in the back, and when we hit, the whole thing blew, like a nuclear bomb.”

“Your horse died too?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he what you were riding when you found me?”

“Yes.”

My eyes welled with tears, and I couldn’t help but let out a sob.

Travis put his free hand on top of our joined hands, and the heat and light came, entering through my skin and bones, filling me with a sense of calm—and temptation.

“Man, that feels good,” he breathed.

“Too good,” I said, shivering with pleasure.

We sat in silence for a moment, just enjoying each other’s energy, and the ways our bodies reacted to it. I didn’t know what sex felt like yet, but if it was anything like holding hands with Travis, I was looking forward to the day I might find out.

“It’s okay, you know,” Travis told me. “Us killing Victor. If it hadn’t happened this way, I might never have met you, we might never have shared this.” He looked at our hands wistfully. “One thing I’ve learned is that everything really does happen for a reason. Even the things that seem bad turn out good, and the other way around, too.”

“So maybe all this bad stuff you say is happening to me is really good stuff, then,” I said.

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But . . .”

I watched his mouth as he spoke. Again, I was taken by its perfection. He noticed me looking, and pulled back from me, almost imperceptibly, but kept his eyes on my face.

“You’re real pretty,” he said, seeming to weaken on his position to avoid me for my own good. “Even first thing in the morning.”

I blushed, and realized my breath was probably as out of control as the mascara that was undoubtedly making raccoon circles under my eyes.

“Did it hurt a lot when you died?” I asked him.

Travis shook his head. “Didn’t feel a thing, actually,” he said. “It was more like—”

Down the hall, we heard sounds of hungover life in the kitchen as my mother rummaged around clumsily, slamming cabinet doors it sounded like, and dropping pots on the floor.

“You can’t be here,” I interrupted him, realizing in a panic that my mom would flip out if she saw him. Then again, she might believe me if she saw him, I thought. No, actually, she wouldn’t. She would assume he was some stalker guy I was letting in through my window.

“You have to go,” I said.

“Okay.” His eyes went to the window I’d crawled out of last night to be with Logan. “Meet me outside in a little while.”

“Where?”

“Same place Logan hurt the rabbit last night, end of the street.”

There was a knock on my bedroom door then, and my mother’s voice calling out, “Shane? Are you talking to someone in there?”

“I’m on speakerphone, Mom!” I cried, the lie coming quickly and easily now that I was starting to get the hang of it. “Talking to Logan.”

My doorknob rattled as she tried to open the locked door.

“You know I don’t like when you lock me out,” she said.

“I know, hang on, I’ll be right there. Let me—um, just let me end this call. Privacy, please.”

Travis went soundlessly to the desk, and wrote on a piece of paper, “Come as soon as you can.” His handwriting was small, tight, neat.

I nodded at him.

“You want pancakes?” my mother asked through the door. “And chicken-apple sausage? I have to get to work today—Dr. Paulson just called in sick—but I wanted to at least have breakfast with you before I go.”

“Um, sure, Mom. That sounds great!” I answered far too enthusiastically, happy that she was leaving so that I could meet Travis without having to think up a lie for her. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the happy tone, or that if she did, that she would just attribute it to my having ostensibly hit my head in the crash. Come to think of it, the whole “Shane hit her head” thing was going to come in handy for excusing all sorts of behaviors I might have gotten in trouble for in the past. Silver linings.

Travis smiled at me, winked to let me know everything was going to be okay. Then he walked through the wall of my room as though it weren’t there, and was gone.