The Unwilling(79)

Conflagration.

Control.

His third fire took a house and two dogs trapped inside. Someone saw him, though, so the cops came, and money changed hands, and X—instead of juvenile detention—went away for six months of intensive therapy, a half year of false remorse and deception while the doctors made notes and encouraging sounds, all while X hid his painful erections and his thoughts of the dogs, and how their screams, as they’d burned, had sounded almost human.

If X had learned one lesson from his time in therapy, it was that fires were messy and hard to conceal. Plus, his dreams were no longer of fire but of screaming dogs, and the animals that came next: first a mouse or two, then the rabbits and squirrels, until his dreams were filled with red meat, and his days with expectation. X spent those days with his traps and his secret places. And though his parents kept a wary distance, things changed for real on the day he used a garden hose to freeze his sister’s cat to a winter tree. Afterward, his parents traveled more often, and when they did, they took the sister, only. On those rare occasions they came home, X’s mother seemed less lovely each time, a near stranger who sent servants at night to tuck in the covers of her only son. Even X’s father said, Better a handshake than a hug, and tried to make a joke of it.

X was thirteen when his father was given hard proof of tortured animals, first from a gamekeeper at the mountain preserve, a small, nimble man who’d discovered a mallard, still alive, with its wings nailed to a tree, and—days later—a young bobcat staked to the ground with both eyes removed and its stomach unzipped.

The looks from his parents grew more worried, but no one asked him about it.

No one said much of anything.

A month later, a foal disappeared from the stable of the equestrian estate in Wellington. It was a special foal, his sister’s. X killed it quick and messy, and left it imminently findable. Why? Because anything was better than the whispers and suspicion, or the quiet, cotton silence that filled up a room each time he entered. Part of him thought that if they’d only confront him, he might stop. If someone would say, Son, this is wrong. Or, Son, why do you have such emptiness in your soul?

When no one spoke a word, he took another foal, and hobbled it, and left it alive to scream like the dogs had screamed. After that, they sent X away, first to other doctors, then to the most expensive boarding schools in Switzerland. He’d hated them for that, and nursed the hatred, feeding on it for five years of solitude and denial, of unanswered letters and can celed visits, a lifetime of aching to belong, and knowing he could not, and rocking himself to sleep in the dark of every single night. They were so weak! Too weak to accept or love or answer the phone on Christmas Eve. That was too much to accept, so X took a cab to the airport in Geneva, cleared customs on a forged passport, and made his way to the winter estate, where he used the holiday quiet to kill them all.

X could remember their deaths without emotion, though their weakness still disgusted him, the way they’d whimpered and writhed, and sworn their love for him had never died. Only their softness was unconditional. So different from Jason, X thought: Jason, who was capable and quick, but also profound of thought and strong and utterly unafraid of his own capacity for violence. Were X to make a list, it would require pages to describe all the things he admired about Jason French: his courage and conviction, his awareness of self. Even his recklessness was absolute, but only when he chose abandon. Of course, Jason had a streak of self-denial that X found mildly irritating. Beyond that, he was the one thing X had sought his whole life. He was an equal; he was worthy.

Maybe it was a short list, after all.





29


The waiting room at Lanesworth Prison smelled like old sweat and stale air. When the guard came for me, I left my friends on a hard bench, and followed him to a blank room with a table and two chairs. A minute later, Jason entered the room, shuffle stepping in full restraints. He eyed me unhappily. The stitches. The bruises. “What are you doing here? I told Dad to keep you away.”

“I’m not really listening to Dad these days.”

Jason sat, chains clattering. “It’s dangerous for you to be here, to be seen here. Do you understand what I’m saying? People will hurt you to get to me.”

“It looks as if they’re getting to you just fine.”

“My face? That’s just prison. What’s your excuse?”

“Hells Angels. The Carriage Room.” I shrugged like it was nothing. “They didn’t like the questions I was asking.”

“Questions about me?”

“You. Tyra.”

“Damn it…”

“You did have a fight there. It did have to do with Tyra.”

“That was about guns.”

“But she was part of it.”

“Not so much it got her killed. I had a deal with the Pagans, protection and cash in exchange for exclusive access to military-grade weapons. Some, they kept. Some, we sold together. Tyra thought I should sell to the Angels, too. She wanted a cut, and tried to broker a deal. It was business. The Angels never cared about Tyra.”

“Business.” I said it coldly, but Jason was unmoved.

“I’ve never pretended to be the good guy. I needed money, pure and simple. I told you my reasons.”

“You must have some idea who killed her.”

“Look, little brother, Tyra was fun, but had a closetful of demons. You saw how she was. The girl could drive a saint to murder.”