Brother

The world went black again.

Then Weston was somewhere else entirely. Looking at his father’s rider face to face. It looked like the shadow, but taller. Bulkier. It sat in a crouch, facing him with empty eyes.

“So. You’ve come to see me. You’ve got a lot of nerve being here.”

Weston looked at his hands. They weren’t his, or his father’s. They were Azra’s.

“What..? What is this?”

“You shouldn’t have given him a name. Now he’s acting on his own, boy. Reaching into places he has no business reaching. You don’t want to see what we went through for three days.”

There was no floor. There was no basement, no chalk, no candles. There was only a gray that went on in every direction without any light to make it gray, and the two of them in the middle of it, and the cold coming off the thing in the crouch.

The hands Weston was looking at were long and dark at the fingertips, and they burned. Deep down, the way coals burn under ash. He turned one over and saw his own fire moving under it, the orange-white of it, the exact color he’d been making since he was twelve, and he understood that he wasn’t wearing Azra. Azra was wearing him. He was folded up inside Azra somewhere the way the rider usually folded up inside him.

Easy, Azra said. The voice came from everywhere at once, from inside his own chest. I brought you. I’ll bring you back.

Weston had never heard him like that. Azra spoke through his mouth when he had it, and only then. Inside, for seventeen years, there had been heat and hunger and pressure and wanting, and never once a word.

“You brought me here?”

I followed him in his sleep. He dreams of it every night. Did you know that? Every single night for forty years. Azra sounded almost pleased. I wanted to see what he was. Now I know.

The thing in the crouch tilted its head. It didn’t have a face, exactly. It had the place where a face would be, and the empty eyes set into it, and when it moved, the gray around it moved too.

“It talks to you,” it said. “Out loud. Like a pet.”

Like a brother, Azra said.

The rider laughed. There was no sound to it, only a pressure, and Weston felt it in Azra’s ribs and in his own.

“Brother.” It unfolded out of the crouch, slow, until it stood a full head taller than Azra and twice as broad. “That woman fed me until I was fat, and I still had to fight a sixteen-year-old boy for three days to keep from being thrown out of the only body I’ve ever wanted. I had him on the floor of that circle with his own teeth through his tongue. I had his heart stopped twice. I had him begging his father to kill him, and the old man wouldn’t.” It leaned in. “And he won. Do you understand? He won. I serve him. I have served him every day since. And you, little ember, you sit in your boy like a dog by a fire and let him call you by a name,”

Weston said nothing. He didn’t trust his own voice in that body.

“Does he know?” the rider asked. Not Weston. Azra. “That the contract runs both ways now? That you’re strong enough to walk into my house without knocking?”

He knows now.

“Then he knows what my master will do when he finds out.”

The cold pressed closer. Weston felt Azra’s fire flare in answer, and he felt Azra hold back. He wanted to swing. He was choosing not to.

“You came to see three days,” the rider said. “You’ll see them. Every night for the rest of your life, you’ll see them, the same as he does. That’s what happens when you go into a memory you weren’t invited into.” It crouched again, all at once, close enough that its empty eyes filled everything. “But you came with something else. I can smell her on you.”

The gray behind the rider tore down the middle. Through the gap, Weston saw his bedroom. The window was cracked. Eva was sitting up in the sheets with her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide open, and she was looking straight through the tear at him.

She had seen all of it. The yard. The river. The circle.

“Oh,” the rider said softly. “Oh, you brought her, too.”

“Azra. End this. Now,” Weston told him.

“Oh no. You’re here. You will stay until I want you to go.” It stood. His father’s presence suddenly filled the room, and they couldn’t move. “You brought her here because you didn’t realize you could. Good. I want a taste while she’s here. I haven’t had anything like her since the day I was summoned.”

“No,” Eva said, and suddenly she was closer, and it pulled her into the grey with him.

