Chapter Two

Duke Knight-Darnell-Moonscale

Teddy hugged me too tight. My half brother was a few years younger than me, but you'd never know it by the way he squeezed my glass skeleton as soon as we came through the Other World gateway. I squeezed him back, wondering if someone had sandpapered his bones too when his carrier died. He let out a sob against my shoulder and our siblings, Sequin and Daliah shot me that look that said he was at it again – being over emotional. I fought off the urge to flip them off behind Teddy's back, because they'd just lost their mother too.

It wasn't possible to be over emotional about losing a parent. It didn't matter how long he knew or didn't know his mama was sick. Lotus's death killed something inside me and left questions vibrating through my hollow places. I couldn't imagine what it had done to them. Everyone grieved differently and later I'd tell them to shut the fuck up and let Teddy grieve however he needed to. Their grief only bought them so many free passes to be assholes.

"Dad wanted to meet you guys here, but he just can't. He's still on the balcony smoking cigarettes. The attorney came to talk to him. Mom's doctor came too. I think Clarence and Medwin stopped by. Mom's parents too, of course," Teddy rambled on between sobs.

"I'll get some food in him," I promised. "We brought some stuff from the bakery and some stuff the folks around the village baked. We got it taken care of. Have you eaten?"

"No," he shook his head. "Not since before."

"You gotta eat. You gotta be there at all the stuff for her," I whispered, avoiding the word funeral on purpose.

Blithe walked back between Sequin and Daliah and I walked back with Teddy. Our mates, Cord and Syre would meet up with us later. I already missed Syre and our baby, but didn't want to add the emotional challenge of dealing with a kid to a house already thick and sticky with grief.

"She wanted to tell you," Teddy sniffled, pulling himself together a bit now that we were in motion. "She was afraid everyone else would find out. Mom loved you. You're one of us."

I let him ramble. Later, I'd work through what she did or didn't want to tell me. I'd work through why I didn't notice anything was wrong with her when she came to picnic with us shortly after Syre got pregnant. I'd work out a lot of stuff later, but this wasn't the time for processing. Death never made sense. It would never make sense. So, I was just there going through all the motions that might aid us all in processing later on.

"They're not at the house," Teddy said, but I had lost the trail of his ramblings.

"Who?" I asked.

"Our grandparents. Dad's parents. He won't let them in. He told Clarence not to let them in," Teddy said.

"Do you want to talk to them?" I asked, ignoring the sour taste that coated my tongue whenever I thought about them. After all, they pretty much claimed I wasn't related to them.

"No," Teddy shook his head hard and fast. "I was telling you because I didn't want you to worry. If you do see them and they say something stupid, just punch one of them. They're not worth it. If they come around they only make everything worse."

"I won't let them bother you," I said and meant it.

"I won't let them bother you," he laughed.

"Oh, that's right. You're their favorite," I teased him.

"I must've been really bad in a past life to get that curse," he managed a chuckle through his tears.

I stopped and hugged him again. Teddy and I didn't grow up together all the time, but the flight and family links vibrated between us. I knew him in his egg briefly when Dad and Lotus showed up to save us all from a psycho when I was just a kid.

"Hey, did I ever tell you about the time your parents flew from Hemlock Academy and crashed through the roof of my grandparents' house to save us from a psycho?" I asked Teddy but the rest of our small group stopped too.

"I don't think you've ever told me how you remember that one," Blithe chuckled, wiping his cheek with his shoulder.

"I knew he was there," I started the story as we walked some more. "No one really believed me. They thought it was all bad dreams until he got there. I had Joy under the bed a couple of times because if I could do nothing else, I wasn't letting him take the baby. I wasn't in the house when Dad crashed through it but I remember the sound of everything splintering when he crashed through the roof. I was with Lotus because my carrier had a red-out because he needed blood. She was so bad ass."

"She was," Daliah nodded. "Handled her parents like a pro too when we were little."

"Thankfully, we have parents that don't need handled," Sequin chimed in.

The fact that Lotus's secret illness might've been the reason Dad wasn't around much when I was little had already crossed my mind. That was something else to process later when the grief didn't stick to our flesh and sink into our pores.

"Come with me to get him off the balcony?" I asked Teddy when we arrived at the house.

The others filed inside intent on getting something to eat. I wasn't hungry any more than Teddy was. Sequin could say all he wanted that Dad didn't need to be handled, but we all needed to be handled or wrangled at one time or another. We had to get him fed and put him in the shower before everyone else arrived. Sure, they wouldn't care if he smelled like an ashtray, but he'd care later. I figured if I got Dad into the kitchen to eat, we'd eat too.

"I'll wait in the bedroom, okay?" Teddy asked. "You don't need both of us a mess on you. He's so--- broken."

I hugged Teddy one more time before we walked inside. It was as if we had to keep hugging each other or one of us was going to lose a broken piece of ourselves before we had the chance to glue everything back together. The others headed into the kitchen, and we started up the wide spiral staircase. There was an elevator in the kitchen that opened in the old maid's quarters upstairs, but unless something heavy was being moved it was barely used.

