Kerrigan looked shocked, and a little sad for him.
“No worries, Querida. That’s when I started going commando, and I don’t exactly hear you complaining about it.” He gave her a knowing grin and a wink, and her legs crossed on cue.
Colton took notice of her reaction. “Seriously, that is wicked cool, bro! You gotta teach me how to do that.”
“You need to learn how to handle a woman like Kerrigan before you try something like that, kid, or else you might just break your dick.”
Kerrigan smacked him hard on the chest, and he flinched. “Ow! I’m kidding, woman.” He laughed while rubbing at the spot.
“Oh, I’ve got a question for you,” Colton said to Kerrigan with eager excitement as he perched on the end of his seat. “Has he ever tried to molest you when he’s all spooktastic? ’Cause that’s gotta be kinky, right?”
“Colton...” Dominic warned.
Gabe leaned forward in his seat and gave him a dismissive wave of his hand. “Shut it, Dom. I want to hear this.” His eyes were fixated on Kerrigan, eager for her to spill. “Do tell, little slut. What’s that like?”
They had never tried it, but it was definitely something Kerrigan was interested in exploring now that they brought it up. She opened her mouth to speak, but Dominic answered for her. “We are not going to discuss our sex life with the two of you.”
“Pfft. Whatever.” Gabe rolled his eyes dramatically and then turned toward Colton. “She’ll tell me later, and then I’ll tell you.”
“Can we get back on track here?” Colton and Gabe ignored Dominic, choosing to impress each other with their witty ghost clichés instead.
Colton’s reaction to Dominic’s secret wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as what it could have been, but he had only told him half of the story. He still needed to air his dirty laundry and tell him about all the bad things he had done in his past before he would feel completely purged. Kerrigan could sense what he was about to spill and positioned herself so she could whisper into his ear without Colton or Gabe being able to read her lips. Not that they were paying any attention to her.
“Don’t, Dominic. He doesn’t need to know the rest. You’re not that man anymore.”
He turned to her. His lips at her ear were shielded by her long hair, but his nearness and cold breath still caused her to shiver. “You’re actually encouraging me to keep a secret?”
She pulled back and looked into his eyes. Her voice was soft and her eyes sincere. “This one, I am. You said it yourself—they’re your demons. Don’t make them his as well. If you need someone to help carry your burdens, I’ll be that person.”
“I don’t want you to carry my burdens, Querida. I don’t want anyone to.”
“Well that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you tell him about all the things you had to do to make sure he had a good life. Look at him, Dom.” They both turned to watch him laughing with Gabe. “You just told him what you are, and still he laughs. Do you think he’d be the same person if you told him you’ve killed for him?”
Dominic shook his head slowly. “No, he’d never be the same again.” Hadn’t he just thought the same thing before they had come down for their talk? He knew she was right. Again.
“You’re too good to me. How did you get to be so wise?”
Kerrigan shrugged. “Maybe it’s in my blood.”
Availia Milena Cruz was the wisest woman he had ever known. Almost oracle-like. It certainly seemed the woman he loved even more than the air he breathed was becoming more and more like her grandmother with each passing day. Maybe it was part of the gift that had been passed down through generations and generations of the women in their bloodline, or maybe it was just the kind of people they were. Either way, he considered himself a very lucky man to have had both women grace his miserable existence. He was a better man because of them. He would never take that fact for granted.
“I dreamed about him last night.” The shadows under Colton’s eyes darkened with his statement.
“Who?”
“Our father. Or at least he said he was our father. Drake, right?”
Simply bringing up the topic almost seemed to drain him of what little bit of perkiness he had managed to hold onto. Dominic had noticed the way his little brother had been shuffling around like an eighty-year-old man, rather than the strapping college student that he was. He had chalked it up to an obsessive amount of studying and way too much partying, but he had been with them for long enough to be rejuvenated again. Maybe it had something to do with Drake after all, which did nothing for Dominic’s otherwise cheery disposition.
“He was in your fucking dream?” Concern laced with outrage tainted his voice. All sorts of red flags flew up in his mind as to what that could mean.
“Yeah, it kind of happens a lot, actually. And it never starts out with him in it. Last night, the dream started out with you and me tossing the baseball around like we used to. Do you remember that? I was maybe nine years old.”
Images of a time long ago flashed before Dominic’s eyes. Colton was in his ratty Florida Marlins cap, smiling proudly about how he had just knocked the ball over the fence surrounding their tiny home and into old Ms. Kramden’s back yard. She was a cranky old bat and refused to let them climb the fence to get their toys back when they hadn’t been careful. Colton had looked terrified when Dominic scaled that fence anyway. Ms. Kramden had come out of her back door, yelling and waving a broom at him as he had hopped back over into the relative safety of their yard. Colton had looked up at him with awe in his bright eyes, praising his big brother for his heroism.
“Gosh, Dom, you’re so brave. I’d’ve pissed my pants, but not you. Nothing scares you,” he had said.
Dominic had put the ball in his hand-me-down mitt and ruffled his hand over his kid brother’s head, causing his cap to slide off. “Watch your damn mouth, kid.” He hadn’t been the best role model for his little brother, but he was the only role model he had. He had done the best he could when he had only been a boy himself.
