Casual Wanderer © 2025 All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and specific other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
"Sprite"
(Fourteen Years Earlier)
Night pulled the house tight like a lid. From the hallway, a nightlight bled a square of lemon-yellow across the carpet, just enough to lift the brass keyhole of Joshua's door into a small, glittering eye.
He lay on his back and counted the sounds that proved the world still existed: the refrigerator's throat catching and clearing, a car passing on the distant boulevard, a clock somewhere softly punching the seconds. He tried to stitch those sounds into a blanket and pull it over his chest, but another sound kept unpicking the seams.
Noah was crying.
It came thin at first, a ribbon of wet breath from down the hall, then truer: hiccups, a swallow, a muffled wail. It came from their father's room. The angles of the house seemed wrong around that sound, as if walls had learned to bend.
Joshua swallowed against a dry mouth and listened harder. Under Noah's crying, a man's voice pulsed, low enough to be the house or a machine, low enough that meanings were more shape than word. Sometimes it lifted and caught the light as it passed a syllable. Sometimes it didn't sound like their father at all.
A bed scuffed wood.
The crying hit a seam and broke.
Joshua's eyes stung. He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, the way you do to stop a sneeze or a shout. He whispered Noah's name into the door seam and jamb, but the door breathed cold into his mouth. Time did a slow, grinding turn. The low voice faded. The crying stopped. Footsteps came into the hall, steady and unhurried. They paused outside Joshua's door.
The click was obscene in its softness. The door opened just enough to draw a thin light blade across Joshua's face.
Noah came first. He shuffled in, socked feet whispering the carpet, his head bent so his hair stood like a little storm cloud. His cheeks glistened. He didn't look at Joshua. He went to his bed and folded himself into it.
Behind him, their father filled the doorway. His silhouette was tidy, exact, as if even his shadow had learned to keep its corners square. He set a hand on the jamb and tapped his ring once against the wood.
"Now get to sleep," he said, as if it were a grace.
Noah made a sound that could have been a yes or an apology.
"If you make a sound," their father added, voice thin as fishing line, "you'll get a spanking. And not the good kind, do you understand me?"
The house didn't breathe. Even the vent held itself still long enough for Noah to say, small and hoarse, "Yes."
"Good." The ring clicked the wood again. "Eyes shut. Mouths shut."
He stepped back. The door sighed, pared down to a crescent, and stopped. The lock turned.
Joshua kept his body slack until the footsteps traveled the hall and the master bedroom swallowed them. Only then did he roll to face the pale loom of Noah's bed. "Noah," he whispered.
His brother didn't answer. The slight rise of his shoulders under the blanket stayed small, fast, and far away.
"Hey," Joshua tried again, softer, because softness felt like a bridge you could throw across a river without a splash. "Hey."
Nothing. Either Noah was gone under sleep already, or he was somewhere beyond it where words couldn't find him.
Joshua lay on his side, hands tucked between his knees, and breathed to the slow count the counselor had taught him once: in-four, hold-four, out-six. Somewhere around the fifty-seventh second, his counting turned to drifting, and drifting became a fall he couldn't stop. He dreamed the nightlight went out and on, out and on, each flash its own small universe. When he woke, it was still dark, which meant morning was far away. The air felt different, cooled from the inside, like the refrigerator door had been open a long time and someone had shut it just now.
Whispering.
Noah's voice, ragged with the rasp that comes after crying. Another voice answering.
Deeper.
Close.
Joshua pushed himself up on his elbows. The nightlight's slice showed him the room in cutouts, the dresser's edge, the mess of clothes on the chair, Noah's small turned back, the glint of a chrome truck tucked under his bed. There was no one else in the room. The closet door was shut, the desk chair empty, the corner where the rocking horse used to be only shadow.
"Noah?" Joshua whispered. His brother stilled. The whispering died like breath on glass. "Who are you talking to?"
For a heartbeat there was a sound like the house thinking. Then Noah turned his face toward him, not enough for the light to lay a line across his eyes, just enough for Joshua to see the wet shine on his cheek.
"Nobody," Noah said.
The word was so clean it might have been washed and hung up to dry.
Joshua stared where the whisper had seemed to live. He stood, put one foot down, the carpet taking him soundlessly, then another, then two quick steps to the closet. He slid the door open.
Shirts. A stack of board games. The sweet stale smell of cardboard. The whisper had been somewhere and was not.
He closed the closet and it made that soft runnel sound the closet always made, like a finger running the seam of a book. He went to the window. The latch was down. He turned back. Noah lay on his side, facing the wall again. The blanket rose and fell. Nothing else moved. Joshua went back to his bed. The mattress welcomed him in the particular way his mattress did, the shallow valley his weight had made over the years. He stared at the ceiling and listened to the deep quiet that comes when a house rests its bones.
But it didn't last.
The whisper came back softer, as if it were kneeling. It was where it had been before, no exact place, just around. It wasn't the house and it wasn't a machine. It had a man's age without a man's breath.
"Don't worry, little one," it said, and Joshua felt the hairs on his forearms rise one by one. "You don't have to worry anymore." Noah exhaled a yes that wasn't a word. "I'll take care of it from now on," the voice said.
Noah's reply was small as a cupped match. "You weren't here."
"I was," the voice said, patient as rain. "I'm always here. Under the bed. In the vent. In the rattle of the milk in your little blue bottle. You remember the whales on the mobile? I pushed them round when the room forgot to."
Noah swallowed audibly. Joshua felt the movement of it in his own throat, a sympathetic ache. "You left," Noah said, and his words trembled like a string someone had plucked too hard. "He locked us. He..."
"Hush now, little one," the voice soothed, a hand you couldn't see smoothing hair you couldn't touch. "Hush and breathe. Do you know who I am?"
Noah's sheet rustled. A quiet nod that didn't make a sound, and yet Joshua heard it. "Yes."
"Say it."
A pause that found every knot in Joshua's spine and pulled. "My...friend."
"That's right," the voice purred, pleased the way a cat is when a bird stops struggling. "Your friend. Your always. Since you were pink and small. Since you had the sparrow blanket with the loose thread you picked and picked." It chuckled, a warm, terrible sound. "I tied that thread back in your sleep."
Joshua's tongue had gone dry against his teeth. The voice didn't sound like Noah, not at all. It was lower and older, and it seemed to come from everywhere. But wherever he tilted his ear, it was still inside the room, not behind the wall, not in the hallway, not at the door. But inside, as near as the breathing.
"He said I'll get a spanking if I tell," Noah whispered. Joshua flinched at the word, shame and anger like a hot hand on the back of his neck.
