Michael laughed, empty and cold. “You ask where Perry is? Not where you are, how you got here, what is going to happen to you. But you ask where she is.”
I feigned strength. “Where is Perry?” I repeated.
He cocked his head, like a bird. Like a raptor. “She’s fine.”
“Where is she?”
“Here, of course,” he said. “Manhattan. She’s come looking for you.”
My heart sank. How the hell did Perry know to come here?
“I told her,” he said smugly, reading my face, or my thoughts.
My fists clenched and unclenched. “Why?”
“You don’t seem to be surprised to be here. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
I frowned at him, feeling rage and frustration begin to bubble up inside. He was changing the subject and I was walking right into it. “Appreciate it? Being here? How the f**k can I appreciate that? This place is hell.”
He grinned at me like a snake. “I know. It always was, wasn’t it? That’s the whole beauty of it, don’t you see, Declan? This has always been hell.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m pretty f**king sure your hell was never as bad as mine.”
He slowly got to his feet and dusted off the suit he was wearing. “You’re right. It wasn’t. But you had one thing that I didn’t.”
“And what was that?” Somewhere in the distance, down the low tunnel of the cave, I heard faint screams that faded as quickly as they started.
“You had love,” he said simply.
I nearly laughed. Love was the one thing I didn’t have growing up. My mother was an abusive, alcoholic trainwreck, my father was a man devoid of feeling, except the pride he vested only in Michael.
“We were both different,” he continued, taking a step toward me. His footfalls echoed off the dank walls. “Did you know that? That they were afraid of both of us?”
“Why? Why were they afraid?” I’d always known that my parents recoiled from me, as if I were covered in a layer of dirt that would never wash off, though I never knew why. I always figured it was just because I wasn’t good enough as Michael, their golden boy. I was scrawny, weird, artistic – second best.
But to hear that they were afraid of both of us, that made absolutely no sense.
“You really don’t know,” he mused. Then he grinned to himself and shook his head. “No, I suppose you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t have lived your life the way you did. You would have embraced the change. Just like I did.”
“Look,” I told him, “if you’re going to start spouting Changeling shit with me, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
“And I used to think you were so open-minded. Oh, that’s right,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “I forgot you used to medicate yourself. Talk about closing one’s mind off.” I stared at him with hard eyes and he continued, “No, there is no Changeling shit, as you so eloquently say. You know our mother was sick, didn’t you?”
I sighed noisily and my breath froze in the air. “In more ways than one.”
“She was mentally weak…mentally curious. She strived for answers to her sorry life, she wanted ways to cope with what she saw – the horrors, the ghosts. I truly believe that she wanted what was best for her and marrying our father should have provided that. It at least provided money. But then again, I’m done with trying to figure out the shallow depths that lie inside each human.”
I cocked my brow warily. Human?
He noted my look and came even closer to me. The air filled with the smell of sour milk, rotted meat and I did what I could to breathe through my mouth. He stopped a foot away and again I was struck with a f**kton of fear, like it was just being dumped from above. Maybe I didn’t want to know what he was going to tell me.
“Regine, your mother, was…not herself when she had you. Not that she had any real idea of who she was, but she was better, you know, before we were born. I obviously did a number on her, so she tried to fix that. She asked for help. As before, she got help, in what she perceived as the wrong form. She was possessed when she got pregnant, possessed while she carried you.”
He let that sink in for a moment. It took more than a moment. My mother was possessed when she had me? Sadly, it didn’t shock me. She acted like a wild creature throughout my childhood, until her death, until I accidently killed her. It almost made sense – almost.
“If you ask me,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, to project an air of nonchalance that I didn’t feel, “I don’t think there was a moment where she wasn’t possessed. You saw her, the way she was.”
He nodded. “It’s true. That is enough to make you go crazy, to know that you’ve had someone else inside you, pulling the strings, controlling the ride. To fear that your child may not be as totally human as you had hoped.”
There was that word again. Human.
“Are you saying I’m not human?” I asked, wincing at how incredibly stupid the words sounded coming out of my mouth. The fact was though, if he told me I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been surprised about that either. It would explain at least some of the bogus shit I’d been putting up with.
My brother gave me an uncharacteristically shy smile. “You’re human, Declan. You have some abilities, as you know, that make you special.” He snorted at his choice of words, as if I could ever be that. “But you’re still a product of your mother and father, no matter what residue remains.” His smile now turned pitiful. “You are nothing like me at all. I’m not sure why you thought you were the one they were afraid of.”
I didn’t understand. But I felt it. The malevolence, the evil. It came off of him just as it did from the fiery pit at the end of the cave or from the oozing black walls in our old hallway.
I was afraid of him. I always had been. Not because he was better than me. No, I was quickly figuring that out now. But because he was worse.
“Who are you?” I asked him, my voice rough and ragged, caught in my throat.
Another smile with dead eyes. “I used to be your brother. A very long time ago.”
“What happened to Michael?” His name sounded strange on my lips.
He shrugged. “He was phased out. He wasn’t very strong. He wasn’t like you, you see. You had some inner strength that he didn’t have. Wasn’t his fault, of course. You had your parents. He did not.”