Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,29

the tiny kitchen and grabbed a couple plastic cups that I kept there. I paused, staring at the disposable plastic cups. It had been a while since I had gotten plowed in this apartment with a friend or two. Was I mellowing out too much? Getting old? I rolled my eyes and wandered back into the living room with its cracked beige walls and stained carpet to find Robert sitting on one of the sunken cushions of the couch.

Sitting on the other end of the couch, I poured us each a healthy shot of whiskey and sat back. “All right, talk.”

Robert took a big swallow and winced as it went down. Definitely not as smooth as Mordred, but it would get the job done. “I don’t have to tell you shit.”

“You’re going to talk and tell me every fucking thing I ask for. I deserve that if I’m going to protect you from whatever Reave has got you involved in.” I set my own glass down without drinking. It was like talking had triggered all the emotions that I had managed to get a handle on. “Why are you fucking working for Reave? You’re not an idiot. Fuck. How could you do this to Mom and Dad?”

“Do this to Mom and Dad?” he repeated, looking at me like I had lost my mind. “I’m not doing this to them. I’m helping myself, and what the fuck do you care about Mom and Dad? What the fuck do you care about any of us? You left!”

“Of course I left!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. Robert pushed to his feet as well so I wouldn’t tower over him. Whatever fear he was feeling toward me wasn’t there now—we were both too pissed. “I had to leave if I wanted to protect you and Meg and Mom and Dad. The Towers might have let me go, but they weren’t going to let me live happily ever after. I’ve had warlocks and witches hunting me for years. You think they wouldn’t have tried to use you or Meg as leverage to get me to do what they wanted? Fuck! I left because I had to.”

“You should have never come back in the first place!” Robert roared. I took a step back, my anger instantly melting away, but Robert didn’t notice. Apparently there was something on his mind that he had been itching to vent. “When you disappeared as a kid, we told the world that you had been killed in an accident. You think we could tell anyone that you became one of them? We would have been lynched in a heartbeat. But no! You came back, destroying everything. Dad tried to make up stories, like you were a distant cousin, but no one believed him. They knew you had been taken to the Ivory Towers. They knew you were a warlock, and everything changed.”

Robert paced a couple angry steps away from me and then turned back, his face twisted with pent-up rage and pain. “You want to know why Mom and Dad moved to Low Town? Because of you. They left Vermont and New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and West Virginia because they were trying to outrun the rumors that they had given birth to a warlock. They came to Low Town to hide!”

I collapsed on the couch behind me, staring blindly at the wall. Whatever anger I had felt only seconds ago about my brother being a part of the Low Town Mafia evaporated. My chest ached and there was a lump growing in my throat threatening to cut off my breathing. In my lifetime, I had been burned, stabbed, poisoned, shot, and had a chunk of my soul ripped off. This felt worse. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to move. It hurt to think, but I couldn’t stop my mind from churning over the same thought. If I had never returned home after leaving the Towers, my family would have been happy, healthy, and safe.

I had been sixteen when I left the Towers and I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to go more than home to my family. I hadn’t seen them in nine years, but they still represented the only happy memories I had in my life. They were laughter, warmth, and love wrapped in a modest middle-class home on an old tree-lined street in Vermont. I had nowhere else to go and nowhere else I wanted to go. I knew that it was only temporary; I