"I heard," the voice said, the soft edges rolling back for a moment to show something harder beneath. "He has a way of making sounds, doesn't he? Tsk tsk tsk. We can make sounds stop. Did you know that?"
Noah's breaths came quick-quick-slow. "You said you'd fix it."
"And I will." The words smiled. "I fixed the rattle in the vent. I fixed the loose thread. I can fix a mouth, too."
Joshua's heart struck once, hard enough he felt it in his wrists. In the nightlight's puddle he could just see the curve of Noah's shoulder lift and fall, small under the blanket.
"You'll get in trouble," Noah said, and the voice made a sound like a hand waving away a fly.
"But you know I don't like when he makes you cry," the voice continued, softer again, coaxing him back from the edge. "When your throat hurts and your eyes burn and you fold up small in the corner like paper. It puts a crack in me. And I don't like cracks."
"I was loud," Noah whispered, apology trying to crawl out of him. "I didn't mean...I tried to be..."
"You were perfect," the voice said, and the word was so warm Joshua's eyes watered. "You're always perfect. If something is too loud, we can put a pillow over it. If something points the wrong way, we can bend it back. If a thing keeps opening, we can sew it closed. There are a thousand ways, little one. You don't have to learn them. You just have to sleep."
Joshua swallowed a curse he didn't know whom to throw at. His fists had curled against the blanket. He uncurled them finger by finger, slow, like he was defusing something with a timer.
"You promise?" Noah asked, so little Joshua remembered the first day their mother put Noah in his lap and said, Hold him, he's light as a loaf. He remembered the feather feel of that baby weight, the trust of it.
"I promise," the voice said, every syllable a hand on a back, a door quietly closing.
"Don't..." Noah's voice cracked. He started again. "Don't hurt him. I don't...I don't want..."
"Oh, little one," the voice sighed, fond and hungry. "You always want kindness, even when the house teaches you otherwise. But protection has a shape, you see. Sometimes it is a blanket. Sometimes it is a wall. Sometimes it is a hand. Sometimes," it said, almost conversational, as if discussing a recipe, "it is a silence that goes on and on."
Joshua's skin pebbled. He stared at the dark between the two beds until it thickened, until it felt like the room had grown a third bed you couldn't see and something lay there watching them both.
"You'll stay?" Noah asked, the words rubbing together like his palms. "You won't go into the floor or the closet or the...the place behind my head?"
"I stay where you are," the voice murmured. "I am where you breathe, where you blink, where you put your tongue on the back of your teeth when you're thinking. I ride along on your blood. When you walk, I walk. When you sleep, I sit up and watch."
Joshua pressed his molars together until his jaw clicked. "Who are you?" he said before he could stop himself, the whisper scraping out of him like a caught nail.
Silence answered him.
Then the voice said, not to him but about him. "The other one's awake."
Noah shifted. "He's good," Noah said. Loyal, automatic, small. "He's good. He's my..."
"Mm," the voice said, turning the sound over in its mouth as if deciding whether to swallow. "He can be good. He can be brave. But he can also put you in danger by looking. By knowing."
Joshua's breath went ragged. He forced it quiet. He forced everything quiet.
"He won't tell," Noah whispered.
"He might," the voice said, and whatever smile had been on its words slid off and fell away. "He might without meaning to. Words fall out. Tongues slip."
In the hall, something ticked, once, twice, the lightest touch of metal on wood. Joshua didn't move. He imagined his father's ring, the slow tap he used when he was deciding whether to come in. He imagined the key in a pocket. He imagined the key moving on its own.
"Don't have to be afraid," the voice told Noah gently, the gentleness of a blanket being tucked too tight. "If anyone puts you in danger, I'll close them. If anyone pries, I'll take the part they use to pry. If anyone reaches, I'll make them forget what hands are for."
"No," Noah whispered, but it was the kind of no that meant please don't leave me, not the kind that meant stop.
"Shhh, sleep," the voice said. "I'll be the door."
It was then that Joshua saw it.
Noah's shadow against the wall.
Growing.
"And if he tries again," the voice breathed, suddenly very close to Joshua's ear, so near he felt its cool on the hairline, "I'll take his tongue."
*
(Present Time)
Noah drove.
Joshua sat passenger with one hand sunk into the tape at his side, holding the heat in. In the back, Shane's screams came in ragged tides, cottoned by the gag, hard against the van's ribs.
Joshua let the next wave hit, listened to it tear itself thin. Then he turned and rapped the metal partition twice with his knuckles, easy as a door-to-door joke. "Tone it down, choirboy," he said, amused like he could afford it. The screams fell to a panting saw.
Wind came in cold around the window seal. The dash light washed Noah pale. He had his jaw set and the wheel high, forearms like bars. The wipers ticked a dry beat over a clean windshield because he'd forgotten to switch them off.
Joshua watched his profile a long time. "Are you in there?" he asked at last.
"I am," Noah said.
"Mm." Joshua tapped the heel of his hand against his bandage, felt the answering throb. "We taking the bypass or riding it out?"
"Riding it," Noah said.
"Uh-huh." Joshua angled his face to the window. Pines strobed. "Who am I talking to?"
Noah didn't answer. The road lifted and fell. He kept it dead center.
Joshua smiled without teeth. "Driver? Or the other guy?"
"Don't."
"That's not an answer." Joshua's voice stayed light, private. "Green or gold."
Noah exhaled through his nose. "You're not ten."
"Never was," Joshua said. He drummed a rhythm on his thigh, two quick, one long, the old truth-test they used to pass under blankets. He waited. The van hummed. Nothing came back.
"Count for me," he said. "In-fours."
Noah's hands tightened, then loosened. He didn't count.
"Okay," Joshua said softly. "There you are."
"Keep your voice down," Noah said. "He's listening."
Joshua didn't look at the mirror. "Backseat or upstairs."
Noah's mouth tugged, almost a smile and not. "Both."
Joshua nudged the partition with two fingers so the metal sang light. "How's the quiet?"
"Big," Noah said.
"Sharp?" Joshua asked.
"Sharp," Noah agreed, as if testing the word with his tongue.
Shane made a sound that tried to be a word and failed. Joshua reached back without turning and thumped the partition once, less amused. "Breathe," he said, to nobody in particular and to everyone.
They passed the JESUS IS LORD sign with the peeled letters. The fuel light chimed once and settled into its amber blink. The sound hung between them like a small, polite alarm.
Joshua let it blink three times. "We need gas."
"We need quiet," Noah said.
