Lost the Sky Again Book One, page 27
part #1 of Lost the Sky Again Series
“Did you enjoy it?”
“No.”
“It was an item on your to do list, yes?”
Shrug. Nod.
“Well, go on and tell me about it, then.”
Lucy sat down with her knees folded beneath her and spent a moment biting at the inside of her lip gently. “I did it for revenge. Not entirely, but I’d be deluding myself if I didn’t admit that was a part of the motive. He hurt Stryker in a way that broke him forever in some ways. That he’ll have to live with forever. But even though that was a part of it, I wouldn’t have killed him if he wasn’t a danger to anyone anymore. But he was. He’s hurt dozens of children and murdered people, as well. He had no intention of stopping either. He had the capacity to hurt or kill many, many more innocent people before he died. I decided not to let it happen.”
“What if you get caught, mate?”
“I won’t. I’m not trying to be cocky, but it was easy and I did a good job. No one will even be looking for a killer, but if they were I knew his schedule and the layout of his house and, oh yeah, I can sense when other people are around now. I’m not sure when it happened but I noticed while.... you know, I shut you out.”
Lachlan lifted his eyes, his face unsmiling, but said nothing.
“I poisoned him. When you took me back to my old house, I stole a bunch of stuff from The Late Not Father. A book and a few small cases of vials. It was stupid of me. I almost got caught with them like ten times at the hospital, and I wasn’t able to be as careful as I should have been. I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself, or someone else. I’ll need to be much more careful with what I took in the future, whether or not I ever use it again. I didn’t realize how serious the stuff in the vials was until I read the book he made with it. I just thought I grabbed a pack or two, but I basically could kill a family of five every week for the rest of my life and never run out.”
Lucy glanced at Lachlan’s face and rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to.”
He paused, and she was aware that he suddenly stopped shielding a particular thought from her. One he had been hiding for a long time.
“NO, you too!?!”
He nodded.
“Tell me?”
“It’s why I didn’t want to tell you about Shelia before. I think that, really, she saw it was necessary, or else I suppose she would have told on me. It wasn’t too long ago. I met Sheila right when my mum got sick, and this happened right after that, when I was thirteen. Anyway, I had a classmate, Blake, and his father was hurting him. Quite badly. I was trying to help him get away, I didn’t want to kill anyone, but it became obvious it was necessary after he finally managed to run away. He was hiding in my room, my parents didn’t even know about it, we were both terrified that he would hurt my family if he found out where Blake was hiding. Only then, our teacher was murdered. Tortured first. And we knew, I knew, that it was him. He thought she knew where he was. The cops suspected but there was no proof so he was still just out there, thinking about who else might have information.”
“I basically had two options, as I saw it. I could send Blake back to him to be killed, or I could wait until someone told him Blake might be with us, and he came to kill us all. I just, there was no doubt in my mind he was capable of it, you know? Not just capable, but desperate for it, for vengeance on his child who dared leave him to escape literal torture.
“It sure as hell wasn’t as smooth as your job. I thought about cutting the brake lines on his car but I didn’t want anyone innocent to get hurt. So, I broke into his house when he was at work and when he came home, I shot him the second he closed the door behind him. Shot him a bunch more to make sure. Luckily, he lived on a few acres of land so there was really no one to see me running away like a bat out of hell. I still wore a mask, though, and gloves. God forbid he lived through it and remembered my face.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“No, I fucking hated it. To be fair, I think I would have been a lot more neutral on the topic if I hadn’t done it in such a fucking gruesome way.... And I wasn’t nearly as languid as you about being caught. I thought for sure I was going to go down for it in the end. I suppose I still could.”
“Huh.”
Lachlan looked uncertain for a moment. “Look. Part of the reason I was so worried about you is because I know that you’ve been hurting yourself a lot when you get upset. You care so much about Stryker that you’d hurt yourself to make sure that he’s safe and I admire that about you. But I’ve been contemplating whether or not to show you something. I knew I’d end up telling you about Blake sooner or later and I’m not certain that showing you this will help you but I think it will. Can I show you?”
“Of course.” She trusted him completely.
“Okay. Blake grew up being physically abused but what hurt him even more, I think, was the emotional abuse that he suffered. His father was manipulative. He knew his son loved him and wanted to be loved and he used it as a weapon. He made Blake feel crazy, like he was the one who had issues.”
Lachlan touched Lucy’s hand and a montage of moving images flooded her mind. A young man, Blake, slipping a pack of cigarettes in his pocket in the checkout queue, taking money from Lachlan’s bedroom and sneaking out the window, shoving an elderly man to the ground and kicking him before taking his wallet. The old man was crying and his face looked so helpless and sad.
