V.J. Chambers - Jason&Azazel Apocalypse 01 (24 page)

I nearly tripped over Mitch’s body. He’d been shot in the head, but Jason had taken the time to
rough him up first. His face was smashed in. If he’d been alive, his nose would never have
healed straight. Blood was everywhere, smeared all over the concrete, gushing from the wound
in Mitch’s head.

That would have been enough. I don’t know if I could ever have felt the same way about him
after that. But two feet away from Mitch lay my baby brother. He was lying face down against
the concrete, and he wasn’t moving.

At first I thought he was dead. I rushed to him, turning him over. He looked up at me, his eyes
frightened. “I can’t move, Zaza,” he whispered.

And Jason? Was he still there, or had he run like a coward?

Jason was in a corner, curled up in a ball. He had his arms over his head, including the one that
held a gun. He was crying.

I advanced on him. “What the fuck, Jason?” I said. I stopped when I stood over him. He didn’t
look up. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt Chance,” he said, looking up at me. His eyes were red-rimmed. “It was
an accident, I swear.”

“And Mitch?” I said. “I guess you meant to do that.”

“Why couldn’t you just break up with me?” he said, his voice wracked with sobs. “Why did you
have to do in front of my face like that? I couldn’t take it, Azazel. I just couldn’t.” His nose was
running. He rubbed it with the back of his hand.

He disgusted me. I was appalled and horrified. I despised him. “Mitch and Chance and I have
been planning a fucking surprise birthday for you, Jason,” I said. “I didn’t break up with you
because I was in love with you.”

The shock in his eyes was intense. He’d really thought I was cheating on him. I could see that
he’d never even considered another option.

“Even if I’d been screwing him behind your back,” I said, “that doesn’t give you the right to kill
him.”

Jason started to sob again. “I told you,” he said. “I told you to do it in England. I said to kill me,
and you wouldn’t.”

I snatched the gun out of his hand. “You want me to kill you?” I said. My voice was shaking. So
were my hands as I aimed the gun at him.

“Zaza,” said Chance weakly. “What are you doing to Jason? He didn’t mean to shoot me.”

“You shot my brother?” I said. I hadn’t been able to tell before. I hadn’t been able to see the
blood. The whole situation was a nightmare, but all I felt was rage. Jason had hurt my brother.

He’d shot Chance. My Chance.

Jason swallowed his tears. He nodded, staring me square in the eye. “Do it. Shoot me. I don’t
work right, Azazel. You have to do it.”

I think I might have. I struggled to steady my arms, pointing the gun in his face.

“Zaza?” said Chance.

Oh, God. I closed my eyes. I dropped the gun to my side. I was shaking all over.

“Don’t shoot him,” said Chance. “Please don’t.”

I opened my eyes. I looked over at my brother. “You don’t want me to kill this asshole?”

“He didn’t mean it.”

I snapped my head back to Jason. “You get out of here,” I growled. “Get away from me. Get
away from my family.”

Jason stood up. He started to walk away, his head down. He got to Mitch’s body. He stopped and
looked at me. “Azazel—”

“Chance and I will lie for you,” I said. “We’ll say it was a mugger. But this is the last time,
Jason Wodden. I never want to see you ever, ever again.”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. He slunk off into the night.

I wouldn’t have come here to see him if it hadn’t been for that damned grimoire. I meant it when
I said it. I never wanted to see him again.

* * *

The whole story came spilling out, with various interruptions from Chance, helpfully pointing out that I’d ignored Jason almost completely for a month and that Jason had probably felt abandoned. I didn’t let Chance snag the forward motion of my recounting the events. When I was done, I was seething mad at Jason again. I thought I’d been mad at him before, but I’d forgotten the force of my fury.

Kieran absorbed the entire thing. By this time, he was sitting on one of the pews in the sanctuary.

Chance was parked next to him in his wheelchair. I was on my feet. The anger had made it impossible to sit down.

“You were too harsh on him,” said Chance. “If I can talk to him, then he’ll see that everything’s okay, and then he’ll stop being horrible.”

I spun to face Chance. “Too harsh on him?”

Kieran held up a hand. “Wait,” he said to me. He turned to Chance. “She wasn’t too harsh on him. She wasn’t harsh enough.”

