But his foot did come off the brake, and he did apply the gas, and he closed the garage door behind him. He snapped off the engine—the first thing he remembered actually doing—and let himself into the side door just off the kitchen.
Mrs. Reinhart perched on one of the stools around the island. The steam from her tea brought with it the smell of chamomile. She was translucent, like she always was, but there was a hard edge to her he'd never seen before. The room was cold, despite the furnace kicking in. He watched her for a second, but for once she didn't just nod and look away.
The voice was in his head. Her face was expectant. There were so many ghosts in the house, including his last fight with Cory. It seemed like ages since last night and their fight.
But Cory had told him to remember what he'd said that evening. They hadn't argued that evening, they'd only...
They'd only fucked. And Cory had told him that he was his.
It was too late to go back. It was too late to do anything but go downstairs and wait for the sun to pass.
* * * *
Cory didn't go to sleep, not at first. The room was cold, and he wasn't convinced that the bookcase would hold. And when he did close his eyes, he felt whatever it was that formed blue and purple lights from in front of the bookcase reach for him. He was predisposed to let it in. Lathe might not have scooped out the pumpkin seeds inside his head, but he had done something, and closing his eyes let the light through him to fill him up.
The light was nothing like Lathe's pressings. There was no escaping these, no hiding what happened, and what was going to happen. He hadn't been stupid, even if he was from a small town. They had the Internet and satellite television. When Lathe asked him to come, Cory had gone.
Lathe lived in one of the old houses on the outskirts of town. It had been an old farm house, before the town's identical houses on similarly named streets reached out to it. He shouldn't have gone; to say that Lathe stared at him hungrily was not even half of it.
Lathe had found him outside of the seven or eight stores that were a mall in name only. He found out later that his social worker had sold him out, giving up his name as someone who wouldn't be missed and was disposable. He couldn't really blame her, though; he didn't think for a second that she gave up the information willingly. Lathe had that ability to pull anything from anyone.
And Cory knew he hadn't made Lathe work very hard. The lights of the vortex, which was what Lathe had called it, dug through the cloth he'd thrown over the memories in his brain. He didn't want to think about them. He hadn't thought about it, not since the burn on his hand had driven the thoughts away. He'd purged it from his head when he'd pressed the iron into his flesh. He dug his nails into the scar, wanting the sweet pain to fill him and take away all the dirty-bad-wrong, but the light tossed his feeble attempts to keep himself from remembering. It wanted to know. Cory felt its curiosity.
"Please,” he told it. “I don't want to remember."
The light tickled him, lightly. It wasn't trying to hurt him, and even as Cory tried to crawl away from the pain, the light wicked it away. He could watch the memories the vortex pulled from him without feeling the shame of what he'd done. He stopped fighting.
The old house had a door that squeaked. Cory had raced to the broken screen door half a dozen times, mostly during Halloween pranks when he was too old to trick-or-treat but too young to stay inside. When he was older, and his aunt couldn't control him anymore (not that she controlled him any less), he'd gone with Lathe because ... because...
Because he'd always thought he was meant for more. And Lathe promised him something older, something more than just another small-town rat. Just another brat that had his eighteenth birthday marked on the local RCMP detachment's wall. It wasn't important that he really hadn't done most of the things they thought or caught him doing. It wasn't important that the first time he'd just been on his bike at the wrong time and in the wrong neighborhood. He knew Luke thought that he'd learned how to con with his father and that he'd embraced it as a lifestyle, but he hadn't. Even as a kid he saw past the smiles of his father's marks to their realization of how much they'd been taken.
But when another of the town's pack of young men, Jack of the grin and the soft blond hair, had asked Cory to keep watch, Cory couldn't say no. He couldn't say anything much at all, actually. With the knot in his throat he could only go along with whatever Jack asked. He'd been weak, as weak as a mark, and he'd gone in willingly. When Jack got caught, Cory took the blame, and after his first weekend stay at juvie, Jack had skipped town. By then, of course, Cory's name was muddied, and in small towns, sometimes that's all it takes.
So he accepted it. And when Lathe started hunting him, he let himself be snatched up. It was stupid. If he could have taken it back, he would have, but that was where he was. Lathe had kissed him, drinking from him, and it was better than every single shy fumble in the locker room.
And then, of course, because every mark realizes they've been taken, sooner or later, Cory had woken up, sticky in the pants and locked in an
