You want to know what I stole, kid?
Brandon opened his eyes and looked up at Julien’s telepathic voice inside his head. He’d been bound in the slat-backed wheelchair again. Sometime earlier, Julianne had returned and given him a sponge bath, methodically wiping away any dried blood or old vomit that remained against his skin. She’d combed his hair, humming softly inside her mind like she’d used to when he’d been a kid, only there’d been no comfort in it now. When she’d tied a rubber strap around his arm, then slid a needle into the swollen length of a vein that had obediently arisen below his forearm, he hadn’t as much as winced. Nor had he bothered to ask her what she injected him with—three syringes, one after another, each filled with pale liquid. One must have been a sedative, however, because as soon as she loosened the tourniquet, he felt a drowsy rush engulf his brain. His eyelids had drooped; he’d passed out before she’d even left the room.
She was gone now, but Julien had taken her place. He seemed to be dressed even more immaculately than usual, in a flawless black suit, with a blood-colored silk tie and tautly starched white shirt beneath. His shoes were wing-tipped and glossy. In his right hand, he carried a lit cigarette pinched between his forefinger and thumb. The acrid smell of the smoke wafted against Brandon’s nose as he drew near.
You asked me about it earlier, Julien said. With his left hand, he dragged another metal folding chair behind him. Brandon couldn’t hear the screech it made as its steel legs scraped against the floor, but he could see it jostling and bouncing along in Julien’s wake. But I kind of got distracted. I hope you don’t mind. It’s been awhile since me and Az…we caught up on things.
He stopped, swinging the chair around and planting it less than three feet from Brandon. When he sat down, he landed heavily, his legs splayed apart, the hand with the cigarette dangling down toward the floor, as if to keep any wayward ashes from lighting on—and blighting—his suit. With his now free left hand, he reached beneath the lapel of his jacket and pulled out a silver flask. Using his teeth, he loosened the lid enough to pop it open with his thumb, then took a long drink. As he lowered it from his lips, he regarded Brandon for a moment, then held out the flask in unspoken invitation.
Brandon might have been more suspicious had Julien himself not just slugged down a rather large mouthful of what smelled on his breath like cognac, and if he hadn’t a slight stumble to his gait as if he’d been drinking for awhile now. Earlier, he’d tried to distract Julien by making conversation; now, it seemed, an even better opportunity had presented itself. He didn’t know who this “Mr. Kobayashi” was that they’d mentioned earlier, but Julien had called him a “sick fuck” and foregone beating Brandon after that. That couldn’t mean anything good.
And the only way out of it is to get the hell out of here, Brandon told himself. He glanced from the flask to Julien and nodded once. What the fuck. Anything to build the camaraderie.
With a smile, Julien stood again, and as Brandon tipped his head back, Julien pressed the flask to his lips. It was indeed cognac. Brandon swallowed a generous dollop before Julien drew the bottle away, leaving him to gasp softly in not-entirely-feigned appreciation.
That’s good shit, he said to Julien.
It’s a Saulnier Frères, Julien replied, giving the younger man another swig. A 1789 vintage, I do believe. As he flopped back into his chair, he looked at the flask, his expression wistful, nearly melancholic. That was the year of my great offense…the first one anyway. The year I stole from my father.
Looking up at Brandon, he spoke aloud. “There’s an oak tree down by the old property line, the creekstone fence between Davenant land and the Giscards’. It was here when they settled the farmlands—more than two hundred years old. It’s been hit by lightning…Christ, probably thirteen, fourteen times since then. Big black stripes, burnt lines, all down the trunk. You know which one I mean?”
Brandon shook his head. There were a lot of old trees on the Brethren farms, in the small but densely wooded areas scattered among the rolling grazing fields.
“It might not even be there anymore for all I know,” Julien remarked, taking a drag off his cigarette. “It used to be. Biggest damn tree you ever saw. A good twenty feet around at the base, at least.”
Leaning back, he held the smoke in his throat for a prolonged moment, before letting it waft in slow-moving, winding tendrils from his nostrils. “It’s been years since I’ve been out in that part of the farm. Shit, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere on this land but this house.”