"Don't we always." Joshua shifted, winced, settled. "You going to tell me where you go when you go."
"I'm here."
"Your eyes say otherwise," Joshua said. "You see me?"
"Yes."
"How many fingers." Joshua held up his hand, two fingers crooked in their old signal.
"Funny," Noah said.
"Okay," Joshua replied. "So it's you enough to drive." Noah's grip tightened, then let go. Joshua turned his head, leaned back, and let the cold crack his shoulder. "You want me to call him by name?"
"No."
"Then he stays 'the other guy.'" Joshua glanced sideways. "He close?"
Noah licked his lower lip, a small dry sound. "He's resting."
"You were doing fine," Joshua said, tone lazy around the hurt. "Then I showed up and here we are. That's the story you're writing?"
"It's true."
"Mm. Half of it." Joshua watched the twitch in Noah's cheek, the one that came when he was keeping something from breaking. "The lid doesn't make the pot stop boiling. It just makes the kitchen quiet."
"The pills worked," Noah said.
"They tucked it in," Joshua said. "They didn't tuck you in."
Noah didn't answer. The fuel light blinked again. The road tilted, then righted. Another mile marker slid by. 118. Pines thinned. A low strip mall slept off to the right, neon dead except for an OPEN that flickered its lie.
Joshua rolled his shoulder, blinked slow. "Left at the next. We'll float the lot behind the laundromat. Trade plates."
Noah nodded once, minimal. "Okay."
The plan sat there like a third person. Shane made soft, exhausted animal sounds, the kind a throat makes when it's learned there's nothing to do but hurt and breathe.
Joshua leaned forward, elbows on knees, and spoke without looking over. "If I'm wrong about who I'm talking to, he's welcome to say so." Silence. The kind that had a hand in it. "Didn't think so," Joshua murmured.
Noah's mouth moved, opened, closed. When he spoke, his voice was clean as a washed glass. "Keep your hand on the wound."
Joshua's eyes didn't leave his face. "That you?"
"It hurts when you don't," Noah said.
Joshua grinned, small and real. "Yeah. That's you."
They took the left and pulled in behind the laundromat, where the light didn't quite reach. The place had that late-hour hum, rows of steel bellies turning shirts into warm weather. Beyond the dumpsters, a pickup slept crooked in two spaces, its vanity plate shining dull as a coin left in rain. Noah idled the van and killed the lights. Darkness slid up against the windows like water against glass.
Joshua stayed in the passenger seat, one palm pressed over the tape and gauze, feeling the wound throb. In the back, Shane made a muffled, exhausted sound and went quiet again.
"Two minutes," Noah said. His voice had sand on it.
Joshua nodded and watched him go.
Noah moved with the care of a boy who'd grown up stepping over sleeping dogs and men with tempers, a sideways glance first, then the door eased, then the slide of him out, light, like he had learned to treat gravity as a suggestion. The night took his shape and returned it in pieces: shoulder, jaw, the pale cut of his throat. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up, not to hide, Joshua knew, but to concentrate.
The hood brought the world in.
Joshua felt himself smile. It came uninvited and it felt wrong and right, both. Running simplified the map inside him. It reduced the day to a single bright line: keep Noah. Everything else arranged itself around that line or got cut away. The ache under his palm sharpened, then smoothed, as if agreeing.
Noah went crouched to the pickup first. He didn't hurry. He had learned the grammar of unremarkable movement: look like you belong, and a camera will decide you do. He set the pliers' teeth on the plate frame and worried at the rusted screw cap until it sighed. The screw turned with the dry chirr of metal. He put the freed screw in his mouth, cheeked it like a coin, and went to work on the second.
Joshua watched the slope of Noah's back under the sweatshirt, the curve of him when he leaned into resistance. He remembered that same curve when Noah had been small and stubborn, crouched on the kitchen tile with a bent fork, picking at a petrified drop of caramel until it came loose and he could hold it up to the light like amber. That same patience. That same quiet violence. Noah eased the pickup's plate free and held it a second as if weighing it. He slid the stolen plate under his sweatshirt, close to his heat, and ghosted back to the van's rear.
Joshua kept his hand on his bandage and his eyes on Noah. Joy sat in him like a small, bright stone. He wasn't proud of it. He was only honest about its size. All the days he had spent shrunken to a cell, listening to clocks, pretending his bones didn't remember running, those days had been a kind of wrongness. This, the hush of a parking lot, the sound of a screwdriver whispering a circle into a stubborn screw head, the little private theater of Noah moving and Joshua watching.
That felt like the world righted itself.
The rear screws fought. Noah dug in and won. He caught one screw as it fell, pinching it between his finger and thumb. The other pinged off plastic and vanished under the bumper. He went to his knees, reached sideways, and found it by touch. He always thought with his hands. He always had.
A police siren murmured far off on the highway, a ribbon of sound too faint to matter. Joshua's heartbeat stumbled anyway, then found the wound's rhythm again. He breathed through his teeth and let his shoulders down. "Come on, driver," he said to the glass in front of him, very soft. "Come on."
Noah lifted the van's plate and slid it free. He fitted the pickup's plate into the frame and set the screws, quick and neat. He didn't overtighten. Joshua smiled at that. He had taught him that. Leave something meant to move with the dignity of its purpose. Noah wiped his fingers on his jeans and moved to the front. The hood threw up a shallow shadow. He glanced once to the roofline corners, checking for dark bulbs in clear domes, and found none. He had always been good at seeing the eyes that watched. He had learned it by being watched.
Joshua eased his head back against the window and let the glass take him, cold seeping into his scalp. He thought of the other voice that sometimes stepped into Noah's mouth and lined the words with velvet and wire. He didn't fear it the way other people would have. He distrusted it. He negotiated with it. But beneath both of those, he loved Noah around it and through it, the way you love a boy with a dangerous dog: you keep your palm between his face and the teeth, and you call that a life.
Front plate off.
New plate on.
Noah worked faster now, the way he did when the math got easy. He set the screwdriver in his teeth while pinching a washer true with his thumbnail. The screwdriver's handle dragged the corner of his mouth down, giving him the sullen look he'd had at six when told to wear a tie for church. He finished and stepped back, the hood light catching the fine gold in the stubble on his jaw.
A dryer inside the laundromat hit its last minute and began to beep, bright, insistent, ridiculous. The sound carried across the lot and bounced off the van's side in little tin echoes. Noah didn't even glance. He slid the old plates under a stack of broken-down cardboard by the dumpster and kicked them deeper with the toe of his shoe. Someone else's trash would be their alibi by morning.
