“Now there’s a question.” Blood Honey sits back in his chair, so we’re on the same level. He folds long arms across his chest. “Harvey, do you want to explain, or shall I…?”
Red froth rings Harvey’s lips, turning a dark shade of berry as it hits his skin, just like the fresh lump on his forehead. He blows bubbles as he struggles to breathe, and every now and then, he sits straight up and whimpers. His eyes roll up to flash white like eggs. In that moment, Death arrives into one of the shadowy corners, strolls up. Takes a seat. I can almost hear his robes drag across the floor.
Nobody notices but me, and I’m suddenly so cold. I’ve taken life before. Felt it dissolve in my hands. It was nothing like this, never this. Back then, I had pure and unadulterated control.
“Don’t worry, son. I’ll handle this.” Blood Honey leans forward on his elbows, giving Harvey’s knee a casual pat. “I think it’s safe to say that this started around the time I sent you those pictures of your niece, didn’t it?”
Harvey groans.
“Beautiful girl. Worth protecting, wouldn’t you say? Worth selling out to a crook like me just to keep her pulse in her throat.” He drags his gaze to me. “It was too easy, Aeron. A few words in his ear and he was my man. Not yours.”
You know those moments when it dawns on you what a dumb shit you’ve been? Maybe you haven’t had one while sitting opposite a creep with a handful of razorblades who claims to be your father, but the realization is disturbing, all the same. I should take time to work out why this happened, but I don’t have time. In fact I have nothing but a wet t-shirt, shorts soaked in my own piss, a huge-ass lump on the side of my face, and a chair. A chair I can’t fucking move from. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
“I hadn’t even started on the girls.” Blood Honey rubs his chin, in thought. “But I knew the right buttons to press. I’ve always know the right buttons, when I think about it. It’s a family trait. Tell me—how’s Asher getting on? Is he like us?”
“I don’t know,” I snipe. “How is Asher?”
“It’s been a long time since I saw him. You took care of your mother, and well…” He sighs. “That put paid to that.”
He looks nothing like the father of Ash I caught on CCTV all those years ago, the one who ‘disappeared.’
“Are you Asher’s real father?” I make myself ask.
“Gosh darn it, you’re all out of questions.” He glances at Harvey. “Looks like he’s Pringle’d out. Shame.”
Of all the times I’ve ever needed to control my anger, this is top. Yet I can’t. I want to buck myself backward in a twisted somersault, relish the pain of the landing, scream at the top of my lungs—anything to get rid of the pressure in my skull. All out of fucking questions? But I have too many. He can’t seriously be suggesting that he fathered both Ash and me, some twenty four years apart, and then fell off the edge of the world while two other men were framed as daddies. One of those men, he killed. Or so he claims. Question is, did he kill the other? How much blood on his hands that only Death can see?
“I should have come to you before, Aeron. I’m sorry about that.” Bloody Honey gets to his feet again and wanders toward one of the windows, almost disappearing from sight. “What your mother and I had was very complicated.”
In front of me, Harvey gives a thunderous choke, vomits red and white, and falls backward. Clatter of chains, shatter of nerves, crack of skull. The sound is meaty and quick.
You’re poison, Leo said to me once. She wept with every word.
Blood Honey sighs. Fiddles with something metallic—a door handle? “One down.”
“How many to go?” I whisper.
He tugs open a door, a wash of pale light in the darkness, and with it, comes a sob. It’s low but female, tragic and weak. Gwen…?
“I have…things,” Blood Honey says, almost to himself. Wind rattles through the windows and garbage bags once more, smudging the sound of his voice.
Another sob. Higher this time, and desperate. Pleading.
I know that sound.