Mourning was a weird thing. I had already mourned Derrick’s death once, but after my talk with Lochlynn the day before, I started all over again. That happened when you thought you had a bit of hope, and it turned out that you didn’t. It felt like I got socked in the gut, and someone dug my heart out through my stomach.
Linda knocked on my door that afternoon, after I had gotten back from school. “Tom? Honey?”
I stared at my ceiling and tried not to curse her out for calling me Tom, again. I hated that. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I hated it. I just knew that every time Linda called me that name, I wanted to tear her eyes out. Maybe because my father had named me and my sister for a reason, and nicknames pissed me off. I didn’t know.
“I’m about to come in,” Linda said.
“What?” I asked, trying not to bark at her.
The door opened, so I guessed that ‘what’ not equated ‘come in’ for her. Wonderful. I pushed up onto my elbows and watched the woman as she made her way over to me. She had on that perfect smile, with her perfectly coiffed hair, and the suit that had been pressed and matched her skin tone wonderfully. If she had a plate of cookies in her hand, I would’ve jumped out the window to save myself.
“Are you feeling all right, honey?” she asked, sitting on the edge of my bed. My emotions felt on edge, because I wanted nothing more than to scream at her. “You’ve barely said three words all day, and I’m starting to get worried.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and plopped back down on the bed.
“You don’t sound fine.”
The window started to look better and better. I thought about poking this bear but decided not to. If I wanted to make Linda hate me, then I should do it when I had less than six months left of being in her presence. “I’m fine,” I told her, again, staring at the ceiling.
“Would you like to do something fun today? We could watch a movie, or even go out. We could go shopping and get some fun new things at the store. Then you and I can head to dinner. We’ll eat whatever we want, and not care if it’s good for us or not!”
“You feed me cookies on a regular basis,” I said.
She laughed. “I suppose that’s true, but this is different. What’s that place you like so much? The one that you always wanted to go to when you were little?”
I closed my eyes. “Chili’s.”
“Yes! We can go there, and you can get whatever you want to eat, and I’ll get you some ice cream. You know, a regular girl bonding trip.”
I’d rather swallow thumbtacks.
“Come one, doesn’t that sound like fun? We haven’t gone shopping since the beginning of the school year, and all you want are these ratty jeans. They never last the year. I could get you dresses and heels. You and your sister never let me dress you up the right way.”
Escape. It’s the only way.
Despite feeling like death warmed over and being stressed beyond all reason, I sat up. “Actually, I have to head to Seamus and Seanan’s. She’s got a date, and I promised that I would help her pick something gout.”
Linda frowned. “You don’t have a date, do you?”
“Of course not,” I said.
Linda pouted. “I’m happy that you don’t, because I wouldn’t want you to feel like you had to lie to me. But on the other hand, I’m starting to worry about you. You girls should be asking out every boy in school. Instead, you’re sitting at home all day, looking said. I’m starting to worry.”
I saw therapist visits in my future. For the first two years after my father died, Linda had us locked up in a room with a therapist every Thursday. Miss How-Do-You-Feel had been nothing but a giant pain in the ass. I wanted nothing to do with her from the start, but my opinions on such things didn’t matter. And she always separated Yesterday and me. She had also advised Linda to make sure we didn’t have classes together, so that we wouldn’t become dependent upon each other. I didn’t like that, but lo and behold. Until this year, Yesterday and I had been separated throughout the school day. Now, we only had lunch together.
I didn’t need more therapy. I needed to convince my friends to get rid of the demon in the basement. After I had come home the day before, Yesterday and I hadn’t spoken. It would’ve only devolved into a fight that Linda would overhear, and neither of us wanted that. As for Seamus and Seanan…The former wouldn’t talk to me and the latter had been too paranoid to talk about Lochlynn at school.
But, in order for me to get rid of the demon in the basement, I had to get out of this apartment first. Which meant avoiding this conversation. I forced a huge smile on my face and put my hand on Linda’s arm. “I assure you that nothing is wrong. How about you and I do something this weekend. Saturday would be fine.”
“That’s four days away,” Linda said.
“But we’ll have all day to do whatever we want.” In my mind, a small part of me started to scream.
“Yes, that’s true.” Linda looked thoughtful for a second before beaming at me as well. I wondered if she screamed in her head too. “All right, deal! Ooh, it’ll be so much fun. If we’re lucky, we can get Yesterday on board. She would want to go to the bookstore, but that’s only one store, and we can let her have it.”
“Of course,” I said.