He came to Joshua's window but didn't come close enough to touch. They had rules for when and where they allowed the body in. He leaned in just enough for his face to float up out of dark.
"Done," he said.
Joshua looked at him and said nothing. He let his eyes speak a language only the two of them still remembered: the two-fingers flick low for good work, the slow blink for go, the tilt of the chin for Are you here. Noah gave him the answer in the way his mouth softened a fraction and his shoulders unlocked: present, yes, enough.
From the back, Shane kicked once and let out a rough, pleading noise. The van took it and swallowed it so the night wouldn't.
Noah went around the front, palming his tools, and climbed in.
Joshua let his hand fall from the wound for the time it took to reach across and set his fingers on Noah's wrist, a quick, loose loop of skin on skin, their oldest pact made without words. Keep me. Keep you. Then he returned his palm to the heat and held the pain where it belonged.
As they rolled past the laundromat windows, a line of portholes showed him small, dumb worlds: a pair of jeans beating out their old dirt, a red shirt slapping itself awake, a basket of white towels folded into quiet. He watched them like omens and took none of them seriously. The only sign he trusted sat next to him, hands at the wheel, eyes forward, plates changed, the road unfurling again as if it had been waiting just for this: two boys, one van, a third breath shaking in the back, and the night more door than sky.
*
They rolled into the kind of motel that had been cheap even when it was new. The sign out front buzzed VAC NCY in a tired red, and the office wore its bulletproof glass like an old pair of glasses: scratched, cloudy at the corners, always slipping down its nose. A plastic ficus hunched in the corner, heroically not dying.
Noah cut the engine and slid out. The office bell went off when he opened the door, with an eager little ding. Behind the glass, the clerk looked up from a stack of crossword puzzles and grinned like they were long-lost regulars.
"Evenin', traveler," the clerk said, leaning on the counter with both elbows. He was all mustache and optimism, wearing a polo the color of old toothpaste. A TV behind him played a game show with the sound off. "What can the Regal Pines Motor Lodge do you for this fine, completely normal night?"
"Room," Noah said. He kept his voice flat, his eyes on the lot beyond the clerk's shoulder. Through the glass, he could see the van and Joshua's dark smear in the passenger seat.
"Now that," the clerk said, tapping a pen against a laminated rate sheet, "we specialize in. Queen, king, or, now don't get too excited, two twins."
"Closest to the back," Noah said.
"Aw, a connoisseur of quiet," the clerk replied. "We're running a special on privacy tonight, half off if you don't ask the spooks their names." He laughed at his own joke. Noah's eyes flicked to the van again.
"You got ID?" the clerk asked, already reaching for the pegboard keys. Each hung on a fob shaped like a pine tree and labeled in fading Sharpie: 12, 14, 16. He held up one proudly. "Twelve's got a view of the dumpster. Very exclusive. Only the best clientele."
"Cash," Noah said, setting bills under the slot with a small push.
"Like the old days," the clerk said, pleased. He counted with a flourish that made the bills look theatrical. "You boys in for the...uh, what is it this weekend…" He snapped his fingers. "Reenactors. Civil War. I can always tell a reenactor. You've got that...historically accurate vibe."
Noah looked at him without blinking. "We're tired."
"Ain't we all," the clerk said, unfazed. "Pool's closed, ice machine makes a lot of noise, doesn't do much, wifi password is 'pines123' but between you, me, and this fine establishment's reputation, it's shit." He slid the registration card through the slot. A cartoon pine tree smiled in the corner like it understood taxes. "Name?"
"Green," Noah said, and slid the card back, unsigned.
"Love that. Nature. Money." The clerk swiveled, plucked the key to 14, and let it clack against the glass twice for effect before pushing it through. "No smoking unless it's emotional."
Noah had already turned his head, scanning the van again. Joshua sat forward now, watching Noah watch him. Their eyes met, and in the thin pane between them, there was an old conversation: left, then right. Once around. Quietly, Noah took the key and didn't bother with the receipt. The clerk kept talking as Noah backed out.
"If you see a raccoon with half an ear, his name's Larry!" the clerk called. "He belongs to no one and to all of us!"
The bell dinged Noah into the night.
Joshua slid across to the driver's seat before Noah reached the curb. With a slow, breath-held drift, he pulled the van around and took it down the side lane toward the far row of doors. He nosed the van into the dark seam between two sickly pines, driver's side to the room. The number on the door matched the key fob: 14, black on peeling white.
Noah walked ahead, quick and light, and palmed the key into the lock. The door pushed in on a room that had seen things and chosen, with dignity, not to discuss them: bedspread in a heroic floral, carpet the color of old tea, a painting of a canoe that had never known water. He let the door ease shut without latching and turned.
At the corner of the building, in the slice of shadow between the soda machine and the ice machine, Noah touched two fingers to his throat and then flicked them twice low. Joshua saw it and smiled, small and almost private.
He killed the engine and stepped out. The air smelled like wet concrete and someone else's cigarettes. He slid open the van's rear door, climbed in, and crouched by Shane. "Field trip," he said, cheerful as a lie. He pulled a canvas tote from under the bench and shook out the hood of a soft black bag. "Head up," he added, not unkind, and slipped it over. Shane flinched, then went still when Joshua's hand found the back of his neck and pressed there, steady.
Noah appeared at the door, the hallway's light cutting a diagonal across his jaw. He met Joshua's eyes once, asking, "Are we clear?" Joshua tipped his chin, "We're clear." Then Noah got both hands under Shane's armpits and hauled. Shane's feet scraped, his bound ankles knocking a rhythm against the metal lip.
They crossed the short strip of cracked concrete in a silent little procession: Noah bearing the weight, Joshua a step behind and to the side, scanning, already counting the steps back. The door to 14 sighed them in. Noah dragged Shane over the threshold, and the room, with its canoe and its floral and its careful silence, took them whole.
*
Shane came back to himself in pieces: the stink of old carpet first, then the rattle of the window unit grinding lukewarm air, then the weight on his wrists where tape bit deep. His head rang like a glass tapped with a fork. Water ran in the bathroom. He was strapped to an armchair jammed into the room's far corner.
Fabric rasped. Fingers found the edge of the tape at his mouth. Joshua's face came into focus: the same blue eyes as Noah's but set to a different temperature, a soft beard, hair damp at the temples, a bandage peeking under his shirt where the tape had lifted and gone loose. He smelled faintly of sweat and the metallic breath of dried blood. He was smiling like this was all dimly entertaining.