He looked back at Brandon, using his thumb to flick ashes off the end of his cigarette and onto the floor. “There used to be this hollow in it, about a quarter of the way up. You could reach it if you were a good climber. And every spring and summer, like clockwork, there’d be bees that built their hive up there in that hollowed up part of the tree. It was always my job to go out and collect the honey—mine, Aaron’s, Julianne’s, and Lisette’s—my sister. Because we were the best climbers. And we never got stung. You ever collect wild honey, kid?”
Brandon shook his head.
“The trick is, you gotta smoke them out,” Julien said, drawing in on the cigarette again. This brought the ember nearly all of the way to the filter, so when he’d finished inhaling, he leaned over, sliding the nub beneath his shoe and stepping down to snuff it. “The smoke, see, it’s like it hypnotizes them. It pacifies them. You blow enough of it into their hive, and they all pretty much go to sleep. So you can just reach right in there…” He mimed, stretching out his arm slowly, his fingers spread open wide. “…and pull out some of the comb. Anyway, the girls had other chores to do, and Az was little—only four years old—so on honey days—that’s what we’d call them—we’d always meet up by the tree after lunch, and then get started.”
He took another drink. “One day, the others didn’t show up so I had to get the honey by myself. I didn’t think much of it—Julianne was always helping in the kitchen with one thing or another. And Lisette took care of Az, so they were always losing track of time. She’d take him out in the woods to hunt for mushrooms, or down by the spring house to look for juniper…” His voice faded momentarily, and his gaze grew distant. “She adored Az. Doted on him like a mother. And he’d have told you the sun rose and set by Lisette, if you’d asked. She was so goddamn beautiful.”
Glancing at Brandon, he said, “Here. Let me show you.”
And when he opened his mind, Brandon could feel it, like a rush of soft breeze rustling through him. Through Julien’s memories, he could see a teen-aged girl, stunning, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She wore a long dress, and her cheeks were bright with sunny color. In Julien’s memory, she carried a small, tow-headed boy no older than Brandon’s own brother Daniel against her hip, and a handful of scraggly wildflowers in another as she tromped through a field of nearly waist-high grass. The boy, Brandon realized, must be Aaron—and this was Lisette.
As the memory faded, Brandon blinked, shaking his head slightly so that Julien shifted fully back into view. Because Julien watched him, an expectant look on his face, Brandon felt obliged to say something. She’s beautiful.
Julien nodded. “Anyway, like I said, I didn’t think much of the others not showing up that day, except that it would’ve been nice because Aaron’s arms were smaller than mine, his hands, too, and he could reach into places I couldn’t to get at the comb. It was late enough in the summer that we’d about picked clean all of the good comb I could get to. So even though I pulled out what I could, it still wasn’t much, and I got my ass ripped when I got home. I was pissed. Mostly at Lisette, because she’d probably been dicking around, I figured.”
Brandon felt that rushing sensation in his mind again as Julien actively shared his thoughts and memories. Now he could see the dimly lit interior of a large, but obviously old-fashioned home, something out of the colonial or pioneer days, with hardwood floors and white, horsehair plaster walls. He could see Julien’s bedroom, one he clearly shared, and the blonde girl, Lisette, sitting on one of the tiny, wood-framed beds beside Aaron. She looked different than she had in the first memory; her hair looked messy, with wayward strands poking out from her bundled braids, her dress mud-splotched and rumpled. When she looked up at Julien, Brandon—through his eyes—could see that she’d been crying, her eyes still glossy, her cheeks still damp—and could hear through Julien’s ears the ragged, hiccupping sound of her breathing.
“What happened?” Julien asked. He was fifteen years old; Brandon could sense this clearly. One of the older Davenant women had spanked him with a wooden spoon for bringing back so little honey and even though his pride had been wounded more than his ass from the swats, he’d planned to tear into Lisette for her absence. But when he realized her tears—and saw bruises on her face, her nose swollen and her bottom lip puffed out—his angry indignation had yielded to concern and fear, and he hurried to the bed.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, but Lisette only shook her head, her eyes swimming with near tears. “Lissie, what happened?”
