Chapter 24: Will

Chapter 24: Will

“Yesterday, you weren’t there at the celebration,” I said.

Fred’s tiny house was like walking back in time. Everything was decades old and retained its original newness, a fact that amazed me. With Fred sitting by the fireplace in his wheelchair, stoking the fire with a poker, the room seemed like a museum exhibit.

“There was once a time when fathers who lost their sons would mourn them for years. It has not been a week since Maurice’s death was made official. How can I celebrate anything when my only son died?” Fred said. Unlike what I had been led to believe, Fred was able to put together more than just a sentence. He was completely cognizant and coherent.

“You mourn him even though you know of all the things that he did? He kidnapped my mate. He killed people, Fred. And in case you missed it, he was running an illegal, dangerous, and downright unnatural business with the vampires. Even still, you mourn him?” I hadn’t come here looking for a fight. I had come here to seek my brother’s counsel. However, the tone of Fred’s voice suggested otherwise. He seemed to be in no mood to entertain me or my thoughts.

“He was my son, dammit. You killed my son, Will. No matter what his sins were, he was born of my seed. I know that you haven’t had the chance to father a child, but the day you do, and if I am alive that day, I will ask you how it will feel if someone takes that child away from you. Until that day, I am afraid I have nothing more to say to you on the matter. You simply won’t be able to understand,” Fred said, turning his back to me.

It enraged me how obstinate he was being, even though he was my younger brother. I strode across the room and pushed his wheelchair so that he was facing me again.

“I am the Alpha of this pack, Fred. I lead the people. Each one of them is like my family. I know the pain of loss. Do not ever dare to say that I do not know that sorrow. I lost my entire pack. I lost Ariana. I have lost more than you know. While you were out in the world, living your life, marrying, and fathering your child, I was in chains, tied in the darkness. So if it is sorrow and loss we are comparing, let us not begin, for you stand no chance against the sea of anguish that I have braved through!”

It was the first time my anger had resurfaced ever since I had taken the potion. However, there was a difference between the two fits of anger. The one before was almost catalyzed by the smallest of triggers. This one, though, was righteous anger. I was holding my ground and standing up for myself. This anger was not unjust. And since it was a natural anger, I controlled it just as naturally.

“There you go again, going on and on about your woes. There must be a point even for you when that whole bitching tends to get tiring. Aren’t you tired of whining about the past? There’s more to life than what happened to you. Could you be any more selfish?” Fred spat.

Were he not so old and fragile and on the brink of demise, I would have grabbed him by the throat for his insolence. But age demanded respect, and it was this respect that was stopping me from turning this verbal altercation into a physical one.

“Are you saying that you know what Maurice was doing all along and chose to do nothing?” I asked.

“What I know matters not. I have been immobilized for the last twenty-five years as a result of a series of strokes that have left me paralyzed from below the waist. You were in chains, but at least you were free to move your limbs whenever you desired. When I wish to move my legs, I have to make peace with the knowledge that as long as I live, I shall never walk again,” Fred said, the bitterness gone from his voice. It was replaced with genuine sadness.

It disarmed me enough to say, “My brother, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hound you.”

“And I didn’t mean to skip out on your engagement celebration either. It is okay. I am just coping with loss in my own way. Sadly, for me, it’s the cripple’s way. I can’t go anywhere, so these walls hold my sorrow,” Fred said, tears streaming from his eyes.

“I never intended to kill your son. Had he repented or turned to our side, I’d have spared him. But even after he had taken everyone to the culling field, he didn’t stop. He continued smuggling with the vampires, and he kidnapped my mate. If I hadn’t made him pay for all those crimes with his life, what good an Alpha would I have been?” I asked.

“If I were in your position, I would have done the same,” Fred said. “But when it comes to family, rationality goes out the window. How am I ever going to get another son at my age? A man only has one thing at the end of the day. His legacy. What about my legacy?”

“Your legacy lives on in the form of your grandson. He’s twice the man your son was, and he is loyal, brave, pure, and strong. Vincent is your legacy. You should rest assured of that,” I said, holding Fred’s hand.

“I suppose you are right. Now tell me why you came here in the first place. It wasn’t to scold me for not showing up to your engagement party, was it? You are troubled. Tell me what’s wrong,” Fred said.

“Before your son died, he said something that has been troubling me. He told me that someone has been working against me for the past seventy years, ever since I left Germany. Do you have any clue of an idea as to who that could be?”