“Yeah, I remember.” Dominic smiled, caught up in the fond memory.
“So, anyway,” Colton continued, “we were tossing the ball back and forth and then, all of a sudden, you weren’t there anymore. In your place was this guy that kept telling me he was my father. Said he was real proud of the man I’d become, and he wanted to be part of my life, that he felt like shit for not being there for me and you when we needed him the most.”
“That’s bullshit. He’s playing with your head, Colt.”
“Yeah, I know.” Dominic wasn’t convinced his brother really believed his own words. He could tell by the look in his eye. Colton wanted everything Drake had said to be true.
For the duration of their young lives, Colton had been the one who had always yearned for a father. He had even drawn pictures of his family, except there had been this extra person standing next to their mother, holding her hand, and they all had huge smiles on their faces. When Dominic asked who it was, he had just shrugged and said it was their dad. The kid was naïve. He really believed one day he would come home and they would be a perfectly happy, little family. Dominic had felt sorry for Colton, and it just made him work that much harder to give him some semblance of a normal life.
Dominic hated their father even more because of the heartbreak he had seen his brother endure—his hopes crushed, his dreams demolished. It was just cruel. But given what he learned of Drake D’Mon, cruelty was what he did best. Case in point: the fact that he visited Colton in his dreams and preyed on what he wanted most.
“What did you tell him?”
Colton fidgeted with a loose string on the hem of his shirt and shrugged a shoulder. “I told him you were the only father figure I ever had or needed in my life.”
Dominic’s heart swelled with pride.
“And then he told me if I ever changed my mind, I could find him at the graveyard. He said he had a legacy he wanted to pass on to me and not to let you stand in my way.”
> Dominic’s heart stopped cold. “That son of bitch!”
“Don’t worry about it, Dom. I told him he could shove his legacy up his ass for all I cared, but he wanted me to give you a message. He said he’d be seeing you soon. That’s when I woke up.”
When Colton had told Dominic that their father would be seeing him soon, he had no idea that it meant within the day.
After a relatively successful disclosure of the facts Colton needed to know about him, he had taken Kerrigan’s advice and gone up to their room for a much-needed nap. It wasn’t long after he closed his eyes that REM sleep set in, and he was forced to relive the nightmare that had haunted his dreams and reminded him that he was not as heroic as the people he loved would’ve liked to believe.
It was the eve of his twenty-fourth birthday—the night evil had stalked and murdered the woman who had saved his life.
Availia had been behaving strangely all day. Usually during the week, her chores would consist of light cleaning and some straightening up here and there, reserving the heavy duty stuff for the weekends. But not that day. She had been scouring every inch of the house as if preparing for guests. Even more strange had been her insistence to go grocery shopping. That was something else she usually reserved for the weekends. When she had arrived home, the trunk of her car was loaded down with enough food to feed an army for a week.
She called her son, Hudson, that afternoon. Dominic hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but when he had seen her tracing the outline of her families’ faces in the photos on the mantel as she spoke, he became concerned. It sounded an awful lot like she was saying goodbye. He dared not alert her to his presence, but odds were she already knew he was there.
By the time dinner had rolled around, the bizarreness of the day hit an all-time high. The woman who had always seemed to have all the answers, to be so self-assured, was obviously fighting a war within herself. She was a total contradiction to everything he knew of her, wavering between nervousness and calm, fear and bravery, denial and acceptance. There was a missing piece to the puzzle, an inevitable fact that should have been as plain as the nose on his face, yet it remained elusive—and he knew before he even tried that there was no way he was getting it out of the woman who revealed things only when she felt it necessary. It was her small contribution to keep the universe in balance, but it infuriated the shit out of him. He hated being kept in the dark.
“Availia, what’s wrong?” Dominic had asked as he had buttered his mashed potatoes.
She had given him one of her signature smiles, a gentle lift of her lips that warmed his heart and made him feel the way he imagined he should have felt in the safety and comfort of his own home when he was a child. Availia just had that way about her; she didn’t know a stranger and every child was her own.
But this smile had been forced. “Not a thing, dear. Stop worrying over an old woman and eat your meatloaf.”
True to form, that was that. She had refused to discuss the matter any further, and when Availia dropped a subject, you didn’t press her on it.
Later that evening, he had felt drawn to the garden, like some force older than time was beckoning him. He had found Availia there, her frail features bathed in moonlight. So unlike her, she had stood barefoot in her flowing, white nightgown. Her hair was down, long tendrils gently blowing in the breeze. She had looked ethereal, angelic purity saturating the scene. Around her, the seeds of the earth completed entire cycles. Tender, green stems broke through the surface of fertile soil and reached toward the heavens. Blooms budded, their silky petals flourishing and unfolding to release their scent into the air. And then, one at a time, the petals had detached to float upon the breeze swirling around the skirt of her nightgown.
Availia had turned and looked over her shoulder, sensing him there, her withered face holding knowledge he would never be able to comprehend even if he lived a thousand lifetimes. The color of her eyes had waned as if her years had finally caught up with her and all spark of the gift she possessed had weakened. She had given him a smile meant to invite him to join her and then turned to face her garden once again.
