Page 125 of Dead Vengeance

A small whimper escapes Liam, his shaking hand at his lips, his eyes locked onto the device.

One of the men starts forward, stomps on it, spilling tiny wires onto the floor. “Told you he’s a snitch,” he utters. Then he’s out the door. We hear his footsteps on whatever stairs must have been out there. The others follow sharply on his heels without another word.

But the vision doesn’t fade. It keeps on and on. The lights flicker overhead, the hands on the clock move fast, like the hallucination is speeding through time. Around and around it goes. An hour. Two. Three. And Jem lying there on the floor, his eyes wide open, staring into nothing. Four, five, six hours, and on and on. Until the light outside that building becomes brighter than the fluorescent light above. Until sunshine hits his sickly looking face. Until the door finally opens once again.

Police.

But not police bursting in with guns ready to try to save him. Police wandering in casually, knowing exactly what they were about to find. Police taking photos. Police dusting for fingerprints. Police stepping over Jem, wandering back and forth, ignoring him, chatting. Until another one enters, and I have to catch Liam, pull him back from that hole in the floor as he tries frantically to get closer.

“I know him!” he cries. “I know that man! He’s the detective on Jem’s case.”

The man does the same as the others—talks about what’s happened, oversees some collection of evidence. Pays little attention to Jem’s corpse, cold on the floor.

Finally, the Coroner’s people arrive, stick the body of Liam’s brother into a bag with zero reverence, only the most basic of care.

Then one of them poses a question. “Who do you want to call the family?”

The detective, leaning against a bench drinking his coffee, looks across. “No one. It’s an active investigation. We’ll deal with it.”

And with those words, Liam drops.

He falls straight to the floor, the hallucination, the temple, Tezcatlipoca, everything disappearing around us as I drop to his side, take him in my arms, and hold him tight against my chest while the sobs rack out of him.

thirty-seven

Regroup

Liam

Ican’t calm down. I can’t stop it. Five years— five years of wondering, of searching, of calling them—calling that man over and over again, asking him where my brother was, why he wasn’t looking harder, why everything came to a dead end so long ago, not a single lead, not a single thread of hope.

And he knew. This whole time, he knew.

My mother’s breakdowns, her passed out on the floor from drink, her wasting away because she couldn’t eat, her weeks of lying in a dark room, silent, never saying a single word to me. When I was so sure she would end it if I left her alone for too long.

All of it. Everything. Five long years.

One word from him. One word from any of them, and we would have known.

“This whole time,” I cry against Archer’s shoulder. “This whole time, they let us think he was missing. This whole time, they told us he was the bad guy. That he got himself mixed up in this shit. They told us!” My fingers scrunch into him, and he only pulls me tighter, so much strength in his arms that I need so badly right now. I cannot hold myself up. I can barely think. No more than one thought. “They told us he was the bad guy. And he was helping them. But I knew. Archer, I knew. I knew he wasn’t like that.”

His hand strokes over my back. He doesn’t say anything. What can he say? What could anyone possibly say?

My brother was mixed up in some bad stuff. And I was so worried about the awful things they told me he’d done. But now I can see. Archer can see. Jem was trying to help. Trying to make up for everything.

Just like that, all my knowledge of him is turned upside down. Selling drugs to kids? Was he really? He was no angel, but Jem… I never thought he’d do that. I knew he wouldn’t do that. Not when he loved me so much. Cared about me so much. Told me over and over who to stay away from, to never touch any of it, no matter what. Why would he do that to other kids when he had a little brother he was so determined to take care of?

And those fuckers killed him. They killed him, then they laughed about it. They tried to cut him all to pieces so we’d never find him.

But it wasn’t even them who kept us from finding him. It was the people we were supposed to be able to trust.

Reality slams back into me. Not just this place—Archer’s house, real around me again—but the wider world. The machine that took my brother, swallowed him whole, and never gave us a clue about where he was. “I need to go.”

I try to push up from Archer, but he grasps my arms to slow me down. “Go where? Maybe we should take a minute—”

“I need to…” I shove away from him, stumble into the middle of the attic, running a hand through my hair as if it will help me get my brain in order. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I need to find him. Find his body. I need to bring him home.”

“Liam…” Archer moves for me, but I step away because I know he’ll try to stop me. All I can think about is how much I need to do this, a list that runs off my tongue as I begin to pace. “I need to find him. I need to tell my mum. God, Archer, I’m going to have to tell her. But I can’t tell her. Not until I have his body. Not until I know where he is. Then I need to tell her. And to organise a-a funeral. A real one. And I need to…”