“Doesn’t work on me here.” It finished for her. “In here, you’re the intruders. And I’m serving my master by teaching you why you should never come here.”

Samael wasn’t anywhere Weston could see, and he was everywhere. The gray had weight now. It pressed down on Azra’s shoulders and into the joints of his long hands and along the back of Weston’s own neck, folded up inside. It was a will, older and heavier than his, deciding where he would be, and he couldn’t get a finger to twitch against it.

I can’t, Azra said. Weston had only been hearing that voice for a few minutes, and already he knew it shouldn’t sound like that. Not here. This is his.

Eva was three feet away and she might as well have been across a river.

She was in what she’d gone to sleep in, his old flannel unbuttoned at the throat and hanging to the middle of her thighs, her feet bare on the floor that wasn’t a floor. Her glasses were gone. The brand sat dark and full in both her eyes, the black curling into the brown, and the rider turned its empty face toward it and went still in a way that made Weston’s stomach drop.

“There it is,” it said. “The same mark. She wore it on her forehead. I fed off her for an hour before I went into the boy, and I have been hungry every day since.” It took one step toward Eva. “Forty years of scraps. Riders’ leavings. Whatever he lets me have off the people he breaks. And now you walk into my house with that in your eyes.”

“I didn’t walk,” Eva said. “You dragged me.”

“Same thing, in here.”

Weston pulled against the weight. Nothing. He tried to reach for his fire and found it, banked and burning under Azra’s skin, and couldn’t lift it. Samael’s will lay over it and kept it down.

“Don’t touch her.”

The rider didn’t even look at him. “You named yours. I’ll let you watch.”

It reached for her.

Its hand didn’t arrive all at once. It came apart as it came, the fingers drawing out into long cold threads that lifted off the gray and drifted toward her face. Weston knew them. He had seen them in the cellar, the night she’d given her worst memories away to the thing at the bottom of the stairs. He knew exactly what they would look for in her.

Eva didn’t step back.

She looked at the threads, then past them at the empty eyes, and Weston watched her decide something. Her chin came up an inch. Her bare toes curled against the gray as if there were ground there to hold.

“You want a taste,” she said. “You think I’m her.”

“I know what you are.”

“No. You know what she was. You fed on a woman who’d already said yes before she came down the stairs.” The first thread touched her cheek, and her breath caught, and she kept talking through it. “I haven’t said anything to you.”

The thread stopped.

Just for a second. Just long enough for Weston to feel the weight on his shoulders shift, the smallest fraction, the way a man shifts in his sleep when a dream turns on him.

Somewhere far above the gray, in a house across the city, Samael Weston had stirred.

“What a disappointment.” The rider said as it dropped her next to Weston unceremoniously. “So close. You’re always so close and yet I can never have a taste. It should have been me. Not the whelp that can’t even comprehend the power he siphons from you every time he feeds.”

It turned away. The presence released Weston and he quickly moved to hold her. Still not himself. Still in Azra’s body. She held him back, and the rider watched and it took a deep breath and turned away.

“I miss my mother every day. I miss her hands. I miss her warmth.” It sounded more like his father now. “Just go. And never come back to this place.”

Weston didn’t answer it. He had Eva against him, and his arms were too long, and his hands were too hot, and she didn’t flinch from any of it. She pressed her face into a chest that wasn’t his and gripped the back of him with both fists, and she was shaking. He could feel the cold where the thread had touched her cheek. It had left a cold mark on the side of her face, already fading.

She’s all right, Azra said. His voice was very quiet. It didn’t get in.

“Get us out.”

I’m trying. A pause. He has to let go first.

The rider stood with its back to them, its head bowed. The gray around it had stopped pressing. It was only gray now, an empty place, and the thing in the middle of it was not crouched or looming. It stood the way a man stands at a grave, and Weston had seen his father stand that exact way once, at seven, in the rain, in the cemetery behind the chapel. He’d thought then that his father was impatient to leave. He’d been wrong.

