Archive of Our Own ^beta

Prologue

The truth is that you have always been a little bit jealous of your brother.

You are the one to discover the baby box behind the sliding plywood panel where the nitwits who built your house in the 1940-something’s kept the access entrance to all the plumbing for your parent’s bathroom. The panel nestles behind the headboard where your mother cast the most painstaking care in completing the mural of the Costa Rican jungle on the wall. It has never made sense to you why she would hide the most detailed portion of the painting, the corner where the monkey is laughing, behind the bed. So here you are looking.

It’s a chest with a vanity padlock, the kind that probably comes with a flimsy key your mother wears on a ribbon somewhere, but nothing that can’t be picked with a bobby pin.

There is no dust to shake off when the chest cracks open. Inside, the precious belongings lie like sentinels in their sleep, ever dutifully in order. Someone has been through here recently and reordered them again so they stand to perfection even after the scale 3 earthquake that made the ceiling lights swing last year.

Baby furniture magazines. Socks. Onesies. Prayer booklets. A nursery mezuzah, the hand-painted kind with watercolor strokes flowing over the smooth porcelain edge in flowering indigo.

At the very bottom, your kid-soft fingers brush across the basketweave cover of a scrapbook, fully decorated but never filled. On the front: To our darling firstborn, Titus Raeken.

—

It takes you several months to parse the meaning of the baby box. You have searched for grief on the faces of your parents, the dying kind at least, but you have found none. You have pressed your rash-bitten cheek against the stiff paint of their door to listen for the location of a grave of an unborn child that was meant to come before you. You hear none.

The only kind of grief you find in their eyes is when you and Theo track mud into the rear foyer because the neighborhood’s stray kitten led you on a wild goose chase around in the rain and you forgot to pull off your galoshes, and your mother and father are there over their Saturday afternoon coffee and their silent disappointments, and your father presses his lips together in that line that you are coming to know and dread.

So you adjust your perceptions. Titus Raeken was never a child that was born and taken away. There is no casket the size of a shoebox. No recollection, either, on the part of the rabbi whom you swear to absolute secrecy because you’re his favorite, of a premature burial before your parents had you.

And you think, your parents had you. They had you, Tara Raeken, and not Titus. And you take another peek at the baby box and the dates of the receipts buried at the bottom of it, and you flip more slowly through the pages of the unfilled scrapbook because your mother is away on her business trip and Dad is somewhere making noise in the back yard and you have time. You trace your fingers over the sticker-puffy lettering—Titus and His Trucks, Titus’ First Game, Mama's Baby Boy—and then your clever little sleuthing brain hurtles into the realization with the force of a thunderbolt that Titus Raeken was supposed to be you.

i.

Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions of some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.

So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. —Genesis 4:2-5

“You hate sports,” Theo says on the day you traipse into the house and fling your backpack by the door with the announcement that soccer tryouts are next Monday. Theo still hasn’t grown out two of his permanent teeth in the front. He is seated at the round table—the dirty table, you all call it, the one shoved away on the far side of the eat-in kitchen—with his ankles tucked under his thighs while he chews on the end of an aquamarine colored pencil.

“Your sister never said she hated sports,” Mom says reasonably enough. She’s on the phone with some lady or other who can’t decide if she wants to order the Impressions set or the Wonderlier bowls, and it’s driving your mother crazy, as usual, to have three different copies of the Tupperware catalog open to different pages on the kitchen island and her finger poised over the industrial calculator.

“She doesn’t have to say it. I know her,” Theo argues.

“I don’t hate sports,” you say to settle the matter. “Besides, if I said it before, I was just being dumb. Mackenzie is joining soccer, too, and Mr. Walker said I need to get into an extracurricular if I want to qualify for one of the semester awards for ‘well-rounded student.’”

That seizes Mom’s attention. She utters a distracted uh-huh to whatever it is the lady just chattered on the phone, and she drops the pencil in her hand in favor of moving toward you to grab the rumpled tryouts flyer you’re holding out to her.

“What's this? What's this?” she mouths at you over the receiver, and doing a poor job at it, overdrawing her lips around the vowels and puffing out too much air that the lady on the other hand has got to hear her impression of a hyena.

When you don't answer quickly enough, Mom shakes the paper in your face, close enough to your nose that the corner could nick you in the soft freckled skin there if she's not careful.

“Tryouts flyer,” you murmur to her. She taps her free ear with her finger to indicate that once again you've failed to impress her with the volume of your voice. You try again. It's a virtue in this house, though not nearly as much as being perfect on the first try. “Tryouts, Mom. There's a schedule. I'm going to need a ride.”

“Terry, you're breaking up, hon, I'm gonna have to call you back from the other phone in just a minute. Let me get back to you,” Mom speaks into the receiver in her sweet retail voice, and then hangs up just barely a second after is socially acceptable. The permanent scowl returns to the space between her eyebrows as she scans the flyer more closely. “This is Saturday. Your father and I have that thing on Saturday.”

“Please, Mom. It's in the afternoon, and it's actually really close to the temple. Check the address. I was thinking you could run me there halfway through and then I'll just wait for you after until you get done?”

“Not safe. You're a girl.”

She spits it out like she always does, idle and casually hurting, but the sting of the words is palpable as ever across your cheek.

“Please?”

“Nope. That won't do. You're gonna have to ask your Uncle Ber—”

“Oh, no, please, Mom. Not Uncle Bertie. He's—he’s no good.”

“And why not?”

“Because! He's just—” Weird, you don't supply in your normal voice, and touchy, but it's not as though it is a tightly guarded secret on your mother's side of the family. She reads the word in your visage anyway.

As the two of you lock eyes, your mother's gaze narrowing, you find your own attention darting sideways momentarily to where Theo is still seated at the table pretending to draw on his homework diagram. His eyes meet yours in the briefest glance askance, and his shoulders tighten and his mouth pinches up, like he already knows what you're gearing up to say and he's daring you with all of his skinny fists and ninety-pound frame to say it.

You never back down from a dare.

“Theo can come with,” you breathe out.

Theo's pencil drops to the tabletop with a snapping sound and rolls toward the edge, caught only at the last minute by the flat of his palm with a muted thud over the beveled edge of the wood.

“What can your brother do? He’s so skinny that a damn leaf would last longer in the wind than him.”

Your brother makes a small, affronted noise, the kind that is easily disguised as a cough that ironically bolsters your mother’s point about his asthma. Not that you care much for dragging your little brother with you to the tryouts, where everyone can see the two of you together and watch how his scrawny legs hang off the edge of the bench and swing back and forth over the grass, but. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

You shrug. “He's fast. And he’s always paying attention, he sees stuff. So he can keep a good watch. And besides, it'll only be half an hour we'll be waiting for you.” You lick your lips. “It won’t even be sunset yet, Mom.”

Mom grumbles under her breath and reaches for the Tupperware catalogs to flip through in annoyance. It's feigned, though. You're beginning to recognize the telltale steps of this song and dance. Her mouth twitches and she rocks back and forth on her butt in the creaking all-wood dining chair, and then she suppresses her little smile and says, “Think you're so smart, don't you?”

You don't, not really. But when it comes to spelling out your parents and their peculiar and variable moods and then exploiting them to the fullest, you're a goddamn expert.

“Thanks, Mama,” you say, all crinkles and freckles and teeth biting bottom lip to sweeten the pot.

“I never said yes.”

Doesn’t matter. “Thank you, thank you.” You take a calculated risk and throw your arms around her belly. The move pays off, because her nose wrinkles as she pretends to be disgusted by the grass stains on your shorts and the eau de sun and sweat in your hair, but really, the way she pets the top of your head and strokes you for a few moments longer is the trophy.

From the corner of your eye, you catch the blur of blue as Theo uncurls his little fist from around the edge of his paper and stalks off in the direction of the bathroom.

—

You think you can ignore the steam billowing from your brother’s ears throughout that evening, but it all comes to a head when the soccer ball you slant to the right with a too-wide kick off the field rolls to a spot perfectly nestled between his feet dangling from the bench, and he simply stares down at the thing and then back up at you with an impassive glance. Even when you holler at him to toss it back, he only hikes his shoulders up to his ears and shoves his hands into the pocket of his hoodie, and then turns his entire frame away as if the dying oak tree several yards away is infinitely more interesting.

“What is your problem?” you hiss.

You’ve cornered him in the visitor bathroom at the outside corner of the gym behind the bleachers. The wooden block letters spelling out Beacon Hills Elementary in crumbling and variant states of wood rot cast long, uneven afternoon shadows over the pallid skin of Theo’s face.

“What’s your problem?” he shoots back.

“You’ve been looking at me like that the whole car ride.”

“I haven’t been looking at you.” He juts out his chin, folds his arms over his bony chest, the picture of prepubescent defiance. Both of you in your stick frames are standing like hangers in your too-loose clothes, really, but in your ten-year-old mind you think he looks ten times more pathetic than you.

“Yeah, you have. You’ve been looking at me like that.”

His eyes flash as his lips press into a white-fleshed little line, exactly the way that they had during the interminable ten minutes from the temple to here. His irises go flinty, the gray leaping out before the green as they always do when the familiar spark of resentment is lit low in his belly.

“Maybe if you didn’t suck up to Mom all the time, I wouldn’t have a reason to look ‘like that’.”

“I don’t suck up to Mom. Shut up.”

“Yeah, you do. Soccer tryouts? You don’t even like running.”

“You don’t know me,” you say, overtaken by sudden fury. “I could like running. You don’t own me.”

“You can’t run.”

He gave you the cheap shot—handed it to you on a silver platter. “Oh, really?” you sneer. “Like you can?”

“I have a bad heart.”

“Yeah, you do.” You check him in the shoulder with the flat of your palm. Not as forcefully as you would’ve liked, but it’s the first time in a long while, and it’s hard enough to make him whip his head back up at you.

His brows slant and his eyes squint into a glower. “You’re the one with a bad heart.”

“You’re just jealous because I can play sports and you can’t.”

“You hate sports. You hate being outside. You’re just doing this because you’re mad that Mom’s sad you weren’t born a boy!”

The accusation steals the air from your lungs. It squeezes the moisture from your eyes like pinpricks, but if there’s something the two of you have in common, it’s having pride obstinate enough that you would rather chew off your own hand than let anyone see you cry.

“And you’re trying to ruin everything for me because you’re mad that you’re born with a heart that doesn’t work.”

The last words barely leave your mouth before his tiny fist is cocked and flying at your face. Knuckles collide with jaw, bone on bone in a resounding crack, and you’re going down like a sack of carrots with a thump in the grass. Your tailbone explodes in pain as you land on your butt without anything to break the fall.

He’s standing over you with his tiny chest heaving and his skinny fists clenched for more. There’s a wild look of terror and rage in his eyes, as if the gravity of what he’s just done—how he’s just hit you for the first time—has begun to engulf him, and yet there isn’t any fear deep enough to unstoke the depth of his ire.

You look up at him, one hand on your jaw, the other braced in the prickly blades of grass behind you, half-blinded by the afternoon sun, and you could get up and take a swing at him. You know you could. He isn’t even braced for impact. The draw of his brow and the tension in his shoulders are simply daring you.

But you don’t.