“Father hurt her,” Aaron whispered, all large, round blue eyes and trembling lips. “He pushed her down in the grass.”
“Aaron, hush,” Lisette said, her hand darting out, her fingertips pressing to his lips. Julien saw the crescents of her fingernails were encrusted with dirt—and blood. Not like her fingers had been bleeding, but like she’d been scratching at something—someone—hard enough to break the skin.
“Lissie?” He looked up into her eyes, but he knew what had happened—Aaron may not have understood, but that blessed naiveté wouldn’t last much longer, not in the Davenant house. Not as long as Lamar Davenant was alive. “That bastard,” he seethed. “That rotten, goddamn bastard!”
“I’m fine,” she whispered, struggling to smile even as her tears began spilling down her cheeks. “I…I’m fine, Julien. You…you mustn’t worry so. You’ll frighten Az…”
Her voice dissolved, and he hugged her fiercely, letting her bury her face against his shoulder and shudder with the force of her miserable, muffled sobs. Aaron began to cry, too, frightened by Lisette’s tears, and Julien hooked the boy by the back of the neck, tugging him near, into the warmth of their embrace.
“It’s alright,” he breathed, kissing Aaron’s head. “It’s alright, Az. Lissie’s right. Hush now.”
From beyond the doorway to their bedroom, Julien heard a sudden clamor. “Get a doctor!” he heard his older brother Victor bellow. “Clear a path for us—move your bloody asses!”
Lissette tensed against him at the sound of Victor’s shout, and Aaron uttered a frightened, breathless sort of mewl.
“What is it?” Julien asked. “What’s going on?”
“Father fell off his horse,” Lisette said in a hush. “He fell down the ravine into the creek. The horse landed on top of him. We…we told Victor…he took the buckboard there to see.”
Julien rose to his feet, drawing free from his brother and sister. “Wait here,” he told them, pushing his shirt sleeves up to his elbows and marching toward the door.
“Julien, no,” Lisette pleaded. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see if the rot damn bastard is dead,” Julien replied grimly, ducking out the bedroom door and closing it behind him. Immediately, he pressed himself against the wall as across the hallway, his younger sisters—who had likewise poked their heads out of their room in curious alarm—scuttled back like a frightened cluster of ducklings.
Everyone else in the house—human, Brethren, kith, kin, or staff—came hurrying from the parlor and kitchen, or leaned over the balustrades and railings of the upper story staircase, uttering a chorus of startled, horrified gasps and cries. Their exclamations overlapped, a cacophony of bewilderment and fright:
“What happened?”
“Fell off his horse…”
“He’s been hurt!”
“…tumbled down the hill by the creek house…”
“Is he dead?”
“…should have rightly broke his neck…”
“Out of the way!” Victor shouted as he, Vidal, and Allistair came barreling through the foyer. They hauled their father in a clumsy cruciform pose between them, with one of Lamar’s arms draped over each of his eldest son’s shoulders, and Allistair scrambling ahead of them, holding Lamar’s feet up by his muddied boots.
As they shoved past Julien, he saw Lamar’s head lolled back, his hair wildly askew, his mouth gaping open. Blood had smeared all across the left side of his face, matting in his hair. His clothes were muddy, blood-soaked and torn.
He watched his brothers haul Lamar upstairs to his bedchamber, the heavy, rapid patter of their footfalls on the stairs thunderous. Hurrying to keep up with their frantic pace, Julien followed. He wanted—no needed to know, to find out for himself, to see firsthand if the son of a bitch was dead. Because he wanted him to be—more than anything, Julien hoped that Lamar had died. And that death had come to him slowly, painfully, in prolonged and excruciating measure.
For what you did to Lissie, he thought, fists bared.
The melee from the foyer had migrated into Lamar’s bedroom, and here, it had only intensified as his wives, siblings, and sons flooded into the room, crammed shoulder to shoulder, everyone shouting and crying and jostling and jockeying for position. At just months shy of his sixteenth birthday, Julien was tall and lean, all gangly limbs and long torso, but even so, he could barely skim his gaze high enough to see anything over the crowd of panic-stricken adults. As he slipped into the room, he pushed and shrugged his way through the throng toward the towering posts of his father’s bed.
