Black Holes - The Mors Mortis Trilogy Book 3

Chapter Twenty Three

Zarah shifted so she stood between them, and Cassandra moved with her, hand hovering over her gun.

"Jared..." Zarah began.

"No," Riley said, shooting Zarah a glare. "Don't try and comfort him. He already knows who it is, and he also knows that whatever pain they're going through is deserved."

Her gaze moved back to Jared.

"Don't you?" she asked. "Or have you suddenly decided you love your father again?"

Jared felt the words like a blow, but they confirmed what he'd suspected.

"Fuck you," Jared spat, and then he was charging towards the house.

"Did you really think that what he did wouldn't have consequences?" Riley yelled after him. "Did you expect any of us to waste time helping him?"

Cassandra and Zarah hushed her quickly, but the damage was done. Riley had clearly known about this for a long time, and hadn't done anything about it. She hadn't even cared enough to let him know until it was necessary.

It made him see red, but that fight could wait. It had to.

When he reached the front door, it wasn't locked, and he opened it and stepped into the corridor, shutting it quickly behind him. He leant back against the wood for a second, relieved to have the scrutiny gone, to have a moment to calm himself, and then he straightened, peering into the gloom.

"Hello?" he called.

There was a creak of floorboards, a shuffle of movement and swish of cloth, and then Alice appeared from a door on the right.

He stared at her, fighting down the emotions that clogged up his throat. The woman he'd meet only a couple weeks ago was almost unrecognisable. In the live world, stress could age a person, but he hadn't realised those rules applied here too, not when people had some control over their appearance, their age.

He lowered Danny slowly to a chair by the door and went over to her, scanning her face. Hollow cheeks, dull skin. Alice's face looked like a sun collapsing on itself — all the energy imploding.

"Jared," Alice said, her voice thick, and she pulled him into a hug. His head rested on top of hers and he squeezed his eyes shut for a second before he pulled back.

"Where is he?" he asked.

Alice gestured back to the room she'd appeared from, and Jared stepped inside. It was a study, with a big armchair beside a window whose blinds were drawn, and in the chair, Jared found the person he'd spent his entire life trying to live up to.

Brenton was smaller than Jared had ever seen, his skin folded and the muscle beneath whittled down to only skin and bone. Quiet moans still left his mouth, with words that sounded like pleas but were too scattered to mean anything mixed in.

"He's been like this for weeks," Alice said quietly. "The moment the sky split open, it started. Sometimes, he's calm, but more often he's hysterical, like he's fighting some one."

Jared bit down a surge of something, everything. He couldn't figure out what he was feeling. He'd accepted that his father wasn't a good man, that he'd needed to die, but somehow that made this so much worse. Was Jared still allowed to care about someone he'd turned against, that he'd tried to kill?

"Why did Riley bring us here?" Jared asked.

"She was hoping you could talk to him," Alice said. "He might know how to stabilise the worlds again. He hasn't been responsive to me but... you might be different."

Jared closed his eyes and let himself swim in the darkness for a moment. With Brenton's moans echoing in his ears, and the darkness coating his vision, he could almost believe he was back there again. The thought made him shiver.

"I don't think that will work," he said, his voice thick.

He felt Alice grip his arm, felt her fingers press in. "Why not?"

"Because he's not here."

The words hadn't come from his mouth, and Jared turned to find Leah hovering in the door way, and the sadness in her gaze scraped his heart like teeth.

"Those noises," she said, her voice rusty. "I heard them when I was in the dark place. They echoed."

Jared nodded, and as he moved, he felt Alice's hand slip from his arm, losing all it's strength.

"Yeah," he said, his voice thick. "I don't know how the connection between Brenton's halves work, and I don't know how it's possible, but I think Leah's right."

He looked back at his father, at the scrunch of pain on his face — pain he was feeling from another world, another part of himself.

"Half of Brenton is stuck in the in between."

...

Next chapter out in two weeks!

- Skylar xx