I kinda wished it would snow. I’d always loved the snow as a kid. And not just because I could go sledding and build snowmen and have snowball fights. I just loved the way snow made the world look so clean. Especially when it had just fallen and nothing had corrupted it yet. Inevitably it ended up thawing and got trampled and churned up with the mud and dirt of the real world and actually looked worse than ever. But for a little while I could pretend everything was pure. A fresh start. A new beginning. A do over. And I could use more than a few of those. Especially during this last year.
It was strange to me really, to think of the boy I’d been being such good friends with Kyan and Saint before this grief truly corrupted me. We’d always joked about the darkness in us being the thing that drew us together, but for me, back before my mom died, I couldn’t really claim to have held an inch of the torment in my soul that they’d been raised with.
Kyan’s family were…well I knew for a fact that I still didn’t understand half of what they were. They were dangerous in all the most terrifying ways. The most brutal, violent, blood soaked ways. He’d once told me that the O’Briens sacrificed the souls of their babies to the devil the moment they were born, bathing them in the blood of their enemies and mixing their milk with it too to make sure they were bloodthirsty from their very first breath. I mean, that was clearly bullshit, but the haunted look he got in his eyes when he talked about them sometimes made me hold my tongue on a lot of the questions I wanted to ask.
Saint’s upbringing was a lot less violent. He hadn’t been beaten or subjected to brutality in the ways Kyan had. He hadn’t been made to bear witness to unspeakable things or assist in crimes when he was so young that there was no way he could have even thought of refusing. No. Saint had been crafted in a much more refined way. He’d been conditioned by his father. Subjected to various stressers time and again and forced to find a way to cope with them. He’d been denied consistency, control, routine. Which was why he was so damn obsessed with it now of course. It was also why I didn’t fight him too hard on it. I mean, sure, sometimes I found it funny to fuck with his stuff like Kyan did, but I usually felt kinda shitty for it when I saw the panic in his eyes. He needed control even more than I needed to win. And I was happy enough to let him have it most of the time.
But for both of them, with their upbringings and the shit they’d had to deal with from such a young age, their darkness made a sick kind of sense. And I liked to believe that they did as well with it as they could.
I, on the other hand, had no trauma to blame for my darker tendencies until recently. Before my mom died, I’d had a pretty fucking perfect life. Not that I’d really appreciated it at the time. And sure my dad was pushy, always wanting me to be the damn best at everything and getting way too invested in any competitions I entered. But that wasn’t exactly comparable to Kyan and Saint’s family. No. I was just…cruel. I guessed I’d always had it so easy that I’d found life boring. And I’d found my calling in punishing people who stepped out of line. In forcing them beneath my heel. But I had the feeling that made me the biggest asshole out of all of us. Especially as I didn’t regret it. Every single thing I’d done to the Unspeakables…I just didn’t have it in me to give a single shit about it.
But Tatum…I’d fucked up royally there. My grief and blind fucking rage had pushed me into breaking my own damn rules. We only punished the guilty. And blaming her for something her dad had done was just fucked up. It wasn’t like I blamed Kyan for the shit his family had done.
Fuck, I’m such a piece of shit.
I reached the end of the path and forced a smirk onto my lips as I found Danny and Chad driving a couple of the golf carts used to transport shit around campus and beckoning me over with excitement. Punch -Toby- was riding shotgun in Chad’s cart and all of them looked seriously excited to see me. Like they could only have any real fun when I was there. And I didn’t mind the idea of that.
We’d been meeting up pretty often, doing stupid stuff which was definitely going to end up in one of us getting hurt or worse eventually and finding some level of relief from the boredom of lockdown in the adrenaline rush we took from our stupidity. I was quite literally living up to the delinquent teen dream and I was okay with that.
I needed the rush I got from playing these games. Needed to forget for a little while that I was a total sonofabitch and just do something fun and dumb and exciting.
“I thought we could race them!” Danny beckoned me to climb in beside him in the cart but as I looked at the thing, I had a better idea.
I moved towards it, but instead of getting in, I leapt up on top of it. The roof buckled a little beneath my weight but it held and I barked a laugh as I got my balance.
“C’mon, Toby, up you get,” I urged and he laughed nervously before climbing up on top of Chad’s cart too.
“Let’s race all