You stew in your righteous fury, thinking how fucking awful this bruise is going to look on the side of your jaw when you make it to school tomorrow, and how Charlotte and Till are either going to pester you with questions or steer clear of you the whole week while it heals. You think of how Mom isn’t going to let you use any of the cosmetics in her metallic red bag in the bottom drawer under the sink, because you’re not old enough, and you’re not girl enough, and you’re neither boy nor man but if there is one thing you can do—

You can have the perfect revenge. You can bide your time, and you can plot.

And in the meantime, as you fling yourself to your feet and stalk off the field to go wash up, you think about how when Mom pulls up to the curb of the school and asks you about the mark on your jaw, you can lie and say a ball came flying toward your face when you were trying out as goalie but you took the hit.

You took the hit just like a boy would, and you’d smile about it, even as she’s leaning over the console and fretting over you, and you’d shrug a little and then shrug a bit more until Mom huffs out a laugh, impressed by your bravado and the dryness of your eyes, and promises she’s going to get you a hot fudge sundae from the McDonald’s drive thru that very night because she’s proud of you.

And you’ll glance up at the rearview mirror, angled just so, and catch the flare of Theo’s nostrils and the way he tucks his knees up to his chin and wraps his arms around them in the back seat in the picture of glowering defeat.

ii.

The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” —Genesis 4:6-7

The truth is that you have always been a little bit jealous of your sister.

One Saturday when Mom is out calling on clients and Dad is home from the office, he doesn’t come when you call for him. You were on the porch playing with the maple keys that had drifted from the trees, taking turns with Tara giving them a flick and watching them twirl like disembodied ballet dancers in the air on their descent into the grass. Then Tara had run off somewhere, saying something about getting the ice pops from the freezer, and she hadn’t come back for so many minutes, so you’d tottered to your feet on the steps of the porch and promptly faceplanted.

You’d wailed a bit, a little bit as a reflex, maybe a little because you know at this age your parents still come running most of the time when they know you’ve hurt yourself. So today you call for your father, but he doesn’t answer. You call again and again, but he mustn’t hear you, and your ankle and your elbows don’t actually hurt all that much anymore from where they banged into the wood, so you scraped yourself up off the ground and trudged inside to see how deep Tara got lost in the freezer or if maybe your dad died napping in the recliner in the office.

Tara takes one look at you from where she is behind the kitchen counter—evidently having been distracted by the leftover cookies she found in the back of the pantry and not bothering to come back out to you even though she’d promised you she would—and rolls her eyes. She points to the ice pops slowly melting on the countertop. You roll your eyes back and keep plodding down the carpeted hallway.

Dad isn’t in the office when you peep in. It sounds like he’s moving around in your parents’ room, though, so you check there next.

When you peer round the doorway, Dad’s hunched over something as he sits on the bed. His back is to you and you can only glimpse part of his face. From your vantage point, you can spy something in his hands, something he’s picked up from a box balanced in his lap. He can’t see you. Can’t hear you either, probably, because despite the wheeze of your asthmatic lungs you’ve learned quickly when and how to turn invisible when your parents embark on another one of their frightful choreographies of glass-shattering screaming matches in the house.

You stand there and watch him for a long time. Your knees and the balls of your feet go partially numb. You’ve even forgotten that you’re still wearing your outdoor slippers, the kind that Dad will yell at you for if he turns around now and spots you intruding.

Dad’s frame shudders with a bone-deep sigh and then, slowly, he tucks the little bits of paper and the pictures or photos back into the box, shuts it, and slides it into some kind of cubby behind the headboard. You have just enough time to slip away from the doorway and into the bathroom as he leaves and crosses the hall to hole himself up in the office.

You don’t waste a moment. You dart into the bedroom and your little fingers pry at the edges of the cubby door to retrieve the box.

And as you open the thing and are greeted with a scrapbook and half-finished invitation cards to a baby shower—I’m a Boy! You are cordially invited—your eyebrows scrunch together in consternation.

It’s only when you push the cards aside to reveal the words stenciled into the front of the scrapbook—To our darling firstborn, Titus Raeken—that you suddenly feel your stomach clench in understanding.

“What are you doing?”

You whip around at the same time that you slam the scrapbook closed. Tara is in the doorway, half-finished cookie in hand and crumbs around her mouth, and the ice pops in their weeping plastic cases clutched in one hand, as you have an inane standoff of sorts: you on your knees growing pinprick indentations from the carpet where you’re kneeling, her in her grubby socks that she used outdoors and looking like she definitely got her favorite teal shirt back from the hamper for dirty laundry. It looks like she was bringing you a bunch of ice pops, too, after all.

“Nothing,” you say.

Her eyes slide to the box on the floor between your knees. You almost want to crouch over it, hide it behind the skin and bones of your frame. Surprise flits across her eyes, sure. But there’s no curiosity: only a fleeting moment of stunned silence, and then acceptance.

“Oh, that. Mom made that stupid thing years ago, apparently,” is what Tara settles on after a long, awkward stretch of silence.

That seems to get your gears working again. You scramble to fit the lid over the square edges of the box and shove the entire thing back behind the secret panel the way Dad had placed it there. You’re pretty sure the cards and things aren’t in the correct order anymore, but it feels ridiculous, almost like an admission of guilt, to open it back up and rifle through it to rearrange everything exactly as it was.

Tara stands and watches you impassively as you put everything back. She doesn’t stir to help, but she doesn’t turn to leave, either. When you pad across the carpet toward her, she simply sticks her hand out with the green and blue ice pops (your favorite) and turns around for you to follow her to the family room to watch TV because it’s almost four and time for your favorite cartoons to come back on.

You sit kind of extra close to her on the couch that day, and she seems weirdly annoyed by it but, even more weirdly enough, doesn’t say anything in reproach.

Eventually you migrate back over to your designated patch on the loveseat and continue sucking the juice out of your ice pop case even long after it’s been drained and your fingers have gone sticky from holding it too long.

—

Grandma Lucy dies in the summer of ’03 when you all suffer through that god-awful heat wave and your family, tightwad as the most award-winning cheapskate, still doesn’t get the A/C fixed, so you and Tara are lying around the house like panting dogs just trying to get a stale breeze to ruffle your face and hair from the oscillating stand fans.

Time has gone soupy, and it doesn’t help that you don’t have the accountability of school to keep track of the days and hours. You both know there’s something somber in the air, because your parents have been sitting for hours now in the front room with adults you haven’t seen since Grandpa Tim stopped coming round the house. Tara tells you it’s something the adults do, huddle in groups and share bowls of mixed nuts and talk ill of everyone who didn’t bother to come by, whenever someone’s died and you’re all waiting around for the funeral to start.

Funeral. Strange word, and even stranger feeling. You were too young to even remember Grandpa Tim’s. Mom says you were throwing up too much that day, and Dad had to be with you in the bathroom of the temple constantly to keep watch over you.

You’re still mulling over the word after Tara has said it, still unsure of where you are and where time is going, when Mom gets up and approaches you in Tara’s room. Her arrival is heralded by the click of her heels on the tile of the dining room and the thump of her feet down the hall. Everyone’s allowed to wear shoes inside the house when other people are over, you’ve learned. Nobody gets punished or shut inside the closet for it.

“You’re still not dressed? The funeral starts in an hour.” Mom’s voice is sharp but distracted. “Tara, get up. Theo, make sure your sister gets ready. G-d knows how long it’ll take her this time. Always misplacing everything and leaving the house looking slovenly.”

She turns on her heel and disappears in a thoughtless whirlwind of disappointment.

Beside you, Tara has stiffened. She shoots a venomous glare to the side at you and then scrambles to her feet.

She’s already got her black top on, the itchy crocheted one she always complains about but Mom makes her wear to special occasions like recitals and such. It must be the skirt that Mom has laid out for her on the bed today that Tara has been dawdling about putting on.

“Are you dumb?” you ask her. “Forgot how to put on your clothes?”

“You’re dumb,” she shoots back with blunt teeth. “You’re not finished getting dressed, either.”

“I got the shirt and the suit on. Mom’s not gonna let you leave the room with those jeans on.”

“You’re not even wearing socks.”

“I’ll wear the socks when you get done. I’m supposed to watch and make sure you’re not fooling around or whatever.” You cross your skinny arms across the ribs of your chest and puff out your diaphragm a little, stupidly arrogant about the fact that the generous fit of the suit set from Macy’s makes you look a bit broader today than you normally are.

Tara undrapes herself from the bedspread with distaste written all over her face. You watch her dispassionately as she peels her three-day-worn jeans from her legs and dumps them on the carpet between her feet. She’s got knobby knees just like yours, and dozens of little scabbed-over cuts and a few fading bruises around the shins from throwing herself a little too keenly into soccer practice with friends in the park over the last few months.

When, finally, she’s managed to hike up the slippery black thing in question over her thighs and tighten the satin ribbon at the top so it doesn’t droop so terribly from her bony hips, she holds out her hands and presents herself to you sarcastically. “Happy?”

“S’not me you gotta show off too,” you mutter.

“Theo may not appreciate a good, serious outfit, but I’m happy,” says a man’s voice behind you.

Tara stiffens even before the man finishes speaking. You don’t have to crane your head backward and look up to know it’s Uncle Bertie, who hasn’t come calling all that often lately since Tara made a ruckus about him having to be the one to pick her up from soccer practice that one time Dad got caught up at the office again. It’s obvious he would be around for the funeral and the family gathering today, though, so you’re bewildered when Tara’s eyes widen and her breathing goes a little choppy before she schools herself and bends down to pick up her jeans and fiddle with them in her fingers instead of addressing your uncle.

“Looking all grown-up now,” Uncle Bertie goes on. “Always see you in those pants and baggy shirts like your brother here. ’S a nice change to see you step into something more ladylike. Your mom’ll be proud of you, huh?”

“Mom hates me,” Tara cuts him off, with enough vitriol to shock you. “She doesn’t care what I wear.”

“Probably not true. She had me take dozens of pictures of you on Award Day, remember?”

“Why you? Couldn’t she do it herself?”

You have officially lost the plot on this conversation. Glancing up at the robin blue clock in the upper right corner of Tara’s bedroom, you notice that you’ve been dallying here too long.

“We’re supposed to leave, like, now. Mom’s gonna be mad,” you tell your sister.

Tara is already snatching up her comb from her bedspread and heading toward you in the doorway as you speak, when Uncle Bertie’s heavy hand falls on your shoulder and squeezes.

“Nope, you’re not leaving looking like that, young man,” he rumbles against your spine.

You squirm in his hold, annoyed. “What? Why? I just need socks. Come on, Tara.”

“Where’s the tie to go with that outfit, Theo?” he badgers you.

“There wasn’t a tie,” you lie to him, because you hate putting anything around your neck—have always hated it since kindergarten Moving Up Day and every other grade-level graduation day when Mom insisted you wear a tie—and because you can’t figure out why the fuck it means so much to your uncle.

“I have the tie,” Tara rushes out breathlessly. “I’ll help him do it. C’mon, Theo, let’s go to the bathroom. We have a mirror there. Uncle Bertie, I forgot to tell you, Dad was looking for you this morning ’cause he wanted to show you something in the garage.”

