Jet (Marked Men, #2)(50)

I could feel the control slipping away, feel the walls I had erected to prevent these very things from happening start to crumble, and I was holding it all together by only the skin of my teeth. Who I was and who I wanted to be were being torn into separate parts, and the me that was left was vulnerable and raw. I had no idea how to stitch it all back together again, or even if I wanted to.





Chapter 10

Jet

I should have known when my mom called me hysterical and crying that it wasn’t going to lead to anything good. Normally, she was too beaten down, too cowed to do anything other than be dejected and disheartened. Not today. Today she was sobbing and rambling on and on about how Dad was going to kill her, and while I would have much rather been basking in the afterglow of some very fine morning sex time, I was instead frantically pulling on pants and rushing across town to see what the hell was going on over there.

I brought the car to a screeching halt in front of the house and ran up the stairs like the house was on fire. I didn’t bother knocking, just shoved the front door open, and before I could stop to get my thoughts in order or do a thorough survey of what exactly it was that I was dealing with, my dad came barreling out of the kitchen and knocked me back out the door. I landed with a dull thud on the cracked concrete of the sidewalk and saw stars for a second as my head banged hard on the ground. Before I could get my wits about me, or even get my hands under myself to get up, my dad launched himself at me, and his fist connected with the side of my face. I felt the skin on my cheek split wide open and jerked just in time to avoid the blow that would have surely broken my nose. I grabbed at his flailing fists and felt my stomach turn over when I smelled the stale booze and pungent fury coming out of his every pore.

We were about the same size, only I was sober and had been in enough fights in my time to know how to get the upper hand. I shoved him off me and scrambled to my feet, so that I was looking down at him. I poked at my bloody face and glared down at him.

“What the f*ck, old man?”

He started to yell something at me, but my mom chose that moment to come running down the stairs. She was a mess. Her shirt was torn and her hair was everywhere, but what made me see red, what made the fire I tried so hard to contain burst forth in an eruption of flame and rage, was the fact that not only did she have a black eye, but also a split lip and tear tracks running down her too-pale face. It was clear that, whatever had set my dad off on his drunken rampage, I wasn’t his first victim of the day. She was wailing that we had to stop, that we needed to go inside before the neighbors called the police, but I didn’t care.

I spit out some of the blood that had trickled from my cheek to the corner of my mouth, and told my dad, in all seriousness, “I’m going to kill you.”

He staggered to his feet and glared at me like I was the one at fault.

“Kind of like you killed my dreams? If it wasn’t for you and that stupid bitch, I coulda kept on doing what I wanted. Touring the world, seeing great bands. You ruined everything, you selfish little prick. I asked for one thing. Look what you made me do!”

His words made no sense and they didn’t matter anyway. All I could see was my mom crying and hear her asking him to stop. There was no stopping it anymore. The flames were raging and I didn’t care if they burned him to a charred remnant of himself.

He was still pretty loaded, so when I hit him he went down easily. I heard my mom scream my name from somewhere really far away and felt immense satisfaction that he wasn’t nearly as quick as I was. My blow to his nose landed with a gratifying crunch. I don’t know how many times I hit him. I don’t know who called the cops, or if my mom was crying over me or over him. It wasn’t until the handcuffs clicked into place, and the cop who looked like he was the same age as me was shoving me into the backseat of his cruiser, that I realized what I had done.

My dad was lying still as stone on the walkway. His face was covered in blood and a paramedic was strapping an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. My mom, my poor mom, in all her black-and-blue, tearstained glory, was holding on to his limp hand and telling him everything would be all right. I think something inside of me officially died when she climbed into the back of the ambulance with him to go to the hospital. The young cop gave me a steady look, like he had seen this a hundred times already today and asked, “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

I sighed and let my head fall against the back of the seat. It wasn’t the first time I had been in the back of a cop car, but I had a sinking feeling it was going to be the most serious reason I’d ever had had for being there.

“He hit her. Normally, he just treats her like shit, and makes her feel bad and worthless, but this time he put his hands on her. I just lost it.”

The cop watched me closely. “He do that to your face?” I had forgotten about my cheek and prodded at the inside with my tongue. It still stung but it wasn’t dripping blood anymore, so I didn’t think it was going to need stitches or anything.

“Yeah. Sucker punched me when I first walked in the door.”

My hands were starting to throb, with my knuckles undeniably split open and torn. The reality of what I had done was starting to settle heavily on my shoulders.

The cop nodded and tapped the roof of the car. “They’re both saying you started it. The old man wants to press assault charges.”

I groaned. I bet he would be willing to drop them the second I agreed to hook him up with Artifice and send him on tour.