Linda giggled, wished me fun, and then walked off. As she disappeared, my smile vanished, and my heart sank once more. I just wanted life to back to the way it had been a year before. I could’ve told Derrick not to do something so stupid, and…Who am I kidding? He would’ve ignored me and broken all of our hearts anyway. Such a selfless act, that hurt so many people. It didn’t make sense to me how that could be.
I got out of the apartment with my bag over my shoulder and a headache. Yesterday had taken her shift at demon duty, so I hadn’t seen her all day and I had to ride alone to the Nashs’ house. The driver seemed nice enough, and I gave him a good tip, but I hated going alone. It always felt like tempting fate.
I rang the doorbell, and Seanan answered. She grinned as she let me into the house. “Thank god you are here. I’m so sick of watching Mopey Moperson grouch at everything. Go talk to him and tell him that he’s being an idiot.”
I took that to mean her brother. “Sure thing,” I said. “Let me just check on Yesterday, though. did you guys talk to her yet?”
“No, we just got home,” Seanan said. “We had to get his car washed, and then he had to pick up things at the store, and yada, yada, yada. I literally just finished putting my bag upstairs. I was about to go check on Yesterday when you rang the doorbell.”
“Good timing.” I muttered and walked into their house. I tossed my bag onto the floor by the door and followed Seanan toward the basement stairs.
Seamus stood in the kitchen, glowering at nothing. He had a snack in front of him, though I couldn’t tell what. When he saw me, he took such a big bite that it looked like he unhinged his jaw like a snake. Still mad at me, and not ready to forgive. Got it. Though, why he thought he had the right to be mad, I didn’t know.
I knocked on the door to the panic room before opening it, so as not to startle my sister. “Yesterday?” I called. “I’m here, and I think we should…” I trailed off when I opened the door. My sister sat in the recliner, watching television with the remote in her hand. She looked bored out of her mind. That didn’t bother me.
The empty demon cage with the door wide open did. “What…” I trailed off, unable to come up with another word to follow along with the rest.
Yesterday looked up, clicked the television off, and turned to face me. “I let him go.”
Seanan stuttered. “Wha-why-how could you do this?”
“Because it was the smartest choice that we had, and I didn’t trust any of you to see reason,” Yesterday explained. She stood up and tossed the remote into the chair. “Not that I care much about what you or your brother think of me, but you…” She looked at me. “You I care about. Not enough to keep from pissing you off, but enough to do what’s best for you. Such as this.”
Too stunned to respond, I just stared at her. Seanan, on the other hand, never felt too stunned for anything. “Seamus!” she screamed and stormed from the room. As she disappeared, I looked from her to my sister again. “You let him go?”
“It’s not like I’m hiding that giant of a demon somewhere in this room,” Yesterday said. “I unlocked the door, stepped aside, and he walked out without saying a single fucking thing. He didn’t even try to touch me. And I don’t care if you’re mad or not, because it was the right thing.”
“I know it was,” I said.
Yesterday blinked. “What?”
“I was going to talk to you guys about doing that today. I wanted to let him go, too. He hadn’t done anything to deserve…this.” I gestured around the room. “I’m just surprised. I didn’t think you would beat me to the punch like this.”
“Well, I didn’t see a reason to wait. Like I said. Your friends’ opinions don’t matter to me.”
She didn’t get to say anything else before Seamus and Seanan burst into the room again. Seamus came so fast that it scared me. He slammed into the door, making it bounce off the opposite wall. Those beautiful blue eyes bulged out of his head, and he stared at the cage with horror. When he saw it empty, he turned sharply to my sister.
Without thinking, I got between them and held my hand out. “Seamus, why don’t you take a second?”
“What did you do?” he demanded, stepping toward me. “What the hell did you do?”
“The right thing,” Yesterday said, stepping out from behind me.
“You killed us!” he shouted, slamming his hand into the nearest object. That happened to be the chair. It fell over sideways, making me jump. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? He’s going to come back for us now, and he’s going to bring all his demon buddies, and they will slaughter us!”
“He said he wouldn’t,” I said.
Seamus turned to stare at me. “You were in on this?”
“No. Yes. Not really. It’s complicated. Listen, okay? Last night, I realized that we had no right to keep Lochlynn down here. He doesn’t know how to help us, and after you beat the crap out of his? He was way more likely to let us suffer. Besides, it’s not right keeping a person locked up against their will. We all know that, and I don’t know why we tried to do it in the first place. I was going to talk to you about it today, in the hopes that you would let me open the cage door and our friendship could survive. Yesterday just beat me to the punch.”
