Strong Enough (Tall, Dark, and Dangerous #1)(52)

I shift into park and get out to walk slowly across the yard, picking through small fires scattered around the grass as I approach the front door. I feel the heat of the flames, but it doesn’t penetrate the cold that’s seeped into my skin. I feel it burn my eyes and throat and nostrils, but I don’t veer from my path. It never occurs to me that I should. I’m not afraid of dying.

As I take in the wreckage, I feel detached, robotic, like I’m watching a bad movie through a crystal-clear camera lens. It isn’t until I stop at the closed front door that I start to feel the cold recede, and then I almost wish it hadn’t.

I reach for the knob, wrapping my fingers around the scorching metal to test it. It’s locked.

Pain threatens to explode from my chest, to shred muscle and bone. If my mother had been able to escape, she wouldn’t have turned and locked the door behind her. She’d have run. But this door is locked. That means my mother is dead.

My boot against the front door is like a shotgun blast in the night. It gives easily and I walk over it as though a violent fire isn’t raging all around me. I scan the mostly intact dining room. Empty. I walk toward what’s left of the kitchen. Empty. No sign of my mother, dead or alive. She must’ve been in one of the obliterated rooms. And now she’s obliterated, too.

With the crackle of support beams giving way overhead, I head toward the bedroom I slept in as a child. Even filled with smoke I can see that she hadn’t changed a thing since I was here last. She preserved it for her dead youngest son just like she’d done for her dead oldest.

Despite the suffocating air, it still feels like home, like all the memories I left behind are housed in the wood and the plaster, in the grass and the leaves and the trees outside. They were all I had left. Them and the tiny woman who lived here.

I feel all the angst I lived with as a child. I feel all the desperation and anger. But I also feel a bone-deep sadness, a sense of loss that comes from the death of the only person on the planet I’ve ever loved.

Like battery acid leaking out of a weakness in the casing, barely controlled fury starts to eat away at the sadness. It gnaws at my gut, burns through my insides until soon it’s a raging inferno that threatens a far worse destruction than the explosive that went off in my mother’s home.

I fist and unfist my fingers. Fist and unfist. Like a pump, each squeeze seems to force more pressure into my chest, into the space where a primal growl, where the pained yet vengeful howl of a wolf grows. I push it down, keep it locked behind clenched teeth and tight lips, promising myself that I will make this right. That I will find the person responsible for this.

When I walk back out to the hole that used to be the other end of the house, I realize with an unbearable anguish that my mother died with a hole something like this inside her. The explosion of my father had ripped Jeremy from her. Years later, an explosion of mercy and protectiveness had ripped me from her life. I thought I was doing what was best for her, but a monster has no control over things like that. The shadows follow a monster and no one he loves is safe. No one.

Not even Muse.

As I look out into the dark ring that stretches beyond the light of the fire, I see a white sliver. My guts clench. It’s a leg.

I take off in a haphazard path through the wreckage until my foot hits solid ground then I run. It takes me seconds to reach her. It’ll take me a lifetime to forget what I find.

My mother. Bloody, burned. Gone. One arm juts out at an unnatural angle and her dark eyes are open and staring off into nothingness. The vision of her lifeless form collides with memories of her from my childhood. Her sweet words. Her gentle soul. Too good for this world. Too good for our family.

My eyes sting as I kneel beside her and pull her limp body into my arms. Beyond the scent of burned flesh and smoke, I smell her, my mother. The only person I’ve cared enough to leave. And even then she couldn’t escape what I’ve become. She couldn’t escape whoever is hunting our crew. She’s dead because of me.

With a hollowness in my chest that hurts like a gunshot, I curl her toward me and I bury my nose in her hair. I inhale, drawing in one last breath of the woman who gave me life, who patched the wounds she could see and loved me for the ones she couldn’t. Part of me hoped that one day I’d be able to see her again, both of us alive. The past behind us, unable to hurt us. But that was stupid. Unrealistic. This is who I am and this is what happens to people I care about. This is what will happen to Muse if I’m with her long enough.

As though my thoughts alone summoned her, I hear Muse’s muffled voice, yelling for me from somewhere in the distance. A pang of alarm shoots through me. Reluctantly, I return my mother to the cold ground. It kills me to think of leaving her this way, but I have no choice. Someone did this to her. And that someone is still out there. And Muse might be next.

I turn and run back through the house, leaping over debris as I make my way toward her trembling voice. When I find Muse, she’s standing near the open front door, tears streaming down her face, streaks of soot marring the cream of her cheeks.

“What’s wrong?” I ask when I stop in front of her. Instantly on high alert, I scan the tree line at the front of the house, my eyes digging into that place between fire-bright and pitch-black, looking for the nameless, faceless enemy that always lies in wait for me.

Muse throws her arms around my neck, smashing her body to mine, and she squeezes me until her shoulders tremble.