He saw Vidal wading past him, making his way to the door with Victor barking orders behind him all the way: “Get Michel Morin—drag his ass back here as fast as you can! We need a doctor, goddamn it!”
His voice was shrill and ragged, and for a moment, Julien didn’t know what amazed him more—that his older brother sounded near to tears, or that Victor might have found it within him to weep for their father.
I sure as hell can’t, he thought, coming to stand beside the bed, blinking owlishly at Lamar as he lay, ashen and motionless, atop the rumpled bedclothes. He thought about what Aaron had said, of how Lamar had pushed Lisette down into the grass—and what Julien knew had happened after that. He thought of all of the times his father had beaten him—too many to fully recollect or count. He thought of all of the times Lamar had raised his hand or lash against his brothers and sisters, because none of them had been safe or spared from his brutal wrath. Not even Aaron, who was little more than a baby, and too little yet to understand that if you cried, it only made Lamar angrier; if you begged, it only made the punishment worse.
I hope you die, he thought, balling his hands into tight fists that shook from the force of repressed hatred. I hate you, you son of a bitch, for what you did to Lissie—for what you’ve done to me, to all of us. I hope you die. I hope it hurts like hell, and you beg for death. For everything you’ve done, everyone you’ve hurt—I hope you die slowly, screaming yourself hoarse.
Lamar’s hand shot up, his fingers coiling fiercely against Julien’s collar. Julien sucked in a startled breath to screech, but his voice cut short as Lamar jerked him forward. Surprising and terrifying strength remained in his arm and he yanked the boy closer until they were nearly nose to nose.
No one else seemed to even notice. Victor was too busy yelling for someone to bring him brandy and bandages, and everyone else seemed too busy fretting, fussing, or scurrying about. No one noticed Lamar holding Julien in a veritable chokehold, with blood peppering from his lips in a fine, frothy spray as he hissed through pain-gritted teeth.
“My desk…lock box…”
With his free hand, Lamar fumbled for Julien, shoving something against his palm—a small iron key.
“Lock box,” he seethed again, gasping out each word. “Bottle…bring it…to me…!”
In his terror, Julien floundered backwards and fell onto his ass when his father turned him loose. Although Lamar’s hand flopped heavily back against the mattress, his eyes rolling closed, Julien still moved as if the man was awake, whip in hand, barking orders directly into his ear. Pushing and shoving his way through the crowd, he clutched at the little key and took the stairs down to the main floor two and even three at a time.
He meant to go back to his bedroom, to Lisette and Aaron, but instead, ran headlong into Julianne.
“What’s going on?” she exclaimed, tilting her head back to gawk at the heavy throng on the stairs and upper landing.
“Father fell off his horse.” Julien seized her by the wrist hard enough to make her wince, then dragged her into the library. So far, none of their other relatives had managed to spill over from the corridor and stairs to Lamar’s personal, book-lined sanctuary, and Julien meant to keep it that way. He shoved the door closed, then threw the bolt to lock it, and whirled to face his cousin. “I think he’s dying.”
“Oh, no!” Julianne clapped her hands to her face in a melodramatic gesture that Julien might have found hilarious under normal circumstances. For some reason, she’d never seemed to develop the deep-seated loathing and fear of Lamar that everyone else in the family had. Perhaps his abuses didn’t extend beyond his own children; Julien wasn’t sure.
“He gave me this.” With a shaking hand, he held up the little key. “He told me to get something out of his desk drawer. There’s a lockbox there, he said.”
“Then get it!” Julianne cried, rushing over to Lamar’s writing table. She jerked open drawers until she found a small tin box—the lockbox Lamar had demanded that Julien retrieve. Pushing aside the heaps of paper and opened ledgers, she put the box on the desktop, and looked anxiously up at Julien. “Hurry!”