Instead of calming him down, my words just seemed to piss him off even more. Seamus shoved his hands through his hair so hard that he nearly pulled huge chunks of it out. “Do you even hear yourselves? You’re listening to a demon. A no good, filthy demon, that would do anything to get what he wanted. He would’ve told you anything to get you open that door, and you fell for it.”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Yesterday said. “The second I heard you guys leave this morning, I peeled that panel off, typed in the code, and held the door open for him. When Lochlynn walked out, he didn’t even try to touch me.”
“Because he knew that he could hurt you more later,” Seamus said.
Yesterday laughed. “Really? He could hurt me more later, when he had me in an empty room, with no one else around, able to do whatever the hell he wanted. Nothing I could’ve done would have stopped him, and he chose to do nothing instead. Yeah, I’m sure he’s got a lot planned.”
Seanan panted, putting her hands on her knees. “I can’t believe the demon that knows my face is out, walking around. What do we do?”
“We boot out the traitor,” Seamus said, stepping toward my sister.
I slapped him right across the face. The harsh sound brought everyone in the room to a complete halt. “What is wrong with you?” I asked, getting closer to his face. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Seamus had his hand pressed to his cheek, and he just stared at me.
“Listen,” I said. “I want to save Derrick too, but here are the facts. We are ill prepared to do that. We are four teenagers who are under the care of the very demons that we are trying to fight. Derrick could be anywhere, with any demon, and we had a foolhardy plan to begin with. Of course, it went awry. We shouldn’t have kidnapped Lochlynn, because that would’ve gotten us in more trouble. Do you understand that? His parents would have found us then, but I’m with Yesterday. I don’t think he’s going to try anything.”
“You are an idiot too, then,” he said, much calmer.
“No,” I said. “I’m admitting that we were wrong.”
Seanan straightened up, her eyes still panicked. “What are you talking about?”
“What we did was wrong,” I said, and shrugged. “You have to see that. If demons did the same thing to us, then they would be monsters. What makes us so much better than them?”
“Because we aren’t demons,” Seamus said.
“You really need a better excuse,” Seanan told her brother, shaking her head. She walked away from him and sat down on the couch. She had her arms wrapped around her stomach and stared straight ahead. “Maybe Tomorrow is right. We did something stupid, and that came back to bite us in the ass. If we’re lucky, then we don’t have to worry about this anymore. Maybe…maybe we have to admit that we failed, and that Derrick is gone.”
The words felt like someone sliced through my chest with a serrated knife. Everything got torn apart, and I felt it falling all around me. “Exactly. We tried. Can’t we take that, and hold ourselves together with it? We tried to save Derrick, and hopefully he knows that.”
Seamus looked at all of us not with disgust or anger, but with a deep sadness. He slid down onto the floor and put his head in his hands. “You don’t get it. You still don’t get it. Fine. We shouldn’t have taken that demon and locked him up. I suppose that he didn’t deserve it, or that we don’t know without a doubt that he deserved it. I’ll admit that, I guess. But…Derrick isn’t going to know that we tried. He isn’t going to know about any of the effort that we put into this.”
“You don’t know that,” Seanan said.
“I do, because if he dies, and the demons use up all the energy in his soul, then where will he go?” Seamus lifted his head to look at each of us. “There will be nothing left of him. He’ll just be…gone.”
At that, even Yesterday slumped. All the energy seemed to leave the room, and I turned to look at the cage. I didn’t want to think about my friend being gone for the rest of my life. The only think that would keep him tethered to this world would be our memories, and that didn’t feel like enough. It felt like we drowned, slowly.
Yesterday stepped forward. “I know that it hurts, and that you wish better things could’ve happened. But Derrick made this choice, and every day that his sister is alive will have to be good enough. Good enough to get you all through your days. Nothing else can be done for him, and I hope you know that.”
I watched Seamus give up, and I wondered if it had looked the same as when I had done it the day before. If Lochlynn had watched me fall apart like I watched Seamus. He didn’t start sobbing or screaming or fighting. His shoulders went loose, and he leaned back against the couch, like nothing else kept him sitting upright.
“You’re right,” he said. “Not only that, but you were right about that demon. Keeping him would’ve only made our lives harder when his parents came looking for him again.”
I stepped up to Seamus and knelt down. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” Seanan added form her seat. She had her legs folded up and her arms wrapped around them. She looked vulnerable like that, like she wanted to hide from something.
