The Falling (Brightest Stars, #1)(43)

Once there was more room, I moved over a little on the couch. We weren’t smushed anymore, but my thigh was still touching Kael’s.

“Do you want to play?” Austin lifted a controller to Kael, who shook his head.

“No, I don’t really play.”

Oh, thank God.

“Who wants to play?” Austin asked again, holding up a controller to see if he had any takers.

The front door opened and a familiar face walked in. I couldn’t remember his name off the top of my head, but I knew he and Austin used to hang out before he went to our uncle’s house to keep out of trouble. Yeah, because that had worked out so well.

“Mendoza!” Austin rushed to the door to greet the guy in the Raiders shirt. Austin always collected people around him. He was good at it.

The guy, presumably Mendoza, hugged Austin. His eyes landed on me as I stared him down. My cheeks flushed. He looked next to me, to Kael.

“Martin! What the fuck are you doing here!” he said, pulling away from my brother. He walked over to the couch and Kael stuck his hand out between us. It took me longer than it should’ve to realize that they knew each other very well.

“Thought you were staying in tonight.” Mendoza’s honey-colored eyes were on me.

“I was going to,” Kael said.

Mendoza looked at me again, then back at Kael. “Right,” he said, smiling.

“You two know each other?” Austin pointed between them. I sat there, observing. Confused. Austin was as surprised as I was.

“Yeah, man. He’s my fucking brother.” Mendoza’s voice was loud and happy. If it were a color, it would be yellow. Where Kael’s was more of a dark navy blue.

Wait, were they actually brothers? They were different races, but that didn’t mean anything, really. Or was this soldier talk, always calling one another family?

“We were in basic together. And we deployed—”

“Mendoza, this is Karina,” Kael interrupted, looking at me.

“My sister,” Austin said to both guys.

“We met before. I don’t know if you remember,” I said.

It shouldn’t have rattled me that Kael and this guy knew each other, but it did. Military bases always seemed so small, but they were really their own cities with hundreds of thousands of people. When someone said, “Oh, your dad’s in the Army. I bet he knows my cousin Jeff, he’s in the Army too!”—it didn’t really work that way. So, Mendoza knowing Kael and Austin, and sort of knowing me, was a coincidence, to say the least.

“I do. We met a couple times.” Mendoza cocked his head to the side. “Didn’t we go to the castle one night? What was that, like last summer?” I thought back to the end of summer, riding in my dad’s van, which had been too full of Austin’s friends. Definitely squished.

“We did,” I told him. “I forgot all about that.” Brien was there, too. We had just met, in fact. I didn’t mention that.

“Your brother and that damn castle.” He laughed, and Austin flipped him off.

Kael was looking at us both like we were crazy.

“Have you heard about it? Dracula’s castle?” I asked. It sounded ridiculous out loud.

He shook his head and I continued to explain. “It’s not really a castle, but it’s this big stone tower that everyone says was haunted.”

“IS haunted!” Austin argued.

“Is haunted,” I said, rolling my eyes. I had gone to Dracula’s castle at least five times with Austin since we’d moved here. I didn’t know if the story about the kid getting electrocuted at the top was really true, but the old tower had earned a reputation for being haunted by ghosts. “Actual ghosts!” is what everyone said. There were all kinds of stories.

“Anyway, so it’s a tower and people drive up there at night to drink and try not to get caught,” I explained to Kael.

“She’s acting like she’s cool now, but she’s always the first one to run back to the car.” Austin held up his drink to Kael and Mendoza, laughing.

“Oh, fuck off.” I shot him a look—more laughter followed.

Mendoza started to taunt Austin. “Oooh, looks like sis has grown up since I saw her last,” he said, picking up a bottle of dark liquor from the table.

“Shots, anyone?” he asked the room.

Everyone took a shot of warm liquor. Everyone except Kael, that was. There were shouts of “To Austin!” and “Welcome back, bro!” Austin gave a mock bow to acknowledge his friends as they celebrated his return. I wasn’t sure if any of them knew that he had been arrested. Looking around at these guys . . . well, I wasn’t sure if any of them would even concern themselves with something as trivial as a night in jail. But maybe I was being hard on them.

We all migrated back to the kitchen to cheer Austin’s return to Fort Benning. I put my shot glass in the sink and gathered up a few more. A guy in a bright blue T-shirt that said Bottoms Up! grabbed his glass back from me and went for a refill. Definitely a soldier. He was with a younger-looking guy wearing a brown band tee. Also a soldier. I kept forgetting how removed I had become from life on post. Sure, I still saw soldiers at work and at the grocery store. I still smiled at them while going through the gate to the Great Place, but I didn’t have any friends who were soldiers. Not one.