All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(77)

Austin was yelling at me. “Are you fucking insane? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

My hands ached. My head ached. My ear had puffed up as big as a campfire marshmallow. “I don’t—he was going to—”

Steering me by the arm, Austin shoved me ahead of him, down the stairs and towards the door. He yanked my jacket—River’s jacket—from a peg and slammed it into my chest. A moment later, I found myself outside, dazed, staring up at the rectangle of light from the doorway and into the shadows of Austin’s furious face. He slammed the door, and the darkness closed in around me.





Standing on Austin’s front step in the darkness, I took a breath, and then another. It’s awful to admit, but I felt strangely relieved. Not just from the physicality of the fight—although it had eased the tension in my shoulders, and it had felt good, felt normal, to hit someone again. It was also, at least in part, the fact that I’d finally been able to confront someone. No more struggling with shadows, no more dreams, no more deaths that I was powerless to stop. Just me and a spoiled brat and my fists. That was the easiest thing on my plate in a lifetime.

And, I thought as I trudged down the steps and up the block, leaving Austin’s house behind me in an island of carriage lights and well-trimmed flowerbeds and perfect, domestic stability, it was partially because this settled things with Austin. I mean, he was going to leave eventually, right? Once he figured me out, once he got smart. So it was better this way. I left on my own terms. I’d beaten some of the snot out of his little brother. I’d made, as best I could, a hell of an exit.

As I reached the next intersection, tires squealed behind me, and two cones of light swept across yellow lawns and dead leaves and the brown lace-ups I’d borrowed from Becca’s brother. The blue Charger rolled to a stop next to me, sounding how I thought a dinosaur would breathe. A very angry dinosaur. The tinted window dropped, and in the blue glow of the dash, Austin stared straight out the windshield.

“Get in.”

“I should probably walk tonight.”

“Get in this car, right now, before I get out of it.” He delivered all of this without looking at me.

So I opened the door and crawled into the leather seat, and the window rolled back up. But the Charger stayed right where it was, idling, with Austin’s left hand gripping the wheel and his right hand gripping the transmission. The enormous energy of the car, its thunder, rumbled up through the leather and into my chest. Somehow, the silence was worse than whatever I had expected. Yelling, I suppose. Maybe hitting me. I could have handled that. I would have known what to do. But the silence—the silence made me sweat. And after another minute of it, after another minute of feeling the machine breathing those huge dinosaur breaths and being fairly sure that Austin wasn’t breathing at all, that he was just these hard planes of blue light and bluer shadows, that he might as well have been on the moon, he was so out of reach, I spoke first.

“Look, he hit me first, and—”

“I know.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to just let him pound on me, just because he’s—”

“Vie, shut up.”

After a moment had passed, as though he were making sure I wouldn’t speak again, he shifted the car into gear and we launched into the night. We passed most of the drive in silence, but as we slipped free of Vehpese and started north on the state highway, I said, “I can’t go home. You can just drop me off here.”

Austin kept driving, though. If anything, he drove faster, dropping his foot to the pedal so it felt like the stars were streaming past us in a river.

Fine, I thought, settling back into the seat. Maybe he’s dropping me in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he’s going to kill me. Who knew, when Austin Miller wouldn’t even look at me? But he braked hard at the parking lot for Slippers, and we spun over the asphalt so hard I was pressed against the door. Rubber screamed and smoked, and the Charger slammed to a stop at the edge of the lot. The lights were off in the apartment, and I let out a breath. Austin hadn’t crashed and killed us, and dad wasn’t home, which meant the social worker wasn’t here. Three very good things on an otherwise crappy day.

“You forgot these,” Austin said, slapping a white paper bag into my chest. The antibiotic pills clicked against each other. “Not that it matters to you, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

“Yes, Vie. God. Of course that’s what you’re supposed to say. You beat the shit out of my little brother.”

“He hit me first. You were there. You saw it, so I don’t know why I have to fucking explain myself.”

For a moment, Austin looked like he was going to explode. He took a huge breath, and his shoulders went back, and anger smoked off him like burning oil. Then he shook his head and said, “Will you get out of my car?”

I kicked open the door, enjoying the dusty print of the brown lace-ups, and dropped the white paper bag on the seat.

“Take those pills,” Austin said. “Pick them up off that seat right now, before I shove them down your throat. I paid two hundred and fifty dollars for those pills, so you’re going to pick them up off that goddamn seat right now.”

“You paid two hundred and twenty-eight dollars and sixty-seven cents,” I said. “And I’ll pay you back when I can. But you don’t fucking own me just because you have daddy’s credit card.”