Chapter 8 — No Different

“You’re what?” I asked, confused. Kier and I sat in the kitchen early the next morning. The kids hadn’t gotten up yet, giving the two of us a chance to talk. To attempt figuring out what our next move would be, now that Kier wouldn’t force me to go home.

“I have to train today, after school,” he repeated.

“Train for what?” I asked.

“My job,” Kier answered.

“I thought you didn’t have a job?” I started to sound panicky and wanted to stab myself in the throat. I couldn’t seem to get a handle on myself. I’d gone so long with my father, being able to deal with all the crap that he did to me, and all the things that hurt so bad that I could barely comprehend it. Now that I’d gotten away from him, I couldn’t handle it? How did that make sense?

Kier sighed and turned his face up to stare at the ceiling. He looked about as through with me as he ever did. I couldn’t blame him for that, I supposed. “I don’t have a job, yet. I’m training for one, which I’ll have after I graduate high school.”

The confusion must have shown on my face, because Kier suddenly looked tired. “I don’t get you humans. Why does it matter if I have a job or not, because you aren’t going to be staying here for much longer? If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be staying here right now, either.”

I didn’t flinch at those words, for which I felt proud.

“It doesn’t matter, I suppose. I just… was curious.”

Kier sighed again, roughly shoving his hands through hair that already looked unkempt. I couldn’t help feeling like I’d done something wrong. “All right, look,” Kier said. “Our culture isn’t like your culture. If you have a bad parent, then you have to live with them until you can finally get away. Your entire society seems to work against people in need, which also doesn’t make sense.”

“There are organizations and jobs dedicated to helping those less fortunate,” I said defensively. I got why Kier always ragged on humans, but it had started to feel like personal slights against me. I didn’t choose how our government worked. As a matter of fact, most people didn’t like how the government worked. We just couldn’t seem to stop it, either.

“Yes, there are a select few jobs where people try to help the others, and those jobs do very little that actually help. If you’re lucky, you get a couple of people off the streets, or a few kids into foster care, where they’re treated like garbage or an easy meal ticket. Wonderful, I know.” He rolled his eyes, and I felt even more foolish than I had a moment before.

“What’s the point of this?” I asked.

“The point I’m trying to make, is that your society and ours are different. We coexist because we have to, but we run on different laws. The only ones that we’re all supposed to follow, is the one that states Nightmares don’t go out during the day, and humans don’t go out during the night.”

He gave me a pointed look, and I stared down at the counter.

“You’ve spent the last several days trying to get away from the madman that you call your father,” Kier continued. “Your counselor wouldn’t help you, your father would only hurt you, and it never even occurred to you to call up your police. Instead, you ran away.”

“What else would I have done?”

Kier’s face grew harder, and I felt small all of the sudden. Sitting next to his large body, with his shadow crowding me, I felt miniscule. “In our culture,” he said. “When one of the parents is abusive or not caring for the children, the eldest has the right to kill them when they come of age.”

The way he said the words, and how he looked at me… My heart stuttered in my chest. I didn’t look around the house, but he had to know that I thought of how he took care of the kids. How I hadn’t seen any adults even come near the house, let alone call or interact.

I shifted around on my seat.

Kier smiled, and it turned his hard face into something ugly. It had a bitterness to it that didn’t belong on someone so young, and a lack of surprise that felt like a slight against me. “Finally scared of me?”

“I’ve been scared of you from the beginning,” I said. “From the moment that you stormed into the backyard, I was scared of you.”

“Because I’m a monster?” he asked with a nasty tone to his voice. I wondered if he wanted me to say yes. That he scared me, because I thought him a monster. It would mean that everything he said about humans applied to me too, and I didn’t want that. Not because my race deserved better, because I didn’t think we did. No, I didn’t want him to think that little of me.

I’d done nothing but make a fool of myself in front of him. Every time that something bad happened, my mind broke like fine china, and I hated myself for that. I hated that I couldn’t get myself under control.

Maybe I just hated myself.

Clearing my throat, I looked around the room. “No. You scared me because you’re big and you looked angry. Angry men have a tendency to hurt me.”

When I dared to look up again, Kier’s jaw had cranked tight, until I could see the tensed muscle along the edge of it. I steeled myself against flinching and making the situation all the worse. He clearly didn’t want to hear my excuses, and I got tired of making them, too.

