Release(45)

“I know. It’s been a carnival of delights.”

“And I’m sorry for it, Adam. I can’t say sorry enough. But my world isn’t safe if I can’t love my own brother. That’s what it really felt like today. And that’s not a world I can live in. So I love you, Adam. And whatever help you need from me to fix all this with Mom and Dad… Well, you got it.”

Adam was silent again.

“You still there, bro?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe don’t come home just now. Maybe let me talk to them. Maybe go to your party.”

“It’s just a get-together.”

“Let me see what I can do. If anything.”

“I’m not asking you to, Marty.”

“You shouldn’t have to. It should be what a brother does anyway. I should be protecting you. As much as I can.”

“I’m not changing. I can’t.”

“As of today, bro, I’m no longer asking you to. Look, that’s Mom coming out the front door. I’m assuming you don’t want to talk to her?”

Adam heard “Is that him?” in the background of Marty’s call.

“I really don’t,” he said.

“Take care of yourself, Adam,” Marty said. “And remember I love you. I’m going to act a lot more like it from now on.”

Marty hung up. Adam stared at his phone, like he’d just hung up on a call from outer space.

“What happened?” Angela asked.

“I don’t even know.”

“Are you going home?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You choose your family, you know,” she said. This was something she often said. Almost her mantra, especially as she came from the best-chosen family he’d ever met. “I chose you ages ago, Adam Thorn. Your family is here.”

“I know it is,” Adam said. “But maybe it just got one person bigger.”





“How can it be you?” the man asks. He has urinated himself – the faun can smell it – and he seems to be trying to fold himself into the back corner of the cell in an effort to get away from her. “This is a nightmare. Something the screws are doing–”

“I will silence you again.”

The man voluntarily closes his mouth, but the faun can still hear him whimpering.

“I have come…” the Queen starts to say, but then she stops. The faun waits, long enough that he can move around to see his Queen’s face. With an astonishment that will accompany him through the rest of whatever brief eternity is to follow, he sees confusion there.

“My lady?” he says.

“I have come…” she says again. Then she looks into the face of the man, and she asks, “Why have I come, Tony?”

“You came to kill me,” the man says.

The Queen’s eyes focus on the man, clearer now. “Yes,” she says. “That is what I came to do.”





“I have come to kill you,” she hears herself saying, and there is surety in it, a purity of purpose that is bracingly tart in her mouth, like a drink made from spring flowers. She will kill this man. She will make him pay for what he has done to her, for the bruises around her neck, for the mud in her lungs, for–

“Tony?” she says, and the clarity is gone.

There is a man in front of her, cowering in his corner. (There is another in the room, too, a man too large to be real, and she can only see him if she does not look directly at him.) But there is a man in front of her.

It’s Tony.

“You murdered me,” she says to him, and his eyes finally meet hers.

“You’ve come to drag me down to hell,” he says.

“You murdered me,” she says again.

“I didn’t mean to–”

“You did.”

“Only right that second,” he says. “Only for a second.”

“A second is all it takes.”

“I’ve missed you so much.”

She feels a flare of anger, and the short bed to her right catches fire. Tony cries out and shrinks back.

“You have no right to miss me,” she says, and again she feels her power, the other power that’s there, the one giving her shape–

But no–

She calms, eyes still on the man, and the larger man she can only barely see pulls the burning mattress from the cell, extinguishing it.

“You have no right.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t.”

“What do you want from me, then?”

At this, she considers. And discovers she knows.





Adam pulled out of the parking lot and started the journey to the lake where the get-together was, the sun still hanging over the horizon, slowly making its way to set out past a sound, a peninsula and then into an ocean somewhere.

“Who’s the rose for?” Angela said, picking it up from the floor.

“I got it this morning,” Adam said. “Just felt right. Like I had to.” He glanced over at her, thinking. “You know what? I thought it was a going-away thing for Enzo, then I wondered if it was for Linus, but I think it’s gotta be for you. On this day. This going-away day for you, too.”