“Blake was a victim but lots of people are victims. Lots of people are terribly abused in so, so many ways, and they still end up as intelligent, kind people who live good lives. Like you said about your therapist’s theory. After what I did to Blake’s dad and how he reacted, I thought about it a lot, read a lot of books and research. I tried so hard to figure out if there was some tangible, predictable quality of people who didn’t move on from their shitty pasts. Why were some people okay and some turned into the monsters themselves?”
Blake was screaming until his face was bright red. Flecks of spittle flew out of his mouth at the cowering child in the corner until its mother came and picked it up. Her eyes were wide and terrified and she ran into the bedroom, locking the door and praying he calmed down before he managed to break the door down. But he did manage it, and though he didn’t hurt his little brother, he did slam his mum into a wall, slicing her lip and breaking her nose. He ran out of the house, knowing he could never come back, as his mum tried to remain calm and call 000 (Australia’s versions of 911, she knew because Lachlan did).
“I still don’t know. The research certainly had nothing in the way of answers. But when you told me what Dr. Macarow said, I thought it was perfectly right. The abuse, maybe, makes it worse. It makes people on the outside feel better because they can pretend it’s the reason.
“Blake isn’t a sociopath, I don’t think, but he is a selfish asshole, just like you said. He’s not okay. He’s violent, angry, in survival mode all the time. His dad had violated custody orders and run away with him and when he went back to his mum, she tried so hard to help him. She did everything Stryker did for you but he was so much more violent than you that she couldn’t keep trying.”
A slightly older version of Blake, running and cornered by police for multiple thefts and assaults. Lachlan had grown stronger because of helping Lucy and he was able to track Blake down, and had sent an anonymous tip into the Police. Lucy realized this had just happened. While she’d been off in her own lala land of revenge, he had been trying to fix a terrible situation that he felt partially responsible for creating. He wasn’t showing her to make her feel guilty, she knew. He was showing her to help her.
“What I know is that you are not like Blake. Your brain may have had some blips along the way but it’s not irreparably broken. It’s already healed so much, so quickly. That’s because you’re determined and brave. You’re a good person and I know that hurting yourself feels good on some level right now but you need to know that I’m here for you and we will figure out together how to help you stop.
“Luce, it kills me to know you’re doing that to yourself but in a way, it also makes me so proud, too. You’re sacrificing yourself to spare the people who care about you, even when it still hurts you to feel their love. I know you’re feeling like a failure more often than not these days but when you feel that way, think of Blake. You’ve come so far.”
She swallowed but didn’t say anything. She looked at her hands and tried to make sense of the information she had been shown. She felt slightly nauseated. Sad but happy in a way, too. Lachlan was right, she wasn’t so broken that she couldn’t live a good life. She wasn’t so broken that she could do those things to other people and have no remorse.
“Thank you.” She wanted to tell him to move on now but he could already tell. He knew her so well after such a short time, and she him.
* * *
Lucy stood beside Stryker’s bed, watching him sleep. Her head was swimming with thoughts and even though it was very late, she just couldn’t force herself to be sleepy. She felt full of anxiety, waiting for the next very bad thing to happen.
It had always been that way. Every single day of her life with Father and Hunter. And every day since she had watcher her brother be murdered. She knew now that when she had been tiny, she had felt peace and comfort but in her memories, she knew no such thing. After much, much assurance that she wouldn’t disappear on him again, Lachlan had done the thing to her. She understood that tiny baby her had been innocent and normal. Father had done all the damage to her. Which meant that she could fix it, if she was strong enough.
Stryker’s face was so peaceful. She had helped him. Even though she was broken and still fought herself over so many things, at least she had finally given him back a little bit of the effort he had spent on her. She looked at him with a cocked head. She hadn’t admitted it to herself until just now, but as time went on, he reminded her less and less of Hunter. Their faces were so similar in features, but the light behind them was so different. Hunter’s light had been a bright, hot fire. His face had always looked either angry sad or just utterly, hopelessly sad. His light hurt her to look at. Stryker’s light was like aurora borealis, soft and gentle and full of a pleasant warmth. She wanted to be like that. She wanted her feelings that he was weak to go away....
There was no Father anymore. Stryker was getting better, and Marcy was helping him. She and Lachlan were good again. Even though she was struggling not to hurt herself, their sessions did seem to be helping her not feel so disgusted by what was supposed to feel nice. Would she finally, for the first time in her life, have a period where she could recover and heal without horror after horror being perpetrated on her? She thought that she might, and somehow that scared her more than anything else as she walked back to her room and crawled into bed.
G.K. Lyver, Lost the Sky Again Book One