"Wakey, wakey," Joshua said, and peeled the tape down careful as a man removing a price tag from a gift he meant you to keep.
Shane hissed through his teeth and breathed. He swallowed, twice, and felt his throat catch. "Where's Noah?"
Joshua tipped his chin toward the bathroom. "Baptizing himself," he said. The water hissed on cue.
Shane rolled his tongue against sore gums and tested the give in the straps. Not much. "You couldn't pick a better chair?"
"It had the personality I wanted," Joshua said, leaning his shoulder into the wall, angling himself where he could watch Shane and the door at the same time. "Welcoming. Honest. No sudden movements."
Shane blinked the blur from the room. "What do you want?"
"A little calibration." Joshua folded his arms, winced, and let one hand drift back to the bandage. "About the night we met."
Shane barked a laugh that wasn't funny. "You barged into my kitchen and roofed me. Then you fucked me while I was unconscious, kidnapped my boyfriend, and just left me there. That night?"
Joshua smiled wider. "See, that's already wrong. I'm pretty sure you wanted to get fucked. 'I feel way out of my league on this...'" He tilted his head. "Am I misquoting you?"
Shane frowned. The memory came with static on it. "I wasn't..."
"Mm," Joshua said. "Yes, you were." He made a little show of setting his own shoulders back, loosening the neck. Shane's mouth was dry. "You were playing it cool, but you leaned in when I sucked the blood out of that cut. I reckon you didn't expect me to look like him."
Shane's jaw tightened.
Joshua laughed, full and delighted. He glanced at the bathroom door, then back. "Now. The awkward part." Shane stared at him. "The...thing," Joshua asked, voice lowering, "before the blackout."
Shane's heart, which had been pounding the same steady warning since he woke, found a faster gear. "I don't...remember."
"Yes, you do," Joshua said. "You remember the voice."
"What voice?"
Joshua cocked his head the way he had at the apartment, like he was listening to a radio only he could tune. "The voice," he said. "The deep, slightly scratchy voice. You've heard it twice now."
Shane's mouth opened and shut. The van. Before the shots. He swallowed. "I heard a lot of things," he said, defensive without meaning to be.
Joshua watched him with a patient, amused interest that felt like a hand on the back of his neck. "What did you see in his face?" he asked. "Right before he went to bed?"
Shane closed his eyes.
It was there, brief as heat lightning.
"You shouldn't have done that?" Noah's voice muttered.
"Done what?" Shane asked, his hand retreating.
"Invite him to stay." Noah clarified.
"But I thought..." Shane stuttered, sensing that the effects of his appeasing nature had disappointed Noah yet again.
"I know what you thought," the stud whispered calmly. He didn't seem upset, but his voice was changing. "You have no idea what you're dealing with," Noah uttered ominously before reaching for his bedside light, turning it off, and enveloping the room in darkness.
"I saw him...go away," Shane said, the words escaping like steam. "Just...a centimeter. Like he stepped to the side and somebody else stepped where he'd been."
The water hissed on.
"Right," Joshua said, satisfied, as if they had finally labeled a bird. "That's the night you met...him."
Shane opened his eyes. "I wasn't talking to Noah," he said. He heard the smallness in his own voice and hated it. "Was I?"
Joshua's smile went kind again, and this time, the kindness had teeth. "No," he said before lifting a finger and tapping his own temple. "You were being auditioned."
Shane's stomach dropped. "By who."
Joshua's gaze slid, just once, to the bathroom door and back. "Depends," he said lightly. "We say 'the other guy' and mind our manners."
The shower cut off, filling the room with the awkward, intimate sound of water stepping away from tile. A beat later, the cheap fan in the bathroom ceiling coughed to life.
Joshua stepped in close enough that Shane could smell the mint of motel toothpaste. He set his hands lightly on the chair's arms, as if they were just two men discussing a bad game in a good bar. "Here's the part where I ask you to be smart," he said. "Because I think you can be. When he comes out...don't try to outsmart him."
Shane wet his lips. "And if I do."
Joshua's eyes crinkled at the corners, an expression that tried to be friendly and almost made it. "Then you'll blackout again," he said, cheerful as a TV host. "But this time...you won't wake up." Joshua's smile didn't move, but Shane watched his shoulders unlock by a fraction, as if some quiet music he liked had begun. "Good talk," Joshua said, and stepped back, still amused, still watchful.
*
The tub faucet gave its thin, unwavering line, a bright thread unspooling into dull enamel, until the water reached for Noah's wrist and asked him to consider warmth as an answer.
He undressed without hurry. Hoodie, then T-shirt, then the slow peel of his trousers. He turned his pockets out to shake loose a coin and grit from the parking lot, setting everything in a neat stack on the back of the closed toilet. He washed his hands at the sink, rinsed, watched the last of the brown go spidering down the drain, then shut the water and stood a moment, listening.
The tub had found its level. He palmed the faucet off, and the line broke with a final silver hiss. Steam kept the mirror polite, Noah's face present but softened, as if even glass had learned not to look too hard. He stepped in, one foot and then the other, breath catching at the first lick of heat, and lowered himself with the reverence you save for doors that don't like to be slammed.
Water climbed his shins, his knees, the pale flex of his thighs. It curled around his waist and gentled the last of his gooseflesh flat. He exhaled and slid lower until his chest floated, until his ribs found that fine, weightless balance between sinking and being held. When he let go, he did it all at once: shoulders, throat, mouth. He surrendered his ears to the hush. He let his head tip back until it drifted, hair blooming and then settling, and his face lay inches under the surface, a pale coin blurred by a skin of ripples.
He opened his eyes and stared upward through the thin glass of bathwater. The yellowed paint, the hairline cracks, the shadow of the shower rod, everything floated an inch away from true, as if memory had smudged it with a thumb.
"What are you trying to do?" said the voice, calm as a hand on the crown of his head. "You know I hate the water, little one."
The words didn't disturb the surface. They arrived inside him the way a name arrives inside a mouth, already shaped. Affection sat in them like warm milk. Something colder sat beneath it, patient and precise.
"You think it makes the edges go soft," the voice went on, tender with a teacher's patience.
Noah kept still. The water held him the way a hand holds a coin flat to a table: not enough to crush, enough to say stay.
"I know what you're trying to do," the voice purred, unbothered by disobedience, "...and I know why. Sweet little river." A soft click in the words, like a tongue touching a tooth. "You forget who found you when the house had teeth."
The fan droned its low monotone. A distant pipe ticked as the building remembered all the showers it had suffered.