Fred’s eyes glared with rage. Color flushed to his cheeks as his hands quivered on the handles of his wheelchair. He snarled at me, furling his brows. “You dare mention him again after what I just said to you? Do you have no honor? I am still mourning his loss, and yet you choose to come here, insult me, taunt me, and then inquire about some matter my son spoke of at the time of his death? How heartless are you?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I am sorry,” I said, struggling to keep this conversation civil, but it seemed that Fred did not want to keep it civil any longer. “I just wanted to make some sense of it.”

“And so you thought that the best person to ask would be the deceased’s father?” Fred spat. “Have you lost your mind?”

“That does it, Fred. I have been trying to remain calm with you, and you keep pushing me and pushing me. Enough. What did Maurice mean by what he said? Answer me or answer the pack for obstructing the course of justice!” Now it was my turn to be angry. Fred was doing this on purpose. Such had always been his way from the beginning.

“I will give you nothing,” Fred said.

“Fred. Really? Are you really going to do this? Mother used to spank you on the butt when you used to pull such shenanigans when we were little. Come off it,” I said, trying to appease us both with the memory of our mother. She was, after all, the link that joined us as brothers. We had fond memories of her, to say the least.

“You had to invoke mom, didn’t you?” Fred said, chuckling dryly. “And you have the memory of a hawk.”

“That I do,” I said, nodding. “Now. Could you please give me something so that we may end this tense exchange? I feel terrible as it is.”

“If something or someone has been conspiring against you for the past seventy years, it must be because they didn’t want you to be Alpha. They must have, let’s say, disagreed with some of your decisions. When you suddenly decided to migrate from Germany to America, you forsook acres of our ancestral lands, lands that the Grimms had owned for centuries. Maybe, someone bids you ill will because they lost claim to those lands because you decided to move from Germany to America. Or maybe someone was in love with the person you thought you were in love with. It is Ariana I speak of. Loves and their jealousies have a track record of forging strong enmities. Or it could be someone who was not a werewolf but of another species: a vampire, a hunter, or an occultist. Maybe Edward Beckett somehow lives. There are so many meanings to that one sentence. Who knows what Maurice might have meant?” Fred said and then took a deep breath from his oxygen cylinder.

“You are strained. I will leave you to it, brother. And for all its worth, I am sorry for everything. For killing your son, for disturbing your peace just now, and for not being a perfect leader,” I said, leaving his room.

“I may forgive you, but there are those whose forgiveness you’d wish to seek who are dead now. What of them? Who is to say that Maurice was speaking of the living exclusively? Possibly, someone from the dead may have been conspiring against you, setting up failsafe plans to ensure your doom. It could be that, couldn’t it?” Fred asked.

“You have given me a lot to think about,” I said. Truth was, I just needed to get out of his home. The tense verbal fight had drawn a lot out of me, leaving me vulnerable. I had never expected my brother to be so cold toward me. It made me wonder if the bond of our brotherhood had been permanently severed by my actions.

When I went home, I searched for Alexis everywhere but found no sign of her. She had mentioned something to me in the morning about going into the city. Perhaps she was off meeting her friend Maliha, or maybe she was doing some shopping. I just needed to see her and feel normal once more. She had that effect on me. It was one of the bounties of true love; seeing her made all the troubles flee from my mind.

While I waited for her, I sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee, mulling over the memories that I’d retained over the years, racking hard in those archives of my thoughts to see who the enemy could be.

The answer seemed to be too simple, and yet it eluded me. I had no enemies outside the ones that I’d made in the course of my revenge against Edward. I’d never even met Edward before he had decided to kidnap me and use me for his experiments.

What Fred had said about someone from the pack bearing me ill will resonated with me. But that resonation did me no good. For now, this knot appeared to have no solution. I did not like it when problems had no solutions. For almost seventy years, I had looked at the padlock on my cage, wondering how I’d be able to open it. If it hadn’t been for luck, I’d still have been stuck in that cage, withering away.

Who would have stood to gain from my imprisonment?

***

Later that afternoon, after I had gotten tired of waiting for Alexis, I decided to take out my old documents from the cabinet. I hadn’t opened these documents in more than seventy years. These were diaries that I had written over the course of my travel from Germany to America. There were pictures of the Grimm pack from the 1940s. Some of the pack members had written journals and had entrusted them to me to make sure that I’d safeguard them in case something happened to the pack members.

If there was an answer, it was somewhere in these documents.