We sat there for at least thirty minutes, not talking or doing anything. The weight of our mourning had fallen over us, but we had finally decided that we couldn’t do anything. That we had to let it go, or it would kill us. Let Derrick go, or let him be the noose around our necks, dragging us to the ground.
I rubbed my face. “Yesterday and I should probably head back home. Linda thinks that we’re depressed and wrong in the head. We have to go put on a show for her. Oh, and we’re going shopping with her on Saturday.”
“What?” Yesterday asked, staring at me.
We said our goodbyes, and I explained everything to my sister on the ride home. It felt twice as long as it normally would have. By the time we got back to the apartment, I had gotten sick of hearing my own voice.
Linda sat on the couch when we got upstairs, and she grinned. “There are my two wonderful wards. I’ve got dinner cooking, so I hope you two are hungry. I’m making steak tonight, to celebrate our day out later this week. I know it’s a bit premature, but I just love spending time with you two.”
I endured the hug that she forced on me and tried not to gag on her. As Linda let me go, I rocked back on my heels. “Sounds great.”
“It will be. Now, I’m sure that you two have a ton of homework to do. Go, go.” She waved her hand at me, and I forced myself not to run to the freedom of my room. When I got there, I didn’t want to do my homework. I wanted to crawl under the covers and stay there until the end of time. My heart had never felt as sick as it did right then.
I pulled my chair out, and slumped into it, trying not to look or feel as bothered as I actually was.
Lochlynn’s image rose up in my mind, looking as he had the night before. He wore his fancy pants and the jacket that he had the night we kidnapped him. His white hair had blood in it but looked mostly fine as it hung around his face, making those icy blue eyes even colder. Everything about him screamed indifference, but we had still talked. Mostly about what I had chosen to put on the TV. He insisted that my tastes sucked, but I argued with him the entire time. Sitcoms could be hilarious, and I would maintain that until the end of time.
Except for the ones that made me want to put a pen in my eye.
Then I thought about how he had looked right before I traded places with Seanan, who had taken the night shift. He watched me leave, his eyes making me feel chilled on my way out. I had barely managed to get out of the room without shivering.
Lastly, I thought about walking into that room earlier that day. Seeing that empty cage, and the weird, pained feeling that I had in my chest upon seeing it. I didn’t quite understand that feeling, because it hadn’t been fear or anxiety. It hadn’t been anger…I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it had been.
Yesterday knocked on my door. I knew it had to be her, because Linda wouldn’t have stayed quiet that long. I called for her to come in, and my sister entered. She had let her black hair fall loose around her face, and she had on a bitchy expression. She usually wore that expression when she got worried about something.
I sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“I just wanted to talk to you, to make sure that we’re good.”
“I told you, I would’ve let him out today if you hadn’t beaten me to it. No harm, no foul.” I meant that too. I didn’t need to be the hero when I had already taken my role as the villain.
“Okay, good,” Yesterday said, relief flooding her face. “I worried that you’d be angry that you didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous. “What are you talking about? I don’t need to say goodbye to Lochlynn.”
My sister gave me a knowing look, which I hated. “Really?”
“What is with you?”
Yesterday came further into the room and sat down on the edge of my bed. She spoke quietly, as if she didn’t want Linda to hear. “You guys kidnapped a demon and locked him a cage, for fear that he would rip your hearts out. Seamus broke into that cage to beat the crap out of him, which I get. That came from fear and anger and a sense of helplessness. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. What I don’t get is what happened after that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You went into that cage and bandaged him.”
“You don’t know that. The first aid kit was in the bathroom. He did it himself,” I said, for reasons I couldn’t name.
My sister gave me a heavy look. “No, he didn’t. A lot of those wounds on his back, he couldn’t have reached. When I got there this morning, Lochlynn had no shirt, but it was cut into pieces on the ground and wearing a jacket over his bare chest. He took it off for a second, and I saw those wounds. He couldn’t have done that himself. He had help. Seanan sure as hell wouldn’t have done it. You risked your life to bandage nonfatal wounds on a veritable stranger.”
With that, she got up and left, as if she had made her point. I wanted to argue further, telling her that she didn’t know what the hell happened in that room. No words came out, because she did know. She nailed exactly what happened, and it made me wonder why the hell I had done something so stupid. I didn’t want him to suffer, no, but I could’ve told him about the first aid kit when he woke up. I could’ve just trusted that he wouldn’t die from those wounds.
I laid back in my bed, feeling more confused than I had that morning.