Sad reality is, shit doesn’t go away just because you want it to. Twenty minutes of staring, and that folder was still there waiting.
Fuck it. I’d lived through Mom’s murder. It wasn’t like reading about it could be any worse.
There’s life again, lulling you in with expectations, and then kicking you in the balls as soon as your guard drops.
It was all there in excruciating detail; full-page articles about the murder, smaller stories detailing what had come after, even a follow-up piece on the fifth anniversary of Mom’s murder, like it had been some sort of event to commemorate. Like there should’ve been balloons and cake and something other than a junior reporter trying to squeeze one more story out of a woman’s death.
I didn’t even remember the press covering Mom’s murder. Sure as fuck didn’t remember cameras, but they’d clearly been there; at the crime scene, at the funeral, and again at the trial, when Dad had been sentenced to the Hole.
The words were bad enough. Things about Mom I’d somehow forgotten. Things about Dad I was pretty sure I’d never known. Clinical descriptions of the wounds I’d watched appear like magic, the blood that sprayed when the enormous knife went in, and again when the knife came back out. Quotes from neighbors that my mind had erased and from multiple social workers that my memory had blurred into one faceless person.
As bad as the words were, the pictures were even worse. The tiny house. The courtroom. The cemetery. And in almost every image, a little boy; pale-faced with sharp cheekbones cutting upward beneath eyes more red than grey. Those eyes were open and empty, like tiny graves waiting to be filled.
I’d never seen a child Walker…wasn’t sure they even existed, but if they did, I had to imagine they’d look a lot like my five-year-old self.
In the weeks and months that followed the trial, I’d found my anger. I’d built my walls. I’d buried that emptiness away, deep inside of me where no one could find it. But those pictures made me five all over again, every hard-won layer peeled away until I was left open and exposed, like a raw and bloody nerve.
I was on my feet and headed for the door before I knew it, hands clenched into fists so tight that the scar tissue across my knuckles pulled and creaked. Wasn’t thinking about becoming a Cape, or proving my doubters wrong. Wasn’t thinking about Alexa’s words, or Bard’s, or even Her Majesty’s. All I was thinking about was Jeremiah and his group; Caleb, Freddy, Tessa and Olympia. The five of them had gone looking for my past and they’d found it. They knew. And if they knew, every first-year would too, soon enough. Twenty-three people reading these articles. Looking through these pictures. Digging into my past, into my body, into Mom’s corpse, like vermin gorging themselves on rot and blood and pain.
Fuck fair trades.
Fuck the Academy and its rules.
Motherfuckers wanted pain?
It was time to share the fucking wealth.
•—•—•
Remember that God I don’t believe in?
Remember those coincidences that miraculously piled up to save me from myself? Of course you do. We just talked about them, not too long ago.
Don’t know if what came next was part of that same chain.
I really hope not.
If it was, if the world or a deity or Dr. Fucking Nowhere acted to put one last impediment in my path, one last deterrent to keep me from going Black Hat at eighteen…
…then it makes everything that followed my fault.
Not sure I could live with that knowledge.
Pretty sure I couldn’t.
CHAPTER 35
The dorm hall was empty, every door shut tight as if the first-years could feel me coming. Didn’t matter. Stonewall would be in the common room. Or Caleb would be, or one of the others. And if they weren’t, I’d damn well find them anyway. Campus was big, but not that big. Fuckers couldn’t hide for long.
I was three feet from the end of the hall when the door to the common room opened and one of the few people I didn’t want bloody and beaten barreled through.
“Damian! Thank God! I need your help.”
“Not now, Unicorn.” I went to step around the small Healer. Somehow he got back in front of me, grabbing my arm and slowing me to a halt.
“Yes now! It’s important!”
I looked down at the hand on my arm and over at the ginger. Whatever he saw in my face made him go even paler than usual, but he didn’t let go. So I took the last step toward the common room, dragging Shane right along with me.
The room was empty. Because of course it was.
There were a half dozen other spots they might be, and I knew it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to check them all. Hour-and-a-half, tops. But first I had to do something about the one-hundred-and-fifty-pound ginger hanging off my arm.
Problem was, when I looked down and met Shane’s eyes, I found them full of stubborn determination, mixed in with fear and raw, desperate pleading. Hard to walk away from anyone looking at you like that. Harder still when it’s one of your only friends in the world.
“Ishmae is missing,” he said.
Fucking hell.
It wasn’t like Jeremiah and his group were going anywhere, right? I tucked my anger back away, wrapping it like a blanket around the empty hole inside me, and blew out a long sigh.
“What do you mean she’s missing?”
“We were supposed to meet half an hour ago.” He blushed at the look I gave him. “To study! Her early admission to the Academy means she missed out on almost two years of high school math, so I’ve been helping her out.”
Which was such a Unicorn thing to do. I could just picture the atmosphere of badly repressed feelings as he walked the younger Pyro through yet another Calculus proof.
“So your emergency is that she