"Listen to me," the voice said, lowering like a lullaby. "I'm always where you are. Under the bed. In the vent. In the rattle of milk in your blue bottle. I am your lock when they bring keys. I am your quiet when they make sounds. You do not escape me by sinking, little one. I have enough lungs for both of us."
The bathwater cooled a whisper along his temples. Bubbles gathered in Noah's hair like small, patient mouths.
"Let me through," the voice coaxed. "Close your eyes. There. Good. You know this song." Noah's chest burned and then eased. "Now," said the voice, softer, the syllables brushing his eardrums like the edge of a feather. "You're safe," the voice told him, with the love that cuts. "You are mine to keep. All you have to do is remember."
Noah's eyes closed.
"Good," the voice breathed, pleased. "Good, little one. Back we go."
*
(Ten Years Earlier)
Noah was small for eleven, with a backpack that hung like a second spine and a lunch that sweated in its plastic box. Joshua, sixteen and suddenly "homebound" for lifting candy with boys who called theft a game, was not at his shoulder.
The day had taken note of that absence, and it had sharpened accordingly.
The bathroom by the gym was where noise went to echo. Noah stood at the sink and watched his face warp in the metal mirror the school preferred, with no glass to shatter or reflection to trust. He made his hands busy with the faucet. The water ran thin and cold.
They came in as a unit, three shadows that decided to be boys at the last second: Tyler with the loud mouth, Micah with the fast laugh, Ben who followed the other two like a spare thought. Their sneakers squeaked, their voices arriving ahead of them.
"Hey, church mouse," Tyler said, shouldering him sideways from the sink. "Where's your babysitter?"
"Got caught stealing gummy bears," Micah chimed, delighted by his own imagination. "Gonna pray 'em back onto the shelf."
Ben hovered in the doorway, eyes on the hall, the way Ben's mother had probably taught him to be cautious while forgetting to teach him to be kind.
Noah swallowed and kept his gaze down. "I need to go to class," he said.
Tyler leaned a hip against the sink and made a show of washing his hands without water. "Class of what? Broken Homes 101?" His smile thinned. "How's the drunk, by the way?"
Micah's laughter snagged. "He means your mom."
"She's not..." Noah started and stopped. You could make a word true by saying it too hard. He tucked his mouth into quiet.
"Bet your dad uses that belt," Tyler said conversationally, like he was shopping for one. He let the tip of his tongue touch a front tooth, tasting his own cruelty. "Bet Joshua stands there and watches because he's brave."
"He'd break your face," Noah said, before he understood he'd said it.
Tyler's grin widened, a curtain opening. "Yeah? He's not here though...is he?"
It happened fast, and then it happened slow. A shove, Tyler's palm on Noah's breastbone. A skid, Noah's shoes losing purchase on a slick of something the janitor had missed. His shoulder hit the paper-towel dispenser, and it juddered loose a single grayish rectangle like a flag of surrender. He went to the floor in a crackle of knees and elbows and dull pain. Tile pressed its cold into his cheek.
They stood over him in a shape that said they were boys now, but the shape wanted to be men when it mattered least. Words fell on him like pennies, cheap and satisfying to throw.
"Trash house."
"Drunk mom."
"Thief brother."
"Crybaby."
He begged them to stop. He was not ashamed of begging. It seemed like the only language left to try. He put his hands up in front of his face, and Tyler's shoe found his forearm instead of his mouth. Micah, emboldened, aimed a kick at his ribs and landed shallow. Ben didn't kick. He watched the hallway and didn't leave.
"Please," Noah said. "Stop."
The part that felt like his chest, the part that counted and shook and loved, stepped back. He didn't choose it. Stepping back felt like the floor taking a breath. The world thinned and clarified. Sound became bead-bright and precise: the squeak of a sneaker torsioning on tile, the wet catch of Micah's laugh, Tyler's breath through his nose, quick and mean.
Somewhere inside him, a small, polite click turned.
And then, Noah's body went quiet.
"Little one," said the voice inside, somewhere between a palm and a whisper, "stand up."
Noah did.
It wasn't growth so much as arrangement. His small frame found a taller geometry. His spine straightened, and the angles took on purpose. When he breathed, it rose from lower, as if there were a second set of lungs that fit only one shape: this one. His eyes went a winter kind of blue. He looked at Tyler, and when he spoke, the voice that arrived did not belong in a nine-year-old's mouth.
"Enough," it said.
Tyler grinned without meaning to. "Oh, look," he said, circling his fist. "Baby's mad."
Noah crossed the distance in half the steps he should have had. He didn't charge. He entered. His shoulder planted just under Tyler's ribs, and he drove. The stall door behind Tyler took the hit, flew open with a rattle of hinges, and banged back. Tyler folded around the impact, and Noah's fists followed, fast and economical, like he'd rehearsed on air, and now the air had a face.
Knuckles met cheekbone, dull, thick, a sound like books dropped flat. Another found the soft under the eye. Tyler's head glanced off the metal partition and left a sharp sound. Blood came, bright and quick, at the nose and running over his lip and onto his chin.
Micah took one look and bolted, shoe soles squealing, his voice pitching high as it broke into the hall. "Help! Hey! Help..." The word ricocheted down the corridor, setting other words ringing. Ben stuttered backward, hands up, then he ran too, grateful for the new, clean job of telling someone.
Noah, or rather the voice that had walked him upright, had settled its hand around the small bones of his wrist. He hit Tyler again. And again. The rhythm found itself and filled the room. Tyler tried to turtle and protect his face. Hands came up, elbows tucked. A punch slid through the crease between wrist and forearm and took the breath out of him with a mewling sound. Another drove at the jaw and snapped his head sideways. He made a wet noise that wasn't a word.
"Closer," the voice murmured approvingly, and the boy it lived inside drove a short punch into the belly, the kind that folds you around a new inside. "Harder."
"Stop..." Tyler managed and found nothing to hang the word on.
The first teacher hit the doorway and hung there a slivered second, disbelief wrestling with protocol. The woman behind him slid past and shouted Noah's name. The third arrived already reaching, a big man with keys that chimed against his belt. They waded in.
It felt like grabbing the wrong end of a live wire. Noah's body did not read as a child's in their hands. His weight contained itself. When they lifted, he lowered. When they pulled, he clenched and found purchase. One took an arm, and Noah's shoulder rolled free. Another wrapped an elbow across Noah's chest, and Noah dropped his center of gravity as if the floor had agreed to rise and meet him. The third slotted behind and locked both forearms across Noah's upper arms, and still the small body dragged the knot of them an inch, two, toward the boy on the floor.