As I sat there, perusing each document carefully, I realized that this endeavor was going to be too tedious and time-taking. So, I called Vincent, and together the two of us started going through the documents one by one. Even then, it took us more than three hours to completely sort through all the documents, and we found nothing.

“What did your father mean by that?” I asked, telling Vincent what Maurice had said, hoping that Vincent’s reaction would be different than Fred’s.

“My dad never told anyone this, but I knew. He didn’t know that I knew. We shared a house growing up. I sometimes heard things that I wasn’t meant to hear. Way before there was Blair or Ralph, there was someone else my father talked to on the phone. I never knew who they were. All I knew was at nine every night, the phone would ring, and my father would lock the study door. Sometimes I’d listen and try to make sense of what he was talking about. I was so little back then I didn’t even understand most of it. Once or twice, I told mom that I had heard him saying bad words. For a kid of five or six years, words like fuck and shit are bad words. And I had heard him using those. After that, mom started spying on him,” Vincent said. I could see that this was straining him, having to deal with so much trauma and unresolved emotions. These were his parents that he was talking about. It was always difficult to talk about one’s parents, especially after they’d died. It was one of the reasons I never talked about mine or Alexis ever talked about hers.

“She would snoop whenever he’d get the calls and try to make sense of things. She never told me what she found out. One night, while I was in bed, trying to sleep, there was a huge argument between mom and dad. I heard a loud thud and the sound of a muffled scream. I was too scared to get out of bed, so I slept, even though that was the hardest thing to do that night. The next morning, dad told me that mom had suddenly gone somewhere and that she would never return. It took me twenty years to understand that my father had killed my mother that night because she had learned his secret. I never prodded into the matter, what with my life being dear to me. I didn’t want to end up like my mom. And so, I never came to know whom he talked to on the landline every day at nine at night,” Vincent said.

“That is a lot to unpack. How come you never told me this before?” I asked.

“Because I had to process it all retroactively. Sometimes, the trauma that shapes us can only be tackled after the fact. When I went away after dad’s death, I did meet some therapists in Ohio who helped me unmask the trauma and make me see the truth. It helped me a lot. I learned to differentiate between the person who was Maurice, the corrupt mayor, and the Maurice who was my dad. You didn’t kill my dad. You killed the corrupt mayor. My dad had already died the day he chose to value his illegal business over his family. He was lost to me the day he killed my mom.”

“It only creates more questions for me,” I said. “Now I am left wondering as to who this mysterious person was who called your father every night at nine.”

“I believe I do have one tiny bit of information that may be able to help you regarding that,” Vincent said, his eyes aglow.

“What’s that?”

“I only heard the man’s voice on the other end of the line one time, and that was by mistake. Back in the day, landlines used to have two or three connections in one house, so if you picked up one phone, you could hear what the other person was saying on the line. I was little, so I didn’t know I was doing something wrong. I was just trying to call mom, thinking that if I dialed some magical combination of numbers, it would dial her number, and she’d answer my call and tell me that she’d come back and that she loved me. That never happened. Of course, it couldn’t happen. My mom was dead. But when I picked up the phone, my dad was talking to that same person. It was a man’s voice, Will. And the man was speaking in a German accent,” Vincent said.

“A German accent? How would you know what a German accent sounds like? You were so little back then,” I said, but even as Vince said it, my mind began unraveling with thoughts focusing on who this mysterious German-accented man could be.

“Because growing up, PBS used to air those documentaries about Hitler and World War II all the time. Not to mention all the Call of Duty games had German Nazi villains in them. That’s how I knew,” Vincent said.

“And do you remember what that voice had said?” I asked.

“I am afraid I don’t remember what he said. Just that it was a man’s voice, and his accent was too Germanic,” Vincent said.

At least now I had some direction in which to search for this mysterious enemy. Thanks to Vincent, I knew two things—it was a man, and he spoke German.

Unluckily, it didn’t come close to narrowing down who it could be in real life. Certainly, it was no one that I knew.

Perhaps Alexis would be able to help.

Vincent had just finished talking when the door opened, and Alexis came inside, her face pale, her eyes wide. Her lower lip was quivering, and her hands were shaking. She was holding a cassette in one hand and a crowbar in the other.

“I have something to share with you, Will, and you’re not going to like it,” Alexis said.

My heart skipped a beat. Somehow, I already knew what she was going to share with me. I just did not want to accept it. Understanding dawned on me a little too late.