Brilliant light that shone down on you and could almost make you believe in miracles.
A light that could almost make you believe escape could be real and life was more than being trained to kill, turned into a weapon with no will of your own.
A light that was worth dying to see.
Only Michael had it in him to think that, which was unbelievable too. A wonder. He was a good kid. A damn good kid. The best. Even while dying, Stefan knew that as well as he knew anything in the goddamn world.
Michael left the bullets and the stars behind. The next was a string of emotions: fear, confusion, exasperation, more confusion, bewilderment, denial, annoyance, finally a reluctant acceptance, contentment, and a sense of belonging. All those emotions had been caused by Stefan, and while he wished the ones at the beginning could’ve been avoided, he was damn proud of the ones he felt . . . that his brother felt at the end.
Aside from emotions, there was also life in the world outside a concrete/razor-wire wall of the worst of prisons. Movies, TV, books, people that weren’t instructors or torturers, restaurants, pizza, girls, a smelly ferret, making his own decisions—a life. A real life, something he’d thought impossible. And family, something he thought a fairy tale. Michael had been stunned by that. Amazed. He had family, a concept that even a genius like him could barely comprehend and could never have imagined applied to him. Someone cared about him. Someone told him he belonged. Someone would give up everything for him. Someone would give up their life for him. He wasn’t alone.
He had his brother. He had Stefan.
Almost impossible to believe, but it was true.
If someone could like dying, Stefan liked that he was reliving Michael’s life and not going through a rerun of his own. This way he didn’t have to wonder if he’d done good by the kid, done good by his brother; he knew. He absolutely knew he’d done good. No doubts. Not a one.
The kid could’ve done better than him, he thought in disjointed chunks as he faded further into the darkness, but it was something; it truly was . . . what Michael thought so fiercely as that Grim Reaper’s cloak from the Everglades came to wrap tighter around Stefan. Family. Brother. You always watched out for your brother, no matter if he was the older one. You held on to your family because having one was a luxury no one . . . goddamn no one could afford to take for granted. You didn’t let your family down and you didn’t let your brother down, no matter how many times he called you a kid.
How did Stefan know that? How did he know what his brother had experienced thought by thought years ago? What he was thinking now? How did he know Michael felt that way—even down to his annoyance at being called a kid? His absolute fury that Stefan would dare die on him? How did he get that last gift?
That was easy.
Because on the day Stefan died, that kid proved what his brother had known about him all along.
That damn kid . . . he was a miracle.
Chapter 1
“Hey, kid. I’ll take a black coffee, large. I need something to keep me awake in this boring-ass town.”
I didn’t bother to look up from my book resting on the counter. “I’m not a kid.” I repeated that every day to my brother, not that he listened. I turned a page. My name was actually Michael, but I couldn’t tell the customer that; I couldn’t tell anyone. “And it’s already waiting for you at the end of the counter. That will be three fifty.” I’d seen him come in, a flash in the corner of my eye, and heard his loud voice from the sidewalk long before he’d entered. If he had been a regular, I’d have given him my immediate attention and the service-friendly smile that exactly echoed that of the former employee of the month, whose picture was framed on the wall. It was the right kind of smile . . . friendly but not stalker-friendly. It said, “I make minimum wage, but it’s a nice day, and you seem like a nice person. How can I help you?” It was natural, nonnoteworthy, and appropriate for the job. It took me two tries in the bathroom mirror to copy it, and I’d used it for every patron since the day the coffee shop had hired me. It was the expected smile—the normal smile.
It was important to be normal.
At least, it was important that people think that you were normal.
I wasn’t normal.
This tourist was my first exception to pierce my mask of prosaic, run-of-the-mill normalcy. He’d come in every day for a week, ordering the same thing, tipping the same amount—nothing—and saying the same insult: boring-ass town. Cascade Falls was not a boring-ass town. It was a nice town. It was small and inconspicuous and no one had tried to kill me or my brother here, not yet. That made it the perfect town really, and I wished that this guy’s new wife—it had to be a new wife; he wasn’t the camping type—had planned their honeymoon elsewhere, because I was tired of hearing him carp every morning. I was tired of him, period.