Page 35 of These Monstrous Ties
The gun is against my hip, concealed by my hoodie. The watch is on my wrist. I glance at it as I walk away.
“I won’t let you down,” I call out into the night.
Nicolas mumbles something under his breath, but I don’t catch it, and he doesn’t repeat it. I hear the door to the SUV thud closed, but he doesn’t start the car. He’s going to wait here, we’re going to dump the tools at his hideaway, and then we’re going back to the mansion together. Jeremiah doesn’t do a roll call every night, but sometimes he does. All the time, though, he lets Nicolas know where and when he’s going to be somewhere. And tonight, he’d told Nicolas he wouldn’t be back until dawn.
I wonder where he and Brooklin are staying, and why.
I know, though, that my brother likes to get away from the mansion sometimes. From the demands. Demands he’d created, demands he dove into like a fool with the jobs he did.
But none of that is my problem tonight.
Tonight, my problem is Lucifer and the Unsaints.
And I know, without him having told me, that Nicolas knows less about the Unsaints than I do. He might know that Jeremiah used to be one. He might know their parents are the Society of 6. But he doesn’t know how dangerous they are, or he would never have let me do this.
I’m fucking glad.
The roads to the forest are quiet. It’s Monday night, and even in a college town, people sleep. Not often, and not well, but they do. The flashing lights in the downtown core are far off in the distance. But twenty minutes after I left Nicolas, I walk through the intersection I’d first met Lucifer at.
I hold my breath as I cross the street, pull my hood over my head, like he’d had his when we first met. I don’t want to think about that night. About the death he’d stolen from me.
I want to think about what I’m going to take from him.
Because whether Jeremiah approves it or not, it’ll be more than his life.
The forest is pitch black, the only sound that of the dirt beneath my feet as I walk down the path in the darkness. It occurs to me too late that maybe I should have just taken Nicolas with me. Whether he wanted to know what I was doing or not is irrelevant; if I had asked him, I think he likely would have come.
But he’s long gone, the city at my back, the dark expanse of the woods before me. I wish there were more sounds, more bugs, more animals scurrying about the forest. It would feel more…natural. But there’s next to nothing.
Just my feet.
I take a dirt path that forks to the left, brush the hood back from my head and pull the gun out from against my hip. I can hear my heartbeat in my head, and I try to stop looking over my shoulder. If someone is watching me, they’ll know I’m nervous. It’s not a good thing to show nerves.
I steel my spine, put one foot in front of the other, and ignore the shapes my mind conjures around me; shadows becoming bears which become leering men. And when a bat flies overhead, the flap of its wings startling the shit out of me, it becomes Lucifer himself.
I huff out a laugh.
I have no reason to be scared. It’s not like Lucifer is going to kill me, even if he does see me in here. I don’t know what he wants me for, but it’s probably worse than death.
He’s an Unsaint after all.
I’ve survived worse than death.
But the rest of the Unsaints…they might actually kill me.
I like the cool feel of the gun in my hand, and I brush my thumb around the barrel, a zip of confidence lighting down my arm with the touch.
I’m safe.
I repeat that to myself like a mantra as I edge closer to the river.
The house down here is supposedly a family home, from way back in the day. But I’d never known anyone to live in it. This park is government property. I’m surprised they’d never torn the thing down.
And then, too soon, it looms in front of me.
Utter darkness, the river glimmering beyond it under the light of the stars. I look up at the second floor. There are curtains closed at every window, but even still, there isn’t a hint of light anywhere in that house. I can’t imagine the Unsaints staying here. They supposedly left town for a while after last Halloween, but they have more money than I’d ever see in my life. They can, and do, afford better lodgings than this.
Maybe Trey had been wrong. Maybe Jeremiah had fed him this information precisely because he knew I’d try to ferret it out of Trey. Maybe no one lives here, and I’m playing into my brother’s trap, like I always do.