Chance furrowed his brow.

“Jason had killed someone. He should have gone to jail,” Kieran said. He looked back at me. “I gotta say I wish you had called the police.”

I sat down heavily, relieved that Kieran had taken my side. I should have known he would.

Kieran didn’t have any love for Jason. After Kieran and I had argued so much the past two days, I had just expected him to take the opposite side as me. “I couldn’t do that,” I said. “After all, I’ve killed people too.”

“You’ve killed people in self-defense,” said Kieran. “It’s not the same thing. Jason killed out of jealousy.” He turned back to Chance. “I guess you and Jason were friends, huh?”

Chance laughed. “Well, I’m not going to lie. I was pretty angry with him for a while. I mean, I can’t walk anymore.” He considered ruefully for several seconds. “There are actually a lot of things I can’t do anymore.” He brightened. “But I’m not angry with him anymore. And maybe you guys are right that Jason really screwed up, but maybe what he needs right now is a friend.”

“We can’t let you talk to him,” said Kieran. “I’m sorry. It’s too dangerous.”

“He won’t hurt me,” said Chance.

Kieran raised an eyebrow. “Five minutes after I met the guy, he had a gun to your sister’s head.”

Chance looked shocked. He didn’t say anything.

“He’s different than he was, Chance,” I said as gently as I could. “He’s a lot different.”

Chance shook his head. “Well, then, I have to see for myself.”

“No,” I said.

Kieran shook his head.

“I still can’t believe they let you leave D.C.,” I muttered.

“Hey, give me some credit,” said Chance. “They didn’t let me do anything. I decided to leave, so I did. They couldn’t stop me. And you guys won’t be able to stop me from going to see Jason either.”

“Chance,” I said.

“Just because you and Jason aren’t together anymore doesn’t mean that I have to hate him too,”

said Chance.

“He
shot
you, Chance. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

“Why not?” said Chance. “I have.”

* * *

I was stunned. I shambled back up to the church from the outhouse, not really sure how to react.

I didn’t look at anyone, I just went back to my pack and dug through it for what I needed.

Armed, I headed back to the outhouse. Kieran stopped me on my way there. “Where are you going?” he asked.

In response, I simply held up the tampon.

I hurried away before he could say anything.

I’d gotten my period. It was a week and a half late, and I’d just tested positive for pregnancy, and here I was, getting my period. I didn’t know what that meant. My period wasn’t accompanied by any kind of relentlessly painful cramps or gushes of blood. It seemed like my normal period.

Was this a miscarriage? If you miscarried this early, did it not hurt?

I guessed it didn’t matter, one way or the other. After all, if I was bleeding I wasn’t pregnant. I repeated that in my thoughts. I
wasn’t
pregnant. This was good news. So why did I feel so sad?

If it was a miscarriage, I could blame biology again. Weren’t there all kinds of hormonal imbalances that happened when you lost a baby? On the other hand, your regular menstrual cycle threw a cocktail of hormones at you. I could just blame my period.

Thing was, I didn’t really believe my period made me think or feel things I wouldn’t normally.

Sometimes, I guessed, it just made the reactions stronger. So, maybe I wasn’t really as sad as I felt. But I was sad.

I didn’t know why. I didn’t want to have a baby. Thinking I was going to have a baby had been depressing. I’d been through over and over the litany of reasons why having a baby was a bad idea. But somehow, in the course of waiting for my period, I’d gotten kind of used to the idea.

And that positive pregnancy test—

That was the worst. They were supposed to be so accurate. How could it have screwed up? Of course, I had kind of left it for longer than I was supposed to. It had said something about not reading the results past ten minutes. Had that caused me to read a false positive?

However it had happened, I had adjusted to the idea that I was going to have a baby. Now I wasn’t. I had to readjust back. Which should be easy, because I’d never wanted a baby in the first place. Had I? I thought about my conversation with Kieran in the afternoon that day, when the light was streaming through the sheets. I remembered my image of the little baby girl. I bit my lip. Okay. Well. Maybe I had wanted a baby. Maybe just a little bit.

I left the outhouse and trudged back to the church. Kieran was standing on the lawn, waiting for me. God. Kieran was going to be so upset.