You protest, “But I don’t—”

Tara doesn’t let you finish the rest of your sentence. She snatches up your wrist in a vise-like grip, nails digging into the soft flesh until the crescent marks threaten to bleed, and she shoves past Uncle Bertie’s looming frame and drags you down the hall into the bathroom and just about slams the door behind you.

You stare at Tara in the mirror. “What the hell.”

“Shut up. That’s a bad word.” Tara whips something long and satiny in her hand and produces, indeed, the supposed matching tie to your suit set that you thought you’d hidden so well behind her headboard.

“You were being so rude to Uncle Bertie.”

“He was being rude first.” Tara loops the stiff tie around the back of your neck and eyeballs the ends, sawing the whole thing back and forth until the tips hang where she wants them.

You shake your head. “He literally wasn’t. We hardly ever get the chance to see him, and he was telling you something nice, but you wouldn’t—”

“He wasn’t.” She loops one end over the other once, twice, movements jerky, and tightens the clumsy knot she’s made.

“Just because he doesn’t always get the chance to pick you up from soccer doesn’t mean you get to be all mean and sour like you—”

“Fuck!” she explodes. “You don’t know anything!”

You rock back on your heels, blindsided by the expletive.

“You don’t fucking know anything,” she repeats with quiet venom. Loop, shake, tighten, squeeze. “You think I wish I were a boy just ’cause Mom has a stupid baby box in her stupid secret closet. You think I’m mad about Uncle Bertie being here ’cause he never comes round and I’m some kind of suck-up.” Tighten, squeeze, squeeze.

“Tara, that’s too tight—”

“You think he’s such a hero and you think he loves us when he doesn’t even like us and you think Mom and Dad are gonna wake up one day and love us both when—”

“Tara!” you all but scream, choked out. The tie has constricted into a dead man’s noose around your neck. “I can’t breathe.”

She’s panting, slim shoulders heaving, and she stares at you without comprehending for an interminable second. Her face is as crimson as yours feels, veins rising to the surface of a stretched-taut skin.

And then suddenly she crumbles.

“Shit,” she breathes. Fingers scrabble at the knot she’s tied too well at the base of your throat. “Shit...”

Eventually she gets the necktie undone. It hangs limp and ruined in her hand, the silk warped beyond recognition. The blood red of the diamond pattern seeps into the ebony threads.

“Sorry,” she gasps once, breathing heavily. She balls the tie up and stuffs it into the trash bin next to the toilet. After a pause, she grabs some of the other balled-up tissues out of the bin and crumples them over top to hide the evidence. She straightens, washes her hands, and spins on her heel.

“Don’t tell Mom or Dad,” she orders you, and then opens the door and disappears through.

iii.

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. —Genesis 4:8

September is yawning into October when you and your best friend Celine get into the biggest fight of your life, and she swears she won’t talk to you ever again.

She wondered what kissing boys is like, because she saw Jen and Timothy smashing lips behind a tree the other day and she said it looked uncomfortable but Jen kept going for it, apparently, so now Celine had to try it on you. You should have said no; you should have thought of any excuse to get her hands off you, knowing that their unconscious touch on your face would send you into a tailspin of emotions you couldn’t and wouldn’t explain.

But you didn’t say no fast enough, and she just dived in and went for it, and the kiss was wet and warm and tasted a little like the disgusting chocolate pudding they always serve at the cafeteria because they think kids have shit taste buds, and you wanted her to keep kissing you but then she pulled back and made a face and declared that she didn’t get the appeal at all. And suddenly you were slapping her.

Thank G-d the fight didn’t end in one of the teachers finding you out on the field like that. Celine looked at you with wide, glossy eyes like she couldn’t understand why the hell you would slap her, and you stared back at her with your breath ragged in your throat, and then she said you freaking hit me and you shot back it served you right and then she whispered I’m never ever talking to you, ever again and you yelled after her retreating figure have a nice life!

But now you’re suddenly wishing that a teacher had gone and found you, or that Celine had at the very least slapped you back or pulled your hair to even it out, because now you just feel like a bitch for hitting her when all she’d done was be curious about what it was like to swap spit with somebody. Never mind the fact that she didn’t ask. Or the fact that you’d secretly wondered what it would be like to kiss her, but she sure as hell didn’t wonder that back about you, and it had you feeling like there were fire ants crawling up your esophagus all the way from your stomach.

Now you’re stuck at the hospital, waiting for news from some doctor or other, because Theo had the audacity to go and faint on the soccer field while watching you practice, and you had to be the one to scream his name and then go tearing off the field for Coach or Mr. Walker or somebody else who could call the ambulance for him. And there wasn’t time to wait for Mom or Dad to peel themselves away from whatever they’re doing at home or work, so you had to ride in the ambulance with Theo’s disgustingly frail frame beside you and his stiff hand looking disturbingly delicate in yours, trying to believe the EMT’s promise that one of your parents will meet you there at the emergency room.

Of course his heart is the culprit. Your brother never seems to know how to use the fucking thing, and yet it’s sputtering and struggling for all its worth as if it’s never seen a day of rest in its life.

Dad came to sit watch a couple of hours ago; you curled up on the lumpy two-seater at the opposite end of the hospital room and pretended to doze. Theo remained as stiff as a wax figure in the bed, all stuck through with needles in a manner that seemed almost absurdly overreactive in your feral, angry hindbrain.

When you make the mistake of shifting your head to glare at your brother’s face better, Dad catches the movement and notices you’re awake. He clears his throat awkwardly.

“Want a snack?”

You shake your head, still pillowed on your elbows crooked up together against your cheek.

Dad hums. He has his glasses propped up on his forehead, oily nosepads digging ridges into the skin of his brow, as he rubs a thumb and forefinger over his eyes in exhaustion. Anyone looking in through the glass on the door might assume, incorrectly, that he’s bogged down by anxiety over the state of his son.

“School was fine?” Dad asks.

Not how was school, or what did you do today, or tell me about practice, or you haven’t talked about your friends in a while. You’ve perfected Dad’s tells. He’s hoping for an uncomplicated yes.

You’re tired. You give it to him with a nod. The outside of your face feels patently morose, though. Surely Dad couldn’t miss that.

He glances at you no longer than a second. “Your mother was telling me about the grade you got on your science quiz last week. You need to keep those grades up.”

It was geography, not science—and geography is a stupid subject, anyway, because it’s not as though you and your family ever have the time or will or sense of coordination to take a road trip anywhere beyond twenty miles from your hometown. As far as you’re concerned, dunes and prairies and mesas can go fuck themselves.

“You didn’t bring your book bag with you?”

You shake your head. “S’in my locker.”

Dad stares at you in bewilderment. “Why’s it in your locker?”

“Had soccer practice when Theo happened,” you mumble tiredly. You’d rather drift off again than put up with this dumb conversation.

“You could’ve gotten it while the EMT’s were treating him. Now you have nothing to do while waiting.”

I could very well be sleeping if you shut up, you think uncharitably at him.

“Grades don’t just pull themselves up, Tara. It takes hard work and discipline and a lot of sacrifice. That’s something you should have learned from an early age already. If you can’t handle a quiz grade, then obviously you don’t have the maturity to handle all the extra stuff on the side. Soccer. Your extracurriculars. We didn’t raise you or your brother to be lazy, Tara Jane. You’re getting older, and Theo is looking up to you. You need to stop footling around and wasting time and show us that we weren’t wrong about you.”

You stiffen with a scowl. You’ve never been good at hiding any of your feelings. It’s the people around you, probably, that have simply been shit at reading them.

“I’ll study tomorrow,” you mutter.

“It’s a wonder you can even sleep in this place. Heck, the lights are bright.” Dad blinks demonstratively. “And stop that scowling. You’ve had the easiest day today, out of the whole family. Look at your poor brother laid out there. The least you could do is put on a happy face he can wake up to.”

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, you want to take something breakable and shatter it in someone’s face.

“Or not,” Dad says, with audible distaste in his tone as he observes the obstinate furrow in your brow. He climbs to his feet with an exaggerated groan of fatigue. “Stay here. I’m going down to the cafeteria.”

You hope he gets a lukewarm coffee with too much dairy milk in it and spends an hour in the bathroom shitting himself.

A minute after your father’s footsteps in the hallway recede, you uncurl your limbs from the loveseat and cross the cold floor to stand at Theo’s bedside. His lashes flutter against the tops of his cheeks and his breath is shallow but even. Shadows ring his eyes; even his dark hair, the exact same shade and thickness as yours, seems limp under all the dried sweat. His parted lips are cracked and ridged with white where the damaged skin has begun to peel.

It would be easy, you think. You can just take one of those extra pillows tucked against the guardrail and fluff it in your hands and then lay it over Theo’s face for a minute or two. He might not even wake up. Even if he did, you’re stronger than he is by spades, and all you would have to do is engage your biceps and pin the edges of the pillow down tight against his cheeks and wait for the ragged breaths of panic to subside. Then he’d go back to sleep, permanently, and then nobody would ever have the fucking nerve to say again that you’d been having the easiest day out of everyone in the family.

Uncle Bertie used to say that he was the only one who saw you. He used to say he didn’t get why your parents didn’t pay more attention to you, you who are strong and funny and quick-witted and creative and so much more than your pathetic little brother who doesn’t do anything besides lurk and sulk.

Maybe you should have believed him. It would have been easier to swallow when he pressed a thumb against the hollow of your neck.

It certainly would have been easier to bear the surprise kiss from Celine without freaking out like a nervous virgin.

“T’ra?”

Theo’s groggy voice slices through your trance.

“Wha’re you doin’?”

Theo’s bright gray eyes blink up at you. You startle. You’ve been standing over him with a pillow in your hands for who knows how long. You open your mouth and eye him dumbly, unable to speak.

“Tara?” He coughs, four times in succession.

You drop the pillow as if you’ve been scalded. You lunge instead for the plastic cup of water on the table and shove it toward his mouth.

He chokes down the water and the rest dribbles down his chin. It’s not the kind of asphyxiation you were dreaming of. There is a sick sort of transference, though, because as you stand there watching him making a fool of himself guzzling down the water from the cup in your hand, a vise begins to tighten around the breath in your own throat until you think you might go dizzy and mad with it.

You could offer the extra pillow you almost killed him with so he’s more comfortable, but it doesn’t occur to you until an hour later to be human again.

iv.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” —Genesis 4:9

The night you finally tell Tara that the masked men of your dreams are real, her face does a complicated thing.

“Do they touch you?” she asks.

You think a little about the grip of the tall one’s gloved hands on your thin shoulders and then nod.

“Where do they touch you?” she presses.

You think some more. It’s difficult to put into words exactly where those gloved fingers have been—easier, in fact, to describe where they haven’t been.

Hesitating, you brush over your shoulders. Shuddering as you remember the steel table and the sickly silver line being thrust into your bloodstream, you thumb the insides of your elbows, even the soft parts under your wrists where you sometimes sluggishly recall the restraints. They haven’t cut you open yet—they rumble out promises that it is soon to come—but one of them, the heaviest-set man, always selects a blade or two from his set and runs it, testing, over the various planes of your body when they whisk you away at night.

Steeling yourself, you point to your chest. Then your abdomen. And then lower on your body, and Tara stops you with a frightening grip around your wrist.

