DEADLY STITCHES - CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

SILENA MEIER

Blind rage.
That’s what motivates me. I cannot believe that this bastard had the nerve to put his hands on my darling brother.
And so I attack. With every punch I throw, I let out my frustrations at this life I’m living, my anger at my brother and my disgust that people like Felix Hogan are still alive while the good people of this world die in droves.
He kicks me in the side and the pain blinds me temporarily. I know I cannot let this scum of the earth win this round, so I pretend to be out cold, and when his back is turned, I grab my taser from the waistband of my sweatpants and touch it to the back of his calf. I don’t let go until I’m sure he’s out cold.  I need to call someone to look at my brother. After two tries, I finally get hold of my friend Avery, a trauma doctor and sort of our family doctor.
“Hey, Avery, I need your help. So, Mordred kind of got himself slightly electrocuted and has lost consciousness and has been in this state for like 5 minutes”, I say breathlessly, before he has the chance to say hello.
“What??
I’m on my way there, don’t touch anything.”
“Well, I won’t be here when you come, I have something important to do that concerns our safety, but you can let yourself in with your keys. He’s in the attic.”

Despite the fact that Avery told me not to touch anything, I can’t run the risk of him finding out about the things we do, so I move Mordred to another part of the attic and arrange him so he just looks like he decided to take a nap on the attic floor.
“Don’t leave me, Mord. You’re all I have left”, I whisper as I kiss his cheeks. I take one last look at him as I stand at the door and breathe a prayer to whatever gods may be listening to bring my brother back to me.
I’m a girl on a mission- to protect my family’s secret and to avenge my brother, so I find the most atrocious rug from the time when our guardians still had free rein of this place and roll Felix Hogan in it, making sure to wrap his face in the dustiest parts of the rug. If I cannot actually kill him, at least I can be petty and give him a cold from inhaling all that dust. I’d had to tase him every time he so much as moved a muscle to keep him down under to avoid any more undue stress.
I roll him down the stairs because I really don’t have the mental strength to touch scum and heave him into the back seat of my car. This is going to be one hell of a road trip, however short it ends up being.
Three quarters of an hour later, I pull up at the service entrance of the hospital the next town over, taking care to park in the CCTV blind spot. This is a routine I’ve done a couple of times before, and I have my contact person on the inside. But this time, I want Hogan to languish in his own pain for a while, patiently (or impatiently) waiting for someone to put him out of his misery. I offload him directly behind the dumpsters. There’s nothing like waking up to the smell of week old garbage roasting in the sun.
Good times.
It should make for a fun memory, something to laugh about with his grandchildren. Not.