“She healed him every night,” the rider said, to no one. “Every night. He never thanked her. He thought there’d be time.”

Then the gray let go.

Weston fell. There was no floor and then there was a mattress, and his own weight came back into him all at once, his own hands, his own skin, heavy and familiar and soaked in sweat. He sucked in a breath that hurt. The bedroom was dark. The window was cracked the way he’d left it, and the air coming in was cold enough to raise every hair on his arms.

Eva was already sitting up. She had his flannel bunched in one hand at her chest and her other hand pressed flat over her cheek, and she was staring at him.

“Are you you?” she asked.

“Yeah.” His voice cracked. “Yeah. It’s me.”

She let out a breath and folded down against him, and he got both arms around her, his own arms, the right length. She was freezing. He pulled the blanket up over both of them and held on.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Her heart was going fast against his ribs and then slower. His was doing the same. Azra settled down low in him, very still, the way he went after a fight he hadn’t won.

“You saw it,” he said finally. “All of it.”

“The yard. The river.” She swallowed. “The basement. Your grandmother.”

“I didn’t mean to bring you.”

“I know.” She lifted her head and looked at him. Her glasses were on the nightstand. In the dark, he could only just make out the brand, and she didn’t look away. “Did you know? Any of it?”

“No.” He thought about the boy on his knees in the mud, the burned palm, the blindfold folded twice. His father in the cemetery. “He never told me anything. I thought he was born like that.”

“Nobody’s born like that.”

He didn’t answer. She put her hand on his chest where her face had been, and he felt it. Her hand, warm, staying.

“He dreams it every night,” Weston said. “Azra said so. Forty years.”

Eva was quiet a long time.

“Then tonight,” she said, “he knows you were there.”

* * *

“Now I can enter into his dreams. I don’t…I hate doing that. I’m not doing it. He is.” Weston was frustrated, and she could tell because he was already pinching the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know how to stop him. And now he’s dragging you into it with us.”

“He said he wanted to show you.” Eva heard him. Clear as day.

“He almost got you hurt.”

“No he didn’t. They were just trying to scare it so it didn’t come back. I was never in danger because your father would never let it hurt me.”

Weston’s hand came down off his face.

He was looking at her in the dark the way he looked at a ward that had done something it shouldn’t. Eva realized it a second after he did. Azra hadn’t used his mouth. Weston hadn’t moved his lips. The words had come from somewhere just behind her own ear, low and warm, the voice she had only ever heard come out of Weston’s mouth, in the cabin and the cellar and the basement, and she’d answered them like he’d said them across the pillow.

“You heard that,” Weston said.

“I heard him.”

“He didn’t say it out loud.”

“I know.” She touched her ear without meaning to. There was nothing there. “I know he didn’t.”

I wanted him to see where he came from, Azra said again, and this time she was listening for it, and it was unmistakable. Not in the room. In her. He wouldn’t have asked. He never asks for anything.

Weston’s jaw locked. Eva had seen that look twenty minutes ago on a boy in the mud, and it was the same jaw, set the same way at the hinge, and she wondered if he knew. She didn’t say it.

“He says you wouldn’t have asked,” she told him.

“Damn right I wouldn’t have asked.” He threw the blanket back and sat up on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, his back to her. The sweat had gone cold on him. She could see him shiver once and refuse to do it again. “It’s not mine to see. It’s his. He’s never told me any of it. Not one word, my whole life. You don’t just walk into a man’s head and take it.”

“Azra didn’t take it. Your father dreams it every night.”

“That doesn’t make it ours.”

She didn’t argue with that. She pulled the flannel closed at her throat and crawled to the edge of the bed behind him, and put her forehead against the back of his neck. His skin was clammy. Under it, she could feel the heat starting to come back, slow, the way it always did after Azra had been out.

“You saw your grandmother,” she said quietly.

He went still.

