People only start to treat you nicely due to two things: if you have something to offer or if you nearly died at their cost. I had both of those things, which ultimately made Keenan act like a replica of St. Nicholas.

Since being admitted out of the hospital, things had changed quietly. You wouldn’t have noticed it if you weren’t in it. To any other person, Keenan would’ve seemed like the asshole he usually was, but I noticed how he stuck by me more, often asking if I was okay or not. He played it off like nothing mattered to him, but I caught his worried glances here and there. I just pretended not to notice.

He made no significant advance towards what was really important for a few weeks while I rested. I could tell that the iron was bothering him, but he had enough pride not to let it show. Lorna got more bitchy as days passed, constantly ridiculing us for doing nothing. Isaac didn’t say anything about it. It wasn’t in his place.

All the attention didn’t do me any good, to be honest. I didn’t like him noticing me because it forced me to notice him as well. I had finally gotten the hang of keeping my eyes shut around him since Lynn’s, but he also started to get the hang of pissing me off again. You may not understand it, but it got tiring and unproductive to fall in and out of him as often as I did. I got around to thinking about him a lot more than before, and allowed my mind to wander to places it really shouldn’t be at.

Even now, he still manages to get my head reeling from time to time. I wish I could play back every moment to you where I thought he was right here in this facility, playing a game I didn’t know the rules to yet. I can’t quite say I’m not going crazy—I probably am. But I swear to you, I hear his voice in the slightest way.

In mornings where the light hits the blinds in a certain angle, I swear I could see the shadows on the ground form his shape. The space on my bed feels warmer than it should at times, as if he had just gotten up to view nature in its natural art form. But I force myself to believe that he was never there. I mean, everyone has to release the things they love someday, right?

I wonder when I will.

Anyway, after two or three weeks spent lovesick and angry, I decided to try to continue our search. I remember lying down on my bed, flipping through each of Skye’s entries to find some kind of hidden clue or obvious step that my feet missed. Keenan was in the room as well, but he wasn’t any help. All he did was look at Finn’s posters on his wall.

Once in a while, he’d make these stupid sounds that got on my nerves, but I never showed it. Every two minutes there would be an ah, and every four there would be a whoa. It could’ve even driven you crazy, believe me.

By the third whoa, I slammed the diary shut. “Do you mind helping, at least? I’m not here to do your job for you.”

He didn’t bother looking at me when he spoke, tracing the lines of the posters on the wall. “I’ve been thinking of exile, like running off to a place where I don’t have to worry about grabbing souls or solving mysteries. A place where time is irrelevant. We could head way out west, or even down south. We could start a business in a small town where I’d use my charms and you’d use your brains to get money. What do you think?”

“We’ve spent too much time on this, Keenan. Wouldn’t it seem wasteful to you? Think about all the effort we put, plus you’ve been putting up with the iron at the gate—”

“It isn’t painful to me yet, to be honest. It’s just a little terrifying.” He jumped off of Finn’s bed then and made his way over to me. “Fine, I’ll let it go. But maybe next time, we won’t pick a job like this. I’ve been thinking that we’re not so cut out for the city life; we would’ve done well out in the country or a coast.” He sighed. “I just want you to be relaxed, Jack. That's all.”

I threw the diary at him by that point, pretending to lay down on my stomach so that I didn’t have to look at him. I felt the section at my feet sink slightly when he sat down, followed by the crackle of the diary opening and the quiet rustle of pages turning.

I hated it when he said things so suddenly like that. If I had known that I would be sitting here retelling this to a person, I would’ve shut him up back then so that I didn’t have to remember it. But since I do remember, I feel like I ought to tell you.

I’m not that great with describing things like that, to be honest. I get embarrassed. But we’ve got a commitment here, and there’s nothing more I’m good at than staying committed.

Well, other than dying.

“Listen to this. The perils of the young are overlooked; they are left to die as they mourn scornfully at the hell they call their lives,” Keenan snickered, turning a page. “Here’s another one. To a desperate city, from your desperate friend. This girl went the extra mile, didn’t she?”

“It isn’t nice to make fun of the dead, Keenan.”

Keenan didn’t know it, but that actually got me thinking about what would’ve happened if I never woke up at the hospital. How many people would’ve made fun of me? How many teens would’ve tarnished my grave as some kind of dare or prank? How many people would Keenan have to fight because of that?

I don’t even know how all that got me thinking about Cillian, but it did. In a way, I sort of felt bad that he didn’t get a proper send off. No funeral, no coffin. No flowers.

You would think that I would’ve been glad that he was gone. I suppose all the crap he did to me would be a good enough reason to get me psychoanalysed and all, not to mention what I did after. I don’t know why I reacted that way—punching the ground and flailing and all.

You’re convinced that he was a bad man; I know that too. But you don’t know him the way I did. I didn’t tell you half the memories I had about him, and some of them were worth broken fingers. I still can’t lift them at a certain angle, but it’s not like I have an absolute use for them, anyway. I’m not going to be a goddamn musician or surgeon anytime soon.

His death should’ve been numb to me by that point, but I always got around to thinking about it one way or another. Even now. Things like that can kill you, but for some reason, I’m still here.