I couldn’t help it. The sight of Kieran for some reason made it worse. I started crying.

Kieran jogged over to me. “Azazel?” he said softly.

I threw my arms around him, buried my face in his chest, and cried.

Kieran held me and let me cry, which he was really good at doing. He was so comforting. He was like some kind of enormous stuffed animal. When I was done, I backed away, scrubbing at my face with my hands.

“I thought the test was positive,” said Kieran.

“I did too,” I said.

“Do you think you lost it?” Kieran said. It was an it now that it didn’t exist. It wasn’t a him or a her.

I shrugged.

“I thought you’d be happy,” he said.

“I thought so too,” I said.

He touched my face. I closed my eyes.

“I
am
happy,” I said. “I’m relieved.”

“Me too,” Kieran said.

My eyes snapped open. “Really? I thought you’d be upset. I thought you wanted the baby a whole lot.”

“I did,” he said. “But it’s relieving. It was going to make things complicated.”

I nodded. We were quiet for a little bit. Kieran put his arm around me. It was late evening, and the sun was drooping in the sky. We looked at it together, watching the darkening sky and the heavy sun.

“I feel like something’s missing,” I said. “Like I lost something that I didn’t really get a chance to understand or know.”

“Yeah, I get that,” said Kieran. “It will be okay, though. I mean, all the arguments you made about why it would be hard to have a baby right now were true. And so now, things are just easier again.”

“Right.” Why didn’t easier seem better?

“And it would have made our relationship even more complicated to sort out,” said Kieran.

I looked up at his face. “We have a relationship?”

He smiled at me. “Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know, Kieran. We seem to argue a lot.”

“Mostly, we’ve argued about the baby. And there isn’t a baby. So that should help to make things smoother.”

Maybe he was right. I leaned in against his body, enjoying his warmth and his closeness.

“Here’s what I think,” Kieran continued. “I think I should run back to the church and get a sleeping bag and we should talk. And sleep outside tonight, away from everyone.”

I gave him a look, remembering what happened last time we slept outside in a sleeping bag.

“You realize I’m having my period, right?”

He just grinned. “I wasn’t propositioning you, Zaza. But if the opportunity arose, you don’t really think that would bother me, do you?”

“I really don’t like that nickname,” I said.

“Well I like it a lot,” he said. He kissed my forehead. “Yes to the sleeping bag?”

I nodded. “Yes. But while you’re there, get Lily or Gus or someone to watch out for Chance. I don’t want him trying to sneak out to see Jason.”

* * *

Kieran’s body was pressed tight against mine. I clutched at him, arching my back and gasping.

His lips met mine. His breath was labored too. I was focused completely on him and on nothing else. I no longer heard the insects singing in the trees or felt the faint sting of the cool night air.

All I felt or thought now was Kieran and me.

It must have been how they managed to get so close to us. They made a racket in the church before they got to us, and if Kieran and I hadn’t been so distracted, maybe we would have heard it. I’d feel guilty later. Very guilty. I should have been in the church. Hallam had left me in charge. He hadn’t left me to get freaked out about my personal problems and run off to be alone with my boyfriend. If that was even what Kieran was.

They were surrounding us before we knew they were there.

I heard the laughter first. It took a moment, because, as I said, I was focused on Kieran and what we were doing. Not much sound was cutting through. But then I did hear it. Jeering laughter.

I went rigid against Kieran. “Stop,” I whispered.

He didn’t listen. I dug my nails into his shoulders. “Stop,” I repeated, still a whisper, but a more forceful one. He stopped. “Listen.”

There were voices now. I recognized the same accent from before. “Hey, I think I found them.”

A snicker.

Kieran’s eyes widened. He made a flailing grab for his pants, which were outside the sleeping bag. Under my breath, I swore. I didn’t have a gun. How had I been so sloppy to come out here without a gun?

They had kerosene lanterns, and I peered around Kieran who was trying to get dressed inside the sleeping bag. I could see them gathering close to us, five lanterns. Five men. The same men who’d been in the pharmacy in Clinton. The same men who’d murdered Kieran’s parents and raped his sister. And now they were all standing in a circle around our sleeping bag. We didn’t have any guns, and we weren’t wearing our clothes.