Blood & Rust (Lock & Key #4) (59 page)

The windshield wipers shuffle faster, doing battle with the heavy thrum of raindrops, lulling me to Groggyville.

“What the—”

Stephan jams on the brakes, and the tires scream. My eyes jerk open, my neck stiffening.

A fox with glow-in-the-dark eyes is glued to the shiny wet road before us. The truck lurches and skids. My eyes shoot to Stephan gripping the wheel. He yells. A hideous, horrible sound.

My pulse explodes. The truck spins.

“Stephan!”

We fly.

My breath chokes out from me.

Steel crunches in the black darkness. My head kicks back on my neck, and my lungs crush together. The windshield caves around me, shards of glass slashing my hands, my face.

I soar.

Ripping howls.

Cracking.

Shouts.

Mom!

Blood.

Mom

Pain.

Terror.

Pain.

Blood.

Blood.

Stephan?

I TUMBLED
.

“Butler! Honey?”

Tania’s voice.

Tania.

Gasping for air, I forced my eyes to unglue.

Tania’s dark brown pools of forever held me. “Are you okay? You were having a nightmare. You were calling for Stephan.”

My head rocked to the side on the pillows.

The box of a window. The institutional beige Venetian blinds. The curtain hanging around my bed.

Hospital bed.

Hospital.

“Butler?” Her hands swept down the sides of my face, and my muscles eased.

“Here. Drink.” She held a Styrofoam cup with a straw out to me.

I raised my head, took the straw between my lips, and drank some water.

“You want to tell me what that dream was about?”

“Not really.”

“Too bad. I think you need to.”

“It’s ’cause of Wes, I guess.” I licked at my dry lips. “He reminds me of my brother. A little bit of both of us.”

Tania adjusted my pillows. “What’s your real first name, by the way, brother of Stephan?”

“Markus.”

“I like that. Stephan and Markus. So, tell me about Stephan.”

I blew out a breath.

“It might help.” She took my hand and stroked it.

My head sank back into the pillow. “My brother was a year and something older than me. More responsible than I ever was. Stephan was a great football player. So great that he was being courted by several top schools for a full ride. It was huge. Dream-come-true huge.”

“Did you play football, too?”

“I did.”

“Were you good?”

“Yeah, but not great. Stephan was great, and he really loved it. I didn’t have the ambitions my brother did either. Didn’t see it as a way up or a way out of our mediocre lower middle-class existence. Stephan had the steady girlfriend and the good grades. But I was the pretty one. I was the player, Mr. Easy Come, Easy Go. It all came easy to me, whatever it was—picking up girls, learning my way around a bike and a car at my dad’s shop, studying for a test the night before and getting a good enough grade. But Stephan was different. Special.

“This idiot at school who was real jealous of Stephan had tried to get him in trouble with the principal by implicating him in a cheating scandal, but it was all lies. Stephan was so worried about his record, so stressed out. So, I challenged Austen Taymor—I still remember the shit’s name—to a bike race by these bluffs we had in our town.”

“A duel?”

“Yeah. Stephan had told me to ignore him, but I couldn’t. I had to do something, stand up for him somehow. So, I did what I did best. Speed.”

“You won?”

“I whooped his ass in front of the whole school—him on a brand-new bike, me on the old bike I’d rebuilt with my dad. I won a lot of money that night, and I stomped on Austen for the whole school to see. He was supposed to retract his bullshit to the principal the next day.

“Stephan heard about the race and came. I hadn’t told him about it because I knew he’d stop me. It started raining, and it was really dark. He was rushing, so we’d get home in time for our curfew. Then, some animal appeared on the road, a small one, and he tried to avoid it. He lost control of the truck. We flipped over. I wasn’t wearing my seat belt ’cause I’d been drinking and felt sick. I ended up getting thrown clear of the truck.”

“And Stephan?”

“Stephan was trapped in the truck, and the truck caught fire. I tried to get to him, but I couldn’t. The firemen and the cops got him out, but his spine was broken, a leg smashed, and he had burns. Everything stopped then. The football, the scholarship, the girlfriend, the future. The health insurance. All his plans, his dreams, my parent’s dreams. Everything. My parents blamed me, and they were right. It was my fault for racing, for getting wasted, for Stephan picking me up.”