Dominic had felt like he was floating, never quite registering his own footfalls as he had descended the stairs to stand at her side. Availia had lifted her face toward the moon, her voice not even piercing the quiet of the night around them. It melded with it and became one with their surroundings. “I was not brought to you by accident. There is a purpose to all things, and you have yet to discover your importance in all that will be, but you will understand... in time. She will be of your making. You will cherish and nurture her.” She had then turned toward him, the certainty in her eyes pinning him in place. “And then you will set her free to do as she is destined.”
“I thought you said we choose our own destiny through free will.”
“And so I did.”
“Then how can someone be destined? And who, exactly, is she?”
Availia had given him one of her elusive smiles and turned her attention back toward the sky. She wasn’t going to give him a straight answer. “Everything that is and shall be has been foretold, Dominic. We are not forced to travel a certain path by design, but rather the design is forced by the path we choose to travel. That doesn’t mean the powers that be cannot foresee those choices long before we’ve made them.”
“The powers that be,” Dominic repeated and tilted his head to the side as if by doing so he might have gained a better understanding of her words. “God?”
“Most living creatures believe in a higher authority, and rightfully so. They put a name to that which I see no reason to name. He just is.”
Cryptic should have been her middle name.
“You’re not going to tell me who ‘she’ is, are you?”
Availia hadn’t answered him. Instead, she had announced that she was retiring for the night and kissed him sweetly on the cheek. Absolution had been in her eyes; an eerie calm that had unsettled him to the core. The very air around her had seemed stagnant, resolute... smothered by finality. Change was on the horizon. He felt it meandering along the outskirts of their complacent little bubble, taunting, waiting to be invited in. Everything would be changed by morning, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Later, he had almost convinced himself that he was wrong. As he had stood out on his balcony enjoying his last cigarette before his transformation, he took in the stillness of the neighborhood that surrounded the Cruz home. Children were tucked into their beds, parents were curled up with a good book, and the streets were devoid of traffic.
Something in his peripheral vision had caught his attention, and he had shot a glance to his right. An immense shadow had seeped slowly across the landscape, enveloping the sleeping neighborhood with its inky blanket. A low rumble of thunder echoed across the sky as the wind picked up and dark clouds eclipsed the moon.
He hadn’t known how it was possible, but he had known something was coming—something dark and sinister. A black mass had appeared off in the distance, thousands of single entities moving as one body and growing in size. It had moved with one single purpose in mind.
Availia.
Urgency had coursed through his veins. He had to get to her.
The old grandfather clock had struck the first chord on its countdown to midnight and panic seized him, rendering him immobile. Fear of failure had hijacked his muscles and held him prisoner within his own mind. Sheer force of will had finally given him the strength he needed to fight through the paralysis, and he had turned to make his way toward her.
Everything had moved in slow motion, like someone had pressed the pause button on the movie of his life and slowed the scene down to a quarter of the normal speed. He had checked his surroundings to make sure he was still in the house and not the Everglades, wading in muck up to his waist, because that was what it felt like. With all his might he had lurched forward and all but slid down the stairs.
Six strikes and he had only managed to make it outside his door. The hal
l leading to Availia’s bedroom on the other end had taken on a funhouse effect and seemed to stretch in length. For every step he had taken forward, his destination took two steps back. Determination had coiled every muscle in his body as he had pushed against the invisible wall before him.
The screeching of what had sounded like thousands of birds had been deafening to his ears, and it was coming from Availia’s room. The air had been thick, the darkness impenetrable. Gail force winds battered the Cruz family home as if its personal mission had been to see it crumble to ruins with no discernable remains. Blinding white light had pierced the darkness through the crack under the door, and he had known that Availia was fighting for her life just on the other side.
Nine strikes, ten, eleven... and still he had only just reached her bedroom. The sliver of light from under the door had suddenly muted like a switch had been flipped.
The clock had struck twelve. His body disseminated, and the force that had been holding him back broke free. He had lunged forward, his energy dispersing and then regrouping on the other side.
But he had been too late.
Availia’s lifeless body had lain on her bed, her snow-white hair strewn about and her nightgown showing traces of the battle she fought and lost. Her head had been turned to the side, but the expression she had worn on her face was one of peace. She had almost looked like she was smiling at someone or something.
Dominic turned to follow the path of her gaze and sucked in a shocked breath. There, sitting in the rocking chair perched in the corner of the room, was the reason for his existence.
“Querida.” She didn’t answer, didn’t seem to even hear him call her name as she smiled down at the swaddled bundle that lay cradled in her arms.
A baby. And even though Dominic couldn’t see the child’s face, the sense of pride that swelled in his chest told him everything he needed to know.
“Our baby,” he whispered. “I’m a daddy.”
A small fist rose into the air and flourished open to reveal four tiny fingers and a thumb. He smiled as tears of joy pricked his eyes—eyes that had never shed a tear in his entire life. Not even when they lowered his mother’s casket six feet into the cold, hard ground.