All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(118)

“Why does it matter?” I said. My mouth had gone dry. The tips of my fingers tingled like my hands had gone to sleep. “Why does it matter if I care?”

River grinned, but sorrow tugged the edges down. “Because we’re brothers.”





The knife slid across my palm, and only reflex kept me from dropping it. I stared at River: at his face, his hair, his eyes, his build. Becca had said that we looked alike. Kimmy had confirmed it. DeHaven had mistaken me for River in the prison cell. My heart thudded, and for a moment, all I could think about was Dad. When I’d been inside his mind, drawing up all the worst things I could find to torture him, he had clung to a single, golden memory: a hospital, and a pretty young blond woman, and both of them huddled over something in her arms. I had thought—my eyes stung, and my breath hitched up higher in my chest—I had thought that was me. I had thought that baby in the hospital, the baby in those warm, loving arms, had been me.

But the woman in that memory hadn’t been my mother. It had been Willa Miller. Now that I had seen her yearbook picture, I knew that. My father had a child with Willa Miller. And here he was, River Lang, flesh of my flesh, staring at me with . . . longing? Fear? Hope? Desperation? Maybe all of those things. I wondered how many of them were mirrored on my face.

I had a brother.

I shook my head, but that was reflex too, automatic denial even after my brain had already recognized the truth.

“Yes,” River said.

I couldn’t bring myself to nod. I knew he was right. I could feel it. But I couldn’t nod. That seemed like too much. That seemed like letting him win.

Jake was still between us, but suddenly it didn’t matter. The howling had begun again. “River,” I said, trying to focus my thoughts. “I don’t care about Willa and David. I don’t. We can talk about this. We can work it out.”

River smiled, a genuine smile, a kind of honest, uncomplicated happiness that came from a different, simpler time. “I’m really glad, Vie. That makes me really glad.”

“But you have to let them go. You have to let Temple Mae and Jake go.”

He was already shaking his head before I finished speaking. “You don’t know, Vie. You don’t know what David did to me. What she . . . what she let him do to me.” His eyes had gone dark. The icy color was gone, replaced with the look of saltwater, deep saltwater, blackish-blue and drowning. The howling was at the door now. “He had to check me, he said. He had to check. At first, only when we were alone. He had to check that I was being a good boy. Then he started checking at night, when Willa was asleep, and his hand would slide under the blanket and I would tell myself it was just a mouse, just a mouse, and he would grab me—” He struggled to draw a breath. The howling was so fierce now that it had become a single, piercing roar. “Someone has to pay for that, Vie. Someone has to pay!”

The door crashed open. For a moment, through my third eye, I glimpsed it: the beast he had summoned, the manifestation of all that psychic trauma, the vehicle of River’s revenge. It streaked across the room for Temple Mae’s throat, and it had the shape of an old bulldog.

I had a brother.

This was my brother.

And then, just like that, the connection unfolded between us, and I rushed across it and into his mind. There was no sense of doubling, no awareness of my physical body. I had entered his psyche completely, and the blackness swallowed me.

Inside myself, a storm of hate and fear and pain and shame battered and clashed and thundered. I would release it, I would send it scouring across his soul, and in that moment of distraction, when he was lost inside that emotional tempest, I would strike with the—

—belt—

—knife, and it would be over.

But I didn’t. I trembled, on the edge of loosing that wild frenzy. But I didn’t. Not because of River’s past, although I knew the scars that he carried because I carried some of them myself. And not because he was my brother, although I wish I could say that it were. I held myself at the brink, shaking with the need to hurt him, but I held because of the belt. Because of the way it had licked up across my jaw and snapped next to my ear. Because of the way each blow of the belt had driven me deeper into myself, like an animal burrowing madly to escape a predator. Because if I did this again, there would be no turning back for me: I would have to face myself, waking and sleeping, and every time I did, I would see the belt in my hand. That belt. His belt. And he would have won. He would have made me what he is. So if I could hold myself at the cliff, if I could last a little longer, I could win. Every instant, every heartbeat was a win, in this small way, in this thing. I was winning.

And that thought lit up inside me like a candle in a hurricane, and then like a lamp at the edge of the world, and then like the sun struggling to rise and push back, one more time, the night. It wasn’t heat. It wasn’t friction. It was just . . . light, like I had become crystal, magnifying this brilliance until it filled me and spilled out of me.

With a snap, the connection between us vanished, and I staggered. My knees hit the carpet, and this time, the knife did slide out of my fingers. River, eyes wide, backed away until he hit the wall. His psychic projection had vanished, and Temple Mae and Jake were still alive.

Then, with fumbling fingers, River drew his knife. Frankie’s words came back to me: River is always handy with that knife. The blade flipped open, and his finger shook as he steadied it against the blunted edge. River dashed a hand across his eyes, and he took a step towards Jake, his arm coming back. Steps came from the hallway, but they would be too late.