Heartless

❆ Twenty-Eight ❆

A loud groan shook the room, startling us. My eyes flew to the back bedroom and the shadow darting under the bedroom door. Kenji hid closer into my side, pressing his face into my leg. "Ada, I'm scared." Another cry screeched through the bar. He jolted and let out a small wail.

Hendric backed us up, pushing my shoulder to force my to comply. "Ada, take Kenji outside and— Ada!" Dropping Kenji's hand, I ducked under Hendric's outstretched arm and darted over to the door, shoving my shoulder into it.

I collapsed on the ground in a heap of soaked blankets. I recoiled back from the pile of vomit I had narrowly missed diving head-first into and glanced up at whose it was. I froze. Sazi lay on their wide bed in a blank-stared daze, her skin pale and her lips whiter that her teeth. I nearly screamed at the sight of her, but before I could a darker shadow zipped in front of me and towered over me. "Get out!" he roared, kicking glass at me as I crawled back on the floor. "Get out!"

"Bromm, it's me! It's Adaira!" I scrambled to my feet and held up my hands to fend him off just in case, but I knew he wouldn't hurt me. Bromm had spent half my life raising me; this man was practically my father.

He paused in the doorway, glaring at me and clutching a piece of a broken table leg in his large hands. A sneer of pure pain smeared across his face. "Then get the hell out." He swung his arm and threw the leg at me. I flung myself back against the floor and gaped up at him in shock. He stomped toward me and snatched a bottle of liquor from the candle, holding it over his head as he approached me.

"Bromm!" Suddenly, Hendric leapt on top of him, ramming his shoulder so hard in to the man's gut that I heard the air leave Bromm's lips. They toppled back in a fury of flailing fists and angry grunts, Hendric shoving him off and standing over him as he caught his breath on his knees. "That's my sister! What the hell is the matter with you?" he screamed, his face a bright red as he wiped blood from his lip. He hauled my still-stunned self off the ground and kept us a safe distance away from the man who had always been a father to us. I wiped glass from my palms and stared at him as he stood, his face pink with the lack of oxygen and his bald head drenched in sweat despite the cold.

Bromm staggered back toward where Sazi lay unmoving, more or less frozen in time. "Get the hell out of my bar, all of you," he grumbled defeatedly, but the anger still pumped in his veins, and we were cautious not to upset him again.

"What is going on?" I wanted answers now. Not just on why he had attacked me like I was a demon from hell, but where the entire town had gone. Something would not sit right inside me and I didn't like it.

He whirled on us, his rage barely restrained as he grabbed a knife off the ground and pointed it directly at us. "I'll tell you what's going on." He trained the knife at my chest and spat off to the side. "Do you have any idea what we have been going through since the offering? Sazi has cried herself to sleep every single night mourning you three, and then— poof! Gabriel comes back with the news that you're alive, Adaira, but you tossed him out like some spoiled princess and left him in the snow to sleep with the monster who's been terrorizing this town."

I shook my head, taking a step toward him. I wanted to beg him to listen, but it didn't appear he ever would. "Bromm, if you would just listen I could—"

"Then," he roared, eyes wild with pain and fury, "you show up here after two months with no word that you're even alive; and you don't even have the nerve to talk to Sazi or me, all because you needed to scold Gabriel for caring enough about you to try and kill those bastards. Oh oh oh! And this one is my favorite. Then— then you bring that bitch down here, knowing damn well that she and that beast up there are growing roses in the garden. And you know what, Adaira? There's a reason we don't trust outsiders here, and my Sazi is the reason why." He whipped his arm out to point back to her, tears rolling down his plump face. "Thanks to you and your friend, Adaira, my wife is going to die."

I watched Sazi now, my eyes nailed to her corpse-like figure and her ashen skin, the blood staining her pillows and sheets, the smears of red streaked under her eyes and nose. I remembered seeing Hendric like that the first night after he went hunting along. He had been trying to prove something to me after we had fought the night before; for the life of me, I couldn't remember what it is we argued about. He went out on his own and came back without a single ounce of game. Later that night, however, as I cooked a squirrel over the fire, I heard him vomiting behind the hut, and found him unconscious in a stream of his own blood. It ran from every orifice: his eyes, his mouth, noses, and ears. Within days, he couldn't get out of bed. After two weeks, his eyesight failed him. The rest was history.

Now, I could only imagine what he was going through. His wife was dying, yet my brother was still— "Wait!" I shouted, making him sneer at me. "There's a cure," I blurted. His gaze sobered instantly, his face falling.

"What?" he mumbled, his lips moving almost as if they were numb.

Hendric whirled around to glare at me. "What are you doing?" he whispered harshly, grabbing my arm.

I yanked it out of his grip and held up my hands in surrender, taking cautious steps toward Bromm. "There's a cure, Bromm. I swear." Before he could argue, I snatched up Hendric's hand and pulled him beside me. "Hendric took it. He nominated himself because he had the blood rose, remember? He was going to die, and now look at him. He's perfectly healthy again." He turned to shoot me an outraged glare. I ignored him. It wasn't entirely true what I was saying: Lumea herself had said there was no actual existing cure, but what she had given my brother had practically brought him back from the dead. So, technically, I wasn't lying.

Bromm looked back at his wife, then at me. "Where is it?" My mouth slacked with an answer. He slammed the bottle against the counter, shattering it. "Where is it?!"

"It's on the mountain! Back with the people we were staying with, they know how to make it." His face suddenly fell. The color drained from his face so quickly I thought he had suffered a stroke. "What is it?" He stumbled back against the edge of their bed and collapsed on the floor, his face in his hands, muttering incoherent words and shaking uncontrollably.

Hendric's face hardened. "Bromm, where did they go?" he asked, but his tone was flat and cold, and in the same instant a pang of terror shot through my heart, I knew where they had gone.

Bromm lifted his heavy head from his hands and peered at us through snot and tears. "They've gone up the mountain." He switched his eyes to stare up at me, his gaze almost pitying me. "They've gone to kill the beast."