My mind was brought back to reality as I heard Keenan flip the page. “She barely mentioned Isaac in here. Most of it is about Aaron, the mystery guy, and typical teenage angst.”

“Keep reading,” I said tiredly. “You might catch something I missed.”

Another turn of the page.

“Ah, there are numbers here.”

“What?” I asked, moving beside him so I could see what he was staring at. It was that same page that had Aaron and James’ names written down; the page I spent weeks trying to decipher but I couldn’t get anything out of it.

Keenan pointed to each red letter. I squinted, noticing that he was right. Beside each letter was a tiny, barely comprehensible number.

“She did it on purpose,” Keenan noted. “Grab me a pen, will you?”

I did as I was told. I went over to my desk and brought a black pen back to him, watching as he immediately removed the cap and started playing Skye’s puzzle. There was a moment of silence, our hope of finally solving things hanging heavily in the air. I heard the steady hum of Keenan’s breathing. The sound of the soft glide the pen made on paper. A slight breeze was seen when the curtains moved.

Finally, he said, “It spells Mason.”

I went straight for the door quicker than my feet could manage, nearly tripping over them as I reached for the doorknob. I could’ve broken my damn neck in the stupidest way if Keenan hadn’t caught me, calling me back to my senses.

“We need to get things straight before we jump to any conclusions,” Keenan snapped. “We’ve got to learn how to go about things smartly from now on.”

I was too excited to give a damn, though. My arm flailed out of his grip as I said, “But we have something now, don’t we? We’ve spent pointless hours on this and now we can finally move again—”

“Do you want to run fast just to hit another brick wall? How many times do you want to go through that, Jack?” When I didn’t answer, he exhaled. “We’ll ask Isaac about it tomorrow. It’ll also give Lorna time to get us out of the house if we need to. We’ll start again tomorrow. Agreed?”

The old me would’ve argued against that the moment he said it. I would’ve sized him up, convinced that he and I were on the same level even though we weren’t. But the new me knew better. The new me watched as he slid the diary under my bed, nodding once before leaving the room. The new me settled onto the pillows, closing my eyes to fool myself into napping.

I wouldn’t blame you if you got angry over that. But back then, I had come to know my place. I knew when it was the right moment to say something or nothing at all.

I suppose that made me a dirty bastard, but to be honest with you, I don’t mind that much.

 ***

I remembered something.

I was sitting in a silver car with black leather seats, watching the way the fog hugged the paved road we drove on. The rain was dying around us yet I still heard the soft patter it made against the passenger window, painting it with dots and lines like abstract artwork.

We were on a long, winding road with houses on top of mountains. Through the fog I could see the glisten of the black road from the rain, yet the car still treaded through puddles with dangerous speed.

Shouldn’t you slow down? I was speaking, but I wasn’t the one controlling my mouth. What happens if we crash Ma’s car?

A look over to my left revealed Cillian sitting behind the wheel, looking more relaxed than the last time I saw him in a car. We just need to buy her a new car, then. If anything happens, just say someone stole it. Remember?

It took me a while to realise what kind of memory that was supposed to be. I had seen it before, just in a different light. A different situation. It was probably the calm before the storm, and I kept my eyes peeled for the thunder as Cillian shredded miles.

Nothing actually happened for a while. There was an eerie type of quiet to it all, like those times when you knew you were going to get in trouble but just didn’t know when. The me from then didn’t feel it; he didn’t have a clue at all. I guess that’s what made everything harder to take in.

After a few miles, Cillian ended up stopping the car to grab something from the trunk. The sun began to suffocate behind black clouds that rolled in treacherously, flashing with beautiful streaks of lightning and earth shaking thunder.

By the second flash of lighting, I took sight of something off in the distance. It took a while for me to notice that it was a girl, standing with a black hood over blonde hair. Cillian came into the car at that point, talking about how the rain probably wouldn’t come back. But I could only stare at her.

We started driving again. Slowly at first, then soon regressed back to the usual momentum. I didn’t feel the speed, though, since things started playing in slow motion. Cillian was looking over at me as he pressed the gas pedal, warning me not to tell our parents about taking the car. He was too busy looking at me to realise what that girl was doing. I was still watching her, noticing the way she looked over at the car before stepping onto the road.

Cillian noticed her too late. I heard the screech of breaks against the wet road, my body fighting a wave of nausea as the car flipped over against the impact. Twenty-Two was knocked out by that point, but I could still see it all.

Snapped wires and dust clouds billowed out in the soft rain. Two people in an overturned car; one put his feet on the glass and kicked hard. Shattered glass poisoned my vision as a man moved carefully in search for his brother.

That was the last clear thing I remember. The rest are just fragments and pieces of what happened next. All the smoke. Dust clouds floating into a grey sky as fire pumped in his heart. Snapped wires. Seatbelt stuck. He ripped through and tried to get him out.

There was a girl laying at the foot of the car, blonde hair soaked in a bloody halo. Blue eyes were barely looking up at the sky as her body omitted shallow breaths and struggled to stay alive. Nobody noticed her until one of the men finally woke up and limped away with threats filling his ears.

He turned around, but he didn’t do anything.

I didn’t do anything.

“I killed her,” was the first thing I said the moment I woke up.