She looks sick.

“And you said they come into the house?”

You shake your head. This was the muddled part, the one you can’t quite explain. One moment the masked men appear at the fringes of your dreams in your bedroom; the next, you’re underground in a windowless room and you can hear water dripping on stone as they strap you down.

“Then where? Where do they get to you?” When you don’t answer fast enough, Tara shakes you back and forth. “Tell me, Theo. Do they pick you up? Do they meet you from school?” Her eyes widen and she sucks in a breath of horror at her own conclusions. “Is it a teacher?”

You shake your head, impatient. It’s masked men. And there’s three of them. What kind of stupid teachers would go on a twisted, surgical quest as three masked men at midnight?

“You gotta tell Mom.”

“No!” you cry sharply. You already told her, and all the good that got you was a short-lived distracted sort of sympathy, followed the next week by an impatient telling off and being sent to your room without dinner for making up tall tales.

“I’m serious, Theo. If they’re touching you…”

You shake your head. You don’t know what you want. You want—you want to follow the voice, the one that says listen carefully, Theo Raeken; you are to follow these instructions to the letter and bring your sister here at midnight. You want to take it all back. You want your mother and father to see all the greatness you are becoming, and how it’s grown like a monster out of their control.

You want your sister to understand.

Her cheeks are flushed. Even now, as your heart squeezes and spasms in your chest, you can tell that her heart is pumping blood strong and fast, just as yours was always meant to be. She’s tall and fit and athletic, a boy where it counts, a working heart as far as Mom and Dad are concerned.

You tell her you’ll deny it if she forces you to fess up to Mom and Dad about the masked men. You’ll deny it, and you’ll tell her about the time she tried to strangle you because you couldn’t see Uncle Bertie often enough.

You are nine years old and you do not understand the gravity of what you are saying. She steps back from you, devastated and seething.

“Don’t you ever say his name,” she snarls at you.

“Make me,” you snarl back.

You push and pull each other. She curses you and calls you a dick. White-lipped and breathing heavily, you shove her back and bolt for the bedroom window.

She hisses after you to come back, but you ignore her. You’ve already got your shoes on and you’re headed straight for the forest edge.

She follows you. Curse her, love her, but she always follows you.

In the end, it only takes a second of indecision from one side of the bridge over the creek to the next before you’re grabbing her by the front of her sleep shirt and heaving with all your might.

She’s stronger than you, but she’s frozen in the shock of it all. She begins to flail all too late, in the middle of the air as she’s plummeting over the edge of the bridge toward the water below.

You hear her body crack against the crag jutting out of the creek’s surface. She gurgles and spasms, just like the knife-cold burble of the water that gushes over her in the still December air.

Her leg splays out at an unholy angle. She struggles to lift herself above the rush of water, to get her chattering teeth to utter an intelligible word.

“Theo!” she calls out, hoarse and reedy.

You stare down at her. Even if you wanted to change your mind, there’s nothing you can do. Heaving her body over the railing took everything that your jackrabbiting heart had in you.

“Theo!” she calls out again. “Help—help me, please!”

You go on gazing down at her through the slats of the railing. In the cold and bitter fury that resides in your gullet, all you can see is a baby box, the puffy sticker letters spelling Titus, and a golden child who plays soccer like a champion and outwits you at everything and pushes you and punches you and makes Mom smile.

You think to yourself, with icy satisfaction, that a heart like hers would do far better inside the body of someone who would know what to do with it.

“Theo…please…”

And then another voice joins hers and drowns it out: Theo Raeken. Success.

In the distance, an iron cane taps against the frozen wood of the bridge. You lift your head and meet the gaze of your three masked saviors.

v.

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” —Genesis 4:10

You wake up without a heartbeat in your chest.

Your hand is every bit as diaphanous as your diaphragm, when you sit up on the freezing concrete floor and take stock of yourself. The surroundings are dank. A copper scent tinges the air; you can feel rust seeping between your teeth if you stay still too long.

You’re on your butt on the floor of a tiny room with an unpadded cot. No windows. No light. Somehow, you can see perfectly through the subterranean gloom.

A shrill cry drifts down a distant tunnel toward you.

You have but to think of racing to the iron door you find in front of you, and suddenly your body is there: or, at the very least, what’s left of it. Your skin is translucent; your muscles feel weightless. Your skin no longer seems to have the same nerve endings you were born with. Somehow you sense there is a permanent chill down here, but none of it touches you beyond the psychological level.

With that whirlwind of realizations, you stumble on through the closed door as if the physicality of it doesn’t exist. A gasp flies from your lungs, the useless organs that rise and fall no longer for your artificial breath.

The wailing voice rises up again and pierces your ears, louder, somewhere close by. You float toward it, faster than you ever intended to, as if something else inexorably tugs you in.

You lose time and vision. Mildew on walls, the ubiquitous echoing drip of water, the stench of layered blood like animals died and rotted here every day for a season. Tall figures in cloaks and helmets—no—long coats and masks—something steaming and hissing; the clink of metal tools; the rumble of a voice that speaks your language but not in any way you’d understand, as through a broken radio frequency; the soft, thin voice of a pathetic boy you know too well.

They’re stitching up his chest. A red seam like one of those cracks in the deep sea floor that hide molten lava runs from below his clavicles to above his navel.

You don’t understand. The boy on the table looks like your brother, but his eyes are wild and his mouth is shaped in a broken O like somebody stuck their fist into his stomach and pulled out all the animal from inside him.

You blink, and then you’re back inside the tiny room with the cot.

The boy that looks like your brother lies inert on the cot. He breathes—barely—and his ribcage rises and falls ever so slightly with it if you squint and watch for a minute.

He stays ashen and motionless for days. Early on, someone comes in; someone else inserts a feeding tube. Still someone else speaks in clicks and writes scratchily in a leatherbound notebook at lengthening intervals.

The boy-who-is-maybe-your-brother doesn’t wake until the third day, with a gasp and an ugly gurgle that will stay with you forever. The two of you are alone.

“Theo,” you speak for the first time since you woke up in this hellscape.

He doesn’t so much as glance in your direction. He tears the feeding tube away, voice bleeding with the effort of it. You call out to him again. And then again and again, and still he shows no indication of having heard you.

When he starts tracing the horrid scar down his bare chest with a quivering finger, the salt of his welling tears stinging the air, you suddenly make the connection between what you saw on the operating table and that weightlessness you now bear inside your closed-up chest.

He has your heart.

Filled with a gut-wrenching wrath so sudden it blinds you, you launch yourself at his tiny, traitorous frame. What for? You never planned ahead. With your face contorted in a head-ringing rage, you fit your hands around his neck and press down, only for your transparent thumbs to pass through completely and for the rest of your body to shudder through his solid one toward the floor like a discarded blanket.

He sobs, over and over, for hours. You stay there lying on your face and panting in fury against the concrete under his cot until one of the three masked figures arrives to flick your brother’s head against the wall once: just enough to knock him out and cease his crying.

You let the proxy violence be enough for now as you stew in your thoughts till morning.

—

Try as you might, nothing you attempt to pick up or manipulate will obey your obstinate ghostly will.

Because that’s what you are. Figuring out that you died from that tumble into the rocky creek in December takes less than a day. Coming to terms with your status as a shade, on the other hand, takes closer to years.

Theo can heal. Not as rapidly as the three doctors would like, not in those first several months, but repeated incisions ensure that he is daily put to the test. You sit cross-legged on the edge of one of the unoccupied surgical tables—because, apparently, when you focus well enough on not letting the rage consume you, you can float just above solid objects on the earthly plane without slipping through—and you fold your arms and scowl endlessly as Theo winces first at one incision, then the next, and the next, and his face twists up and big, fat tears roll down his cheeks.

He always was such a pathetic little crier. Between the two of you, on the rare occasions he ran to Mom or Dad because of a fight, he almost always won their sympathy over you because of those gigantic glossy eyes, no matter if you’d gotten to your parents first.

Then the doctors try breaking his bones next.

The crack echoes so loudly in the cavernous operating room that, though you startle, it doesn’t register with you yet what is happening until a beat later, when Theo sucks in a choppy breath and then screams, high and raw.

Pain is healing, Theo Raeken. Pain is bearing it.

“Please please please please,” Theo gasps out wetly, his small wrist captured in the merciless grip of their gloves. “Please, oh G-d, please stop—”

Healing is a testament of your strength. Remember why you are here. If you make more noise, you show yourself a failure, Theo Raeken.

Somehow, those words seem to pierce through Theo’s craze more deeply than anything else they’ve been doing to grind the shattered remains of his wrist bones together. “No,” he breathes. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not I’m not I’m not…”

You have to look away. You still struggle with consistently controlling your teleportation; as soon as your mind yearns to be far away from here, to not have to watch the sobbing pile of flesh on the table that used to be your brother, you find yourself back in his empty cell.

As the days passed from Theo’s initial stay with the doctors, you fantasized endlessly about killing him. When you weren’t in the mood to follow him to the operating rooms to watch the scalpels slice into his skin and satisfy some grim sort of retribution, you spent hours practicing at picking up objects around his cell—a cup, a pillow, his shoe, anything you could fit your hand around. Your successful attempts have been spotty at best. Sometimes, when you’re too tired of thinking, you find that you can lean against his locked cell door without falling through. But nothing else seems to solidify in your grasp when you want it to.

Now, hours later, as you watch Theo’s frail body curl up in a fetal position on top of his covers on the sweaty cot, you find to your dismay that you can no longer stare at him as impassively as you used to.

Instead, to your horror, you find that your nonexistent heart gives a twinge every time his eyes screw up and his mouth quivers open in a silent scream.

—

Your greatest shame lies in the fact that you try to leave.

A few days of watching this—this, your brittle-boned, stretched-skinned parody of a brother writhing on a cot—has you begging whatever higher power exists out there for relief.

Why didn’t you die? When Theo laid his hands on you and finally murdered you like one of you was always fated to do to the other, why didn’t your soul leave your broken body and join the rest in the afterlife?

You think, through an icy flush in your cheeks, that you don’t deserve this. Sure, you may not have been the best big sister there ever was on earth, but you don’t deserve to have your heart cut out and stolen from your mangled chest and then your soul forced to watch as three lunatics carved up your murderer’s ribcage to give him a new life. He may be the one gasping and crying in pain now, but every shrill breath he draws grates at whatever underfed conscience you developed from long ago.

You know something of the urban legends: not all souls pass on over that border between this plane and the next; and those that linger on the surface of the earth, more often than not, have unfinished business to resolve before they can rest in eternal peace.

Unfinished business, indeed. Dying at fucking eleven years old tends to result in unfinished business.

But why, now, must you be the one to suffer as he suffers?

You try to leave. It results in nothing more than a tearing sensation so deep inside you that it’s more like your remaining internal organs have been pulverized, and you have no choice but to reappear at Theo’s side like a starving vampire tethered to its sire, and to stare at him and stare at him and stew in your juvenile hatred as he heals and you don’t.

—

Another year passes, and another, and infuriatingly, you’ve come close to the point where what Theo did to you on that bridge doesn’t matter anymore.