"Let..." the deep voice began, and the teachers felt sound vibrate against their bones. "Go."
"Jesus," one of them said under his breath. "He's..."
"...heavy," the big one panted, adjusting his grip, "I can't..." He couldn't finish the sentence. Strength was the word he couldn't make.
"NOAH!" the woman shouted again, with the force you would use to step a child away from a truck.
Something in the boy's body flinched at his name, not meaning, just recognition. The deep voice, that other, went still, evaluating.
"Little one," it said, quieter now. "We kill what hurts you."
Tyler made a small, broken sound. His face was blood-wet and already swelling. He put his palms up, an ungainly bless-me gesture, part plea, part surrender. "Please," he whispered. He had never said please to anyone and meant it.
The man with the keys shifted, heaved. The grip on Noah's arms tightened. A fourth adult arrived, then a fifth, the gym coach, red-faced and sure of leverage. They took Noah in layers, pried him back a little, and then a little more. His feet skated, his sneakers squeaked. He strained forward with the locked, terrible insistence of a machine that had found its groove. Three of them were needed, then four. It took all of them to lift his body, and still, he weighed.
"Turn him," the coach barked, breathless. "Turn him..."
They did, and the sound stopped because the fists had nowhere to go but air. Noah's head snapped side to side, not looking for help, just hunting the one thing his body had learned to answer: closeness, and closure. The deep voice stayed in his mouth like a bit.
"Enough," the woman said again, softer now. In that softness, something opened that force couldn't touch. Noah blinked. The winter blue receded in small degrees. He hung in the tangle of adults with sudden, bewildered lightness, as if someone had quietly removed a weight from his pockets.
He looked down at Tyler—the red mess, the shocked eyes, the raw sound trying to be breath, and for a moment, nothing in him recognized the scene. Then it landed. His mouth opened. No sound came out.
"Hey," said the big man with the keys, voice gone careful, as though speaking to a skittish dog. "Hey, kid. You here?"
Out in the hall, sirens started slowly approaching, bringing with them what would later be described as "not what anyone expected at Jefferson Elementary."
*
(Present Time)
Noah walked out of the bathroom, a sigh of steam following his trail, towel slung carelessly around his neck.
It was the first time Shane had seen him since the shooting. Noah didn't look at him. He crossed the little room in three quiet lines, doorway to dresser, dresser to bed, bed to the far lamp, cornered the mattress, and slipped under the floral. His hand found the switch and dropped the light on his side into a small black well.
Joshua chuckled from his bed, low and pleased with himself. "Reunion's going great," he said to the ceiling.
Shane's eyes stung. He let the tears come without sound. He drifted the way a boat drifts when the rope is still tied, sleep catching, jerking loose, catching again, until, at some unkind hour, he woke.
The room had gone that soft, colorless blue of a night halfway done. The world was a smear until he blinked it back into edges. Joshua lay on his stomach, one arm flung out, the bandage ghost-pale at his side. At the other bed's edge, Noah sat upright, back to Shane, elbows on thighs, head bowed. His shoulders looked larger in the murk, the back broader than the one Shane knew.
Then the voice came.
Deep.
Close.
Not Joshua's.
Not anything human asleep.
"We need to be done with liabilities," it rasped, almost affectionately. Irritation braided through the calm.
Heat feathered Shane's scalp. He didn't move. He watched Joshua sleep and listened hard enough to make his own pulse feel treacherous.
Noah's answer came thin as thread. "No."
"He screams," the voice said. "He flails. He knows where we are. He makes us visible. We don't keep glass in our pockets and pretend it's cloth."
"He's not to be touched," Noah said, a notch firmer. The sentence landed like a small hand set on a table.
A beat. The unit kicked and coughed. The blue light shifted a fraction. The deep voice lowered, coaxing. "You always hesitate when it's soft-eyed. I clean. You breathe. That is the arrangement."
"No," Noah said again.
The voice sharpened. "You forget what happens when you take your palm off the door. They walk in. They look. They say the wrong things."
"Enough," Noah said, quiet and clear, as if naming a boundary the dark had to obey.
Silence cracked and settled. Shane could hear the tiny clicks in the voice now, the way it tapped a tooth between words, like a man deciding which one to pull. "He will hand you to them," it murmured. "Not by malice. By love. They all do. We close what hurts you. We close it, and the quiet comes back."
Noah leaned forward until his shoulders made a hard silhouette. He spoke very softly, so softly Shane missed it, the words swallowed by the dark.
"If you hurt him...I'll kill us both."
*
They got him out at first light.
Joshua's fingers worked the tape at Shane's wrists, the same careful peel he'd used on the gag. Then he stooped, one arm under Shane's knees, the other at his back, and lifted. He grunted once when the bandage tugged, then carried him out.
In the lot sat a dull-gray SUV with a plate that hadn't belonged to it last night. Joshua popped the back door with his hip. "Finally," he said, half-laughing, half-winded, "wheels with a fucking AC." He set Shane on the seat and buckled him like a stubborn child, quick and neat.
They rolled.
Noah drove, eyes on the road. "We're running low," he said, not to anyone in particular.
Joshua checked a phone he should not have had. "Gas station two miles," he said.
Minutes later, they pulled in under the canopy's flicker. Noah slid out, carding the pump with a shrug, the hose nesting into the tank with a hollow clunk. Joshua tucked his shirt over his bandage and walked inside.
Shane watched Noah. He waited for eye contact and got the profile instead, the jaw set, the lashes down. Noah did not look back.
Then, the sound came like a door slamming two rooms away, a metallic bark, then voices knotted hard.
"Shit," Noah said under his breath. He yanked the back door, knifed the strap at Shane's ankles with a box cutter, and caught Shane's gaze at last. "Be quiet," he said. "And stay behind me."
Shane nodded slowly, and they crossed the short run under the canopy, pushed through the jingling door, and into the bright, humming cold of the store.
Joshua stood at the end of the counter, gun up but low, posture loose like a man explaining a problem with a return policy. Behind the register, a middle-aged clerk in a faded hunting cap had a shotgun leveled at Joshua's face, eyes wide and wet, finger white around the trigger. The last shot had shredded a shelf of jerky into confetti. The air smelled like propellant and sweet meat.
The clerk's barrel jittered. "Get the hell out," he barked, voice cracking, and it sounded like he wanted to be someone else when he said it.
Noah stepped in sideways, palms empty and open. He pitched his voice gently and humanly. "Hey," he said. "Sir. Take a breath. We're leaving. Nobody's here to do anything stupid."