I ignored the fact I walked through Dad and Lotus's bedroom as I made my way out to the balcony. I didn't look too hard. I hadn't been in the room since I was a little kid. It felt as if I was crossing through a foreign land where I didn't want to learn the customs. Whatever life they lived behind closed doors was none of my business.

"Duke?" Dad's voice reached my ears before I ever touched the closed sliding glass doors.

"I'm here," I said, sliding the door open and stepping back out into the sunlight.

Teddy was right. Dad did look broken. His hair stuck up at odd angles and he smelled like he set himself on fire to spite the rain. Still, he sucked on a cigarette.

"You know no amount of those will kill you, right?" I teased and actually managed to get a chuckle out of him before he took another smokey drag.

"Can't blame me for trying," he shrugged.

"So what's the plan?" I asked, picking up the pack and looking inside.

I barely glanced at the brown butts of the cigarettes before he snatched them away from me.

"Not for you," he shook his head. "You got a baby that's part coyote. You don't need this habit. Hell, your part wolfy-tail doesn't need this habit."

"Well, you're smoking around me," I shrugged.

He stubbed the cigarette out in the flowerpot and leaned back to rub his eyes with the heels of his hands. The flowerpot overflowed with cigarette butts. If I spotted the cleaner Medwin and Clarence sent over, I'd ask them to take care of it. Maybe if someone cleaned up the balcony he'd not come back out here and try to impersonate a chimney.

"Thank you for not apologizing about her," he said. "Every fucking body keeps saying they're so bloody sorry like they broke in and hacked her to fucking death. I'm so fucking tired of hearing that. I get it. They don't know what to say. There is nothing to say. She's gone and ---" he choked up.

"I get it," I nodded, touching his shoulder, half afraid he'd shatter and scatter through the breeze like the cigarette ash still floating around us. "I won't say that. Instead, I'll be the level-headed one."

"You always were even as a fucking kid," he laughed, shaking his head.

"Maybe I was born for this role," I said, trying to sound like Jonah talking to a rowdy crowd of fans. He had such a way of calming everyone down before things got too out of hand. "So, what's the plan?"

"For today?" Dad asked, rubbing at his forehead.

"For her arrangements," I said.

"Reading of the will tomorrow. Some sort of brunch at her parents' house the day after. Then the funeral the next day. That should give everyone time to get in. After the funeral," he paused for a deep breath, "is her pyre. She doesn't want to be beneath the ground."

"No, she wouldn't want that," I shook my head, trying not to think of what was left of her burning away. "She loved to be in the sky. She wouldn't want to be locked in some coffin-den forever. She'd probably joke about if she wanted that she'd have stayed at her parents' house."

"That's funny," he laughed. "Only, if you can, kiddo, if you can manage ---" he took another deep breath. "Be kind to her parents. Her dad's sick too and her mother is beside herself."

"They never did anything to me. It was—" I decided it wasn't important who did what to me.

"I know. My parents. We should've told you she was sick."

"Is that what was really going on?" I asked him and he nodded.

"You'll hear more, I bet," he pushed himself upright on wobbly knees as if he hadn't stood up in a long time. "She made a video for her will reading. Didn't trust anyone else to do it justice."

"That's Mama Lotus for you," I nodded. "Do you need help?"

"No, I just gotta stretch them out I think," Dad said, looking older than I'd ever seen him before.

My inner beast howled, and the sound bounced around my skull, but I didn't let it out. I wanted to beg him to get it together and not follow her through her door. I couldn't handle it. Teddy and the others couldn't handle it.

"I'm not dying," he said, picking up my thoughts over our family link. "I just haven't stood up since she died. It was choosing between burning down London and becoming a stone. London's been burnt down enough recently, don't you think?"

I didn't say anything. I thought once was too much, but London had a history of burning and it would probably burn again because everyone was an asshole. I leaned against the balcony railing and looked down at the swing set and slide we played on as kids. I could almost feel Lotus's hands on my little self's back pushing me on the swing as I shouted ‘higher' and pumped my legs. I swallowed hard. Other people had more right to feel all of this. So, I pushed it down. After I got Dad, Teddy, and the others through all this I'd grieve back home. Hell, maybe I'd go stay with my parents for a few weeks. They were all beside themselves too. Hell, even Uncle Lee. Poor Uncle Lee.

"Don't," Dad shook his head. "Don't start playing that game. No one has any more right to grieve her than anyone else. Don't think for a moment she loved you less than she loved those egg brats. She didn't. The situation was just difficult with our families scattered so far apart."

I turned around and hugged him because now wasn't the time to talk about anything too deep. The years behind us were behind us and would never circle around in front of us again. They were gone. Time only runs in one direction. All we could do was try to make the years and days in front of us better than those behind us. Though, I didn't see how any of us would do that with how dead Lotus was. Dead is dead, but somehow standing on that balcony she seemed impossibly dead – like more dead than the other dead people.

Dad hugged me tight and I rested my forehead on his shoulder despite how much he smelled like an ashtray. If Syre was dead all of Heartville would smell like a fucking ashtray. He was doing the best he could.