The finishing touches of the genetic chimera blend to infuse Theo’s body with the jaws of a coyote and the claws of a wolf transform him into a feral thing writhing on the floor. You want to look away, but can’t.

The doctors attempt to contain him in a cage, at first. Theo froths and foams at the mouth in his animal form while the doctors attend to their other victims, and he bites at the iron bars ceaselessly until he loses first one canine and then the other and the blood pours sticky and sick-smelling from the cavities in his jaws. You sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the bars and plead with him to stop until you both smell sick and spent with tears. He doesn’t hear you.

When they return, the Pathologist—that’s the tall and broad one, you’ve come to know—breaks Theo’s hind leg cleanly to trigger his healing. Theo knows how to swallow his whimper now. He whines and then pants as the new canines grow back into his jaws.

That night, they drag another half-feral, half-dead body into the open area and release Theo from his cage. With prods and jolts, the two crazed animals charge at each other and clash in the middle in a tangle of fur and blood and bones and claws.

The nameless chimera tries to break Theo’s neck. Theo sinks his new fangs into the other one’s jugular, spraying you in an arc of fire-hot carmine.

The wall behind you paints with the rivers of Theo’s first kill. Your nerveless skin, still, feels like it wears the congealed evidence of what they’ve done to your brother.

The sated bloodlust, at least, triggers Theo to shift back to boy, which must be what the doctors were after all along. Beside him, in the last throes of agony, the other chimera shifts halfway back to a broken teenaged form and falls limp forever.

Theo doesn’t go back in the cage. He’s allowed to hose himself down and drag himself with a small meal back to his cot in the cell. The door is closed, but the lock doesn’t click into place.

Theo doesn’t eat. The bowl of meal sits on his trembling knees as he presses his hands flat under his thighs and rocks back and forth on the edge of the cot, mouth opening and closing, eyes distant and cold as glass.

You crouch in front of him.

“Theo,” you try again, the first time in years.

“Tara,” he says, shocking you. Your eyes widen.

But he’s not looking at you. Through you, perhaps, but at the wrong angle. An unhappy coincidence that the first time he’s uttered your name aloud since entering this hole, it’s in accidental reply to you naming him in kind.

“Tara,” he whispers. “I wish you were here.”

But you are.

“It wasn’t worth it,” he says. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t.” His breaths are wet, but his lashes stay dry. “Not for your heart. Not for it to be treated this way.”

“Theo,” you cry out.

He doesn’t hear you. He rocks, slower and slower, until he’s still, and he doesn’t cry.

You have enough tears to cry for both of you that night, anyway.

It’s his twelfth birthday. It feels cruel that now, in more ways than one, you'll never be his big sister again.

—

Just because Theo is sixteen now doesn’t mean he can be a stupid fucking idiot and put everything on the line for the doctors’ stupid fucking mission.

He’s in Beaverhead County, Montana, an absolute freezing bitch of a place in the middle of a high-mountained nowhere, and he’s changing out of his usual baggy shit into one of those mission outfits he picked out for this purpose. Form-fitting, dark, with a little variation in color, low-collared and older-styled. His hair is swept and gelled away from his forehead, shorn close to the skin at his nape, to affect the air of a college kid who’s already gotten his second-year bearings.

It infuriates you how seamlessly Theo slips into the persona. It infuriates you even more, after all these years, that there is nothing you can do to separate yourself from Theo, whether he is in Ohio or Ontario or Baja California or even goddamn Miami. Where he goes, the tether between the two of you means you go, too. On one hand, it’s a relief from the oppressive stench of blood and guts in the underground labs that you’ll never get over; but on the other hand, it means you take a front and center seat to the unpredictability and danger of all of Theo’s infiltration missions.

“You look like a dick,” you tell Theo’s reflection in the mirror as he combs his fingers through his hair to spike it up in the in-vogue style that year. “I mean, you are a dick, but usually you look more pathetic and bitchy about it. Now you just look like a proper dick.”

Theo finishes fiddling with his hair and slings some silver chain around his neck with a meaningless pendant that looks old enough to be an heirloom from a werewolf pack. His attention to detail is irritating.

“I mean, at least back then I could get why everyone would stop yelling at you when you started to cry,” you go on musing. “Like, I sometimes felt sorry for you. Now you just turn it on and off and it’s so fucking fake, like, oh, my G-d, could you be any more irritating?” Even as you say it, your mouth is twitching in a barely-contained smile in your translucent reflection.

Theo finishes off his outfit with a watch and carefully careless-looking leather shoes that he scuffed just a little bit around the toes against the baseboards last night.

“You’re not gonna do the whole charming and crying and stabbing routine again this time, are you? It’s getting old. I can always tell when you’re about to pull the sob story out of your ass.” You perch on the covers of the bed in his fake room next to him and watch him tie his laces with steady hands.

Theo straightens again with his palms flat over his jean-clad thighs and steels his fingers once, obviously resisting the urge to curl them into fists. He draws three quick breaths in succession. “C’mon, Raeken,” he mutters to himself. “Get into character, get into character. Run it over one more time.” He digs the still-blunt nail of his left thumb into his upper thigh and grimaces at the burn that grounds him: a habit of his that has tortured you since his twelfth birthday. “Don’t be a pussy. You can do this.”

“Ugh,” you say. “I should have smothered you with that pillow back in the hospital when I had the chance.”

Theo digs for the notebook he stashed under his mattress and flips open to the notes he was scribbling down last night. He looks over them once with a nod, as though confirming what he memorized from some flashcards, and then rips out the page and flicks on a lighter and touches the flame to the corner to consume the evidence of all the details he’s gathered on the Chouinard pack so far.

He cranks open the window and tosses the ashes out into the biting air. They float away in lonely paths on the wind, just like the way you have felt for the past seven years watching him with no one else to hear you but an echo chamber.

As he turns and leads you out the door, you say smally to his back, “You have no idea what you’re doing to yourself now, do you?”

—

Delilah opens the back door of her uncle’s snow lodge dressed, incongruously, in a pair of light-wash skinny jeans stuffed into some furry boots, and a sheer minty robe of sorts over her torso that leaves nothing of her boobs to the imagination.

“Almost thought you’d chicken out,” she teases your brother.

You watch Theo rake his eyes over the pack alpha’s niece from head to toe and then back up to meet her hooded gaze. The deliberateness of the act has you choked up.

“Do I strike you as the type?” Theo teases her back.

“Not really. But not many people can handle my energy, y’know,” Delilah says with a little grin. She beckons him inside in a swirl of stray snow and shuts the polished wood door behind her. They’ve entered through the rear and thus ended up in the open-plan kitchen, a gigantic place covered from ceiling to floor in real hardwood and paneling. She walks Theo back, step by step, till his lower back hits the kitchen island, and she presses the pad of one finger into the space where his delicate navel would be under his shirt. Just a few inches below that transplant scar.

Despite your lack of nerves, you flinch. You’ve been forced to watch, day after day, as Theo and Delilah built this relationship over the past several weeks. Delilah is on a holiday of sorts, from what you can gather. Having graduated from college a few years ago, she normally helps her uncle run the pack affairs and the local milling company—has been for several years—but she told Theo coyly on the phone yesterday that she faked sick from smoking too much wolfsbane and was able to beg out of the pack summit that her uncle must now attend alone up in Helena.

Delilah Chouinard, brunette and sharp-toothed and beautiful in a way you don’t think someone like your brother was ever raised to handle, is standing too close to Theo for your comfort. But you force yourself to relax. Theo has done this song and dance before: flirt, lie, manipulate, tease the truth out. Then drug the hapless victim—or, if worse comes to worst, dispose of them without a trace—and finish up the mission by incapacitating and gathering all the vulnerable subjects that could be useful for the doctors. In rare cases, simply steal the medical or magic herbal information guarded closely by one of the packs he infiltrates, and decimate the rest of them.

He never goes too far. You’ve probably had to witness the disgusting sight of someone kissing Theo full on the mouth once or twice, but you think he knows his limits. He would never let them get too far.

“You’re so hot,” Delilah whispers now into his ear, as they stumble out of the kitchen and toward the stairs. “Like, look at you. Look at that body. It should be illegal.”

“The bite never was that kind to you?” Theo mocks her softly. He leads the way, walking backwards up the plush carpet of the stair runner. You dally at the landing, but once again, that accursed tether between your soul and his floats your incorporeal body upward after them.

They reach the suite. A door slams. Delilah pants. Theo has his blunt teeth worrying at the thrumming skin of her neck as she wraps her heavy thighs around his hips.

“Oh, shush. You know you couldn’t tear your eyes away from me the moment you met the pack,” she bites back.

You could turn so that you face Theo’s back, but then that would mean having to look into the hazy, lust-drunk eyes of the woman he’s pressing to the wall. You stand there, stock-still, and catch sight of Theo’s eyes over Delilah’s shoulder pingponging around the entire suite, mapping exits. By the time he’s done and has pulled back from laying hickeys into her neck, you can tell he’s identified three ways out of this place.

“Isn’t that right?” Delilah ribs him. She draws long nails, half-clawed, down the skin of his back underneath his shirt. “You couldn’t help yourself. Wanted to jump in bed with me the instant I walked into the room. So wide-eyed and innocent about it, too. So…virginal.”

Theo closes his eyes. You are unwillingly familiar with this part of the ruse, before he kisses someone or allows himself to be kissed. He goes somewhere in his mind—he tells you accidentally, sometimes, speaking in his dreams, of the boys he thinks about—and then when he reopens his eyes, they’re half-clouded with lust and grief alike.

“Sounds like you know exactly your type,” Theo murmurs, without any heart in it.

Delilah can’t tell the difference. You can.

“Oh, yeah. This your first time, baby? We can make it good for you from the get-go. You could fuck me right here against the door,” Delilah invites him. She seems titillated at the wicked prospect of being naughty in her family’s own vacation home.

“On the bed. On the bed,” Theo insists breathlessly.

You freeze.

“What the fuck?” you hiss at him. “You’re going too fast. Slow down. You’re supposed to interrogate her first.”

“Mm,” Delilah moans. “And how do you want me?”

Shit. This is a disaster.

“On your knees?” Theo asks, more than tells her.

She curves up a brow and traces a line down from his clavicle to his belly button with her toe. “You really are a virgin!” she laughs, delighted. “Hm. Maybe next time. Right now, I think I wanna see you.”

This is a total fucking disaster.

Theo shudders and can’t help the flutter of his lashes or the spasm of his throat as he swallows. Delilah must think he’s struggling to keep it in his pants. You’ve known him for sixteen years. You can tell when he wants to throw up.

“Theo!” you yell. “Theo!! THEO!!! Fucking listen to me!”

He doesn’t hear you. He rolls forward on his belly and then shifts onto his back. “Wanna be on top?”

She grins, cheshire-like. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“Theoooo!!” If ghosts could go hoarse, you’d set a record for most shredded nonexistent vocal cords on the astral plane. “Theo, Theo, Theo, fuck, don’t do this. Stop it. You can stop this. Tell her no, fucking dammit.”

He rolls his head listlessly against the pillow, casting about the room with another spasmodic swallow. “Condoms?”

“In the bedside drawer,” she murmurs. Fingers walk up his bare skin where the shirt has ridden up over his chest.