“Yeah, but—”

“They were right.” My eyes met Tania’s. “Then it turned into,
Why Stephan? Why not you?
My parents started seeing right through me, like I was invisible, like I was nothing. I didn’t exist anymore in that house. There was a lot to do to take care of Stephan, bring money in, double mortgage, and all. I pulled my weight, but no matter what, I was invisible. They had to put Stephan in a state-run facility, and a few months later, he died from pneumonia and a hundred other complications. It was horrible, it was a relief, it was a nightmare all over again. The blaming and the,
We didn’t do enough. We should’ve done more,
started back up again.

“I couldn’t stay in that house. I had two months to go to finish my senior year, and I dropped out. Got on my bike, and didn’t look back. Headed further north, up the coast, and just bummed around. I surfed, got odd jobs, sold weed and whatever else I could get my hands on. I convinced myself I was living the good life.

“The Jacks were out west on some run and were joyriding up the coast a bit before heading back here. I tagged along, figured,
What the fuck else did I have to do?
”

Tania’s head slanted. “It was more than that, wasn’t it?”

“Ah, Scarlett.”

“Tell me about meeting the One-Eyed Jacks for the first time.”

“What I remember most is looking into those golden brown eyes of Dig’s and wanting to be like him. Confident, full of purpose, no shadows hanging over him, and not giving a fuck. And Boner? Oh, man, that cat didn’t let anything touch him. The epitome of a free spirit. Totally in the moment, as if he had no frame of reference for anything but what was right there in front of him. I envied that. Boner played it cool and easy, but I could also see the hard glint in his eyes. Dig’s, too. It was startling. They were just a few years older than me, but they had lived, and they were living. I was just hanging out, waiting for shit to happen and bumping into it as it did. I didn’t know I could want things out of life.

“I got on my fucking bike and came back here with them, prospected, and you know the rest.”

“Yes, I know the rest.”

“I was Wes once upon a time. I had what he had in the palms of his hands—School, football, and the cover-boy looks to make it all real sweet, but I let it go. Stephan was the good one. Stephan followed all the rules, and it actually bothered him if he ever fell short. Not me. I didn’t have that kind of conscience. He did, and he kept me on the straight and narrow, pulling me back in between the lines whenever I strayed.”

“Which was often?” she asked.

“Pretty much. Without my brother, I felt lost. In the end, my wrongs, my badness, my unworthiness were all that was left. So, to let all that go, I let
everything
go.”

“Did you ever tell your parents that the accident wasn’t your fault?”

“They wouldn’t have listened, Tania. It just didn’t matter at the end of the day. It wouldn’t have changed that Stephan wasn’t ever going to get better, that he was gone. Their grief was so deep that they couldn’t see straight, and so was mine. If it made them feel better to have someone to blame, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry,” Tania murmured.

“Almost lost Wes on that road. Because of me. Almost lost Wes. When I saw him spin out. When I heard the gunfire. I saw Stephan again. I saw Caitlyn. Almost lost Wes…Almost.”

“But you didn’t. You protected him and he protected you. Both of you, together.”

“I was a good brother. I was,” I breathed.

Stephan grinned at me from inside that truck of his, and a shudder passed through me.

“Yes, you were.” Tania’s hand stroked the side of my face, and something heavy detached inside me, crumbling.

My body trembled, a cold sweat prickled over my skin. “I was a…g-good brother.”

“Yes, Markus, yes, you were. You were a good brother.”

She pressed a red button on a cable by the bed.

“I was. I was.”

Is that my shaky voice?

“Yes, honey.”

Tania took me in her arms and held me as I finally mourned for Markus and Stephan.

THE DRAMATIC SOUNDTRACK
to
On the Waterfront
blared from my television set as the credits rolled on the screen.

“The music in this film is amazing, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s the one time Leonard Bernstein composed for film.”

Since I’d come home from the hospital a couple of weeks ago, Tania and I had been spending almost all our free time together. Tonight, I was cooking us dinner while we watched one of my favorite Marlon Brando films on DVD.

“I liked how it ended. Hopeful.” Tania put her feet up on the edge of my old coffee table.

I scoffed as I stretched out next to her on the sofa.

“What? You don’t think so?” she asked.

“This is the Hollywood version, baby, where Terry Malloy—the has-been boxing contender, the young underdog under everybody’s thumb—is finally able to step up and do the right thing, be the best Terry Malloy he could be and forge a new future for his community. Doesn’t end this way in the original.”

“You’ve read the book?”

“One of my favorites.
Waterfront
by Budd Schulberg.”

“How does it end in the book?”

“In the true ending, last time we see Terry, his pigeons have been massacred after he testified against mob boss Johnny Friendly, and he’s saying good-bye to the girl.”