One of them had to break, eventually. Niall had been a wild Belfast dreamer with fire biting at his heels, and Aurora had been a golden dream with the borderless sky reflected in her eyes. Their sons were built for chaos.
It was a sharp October, a wild October, one of those fretful spans of time that climbs into your skin and flits around. It was two months after the fall semester had begun. The trees were all brittle and grasping. The drying leaves were skittish. Winter yowled round the doorways at night until wood fires drove it away for another few hours.
There was something else afoot that October, something else stretching and straining and panting, but it was mostly as of yet unseen. Later it would have a name, but for now, it simply agitated everything uncanny it touched, and the Lynch brothers were no exception.
Declan broke first.
While the youngest brother was in school and the middle brother malingered at the family farm, Declan opened a drawer in his bedroom and removed a piece of paper with a telephone number on it. His heart beat faster just to look at it. He should have destroyed it, but instead, he entered it into his phone.
“The Lynch boy?” said the voice on the other side of the line.
“Yes,” he said simply, “I want the key.” Then he hung up.
He told no one else about the call, not even his brothers. What was one more tiny secret, he thought, in a life full of them.
Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination.
Something was going to burn.
1
Creatures of all kinds had begun to fall asleep.
The cat was the most dramatic. It was a beautiful animal, if you liked cats, with a dainty face and long, cottony fur, the kind that seemed like it would melt away into liquid sugar. It was a calico, which under normal circumstances would mean it was certainly not an it, but rather a she. Calico had to be inherited from two X chromosomes. Perhaps that rule didn’t apply here, though, in this comely rural cottage nearly no one knew about. Forces other than science held domain in this place. The calico might not even be a cat at all. It was cat-shaped, but so were some birthday cakes.
It had watched them kill him.
Caomhán Browne had been his name. Was still his name, really. Like good boots, identities outlived those who wore them. They had been told he was dangerous, but he’d thrown everything but what they’d feared at them. A tiny end table. A plump and faded floral recliner. A stack of design magazines. A flat-screen television of modest size. He’d actually stabbed Ramsay with the crucifix from the hallway wall, which Ramsay found funny even during the act of it. Holy smokes, he’d said.
One of the women wore lambskin dress-for-success heeled boots, and there was now an unbelievable amount of blood on them. One of the men was prone to migraines, and he could feel the dreamy magic of the place sparking the lights of an aura at the edges of his vision.
In the end, Lock, Ramsay, Nikolenko, and Farooq-Lane had cornered both Browne and the cat in the low-ceilinged kitchen of the Irish holiday cottage, nothing within Browne’s reach but a decorative dried broom on the wall and the cat. The broom wasn’t good for anything, even sweeping, but the cat might have been used to good effect if thrown properly. Few have the constitution to throw a cat properly, however, and Browne was not one of them. One could see the moment he realized he didn’t have it in him and gave up.
“Please don’t kill the trees,” he said.
They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.
The calico was lucky it hadn’t gotten shot, too, crouched behind Browne as it was. Bullets go through things; that’s their job. Instead it merely got splattered with blood. It let out an uncanny howl full of rage. It bottle-brushed its tail and puffed its cotton coat. Then it hurled itself straight at them, because you can trust that the Venn diagram of cats and folks willing to throw cats is a circle.
There was a very brief moment where it seemed quite possible that one of them was about to be wearing a cat with every claw extended.
But then Browne gave a final shiver and went still.