Page 61 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“He had a⁠—"

“He's fine.” The words come out harder than I intend. I stare through the windshield at the stretch of coastal road and think about the way Carnage moved in that parking lot. The way he absorbed the hit and didn't show it and kept going. I think about Toren's voice when she said

he has a bullet wound in his side and the way she looked at me when she said it, like she was daring me to be the version of myself she couldn't stomach.

I don't know which version I am tonight.

That's the problem.

“One hour,” I repeat and end the call.

I don't drive to the apartment.

I know I said an hour. I know the meeting is happening and Fiona Williams needs to become a target. There are pieces to move and decisions to make and the entire war is in a state of recalibration that requires my full and undivided attention. I still have Masen to track down and slaughter. I was distracted earlier but I won’t be when I see her again. She will give up the location of her piece of shit brother!

I drive to the cemetery.

I have never been to her grave before.

Two years.

Two years since they put her in the ground on a gray Tuesday morning, when the sky couldn't decide between rain and just a general, personalized misery. I stood at the back of the crowd in a suit that cost more than most people's monthly rent and watched them lower the casket and felt nothing. Not because I didn't feel it. Because I couldn't afford to. Because the second I let it in, I knew it would take me under and there were things that needed doing that required me to stay above the surface. I made a decision that morning, standing in the wet grass at the back of a crowd of people who didn't know half of who she was, that I would not let grief make me useless.

I didn't come back after.

Cas asked me once, early on, in the careful way he asks things when he already knows the answer won't be good. I told him the dead don't need visiting. That she wasn't there. That standing in front of a piece of carved stone and talking to the dirt was a performance for the living and I didn't have time for it.

He didn't push.

He never does, which is the only reason I haven't killed him yet.

The cemetery gates are locked. I find the gap in the east wall anyway, the one I identified two years ago, on a night I drove here and sat outside for three hours and couldn't make myself get out of the car. I paid the groundskeeper never to fix it.

I get out of the car now.

The grass is wet. The dark is the particular quality of dark that exists at two in the morning, in a place built for quiet, thick and broken only by the weak spill of a half-moon through cloud cover. I don't have a torch. I don't need one. I know where she is. I have always known where she is, the coordinates of it burned into me the way everything about her is burned into me, permanent, involuntary and completely beyond my control.

I walk.

I stop at the headstone.

I just stand there.

My hands are shaking.

I look at them. Me, Xaden Devlin, who held a hammer over a man's kneecap without a tremor. Who pressed a scalpel to a woman's throat with a steady hand. Who sat in his father's study at seventeen and was told, plainly, what he was being built into and didn't flinch.

My hands are shaking outside my dead sister's grave.

I close them into fists.

Emmerson ‘Emery’ Devlin.

Beloved daughter and sister.

Gone but never forgotten.

The headstone is simple. She would have hated something ornate. She used to say that people who needed grand gestures to prove their love hadn't been paying attention to the small ones, and she was right. She was almost always right about things like that. About the texture of people, the real shape of them beneath the version they presented to the world. She could read a room in thirty seconds. She could read me, which is a considerably harder proposition, in less.