He flaps his hand around and roots around in the nightstand to his right where she indicated. As the drawer pops up, your eyes widen and inspiration strikes you.

You still don’t have the control to snatch up an object as light and fine as a condom packet, but by sheer force of will you know you can strike something wider and heavier.

You hurl all your force into slamming the drawer shut at full speed while Theo’s hand is still reaching into it.

Over the sickening crunch of bones, Theo howls.

It devolves quickly from there. Delilah goes almost hysterical from the insane boner-killer. Theo curls in over himself, cradling his mangled hand; the woman clutches the see-through robe uselessly over her naked chest; your brother gets to his feet with gritted teeth and says he’ll have to take care of this first.

And then they’ll have to meet up another time.

Yeah, sure, today would have been perfect. Too bad all the little bones in my dominant hand are sticking through my skin like they went through a meat grinder.

Theo stumbles out to his car. He rifles angrily through the glove compartment for the first-aid kit.

He won’t be doing any miraculous healing any time soon—not soon enough to change his mind and head back inside and fuck Delilah for information, at any rate. You watched him smoke enough wolfsbane this morning to calm his nerves before driving up here, and the substance is still suffused throughout his system. You should have known from the moment he picked up the joint that he was planning on letting Delilah take things all the way this time.

Stupid. Stupid.

You watch, seated in the passenger seat of his sedan, as he sets all the bones in his hand and single-handedly tears off strips of bandages and binds his ruined appendage in them with the aid of his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” you say. You never meant to cause him pain. Not these days, anyway.

When Theo finishes dressing himself, he glances up at himself in the rearview mirror and seems to come to the same conclusion as you. The doctors. Their disappointment.

Their punishment.

Theo sucks in a long breath and screams, “Fuck,” into his steering wheel.

“I’m sorry about that, too,” you whisper.

But you can’t help but feel vindicated when, later, the doctors merely have him skip dinner and kill and bury another half-dismembered test subject as his punishment. Theo may not appreciate you for what you’ve done, if he ever got to figure it out, but at least he won’t have anything in his stomach to throw up when the truth of what almost happened today hits him as he’s digging that grave six feet below ground.

—

You promise yourself, after you managed to hurt Theo in the real world that one and only time to save him, that you wouldn’t do it again.

Theo gets older and he grows harder, and he knows what he wants. He plans to return to Beacon Hills. All things considered, you think his cockiness—his overinflated sense of success from dozens of missions accomplished over the years—could be his blessed undoing.

You think that him coming face-to-face again with Scott McCall, the only boy you remember him remotely liking from your childhood together, could do him some good. You know Theo will make mistakes. He’ll try his old seduce-and-manipulate routine, and he’ll fail, and he’ll be found out. But it’s all necessary to the plan you have, now. Because as you’ve watched him interacting with Scott and the rest of the McCall pack, an inkling of hope you haven’t harbored for the last several years has begun to stir inside you.

These are the kinds of people—the kinds of kids his age—who could see right through Theo and bring him back.

But then it all goes to shit.

They find out, and Theo gambles away the rest of his chips. The Skinwalkers open up a chasm in the concrete. Theo slips into the crack, screaming Scott, Scott, help me, Scott, and then a bastard version of yourself crawls out to drag the only person that’s ever meant anything to you down to the depths of hell.

And you and the selfless shade of who you once were are plunged into utter silence for a year.

& i.

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer, and whoever finds me will kill me.” —Genesis 4:13-14

You wake up in the back seat of your truck in a dank pool of your sweat to the glare of a flashlight shining through the fogged-up windows.

You check the front of your shirt. There are no fresh tears in the cotton, this time, but it’s been a close thing. You jolted awake with your right hand clawed just millimeters from the meat of your chest where it has burrowed in self-flagellation before. The faint splotches of rust that never could quite wash out of the green of your shirt are a testament to previous nights of this torment.

I tried calling your name, but you never respond, says the shade of your sister perched up front in the passenger seat of your truck.

You barely spare her a glance. The first time you saw her—hours after you had crawled your own way, claw by bloody claw, up from your living grave and back into Beacon Hills where Liam had summoned you by sword—you had felt the blood drain from your face, recognizing the same girl who had reclaimed her rightful heart from you a thousand times over below ground.

She haunts you everywhere now: when you wake, sitting at your side in the truck cabin or floating a few feet behind you as you drift from place to place in the wake of the war; when you sleep, crawling past the curtain of your dream world to punch her blackened talons past your sternum into the soft, seeping cavities below. The Tara of your nocturnal torture is exactly the way she was in hell—ribs split open, heart carved out, flesh spasming and beating around the gaping hole where the muscle should have been.

The Tara you see in the daytime is clean and whole and composed. She’s dry, not waterlogged, and her hair is shoulder-length like the way it was the night you pushed her off the bridge, not overgrown like the one that haunts you at night. She speaks to you, sometimes, her voice appearing in your ears without her mouth ever moving, but you never really know if it’s Tara’s voice or just the one you conjured in your head because your fucked-up brain couldn’t deal with the real remains of the sister you murdered a decade ago.

He’s at the front window now, Day-Tara tells you.

You slap a clammy hand against the moist inside of the window glass, startling the police officer who was peering into your truck. You clamber over the console toward the driver’s seat and turn the key in the ignition enough to power the window to roll down.

When the glass descends, you immediately regret having opened the window at all. Over the edge, his flashlight shining almost directly into your pupils, Sheriff Stilinski gazes impassively at you.

“Parrish alerted me to a strange pattern in the police reports,” says Stilinski without preamble. “When he was insistent about his suspicions, I had to come see myself.”

“Come to gloat, then?” you ask him hoarsely.

Stilinski gives you a particular look, like you’ve struck the ball and knocked it so far afield that he can’t imagine a way to retrieve it. He looks like there are a thousand and one things waiting on his tongue to be said. Instead, he goes with, “It’s not safe for you to be parking out here every night.”

You quibble half-heartedly with him about the exact definition of here—after all, some nights it’s behind the Dollar Tree; other times, it’s near the gas station on Third, or the unpaved lot a block away from the granite supply store, or in the bushes close to the south entrance of the preserve—but in the end, Stilinski is implacable.

“I’m driving back uptown, and you’re following me.”

“I’m not willingly driving after you to the station to get booked. Christ, all I want is some sleep.”

“And, hopefully, that’s what we’re going to get you, kid. Tonight, at least. Can’t guarantee tomorrow, but I have it on pretty good authority that you won’t be out on the street any longer, if we can help it.”

Your head spins at can’t guarantee tomorrow and tonight, at least and, mind-bogglingly, we. You imagine the bars of the holding cell where Stilinski would have kept you overnight last time, if only the sheer panic and necessity of the swift descent of the Ghost Riders hadn’t waylaid his carefully crafted plans of keeping you where he could see you. Creepingly, your chest tightens at the prospect of going back into that cell, of pulling into the parking lot of the station and dismounting from your truck and raising your hands in surrender and willingly placing one foot in front of the other just to reenter that awful iron cage.

Stilinski reads something in your face. What it is, you couldn’t tell anyone even at gunpoint, with your mind so blanked out by fear.

“It’s either that, or I slap the cuffs on you and drag your ass into my cruiser, and leave your truck out here to fend for itself,” he says.

Your knuckles are ice-white and frozen on the steering wheel. “I could rip your throat out with my teeth without breaking a sweat,” you say evenly.

Stilinski nods, as though acknowledging a blasé comment on the cloudiness of an ordinary noonday. “You could. But then you’d have to be the one explaining that to Scott. Not to mention his mother Melissa.”

Fuck, he’s got the point of his dagger plunged deep into your weak spot.

You contemplate the merits of hightailing it out of there and bolting for fucking Canada.

You glance down at your dashboard display. You’ve got less than a quarter of a tankful of gas.

Shit.

You turn to Stilinski, licking your lips. “You’re getting me a cheeseburger.”

The man’s brow lifts. “Any special way you like it?”

“Double, with bacon. And fries. And…”

“Ten-four. I’ll get you a whole supernatural-sized meal.” His gaze drops briefly to the stained shirt hanging off your collarbones, and then back up. “Don’t worry, we’ll order the good stuff.”

—

When the sheriff said we and promised a safe place to sleep tonight, at least, you didn’t imagine this: being frogmarched up the rickety front porch of Scott’s house, still reeling from the deliciousness of your run to Five Guys, and coming face-to-face with a sharp-eyed, haggard-looking Melissa McCall at the door.

What startles you most, perhaps, is that she doesn’t seem the least bit surprised.

“I thought you got lost at the Five Guys, for a second,” she jokes briskly as she holds the heavy storm door open with a single slippered foot.

Behind you, Stilinski snorts once at the jab—the first time tonight he has shown a shred of mirth.

Melissa’s gaze snaps from the sheriff over your shoulder onto you. She doesn’t fix her eyes on yours, so much as her look slides down your face and pauses somewhere on your cheek or your ear and then hitches back up to a point between your eyebrows.

She beckons with her head, wrapping herself and her worn robe up in a hug against the frigid air. “Don’t be wasting the heat at this time of year.”

The adults’ voices turn muffled as you are shuffled from one spot to the next: over the threshold, toward the couch, redirected down the hall, instructed to pop into the bathroom for a shower.

The time inside the glass stall sluggishly seeps into a lost period anywhere between ten minutes and an hour. When you emerge in a cloud of steam shrouding your pink-rubbed skin and the ill-fitting spare sweats that need to be cuffed at the ankle, the sheriff is inexplicably still there.

Melissa says something about rooming options. She and the sheriff herd you down the hall. The first door, left slightly ajar to offer a peek of a fairly large space, must belong to Melissa. The second door you pass smells strongly of your greatest defeat: even months after Scott left for college, there is no mistaking that that space was his home.

The last door opens up to a smallish room with a stereotypically masculine teenage bedspread in blocked colors. Some tchotchkes seemingly too personal to have been random finds at the decor store lie around the shelves and other wooden surfaces.

You make the mistake of looking up at the blindless window directly in your line of sight, and you freeze at the semi-translucent reflection of your sister in the smudged glass.

Though she perches regularly in the passenger’s seat of your truck, you’ve never noticed her following you out of the vehicle before. You scold yourself for the quickening of your heartbeat; and then you berate yourself for that ensuing visible twitch across your face. No one could have heard the sudden uptick in your heartbeat but yourself, but now, like the depths of the sea insistently eating at the edges of the shore, your ability to master your tells has been chipping away since the Skinwalkers’ prison.

“Don’t look so shellshocked,” Melissa says, right beside you. Her voice seems suddenly loud. “It’s just a room. I haven’t even cleared it yet of Isaac’s stuff, and I’m not about to do that now when it’s way past my bedtime to get a sufficient amount of sleep for my shift tomorrow, so you can count on being the one to help clean up sometime tomorrow.”

Not so much of your own volition as it is to escape the energy of her presence, you drift forward toward the bed. You skim your fingers along the edge. It feels—absurdly—almost insulting: to have committed the crimes you have and not be stripped down and tossed to an icy concrete floor to await trial and then your death.

The sheriff awkwardly clears his throat. “Well, I think that’s that. We’ve all had a fantastically late night tonight. Melissa, call me if you need anything.”

His soles creak against the floorboards as he turns to go. You whirl.