There’s nothing that rivals the excitement you feel when you execute the perfect crime, but my excitement is dampened by the fact that my brother is lying on a bed somewhere in that house, fighting for his life because he got distracted by me.
Things haven’t really been the same between us for a while now, and I thought he’d get over it, but every time he looks at me, I see that fear in his eyes-like I’m a barely restrained wild animal.
I mean, I object to that for purely vain reasons, one of which being that I went to a fancy finishing school, and therefore regard myself as something of a lady- and the other being that he doesn’t know the whole story. And he probably never will, now.
No. I cannot let myself think like that. If... when he gets well, I will tell him the whole truth.
I’d waited so long for him to just ask. I knew he had questions, but darn that boy. He’s always locked up tighter than Alcatraz. In his head, I know he thinks he wears his heart on his sleeve, but that’d only be true if his sleeve was a safety deposit box.
I’m seated by the window in the only café in our town - The Bean - nursing a hot chocolate, when I notice the owner, Franco, casting worried glances at me. I guess I must have looked a little lost, and since I ordered my feel-good drink, he probably thinks I need some cheering up. He’s right, but I don’t think I deserve cheering up at the moment.
“Hey doll. Want a blueberry muffin with that? On the house.”, he says as he makes a show of wiping the table beside mine.
“Sure. And I’m fine, thanks for asking, or not asking in this case.”
He nods. “I’ll send the blueberry muffin to you fresh from the oven.” He smiles at me and walks away whistling one of his weird songs.
He really has the nicest smile, and he and his wife are the cutest couple ever. I’ve known them since I was four. Foster homes were all I knew until this seemingly nice couple adopted me when I was four; because they thought their son needed a ‘big sister to play with.’
Ha! More like they needed a lab rat for their parenting experiment. Even though my adoptive parents were train wrecks, I’m grateful for them bringing me to this town. To the people in this town, I’m Silena the spelling bee winner, the brainy junior scientist, the responsible young lady, and it’s such a breath of fresh air at the times where I’m suffocating under the weight of the things I do.
My blueberry muffin arrives and I savour it piece by piece while waiting for Avery to call me with a status report. All of me wants to be by my brother’s side right now, but guilt holds me captive. I don’t want to face him in this state, not knowing if he’s going to live or die. I don’t want to be alone in that big house full of bad blood, history, secrets and lies. On the outside it looks like just another stately old mansion with a lot of history only the most scholarly or the most pretentious can recite by heart.
It even has a name, Nocturne. It brings to mind starry nights and stargazing.
Stone walls, lush green scenery and a little river at the back of the property will almost convince you that you’re living somewhere in the Scottish highlands. We used to rent out the fields for weddings and garden parties when I was little, and I remember being really excited about all the parties. Now we just have a groundskeeper come twice a month for maintenance.
Avery finally calls me home, and on the commute back home, I have to hold myself tightly together to brace myself for the bad news that may or may not come.
I let myself in and Avery meets me at the door with a grave expression on his face. He takes in my expression and cracks a small smile.
“He’s not dead, Lena. He’ll be fine. He just needs to sleep for a while to let his body heal itself. I have him on an I.V solution of electrolytes for now. Call me when it’s finished, and I’ll send someone over with another bag. Take care of yourself. It’s not your fault, you know.”
I cannot trust myself to speak, so I just nod. He pats my shoulder as he exits the house, and I go up the stairs to Mordred’s room. He’s not there, so I know that Avery took his own advice and set everything up in the attic. I take a minute to look carefully at the room, with all the traces of my brother and first friend in it- the posters of bands, his drawings, photographs and his crafty projects. I imagine having to clean the room out if he dies and nearly crumble under the weight of the combined forces of guilt and sorrow.
Mordred cannot leave me. He just cannot. Not now, not ever.

Six days later

It’s almost been a week, and in that time I’ve cried, screamed, prayed, bargained, cleaned the house top to bottom twice, cleaned out my closet, cleaned out the garage, read to Mordred, read to myself, just read aloud, played all his favorite songs, played all my favorite songs, played all the songs we both hate….and nothing.
No response.
Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Is. Happening.
I even called Avery to rant at and to him a little and he let me tire myself out before calmly asking if I’d eaten. So of course I yelled at him some more until I felt a little better.
I think I’m going a little stir-crazy. Staying here is not helping my premonitions of certain doom.
I need to get out of my head and this space for a while.
I think I’ll go hunting. There should be an unfortunately arrogant soul in need of some ego trimming that I can let out my frustrations on and scare to within an inch of their life. Literally.
I’m going to take a shower - no long luxurious baths for me just yet; it’s part of my bargain with the universe for Mordred’s life - and then transform into Silena the slightly terrifying, irresistible-but-totally-not-good-for-your-mental-health.
In the middle of deciding what to wear to complete the illusion, the doorbell starts ringing. Incessantly. Almost like the person at the door is trying to conjure up the spirits of the previous owners of the house back to the 500 BCs.
I hate it when people do that.
I rip my tights in my struggle to get them on so I can see to the person at the door, so I just quit and wear sweatpants instead. This very rude person seems like a sign from the universe, telling me to sit my butt at home.
The doorbell keeps chiming insistently and I mutter curses under my breath all the way down the stairs, damning the person to the darkest, hottest recesses of hell to be guarded by the fiercest of all the hellhounds.
I don’t look up when I throw the door open, but the smell of the person’s perfume reminds me of violets, chewy vitamins and chocolate and my head jerks upright.
Ugh.
My worst nightmare stands here grinning at me...