I said, “So, that’s what happened to your parents?”

Kier looked around the house, and that tensed expression disappeared from his face. For the first time since I met him, he looked uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what happened with my parents.”

I thought that he would leave it at that, allowing me to draw my own conclusions on what happened with them, to him…

When he kept talking, it surprised me.

“They didn’t care much about us, one way or the other. I think they had me, because it seemed like the thing to do. They probably thought that they’d love me when I was born, or something like that. My first memory is climbing out of a crib too small for me, because I hadn’t eaten in two days and my stomach hurt.”

I knew that kind of hunger. Sometimes, when my father got angry enough, it became too dangerous to leave my room. During the summer, on his days off, I’d spent four days in my room, only darting out to use the bathroom and drink some water. He’d slept on the couch, so that I couldn’t even get into the kitchen. I’d eaten all my reserve food, the crackers and candy that I kept in my nightstand drawer, by the end of the second day.

“I don’t know why they kept having children, when they so clearly didn’t give a damn about us,” Kier growled. His hands cranked into fists so tight, they looked like they could punch right through the table that we sat at. “They did enough to keep Ash alive when he was born, but after that? I was a five-year-old, taking care of a baby. Oh, they’d feed Clementine when they remembered, but otherwise, I did all the work. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing either, so it’s kind of a miracle that she’s alive.”

Kier loosened his fists, and I caught the red skin on his palms. Like his nails had dug into his skin.

Shaking his head, he said, “Then they had Aiden, and it made even less sense to me. With every child, they cared less and less. Aiden was a sick baby, too, and it stressed everyone in the house out. They used to scream at everyone, whenever someone made noise. Clementine was four. She made noise all the time. The rest of us, we didn’t know what the hell to do.”

“Did they… hurt you guys?” I asked.

Kier shook his head. “Not really. My father would shove me around sometimes. Usually when I got mouthy with him, but they didn’t physically hurt us. They just made it so difficult to live… They wouldn’t even buy us food. I’d have to steal money from their wallets to get groceries. I got a lot of funny looks, walking down the aisle at the store with a cart and three children with me. One of which was an infant that couldn’t stop screaming.”

I pictured little Kier doing just that. In my head, he was too small to see over the edge of the cart, though it probably wouldn’t have been like that in real life. He stood well over six feet now, so I couldn’t imagine that his younger self had been a shorty. In my head, baby Aiden sat in the cart, surrounded by food and sobbing. He flailed his chubby arms and had tears running down his face, while two other kids ran around the aisles, trying to find something to eat.

The image broke my heart, because if I’d had little siblings, then I’d have been doing the same thing. I thanked god that my parents only had me, because I didn’t want to subject a child to having me as a protector. I couldn’t even save myself. How would I save a baby from a monster like my father?

How did my mother do it?

“Amber was the last straw,” Kier said. His shoulders still looked tense, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Everything about him screamed discomfort, and I wondered why he bothered telling me any of this, when it so clearly made him uncomfortable. “Don’t get me wrong. I love all my little siblings, and I’d die for them. Everything in our culture says that the young must survive. If someone touched any of them, I would murder them with my bare hands.”

Kier turned to stare at me, and I swallowed. He didn’t need to threaten me, but I would respect the threat anyway. “Of course,” I said.

He nodded once. “But when Amber was born… I was fourteen and raising three other kids. I’d just come of age—for us that means when we get our abilities. The young ones don’t have them, because their bodies can’t handle the power.”

A thousand different rumors popped into my head, and I wondered which ones held truth. I didn’t know what a Nightmare could do, because they no longer taught that in school. I didn’t have friends to pass stories around with, either. I’d spent so much of my time… alone. Scared, isolated, and in danger. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that I ended up in this situation.

“I was the only one of us that had any abilities, and my father wouldn’t teach me how to handle it,” Kier said, his voice a deep growl again. “I spent every fucking day worried that I would hurt someone. When I dreamed, my siblings usually bled by my hand, and I’d wake up horrified with myself, and the man did nothing. It didn’t bother him that I couldn’t control myself. When I got too uppity with him, he would slap me upside the head, or shove me down.”

Kier cut himself off and looked down at the surface of the counter. With his short hair kind of unkempt and his brown eyes full of fury, he looked more his age than I’d seen from him before. More than when he cooked for his family, or when he played with the little kids. For some reason, I didn’t like it. He looked wrong.