“Wait!”

Both adults lock eyes on you.

“Arrest me,” you blurt out to the sheriff.

This time, Melissa and Stilinski lock eyes over your head.

“It is late,” the sheriff notes dryly, as though that has anything to do with what you’ve just said.

“You’re talking nonsense,” Melissa tells you decisively. “Go lie down and sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow evening when I come back from my shift.”

They shut the door behind them and huddle in the hallway, either fully unaware of or insouciant to the fact that you could hear them without trying to eavesdrop.

“You said you fed him,” Melissa says, just slightly on the side of accusatory.

“I did. Seconds, too.”

“Christ, I’m not equipped for this.”

“You reckon Deaton would be any better?”

Melissa gives an exhausted laugh. “Maybe. I don’t know. At least his patients only bark and hiss at him. Pretty simple to deal with compared to this, don’t you think?”

“Hey. I do have some experience with a teenage son who barks and hisses. Maybe with a whole lot more words than one of Deaton’s patients would, but they’re generally looking for the same assurances, is what I find.” Stilinski sighs, and his voice begins to fade as the two adults evidently move toward the foyer. “If you want, we can swap stories sometime this week. And you let me know by then how many times he’s tried crawling out the window.”

You’re too damn mystified by the turns in their conversation to bother listening in any longer.

Suddenly feeling your fatigue press down on your clavicles like human hands, you turn and sink down onto the bed. Beside you, Tara’s shade joins you after a moment.

“You know, you do bark and hiss like a dog,” she says. “You’re not so different.”

You ignore her. You wish feverishly that you thought to bring your shoes into the room instead of leaving them to the side of the welcome mat in the foyer.

At some point, you list to the side and become a deadweight against the pillow for fourteen hours straight.

—

Melissa doesn’t kick you out. Stilinski doesn’t show up to arrest you. Scott doesn’t drive back home to demand an explanation for why you’re taking up space where someone special to him and so much better than you used to live.

That first week, you wake up with a start every morning from a cold-sweated nightmare of the hospital and shattered ribs. You don’t count your breaths, but you do count the heartbeats in your surroundings. Each time, you find yourself alone.

You then count the seconds and minutes before it feels acceptable and not presumptuous to open the door and make your way to the kitchen for breakfast.

You sit, pour cereal, let it float until it congeals in the milk into a distasteful enough mass to resemble the mush you used to eat before coming back to Beacon Hills, and you plan how not to get executed.

You spend several hours each morning clearing Isaac’s shit from his room. You unearth unused cardboard boxes in the attic and build them on your own. You pack and label things, taking the time to wrap them in the often-reused tissue paper from years of giftgiving that you also found stuffed into a plastic bag upstairs.

You rearrange skewed furniture. Screw in loose lightbulbs and spend hours hunting for new ones to replace the dead fixtures. Tighten whatever’s been leaking under the sink in the kitchen. Throw out all the rotting produce in the crisper drawer that has been languishing for attention. Hammer and glue down the vinyl tiles in the kitchen coming loose at the corners. Sweep the chimney (you remember that day vividly for your stupidity, when you didn’t think to lay down anything to catch the years of soot that would billow out, and Tara laughed meanly and endlessly in your ear as she lounged on the coffee table behind you and you ignored her).

The first week, Melissa comes home at odd hours. The times that you’re still awake when her keys rattle at the door and you can’t find a less suspicious way to make yourself scarce, she visibly glances about at the neater space and then looks at you for a stretch of time.

Each time, you don’t say anything. Neither does she. She eats. You slink off to your room to daydream about a dreamless death while Tara’s shade relays to you how ugly you are with the constipated look on your face.

The second week, Liam wakes you by flinging pebbles at the already damaged window. He’s unphased—unimpressed, in fact—by you slamming against the glass with amber eyes and claws.

“I need to get to practice and Mason’s out of town. C’mon, you’re driving me,” is all he says.

Dumbly, you drive him around all throughout the day. The afternoon ends with an errand for Deaton, which then leads to you accidentally calming down a feral cat when Liam thrusts it into your hands because he doesn’t want to deal with it, which then leads to you even more accidentally landing a job as Deaton’s new and frankly unvetted assistant.

—

You know that Melissa locks her bedroom door at night, those times when she’s going to sleep under the same roof as you.

On a rare Saturday off when Melissa stirs awake past noon after a graveyard shift, and the click of the lock being undone precedes her shuffling out into the hallway, you speak to her from behind the door of the linen closet you’re repainting. You found the supplies in the garage, freshly purchased some months ago but never opened.

“You know, maybe it’s a peace of mind thing, but you’ve been living with a werewolf son long enough to know that a lock on your door isn’t going to keep anything with claws and superstrength out of your room for longer than two seconds.”

Melissa blinks mid-yawn. “Excuse me?”

You repeat your comment, peeking at her through the round hole in the closet door where you unscrewed the knob, though you’re still too much of a coward to stand up and step around the wooden panel to face her.

Melissa sighs. “It’s too early for this bullshit.”

This feels more like familiar ground.

“You call it bullshit. I call it common sense. I could shift and invade your room at any time—put my claws in you while you’re sleeping.” Because every night you shift against your will, is what you don’t say. Your body rebels against the nine years of lessons on control pressed by scalpel into your skin. Instead, it reaches for that other memory, that one hovering over the blade-cold creek in December, the one that’s dominated them all, and reimprints that remembrance over and over into your ribs.

It’s only a matter of time before those claws turn on other soft, fleshy living things in their quest for a heart that will forgive.

When Melissa seems to realize you’re not backing down from this conversation, she places her hands on her hips. “I see. So you think that I went through everything that I went through in the last year and a half, and somehow conveniently forgot the fact that your face gives me nightmares, and, what? Decided to invite you into my home willy-nilly, anyway?”

You flinch belatedly at her confession. It should sound vulnerable, but all it feels like right now is a condemnation.

“Maybe you did,” you snap, rising to the defense. “Maybe you didn’t think things through. It would make a whole lot of sense, where Scott got his martyr complex from.”

The last few words have barely flown off your tongue before the linen closet door is being wrenched back with a whoosh. Melissa’s left hand is planted around the edge, fresh paint whitewashing her palmprint, but she doesn’t give a damn.

“Whatever the hell you think is Scott’s problem,” she hisses, “says a whole lot more about you than it says about him. Now, I know the sheriff is peculiar in that he advocates for patience, but I, for one, am a fan of cutting the bullshit. If you think for a second that I don’t have other means of protecting myself from you, you better think again. And if you think you’re remotely the scariest thing out there that plans to get to me, then maybe that time underground solved some of your issues but it sure as hell didn’t solve your ego problem.”

You stare up at her, butt frozen to the plastic step stool beneath you. She stares back.

You swallow.

You break first. “There’s a warm omelette on a plate in the oven.” Because you were never raised to say sorry.

She leans back, finally releasing her hold on the door and briefly wrinkling her nose at the mess of wet paint on her palm. She looks back at you, less intensely this time. “You want some caramel in your coffee?” Because she’s not the type of woman to say I’m sorry, too to the likes of you.

“That sounds perfect,” you say in barely anything above a whisper.

“I don’t know what the fuck you gain by pushing their buttons,” Day-Tara comments as Melissa walks away toward the kitchen. Your sister’s shade is trying and failing to kick the stack of old newspapers bunched up next to the paint can. “You happy now? Was that the screaming match you needed to make you feel good again? How’s misery for company day after fucking day when you could have just asked her if she slept okay last night?”

Misery for company is just fucking fine, you don’t say aloud, because then you know if Melissa was going to return to her senses and kick you out, that shoe will drop sooner rather than later.

You don’t say any of this to your sister. She’s not real, anyway. She’s just the resurrection of what the perfect victim of your perfect crime could have looked like if you didn’t leave her for the doctors to desecrate in the woods.

Serve you right to have her face on the ceaseless voice of guilt that yowls at you when you have no one else to talk to.

—

You talk to Theo day in and day out.

If you had normal human vocal cords, they would have been shredded by now. The stream of comments you keep up is practically endless.

When he wakes up alone in the cavernous-feeling McCall home and goes about his frantic ritual to calm himself and prepare for the day, you try to talk him down by making fun of his face or the other thing he’s planning to do around the house to suck up to the people he thinks are his jailers, or even dig at his increasingly frequent hangouts with that Dunbar boy.

When he spends too long in the shower trying to flay his skin off under the boiling water, you yell through the door that further self-immolation won’t make him prettier.

When he lets a flash of annoyance twist his face for a moment at the constant chime of notifications from Liam’s phone, and he chides the other boy for not turning his device on vibrate for their self-proclaimed night patrol, you laugh from the back seat and tell him to stop being jealous of the kid having friends. Because, really, how the fuck does Theo expect to make new ones, when he can’t even get his head out of his ass and start treating the others with half as much paranoia and a tad more trust?

But no matter what you say, how you beat your fist ineffectually at the wall beside his head, how incessantly you bob after him or pop out with the most out-of-left-field comment to seize his attention, he never looks at you.

He never responds to you.

You’re just as invisible to him as you were all those nine years before he went into the ground.

The bigger part of you is not surprised, even if a tiny voice inside you hoped vainly for that year he was gone that someday, somewhere, he would return and suddenly your two ghosts would be reunited in the astral plane, and you could finally torment him in all the innocent ways that you never really did when you were kids because you were both hellbent on killing each other. There never was any point to it, you’ve come to realize in this past year of silence. The world would be powerful enough to kill you both.

Still, subconsciously, you know why you talk to him so ceaselessly these days, no matter how fruitless the endeavor may be.

You thought the split second of realization of who Theo was before he shoved you over the bridge was unbearable. You thought the years of witnessing his vivisections, and watching him haul bodies and toss grave dirt as he teetered on the constant brink of nausea, was hell.

But the year of absolute silence from him—the year you lost your purpose, and with it very nearly your mind—made you realize that you fucking love your brother.

—

“Will the enchantment hold through a shift?”

Deaton sighs at Theo. You’ve witnessed him explain this to your brother more than once. “It will. Nothing will break the enchantment, save the will of the one who has placed the restraint on the subject. Though…Theo, I’m sure you know this feels quite a bit like an overprecaution.”

Theo takes the set of handcuffs proffered to him. “Rogues may not have been sighted yet, but I’m always on watch with Dunbar. If anything happens to him while I’m on the clock, you know as well as I do that his alpha and all the rest of them will be on my case. So, really, this overprecaution is for selfish reasons.” He flashes his boss one of your least favorite smiles on him. “I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sure I don’t. I’m also sure that your shift was up several minutes ago.” Deaton snaps his tome shut and puts away his readers. “Drive safely, Theo.”

You think nothing of the uncharacteristic lightness in Theo’s shoulders as he makes his way to his truck, or even as he cruises the streets back to the McCall house.

You think nothing, even, of Theo seeking out Melissa in the living room and asking to speak for a brief moment.

You only begin to feel the buzz of anxiety inside you when Theo pulls out the handcuffs from the back pocket of his jeans and places them in Melissa’s unsuspecting hand.

“Theo, what is—”

“They’re yours.”

“Excuse me? I’ve never owned a pair of handcuffs in my life.”