The clerk snapped the barrel toward Noah by inches, eyes running past Shane's frame, torn between targets. Joshua didn't move. His eyes flicked once to Noah and back, an old baton pass.
"Don't you come closer," the clerk warned. Sweat stood at his temple, a bright coin. He'd missed by inches once and knew he didn't have many inches left to waste.
"I won't," Noah said, and stopped where he was. The door chimed behind them, polite and ridiculous. "Look at me. Not the gun...me. What's your name?"
The clerk swallowed. "Why."
"Because you're shaking," Noah said softly, "and names stop the shaking."
"Rick," he said, too fast, like a boy called to recite.
"Rick." Noah nodded like they were at a counter discussing a lottery ticket. "Okay, Rick. I'm Noah. This is my brother. You're scared. So am I. You're thinking about the last men who came in here with a gun, or the story you told yourself when you bought that one. You're thinking...what if today is the day I have to use it."
Rick's eyes pinballed between them. "Back up."
"I will," Noah said. "In a second. Right now, breathe. In for four. Hold. Out for six." He lifted his hands and counted with his fingers, slow, letting the air between beats thicken. Somewhere behind the counter, a lottery display clicked through its numbers. Somewhere behind Noah, Shane's breath scratched like a match.
"You don't get to..." Rick began, and his voice broke on the word get.
"You have kids, Rick?" Noah interrupted, as if the question had been waiting its turn.
A blink.
A flinch.
"Or a dog," Noah offered, easily. "Or a tomato plant you named because you're lonelier than you admit. You know that feeling."
"I said back. The fuck. Up," Rick snapped, and the barrel twitched again, left, right, a stutter step. He was going to shoot by accident if he didn't shoot on purpose.
"Look at your right hand," Noah murmured. "See the tremor? That's adrenaline lying to your muscles. It's saying you're bigger than you are. It's telling you time is shorter than it is. Let it go."
Rick's eyes flicked down, furious with himself for listening. His finger tightened reflexively.
Then, Noah's voice changed.
It wasn't louder. It was simply nearer, closer to the ground, the vowels settling lower in his mouth like stones placed in a stream to make the water bearable. "Rick," he said again, and the syllable darkened. "You're a good listener. I like that about you."
The clerk's gaze ticked up, caught by the compliment he hadn't been fed in a long time.
"Here's what's going to happen," Noah went on, the cadence smoothing, the room narrowing to the path his words cut. "You're going to angle the barrel toward the tile. No one wants the ceiling peppered. You're going to ease your finger off the trigger because you don't want to be the one who makes a sound you have to live with. You'll feel silly, and then you'll feel relief. You will."
Rick's breathing stuttered. "You think..."
"You'll do it because you're tired, and because your shoulder's going to ache tomorrow from how you're holding that thing, and because you don't want your boss to see the camera footage and think you don't know how to carry his business." Noah took a step, then another. "Because you are a reasonable man."
"I said..." Rick tried, and the barrel dipped a fraction, as if it had decided to be heavy.
"That's it," Noah coaxed, warmth threading the words now, something like pride braided with it. "Reasonable. Good. See how your wrists like that better? There you go."
Joshua had not moved. He rode the moment like a man on a small boat waiting for a larger ship to throw a shadow.
Noah walked until the muzzle was within reach. He lifted one hand, slow as a sunrise, and set two fingers on the barrel's underlip, just enough to show the metal it could be still. "Rick," he said, and in the name was gravity.
The clerk's mouth opened. The barrel came down to the tile in an obedient tilt. He let go with his right hand first, then the left, as if the shotgun had cooled under Noah's touch. Noah slid it out of his grip with a small, precise turn.
"Thank you," Noah said. He smiled the way you smile at a man who has finally understood the rules of a game and found that he can live with them.
Noah's smile stayed.
But the voice didn't.
"I appreciate your cooperation, Rick," it said, deeper now, sin smoothing into the syllables like oil. Noah's eyes didn't quite look like Noah's.
Rick's relief broke across his face, naked and sudden. There was the briefest pause, a blink in which the room felt the shape of what it was about to be.
"Unfortunately, I'll have to kill you," the voice finished, almost apologetic. "But for what it's worth...I'll relish it. Tremendously."
The shotgun rose in Noah's hands as if weightless. Joshua's eyes flicked once, and then held, because there was nothing left to do but watch.
Noah pulled the trigger.
The scream tore out of Shane before he could swallow it. It bounced off the glass coolers and the tile and the tin ceiling and came back to him sounding like someone else.
From the back of the store, behind a swinging stockroom door, two female voices answered, thin, ragged, a woman pleading, a child's high, bright terror threading through her.
Noah, blood stippling his forearms and face, the shotgun hanging easy in his hands, walked toward the door without looking at anyone. The door flapped once and shut behind him. The woman's begging spiked, words falling over one another. The smaller voice hit a pitch that made Shane's teeth ache.
Two shots cracked the room open.
Shane began to cry. It was not loud. It was the helpless leaking of a body that had run out of places to store anything. Joshua closed his eyes. His fingers flexed once on the pistol and stilled, as if finishing a prayer he already knew wouldn't do any good.
Noah came back through the door, pushing it with his shoulder. He was splashed now, shirt, jawline, a constellation across one cheek. The set of him was different, quiet in a way that wasn't restful. The eyes were wintered-over blue. The smile, when it came, wasn't Noah's.
"Nice going," Joshua said, dry, like there might be a version of the moment where he could pretend they still told jokes.
"Relax," the other said, voice smooth and dark, placing the shotgun on the counter as if returning a borrowed umbrella. "I'll take it from here."
Shane screamed again, raw and useless. For the first time, the other turned and let the voice rise.
"Enough," he thundered, and the room flinched. The word filled the aisles and rattled the plastic on the pegs.
He crossed to Shane in three easy steps and took Shane's jaw in his bloodied hand, not cruel, just claiming. He tilted Shane's face up until their eyes met. Up close, there was nothing of the man Shane loved: no soft to the mouth, no skittish light behind the blue. What stared back at him was engineered calm stretched over a bright, cold hunger.
"Where's Noah," Shane managed, salt and snot and air fighting for the same inch of throat.
"Sleeping," the other said pleasantly, as if they were in a waiting room discussing delays. His thumb stroked once along the hinge of Shane's jaw, a parody of tenderness.
Shane shook his head, small and hard, like he could rattle the answer out and make it the wrong one. "Who the fuck are you...?"
The smile widened a notch, just enough to show the idea of teeth.
"Name's Sprite," he said. "We've met before, remember?"
(To be continued...)
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