Swallowing, he brushed his hands against his forehead. “Anyway,” he said. “Amber was born, and I had another mouth to feed, another baby to take care of, and I just… couldn’t do it. It had all become so much. I had to keep them safe from my parents, feed them, find money to feed them, go to school, and pretend like everything was normal. I knew that it would be easier if I could get rid of my parents, because they wouldn’t stop having children. What did it matter to them, when they weren’t the ones taking care of the babies?”

“It should’ve mattered,” I said. “Even my father, when I was little and had to stay with him on the weekends, he would feed me. He’d try to act like I mattered to him, even though I clearly didn’t. I was this prize that he could win from Mom. I used to think that he loved me, but after what happened this week…”

Kier snorted. “Yeah, I wouldn’t count on that love anymore. You’re just something that he thinks he owns.”

The words sliced right through my heart, because I thought them so accurate. How could I doubt their truth, when my father had done all of this?

“The month after Amber was born, I went down to our Authorities office, and filled out a challenge paper. It’s a document that states I’m asking for the right to murder my parents.” He smiled bitterly. “You have to site how and why they are unfit to run the household. I didn’t have enough paper to list all the things they did. All the times they neglected to feed us, to take us to the doctor, to remember we existed. I picked the worse offenses, hoping that it would add up to something that would free my siblings and me. It took a week for the committee to review my request, and then the officials came to our doors. They handed me the paper saying that I had another week to kill them. If I failed, then someone else would come in and do it, and remove my siblings from my care.”

“What? Why would they do that?” I asked, panicked retroactively.

“Because I would’ve proven myself incapable of keeping them safe,” Kier said. “They would’ve had the right to take them all away at that point.”

I disagreed but kept that to myself.

Kier looked across the bar, at the empty space between the counter and the table. “That’s where I killed my mother,” he said. “She was in here, talking on the phone with her coworker. They planned on going out to eat. I can still remember the sound of her voice. She looked forward to getting out of the house. I came up behind her and slit her throat.” One of his hands tightened into a fist and then let go, tightened and let go, tightened and let go. “She didn’t even have the chance to scream before hitting the ground.”

I swallowed.

“My father heard the thump of her body and came to see what happened. When he saw her on the ground…I finally saw life in him. He never looked like a real person to me, because he never reacted to anything. My father would always dismiss us out of hand, and he would pretend like nothing we did mattered. But when Dad saw his mate on the ground, his eyes shattered. And all I could think about was how I did that to him. I broke the man, and it didn’t feel satisfying. It felt like I’d done something wrong. Something unfixable.”

My hand twitched with the need to touch Kier’s shoulder or hand. To offer comfort in some way, but I kept my hands in my lap. I didn’t know if touching for comfort was a purely human thing, and if I startled him… It would only take one swipe of that big hand before I hit the ground and broke something. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Kier didn’t seem to hear me. “His brokenness only lasted a second. Maybe two. Then he just looked furious, and my father came at me harder than he ever had before. I shouldn’t have been able to take him. I had no control over my power, and he was almost a century old. He had all the control that he needed. Yet, still, I killed him. He gave me enough wounds that I nearly bled out, but in the end, I cut his throat open, just like I had my mother’s.”

The images in my head had my heart racing. I could so easily picture everything that he said, down to the way the blood pooled on the ground. My hands tightened around the barstool I sat on, because I couldn’t keep myself under control any other way. If Kier wanted comfort, then he would’ve shown me.

“I’m so sorry that you had to go through that,” I said.

Kier finally looked at me, and his hard expression returned, like the other side of him hadn’t been there. The side that had been willing to share something with me, even if it made him uncomfortable. My stomach tightened when I saw the return of his usual personality.

I did something wrong. I must’ve done something wrong. I was right. He doesn’t want my comfort, or to hear me say anything. He just thinks I’m weak and is telling me this so that I’ll shut up. So do that. Just shut up and stop making everything worse with that big mouth.

Kier cleared his throat, and his voice sounded different. Gruffer and less willing to take my shit, I supposed. “It’s something that many of my kind have to go through, and it was my job, as the oldest child. If Ash had been born first, I would’ve expected him to do the same thing.”

It sounded like a dismissal, so I shrunk in on myself.