“They’re yours, to use on me, whenever you feel you need to.” Theo heads off Melissa’s obvious dubious question. “They’ve been enchanted by Deaton, so no supernatural, no matter how old or strong, can break through them on their own. Only on your say-so, if you’re the one who puts them on me.”

Melissa gapes up at him from her spot on the couch. You’re not faring much differently from behind her.

“The headboard in the room you lent me is made of metal. The bars are welded together. You could easily run the chain around one of them. With the cuffs zapping my strength, you could sleep a whole lot easier at night.” When Melissa has still failed to say anything, Theo rubs his nose once and places his hands casually at his sides. “It may not make the nightmares about me go away, but…maybe it will do something to ease your mind.”

That final comment, at last, seems to snap Melissa out of whatever deep consternation she has been swimming in. Her hand spasms, and the handcuffs clatter to the floor.

“Deaton enchanted these? He knows about your plan?”

“He knows of the strength of these restraints I asked him to spell, yes. With…everything going on now with the rumors of rogues, he was willing to help me in this.”

“Holy mother of…” Melissa sinks her head into her hands, dark curly hair fanning out tiredly around her shoulders. She speaks to the floor. “I knew your case wasn’t so simple, but—I may have underestimated how much I should have gotten Alan involved in this from the get-go.”

For the first time in this exchange, your brother looks confused.

“He’s much better at these sorts of things, you know. Contrary to what people think,” Melissa goes on, looking up at Theo this time. “But he’s not here, and I told Noah I would be the one to see to you, and I mean it. So—this may sound like a whole lot of gibberish to you, but—listen and let me say this all the way through.

“I used to have nightmares about you, yes. When you came back from the Skinwalkers’ place, when the dust settled in the wake of everything Monroe did to my son and to the pack, I had nightmares. They were all over the place. And, yes—sometimes, occasionally, they featured you.

“I don’t know what exactly you dream about at night, Theo, but I saw the bloodied t-shirt you hid in the bathroom wastebasket last week.” Your brother’s lips part and his next breaths go shallow. “I don’t know what you think of or who you talk to when I’m gone at work, but I see the things that have been spruced up around the house. I may have never broached the idea of getting back on your feet directly with you, but one day I heard from Alan that you’d gone and gotten a job yourself.

“I don’t believe in perfect people. I also don’t believe that, after you’ve forgiven someone, you always need to welcome them back into the fold. My relationship with Scott’s father is testament to that. Sometimes—sometimes things are simply too damaged for there to be any visible way forward.”

Theo’s eyes slope at the corners, devastated.

“But Scott’s father is a man who grew up on the nice side of Burbank in a normal home, and he had every chance in life to get things right when the people who loved him gave him second chances. He is a man who saw those second chances, and decided differently: that work mattered more than anything else.

“You’re different. You’re eighteen years old, and during your lifetime you’ve killed at least four people that we know of.”

Theo goes white as a sheet.

“You also lost four people,” Melissa goes on, bewildering both of you. “Your sister, and your mother, and your father…they’re three of them. And you lost any chance at a normal life, nine years ago. You see that doorway?” She points down the hallway toward the lintel of Scott’s bedroom entryway, where crayon and pen marks in an array of colors scuff up the painted wood in lines and numbers. “You were as tall as that third mark from the bottom there when you disappeared from Beacon Hills.”

You drift over to the measuring post and with your fingers trace the shaky numbers spelling out ages and years. The highest mark is well beyond your reach and reads two years ago: right before Scott was bitten and everything in this house changed forever.

“This isn’t your second chance, Theo,” Melissa says. His attention snaps back to her, mute. “This is your first.”

Your brother’s expression freezes and then cracks wide open.

“And,” Melissa adds, a wobbly smile creasing one side of her face, “by the looks of it, you’re doing one hell of a fine job trying to make the most of it.”

You don’t need to look up at Theo to see that your heart is beating right out of your little brother’s chest. You look at him, anyway, because if there is one thing you have been starving to see all these years, it’s this: the first time he hears the words that you’ve always wanted to pass on to him, not in so many syllables, but never could.

A few seconds pass. Then, pallid and unsteady, Theo lets his mouth drop open and he swivels on his heel and faces the wall away from Melissa.

From your vantage point in the living room, you glimpse the shine of moisture bright in the corners of Melissa’s eyes. She has one hand pressed over the bottom of her mouth and the other bracing her elbow over her lap. She doesn’t say anything. She simply looks at Theo, and you look back at him, and you see that his shoulders are silently shaking.

Neither you nor Melissa utter a word for a long time, either on the astral plane or the earthly one.

Finally, Theo is the first to break the quiet. “You’re making a mistake,” he tells the wall. “I am who I always was. There is no other version of me.”

“Theo,” Melissa says readily, dropping the hand from over her mouth and folding her arms. “Look at me.”

Reluctantly, Theo turns partway to dart his eyes down toward hers.

“You know why I wasn’t frightened of you when you confronted me about the lock on my door?”

Mutely, he shakes his head.

“Because it’s not the lock that keeps someone like you out. It’s the powdered mistletoe that’s spread inside the doorway.”

The shock of the confession is enough to make both of you jerk your heads up at Melissa.

She gives him a brittle smile. “That’s right. And if at any point, you had actually tried to enter my room, you would have clocked it instantly. You wouldn’t have nagged me about a flimsy lock on my bedroom door. So when you came after me about the lock, and you got so angry at me for seeming so careless, that’s when I knew.” She blows out a low breath. “I knew that you valued my trust. And I also knew that, deep down, you were still the old, caring little Theo we all used to know.”

Your brother evidently can’t take it. He stares at Melissa, long-lashed and wounded. And then he moves like a marionette to the front door, choking out, “I need some air.”

The door slams behind him.

—

You know deep in your soul, even without being bound to follow him, where he’s headed.

He sprints blindly into the edge of the forest and legs it for the darkest interior of the preserve. Though you have no flesh that thorn or root can damage now, you still wince as each low-hanging branch whips across his face and arms and raises welts across his pale skin in the moonlight.

You can’t tell in the gloom, but your hearing is keen enough to catch the ragged, wet breaths that tear from his lungs with every pump of his legs. By the fourth time he nearly collides into a tree, he takes a running leap over the edge of a crag and shifts midair into his full wolf form, bones grinding, jaw malforming in a howl of agony.

Four paws land on the other side of the dip in the rocky ground. You race after him, silent and grim.

Soon enough, you both arrive at the rickety bridge over the winter creek by muscle memory. After all, the heart is a muscle.

You pause several feet behind Theo, but he bolts forward. Something makes him whine and spin around when he reaches the center of the bridge. He turns and paces, turns and paces, agitation leaking from every pore into the sweaty fur of his massive, heaving body.

“Theo,” you call out softly.

The wolf freezes. It lifts its snout in your vague direction. Its ears flick atop its head; the amber sheer of its eyes sharpens as it seeks out the source of your voice on the near-still breeze. The gurgle of the creek below you both makes the same sound as he did when he struggled for breath under the noose you’d made out of his necktie.

The wolf turns forward again to face the edge of the bridge. It tosses its head back, and its jaw drops open and from its throat comes the most devastating and ragged howl you’ve ever heard.

Your brother howls and howls. When his voice goes raw and all else fails him, he lets out a whine that splits you in two.

And then he leaps for the railing of the bridge.

“Theo, NO!”

It all happens in a blur. One moment, you’re watching in horror as your brother flings himself over the broken wood; the next, your entire form is arched forward and your hands are latched around great chunks of fur, and you’re both plummeting over the edge, twisting once, headed for the jagged rock bed and ice-cold water below.

If you were still human, you would feel the impact of falling a second time in the same spot twice in your lifetime. As it is, your spectral form plunges below the surface of the creek like an impenetrable mantle of cold, blanketing you more closely than any of the chill that has pursued you all these years existing as a shade.

You don’t even register shock at the fact that both your hands are still looped around Theo’s neck and gripping the sopping ends of his fur. On instinct, you push with your legs and heave with your back. You break the surface, sobbing, and you flail and kick and drag his heavyweight body toward the nearest outcrop of shore you can spot.

You collapse onto your belly on top of Theo’s body on the ground. His skin is smooth and slick under your touch. He’s trembling. Goose pimples sprout all across his flesh, bumpy under your fingertips.

You whip your head up to meet his gaze.

He’s human again. Theo is human, and he is staring right at you with his inhumanly silver eyes, wet and teary everywhere, and you know that this time, he sees you.

“Tara?”

“I’m here,” you gasp.

His teeth chatter. “I—I thought—”

You shush him incessantly through his stammering. He’s naked from head to toe and still drenched through with creek water.

“You’re—you’re really here?”

You try a fractured smile. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

“I thought I brought you up from the Skinwalkers…”

You’re already shaking your head. “That wasn’t me. That was never me.”

“But then—”

“That was maybe whoever you thought I’d be. And maybe there was a time I would have hurt you back like that, for what you did,” you confess all in a rush, “but the last time I felt like that was almost a decade ago.”

His brain, sluggish from the iciness of his plunge into the water, takes a long moment to do the math and digest your words. Then: “Nine years?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes, I’ve been here,” you murmur, and then again, as you gather him up into your arms for the first time, because you can do that now. You don’t know if you will ever be able to do it again. But right here, right now, as you feel the guilt-taut skin of your brother for the first time again after all these years, you suddenly know in your soul that this is why the universe has sentenced you to wander the earth after Theo Raeken.

It has all been for this moment.

“The whole time?” Theo breathes out raggedly into your chest.

For better or for worse, you nod into the top of his head and affirm, “The whole time.”

“For everything?”

“For everything.”

“And you’re still dead.”

“Yeah, I don’t—I’m pretty fucking awesome, but I don’t think even I could ever come back from the dead,” you say with a wobbly, self-deprecating chuckle.

Theo doesn’t find it amusing. He clings to you, nine years old again and clinging like you both should have done when you found that baby box hidden in the wall behind your parents’ bed.

“I’m sorry,” Theo says instead. It drags like a broken knife blade out of his chest.

“I’m sorry too,” you say.

“You were their Titus,” he says into your shoulder. “I couldn’t live with that. And now I—and now—”

“Shh,” you say. You wish he would cry, instead of this thing he does where he walks a tightrope of razor wire and flings himself belly first onto the edge.

“I was selfish, and horrible, and cruel, and insecure, and I knew what I was doing but I still did it anyway, and it took me three years to even realize—”

At the crack of his voice, you brush your fingers through his damp hair and soothe him again. You know. You were there, crouched in front of his knees, for his twelfth birthday.

You don’t really know what to say. All you know is that the pressure is building inside him and the cracks are showing at his seams.

“I’m sorry I wanted so hard to be Titus,” says Theo.

And then you know what news to be said. Like a secret, you whisper, “Hey. We were never meant to be Titus.”

And that’s the thing that breaks him. It contorts his face and casts across his eyes the true light of grief as it bursts out and spills over his cheeks.

In the cool stillness of the place where it all began, you let his sorrow bleed out onto your shoulder until his eyelids grow heavy and he’s ready to begin anew.

In a little bit, you’ll move and help him up so you can walk him back home.

—

“My name is abel, said cain.” —José Saramago, Cain