“Maybe it’s his will,” Julien said, struggling to hold the key steady enough to get it in the lock. “Maybe he realizes…he knows he’s going to die. Maybe he means to read his will.”
Just then, Julien managed to unlock the lid. Pushing it back, he stared down inside the lockbox at a small glass bottle, closed with a little gilded stopper. There was nothing else—no papers, no will, no money, no jewelry. Only that tiny vial, no bigger than a snuff bottle.
Julianne came to stand beside them and they both blinked in curious wonder. “What’s in it?” Julianne whispered.
Julien lifted the bottle in hand. The glass was opaque, but he could see the dark shadow of something inside of it. As he moved the bottle, it moved back and forth—something liquid, no more than a tablespoon-full. “I don’t know. Maybe a tincture, some kind of medicinal elixir.”
“We have to bring it upstairs,” Julianne said.
With a nod, Julien turned to head back to the door. Then he paused, frowning thoughtfully at the bottle. What if it was something medicinal inside? Lamar had kept it locked up as if it was something valuable. What if he really was dying, and that vial could save him somehow?
Do I want that? Julien asked himself. And then, in reply, he thought: No.
But Julianne was there, and Julianne didn’t understand; she loved Lamar, and in her eyes, the old bastard could do no wrong. He and Lisette had always allowed her that delusion, in part because they’d never liked to speak about Lamar or the things he did because they were ashamed of them, certain of some sort of culpability on their parts, even if they couldn’t quite fathom how.
“Julien, come on,” Julianne pressed, beating him to the door and throwing back the latch. “We have to hurry!”
In the end, it was as if fate decided for him. As he hurried after his cousin, he tripped over the edge of a hand-loomed rug on the library floor and fell. The bottle tumbled to the ground, and the stopper fell out, spinning in one direction on the hardwood planks while the vial skittered off in another. The liquid inside—something viscous and dark—spilled out between them.
“Oh, no!” Julianne exclaimed, doing that hand-slap-to-her-cheeks thing again.
“Shit!” Julien cried. He carried a handkerchief in his pocket and snatched it out now, mopping at the stuff, trying to wipe it off the floor. To his surprise, it didn’t soak into the thin linen. Instead, it rolled and scooted along, like something solid. It wasn’t until decades later—when he first saw a mercury thermometer broken against a flat surface, the liquid metal inside moving about in oily blobs—that he ever had any basis for accurate comparison to what had spilled out of his father’s vial.
He managed to scoop some of the stuff back into the bottle with his fingers, then clapped the stopper back in place. Using his handkerchief, he quickly wiped up the rest, then shoved it into his pocket and scrambled to his feet.
“Come on,” Julianne urged, opening the door.
She followed him up the stairs, into Lamar’s bedroom, and stayed pretty much like a shadow to him as he worked his way back to his father’s bed. Lamar didn’t appear to have moved since Julien had left his side, but at the sight of him, all bloodied, ashen, and unresponsive, Julianne shrank back, uttering a quiet little cry.
“You shouldn’t be here,” one of the men said, taking notice of her and clapping a heavy hand against her shoulders. “Julien, take her back downstairs. This is no place for a child.”
Instead, Julien lunged for the bed. Throwing himself across Lamar’s chest, as if in abject despair, he managed to gasp into his father’s ear: “I have it!”
As he spoke, he pressed the bottle against Lamar’s palm. At first, his fingers remained lax and limp, but as the man caught Julien and drew him roughly backwards, he felt Lamar’s fingers twitch, then fold inward, curling about the vial.
Julianne squirmed and howled in protest as they were dragged from the room, but Julien didn’t offer a single word or sound of objection. Glancing back, he thought he caught a momentary glimpse of his father lifting the vial to his lips, as if he meant to drink the strange, syrupy stuff inside—but then the crowd closed in around him, and Lamar was gone from his sight.
He forgot about his handkerchief until later that night, when he undressed for bed. Pulling it out of his pocket, he’d unfolded the edges of the wadded handkerchief carefully, and studied the tiny puddle of goop inside. It still hadn’t absorbed into the linen. He couldn’t think of what to do with it, but somehow instinctively he knew.