“Anyway,” Kier said. “When one of my kind kills their parents and has little siblings to look after, our government helps out. Not by taking the children away, but by offering aide. If I’m willing to take the job that one of my parents had, then they will start giving paychecks immediately. If I wanted to go out on my own, then they’d help me find a job, but they would’ve monitored me closely. If it looked like I didn’t care properly for the children, they would’ve taken them away from me.

“My father was an Authority. He made enough money to support this entire family. My mother worked as a dispatcher at the station. I could’ve taken either job, but I needed my father’s paycheck more than I needed my mother’s, so I agreed to take his. They’ve been training me for the position for three years and will continue to do so until I graduate high school, at which point I will be hired on fulltime.”

“So, you’re still taking care of the kids, but now you don’t have to hide from your parents?”

Kier nodded, getting off his stool. “I have training three times a week. On both Saturday and Sunday, and Wednesday. Tonight. I can skip school for a couple of days, claiming to be sick, but I cannot skip training. They will come looking for me otherwise.”

I thought about a bunch of Nightmare Authorities breaking down the door, and finding me sitting in the living room, watching television. They’d probably assume that I’d broken into the house for some reason and try to kill me. Because of Kier’s story, my mind immediately went to having my throat cut open and bleeding all over the ground. I could so easily picture Kier’s family standing around me, and I didn’t think they would look all that upset. They’d be annoyed that their favorite human died, but nothing else.

My breathing hitched, and I looked away from Kier before he could notice.

“You’ll stay here,” Kier said. “I haven’t told anyone about you, and I’d like to keep it that way. It would be too difficult to explain. Tonight, just before the sun rises, I’ll take you to that shelter that you were talking about, and we’ll be rid of each other.”

A little pang went through my chest, but I fought not to show it on my face. “They’ll just turn me in,” I said, wrapping my arms around my middle.

“You don’t know that,” Kier growled. “You can’t assume that everyone is like that bitch from your school. I’ll take you to that goddamned shelter, and they’ll take you in. If they’re worth anything, they’ll take you in.”

I closed my eyes and nodded. “You’re right. I can’t make assumptions just because I’m scared. But if they take me back to my father…”

Kier sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You’ll have to figure something out, then, Whilda. I can’t keep you here, not with the kids. It’ll create too many problems, and you won’t just be some random human that vanished into the system like you are now. Do you understand that?”

I nodded, guilt poking me in the stomach. I had disrupted their lives, when they had already gone through so much. I should have just kept running when I had the chance. It would have been better for Kier.

But it feels safe here.

That didn’t matter. Besides, feeling safe didn’t make it true. Kier had decided to be lenient with me. That didn’t mean he couldn’t change his mind and get rid of the stupid human who had interfered with his life. My stomach had no reason to be rocking and rolling in my body.

“I’m going to get ready,” Kier said. “And wake up the kids. Are you all right down here?”

Are you all right not to slit your wrists when I turn my back?

“I’ll be fine,” I said, easing back onto the stool. “You go ahead.”

Kier eyed me, clearly not believing me, and left the kitchen. The second he vanished, I slumped against the counter. My stomach tightened even more than it already had, and I wanted to bring him back. I wanted him to tell me that everything would work out again, because saying it in my head didn’t work. Maybe it would sound more honest coming from someone else.

I rubbed my hands down my thighs and closed my eyes. “It’ll be fine,” I whispered.

From the depths of my mind, the image of my father rose up. Not like he had been this week, chasing me with the car or destroying my room. No, the image that came to me was from the week that my mother died. The police had dropped me off at my father’s house, and I remembered standing in the living room, and knowing that Mom would never come to pick me up. That I’d never see her face again, or feel her hugging me, or hear her singing. She had died, and that meant that she’d never comfort me again.

I’d started sobbing, standing there with a small suitcase filled with my favorite things. The cries ripped right out of my throat and felt like they would kill me. As I cried, I’d looked up at my father, and he had been disgusted with me. He told me that I needed to stop being dramatic and shoved me down. I hit the ground hard enough that I bit my tongue, and he had seemed even more disgusted with me for that.

I pictured going back to my father’s house after all of this. The police would escort me back, and I’d enter that house. And I could see the disgust on my father’s face again, but he wouldn’t shove me this time. No, he would hit me, and he wouldn’t stop until I learned my lesson.