“Standing up,” Eva said. “On the steps with her cup, watching him. You told me once all you remembered was her hand on your forehead when you were sick. Now you’ve seen her walk across a yard.”

Weston didn’t answer. His breathing changed. She kept her forehead where it was and didn’t look at his face, because he wouldn’t want her to.

“I could feel her,” he said after a while. His voice was thick. “When she healed him. It was the same as you. It was exactly the same.”

“I know. I felt it too.”

“She knew. Every time she went out, she knew they were coming, and she went anyway, and he—” He stopped. “He stood at her grave like that. I was seven. I thought he wanted to leave.”

Eva put her arms around his chest from behind and held on.

Tell him I’m sorry, Azra said. Not for showing him. For not knowing the other one would be awake.

She told him. Weston let out a breath that was nearly a laugh, and laid his hand over both of hers on his chest.

“Your father knows now,” Eva said. “Whatever that thing saw, he saw.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to call him?”

The clock on the nightstand said 3:14. Weston looked at his phone beside it for a long moment, face down on the wood.

“No,” he said. “He’ll call me.”

“He misses his mom,” Eva said after a little while. “I’m glad Azra showed that to you. To us. It makes him seem a little more human. Less scary.” She paused. “Maybe I’ll invite him to our wedding after all.”

Weston didn’t answer right away. She felt him take the words in. His back moved against her chest, one long breath, in and out, and his hand tightened over hers.

“After all,” he repeated.

“I wasn’t going to.” She kept her forehead on the back of his neck. “I had the list open on my phone last week. Elizabeth and Talon. Malcolm, if he’ll come. Ren and Mira and Liora and Pax. Marisa.” She hesitated. “Jean. I put Jean on it. I didn’t put him.”

“I saw.”

She lifted her head. “You looked at my list?”

“You left it open on the counter.” He still wasn’t facing her. “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think there was anything to say. It’s your list.”

“It’s our wedding.”

“It’s your list,” Weston said again, quieter. “He made his terms with me in that study. He knocks. You decide. That counts for this too.”

Eva sat back on her heels on the mattress and looked at the shape of him in the dark. The line of his shoulders. The place on his spine where the sweat had dried. She thought about the boy in the yard getting up every time he went down, getting up with his palm split open because getting up was the only thing anyone had ever taught him to do. She thought about the man in the study with his hand flat on a notebook, telling her she was a door.

They were the same person. She hadn’t let herself think of them as the same person before tonight.

“Do you want him there?” she asked.

Weston was quiet for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Five years, I didn’t want him anywhere. I didn’t want him at the house. I didn’t want him in the city. And then he came down the basement stairs and kept a demon talking so you’d have what you needed, and he made Marisa forget, and he lied to the whole Council for us.” He rubbed his thumb along the back of her knuckles, over Noelle’s ring. “And tonight I watched him be sixteen.”

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s not a yes.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive him.” Eva moved so she was sitting beside him on the edge of the bed, her shoulder against his, the flannel pulled around her knees. The floor was cold under her feet. “I’m asking if you can stand to see him across a room on your birthday. That’s all. One day.”

He turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were wet. He didn’t do anything about it.

“She would have wanted him there,” he said. “My grandmother.”

“I know.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s a reason,” Eva said. “It just isn’t the only one.”

He let out a breath and leaned until his temple rested against hers. Azra stirred, low and warm, somewhere between the two of them.

Ask him, Azra said. He’ll come.

“Azra says he’ll come,” Eva said.

“Azra doesn’t know that.”

I know what he dreams about.

She didn’t repeat that one. She just held Weston’s hand in her lap and turned Noelle’s ring on her own finger with her thumb, slowly.

On the nightstand, the phone buzzed once against the wood.

Neither of them moved. It buzzed again. The screen lit the ceiling a pale square of blue through the gap between the phone and the nightstand, and kept lighting it, and Eva didn’t have to turn it over to know whose name was on it.