I have to keep it.
Whatever the stuff was, it was important enough for Lamar to demand it on his seeming deathbed. And since he’d swallowed it, he hadn’t died. He hadn’t done much of anything except demand to be left alone, wallowing behind the locked door of his bedroom, and although rumors had started that he’d gone off to die in there the way a feeble dog will crawl under a porch to pass its last breaths, there was, as of yet, no confirmation of this.
I have to keep it, he thought again. But how? And where?
Then he remembered.
Two nights earlier, while at supper, Aaron’s mother Annette had been wearing a small silver medallion on a thin, filigree chain. During the course of serving food, passing platters back and forth, and helping her littlest children cut and dice their meat and potatoes, the chain had gotten tugged hard enough for the clasp to break.
“Oh, dear,” she had lamented, cradling the necklace in her hand as she’d carried it upstairs to tuck in her room. “And it was my mother’s locket, too. Practically an heirloom.”
Locket.
Julien crept upstairs and rifled through Annette’s belongings until he found the necklace tucked away in a drawer. The medallion was round, a Saint Christopher’s medal, with the image of a man carrying a child on his shoulder embossed on the surface. The words Behold Saint Christopher and Go Your Way in Safety had been etched in a semi-circle above the man. When Julien opened the locket, he found a shallow opening inside, just big enough for him to scoop up the remaining ichor from his father’s vial and deposit it inside. Closing the locket, he’d pushed the necklace back beneath her folded linens, nightshirts and undergarments.
Why doing all of this would seem so important was a mystery to him—and would remain so until three days later, when the wooden door to Lamar’s room had flown open wide, smacking into the wall with a gunshot-like report. In the doorway, Lamar had stood, wearing only a rumpled nightshirt, his shoulder-length hair swept around his face in manic tangles. He’d leaned against the door frame with his arms outstretched wide, his knees buckled slightly, as if threatening at any moment to fail him. His cheeks and chin sported a coarse overgrowth of unkempt beard, and his eyes were ringed heavily with shadows.
“Get me…” he croaked, his voice rasping and low, “…a goddamn brandy.” And when no one had moved, his entire family frozen with the shock and terror at the sight of him, he’d balled one hand into a shaky fist and drove it furiously into the wall. “A goddamn brandy, I said!”
With this, Julien withdrew his thoughts, his memories, his mind, leaving Brandon blinking again against sudden, shocking dizziness in the aftermath of his recoil. As his vision cleared, and he blinked at Julien in bewildered surprise—as at a loss for words with his mind in that moment as with his mouth—Julien smiled at him sadly, a crooked upturn to the corners of his lips.
“And that, kid, is the story of how I stole from my father,” he said, pulling a rumpled pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter from an inner jacket pocket.
I…I don’t understand, Brandon said at length. It no longer felt so easy to hate Julien. As one with his own siblings—including a sister and younger brother he adored—he found himself struggling not to identify—and sympathize—with Julien. Why are you telling me this? Showing me these things?
“Because I want you to understand,” Julien replied, tapping the cigarette pack against the back of his hand. “It’s nothing personal. Any of this. My father is—and always has been—a son of a bitch. And I hate him as much today as I did back then.” As he slipped a cigarette into his mouth, pulling it out from the pack with his teeth, he awarded Brandon a quick wink. “More, even.”
Then why do this? Brandon tugged against his restraints, his brows narrowing. Why go along with any of this—you or Aaron? There’s another way—there’s always another way. Let me go—come with me. I can show—
“Show me what?” Julien cut in, the cigarette dangling laxly from his bottom lip. “Michel Morin’s little Jonestown out in California? No thanks.” With a flick of the wrist, he opened the Zippo, and hit the roller with his thumb. As a blue-tinted flame obligingly sprang to life, he cocked his head and leaned toward it, lighting the business end of his cigarette. “There isn’t any other way. Not for me, or Aaron—or you. It is what it is, kid.” He drew in a deep drag, then snorted smoke out of his nose. “We all got the shit end of the stick.”