Allhan is the son V never wanted, and the fact that the Brother backdoor’d into the parenting thing is the only way it could have happened. An orphan, abandoned in the human world by his parents, ended up at Luchas House—and had some serious computer skills. V took Allhan in at F.T. H.Q., and the kid worked his ass off. All hours, all the time—to the point where V started to feed him, and eventually took him home so he knew the kid was getting some sleep.
Pretty quick, that became a habit on both sides.
I don’t know when exactly V realized the young was his, but I’m guessing it had to do with a creeping sense of anxiety that eventually had to be acknowledged. The transition is hard on everybody who has to go through it, and the suffering isn’t contained to the pretrans at hand. The parents worry so much, the risks for when adulthood comes knocking as bad as the ones on the birthing bed.
I’ll bet you that was the hook that made V see what was obvious to everybody else—
“Don’t think you know me.”
“If you’re reading my mind, then you know exactly how much I do.”
The glower is obvious, but whatever curses are going through his head he keeps to himself. It’s okay. I can dub them in—because this is, of course, the root of our problem. He’s used to being the one who knows everything, and not just because he’s the smartest guy in every room he walks into. He sees into the future, the finale to everybody’s season known to him, the fade-to-black haunting him so that he can’t look into the face of any of his Brothers or their mates, or the fighters or the young, without being fully aware of how it ends for them.
Put like that, of course he keeps himself a little apart. You want to talk about an attachment disorder? You see fate spool out, each person’s individual timeline a different rope tied to a separate and distinct sinking anchor, every day and night that passes another tug on that iron-clad connection, another pull, another drag. Closer and closer the graves come for the ones he loves, and you think he’s going to get any closer to that grief than he has to? When he knows the loss that’s coming?
He holds himself apart because it’s a survival mechanism.
And meanwhile: Tug. Tug. Tug…
That’s really what mortality is, each of us waking up to a new dawn we can’t control, our own endings approaching inexorably, the measurements of minutes and hours and days and seasons a human conception that marks a universal entropy. Thank God we have the minutia of our lives or we’d be paralyzed by the fact that we’re all going to end up gone someday.
Youth is not wasted on the young. Those blinders are a gift.
And you know, people say that they see me in Vishous. All my friends, when they read him on the page, tell me that I’m him—and maybe on the surface that’s true enough. I mean, the cursing, for sure. But they’re wrong about the real why.
He hates me because he and I both see the endings of them all.
I know how the Brotherhood series ends.
When Wrath showed up and brought me his world, he started by giving me the first ten books. In the succeeding twenty years, there have been many, many more over and above them, so many stories, so many destinies, so many loves and losses. Laughter and joy, too. He opened the door to the whole world of Caldwell, NY, and people have been walking through it ever since.
But yes, at this point, I know what happens when the lights go out for the last time, when the final meal is cleaned up, and the last syllable is spoken, and the door is closed on all these people we love and care about so much.
This knowledge is what unites V and I, and also what tears us apart. Sure, the lie is part of it, but he enjoys feeling invincible and superior. That’s his armor against the trauma he’s not so much lived through as locked away behind his intelligence.
His own LBD with diamonds and sunglasses.
But I’m one level past him because, of all the visions he’s ever had, he cannot see his own future, and he hates that I have something of his that he cannot possess.
He would like to know how it happens for him, actually. Control freak that he is. But he hasn’t been given that option, and I’m not fucking with the rules. Besides, it wouldn’t make him happy—
Annnnnd okay, this is getting weird. Although like the whole concept of my Rice Krispies and this interview thing isn’t already out there.
I offer him a little wave. He glowers at me in response—because even though he isn’t reading my mind, he knows damn well I’m in the mood for retrospection and remembrance, and he can guess exactly where I’ve gone in my head.
Or maybe he’s already there because it’s all he can think about if he sees me.
I turn away from him and step over the threshold. The ironic thing is that Z is my favorite hero, but Vishous is the one I’ve always wanted the most.
I guess I’ve always had a thing for pricks.
“I love you so much,” I whisper as I walk away. “True.”
Tohrment, son of Hharm
One of the coolest things about the mansion’s layout is the hidden steps under the grand staircase. You head to the right, bypassing that glorious ascending red runner and its gold-leafed balustrades, and go down the ornate, paneled sides of the rise. As I continue along, I can’t help but notice the incredible craftsmanship, all the joints precisely meeting, the expanse extending up twenty-five or thirty feet to the second-floor landing.
The seam for the entry I’m looking for is nearly invisible, and given how perfectly everything else fits, I’m thinking whoever made it deliberately created the subtle gap so people could find the way. I fumble around for the release. It’s just a small latch under the lip of one of the panels, and as I trigger it, a big section swings wide open. After I enter a code, I’m allowed access past the solid steel fuck-off that’s behind all the pretty exterior stuff.
