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“I had a rocky childhood.” I began with the world’s largest understatement. “I never had a good relationship with my parents. I was always trying to make them proud, but their attention always seemed to be on my little brother. He had it all. Great at sports, at school, at theatre. Wanted to be a doctor. And he probably would have been a great one.”
Maddox must have caught on to where this story was headed. His brows dipped, forehead wrinkled. An expression of sorrow I was used to being on the receiving end of. I played with the pale yellow tassels on the pillow in my lap. “I’m sorry,” Maddox said. “What happened?”
“The Pulse happened.”
Maddox twitched forward, likely not expecting that answer.
“The Pulse from a year ago?”
I shook my head. “No, the one before that. The one I got my powers in and the Pulse that took my little brother.”
His entire face appeared to drop. Any guard or intensity that had been in his gaze quickly disappeared. He came over to my side without hesitation, sitting down next to me, shoulder against mine. “Fuck, Caleb.”
“I was one of the lucky few who got magical powers, and my brother was one of those who burned. Right there in the kitchen, as my mother was serving us dinner. We knew the Pulse was coming, so we hunkered down at home and planned on having a big family meal, assuming none of us would be affected. Just like the majority of other people.
“But we were so wrong. So fucking wrong. My mom started shrieking, my father became enraged.” Images of that night flashed across my mind. A terrifying reel of film I wished I could permanently get rid of. I’ll never forget the shade of violent red that washed over his face. Or the sound my mom made as she picked up the ashes in her hand, asking “why” over and over and over again.
Why Micky? Why him? Why Micky and not him? Why, why, why, why?
And I just stood there, reborn and destroyed all at the same time.
“Shocked didn’t even begin to describe it, but that night only got worse.” I took a rattling breath. Exhaustion from earlier still crept around the edge of my psyche, but the pain of that Pulse night was raw enough to fill me with a burst of adrenaline.
Fight or flight, except all I could do was crash and burn.
“My father started getting physical with me, pushing me toward the door. Saying he didn’t want a Marvel in his house. A tainted mana fucker, as he liked to say. My mom didn’t fight, didn’t argue. She just kept crying, which made me cry. Like breaking down, just tears that racked my body, bent me over. I begged for my dad to let me stay, for my mom to do something.” I shook my head, the words becoming lodged in my throat as if an invisible hand were clenching around it.
“Caleb… fuck. I just need to say that your parents were wrong in pushing you away. Having a child, that’s supposed to be unconditional. They needed you in that moment just as badly as you needed them. I’m so sorry they couldn’t see that.”
I looked up into that icy-blue gaze that somehow carried a sun’s worth of warmth. “What happened? Where did you go?” he asked.
“I went to my grandparents’ house. They lived four streets down from mine. They were just as ruined by Micky’s death, but I guess not having the visual shock of seeing the rainbow fire one minute and ashes the next helped with accepting me.”
Maddox shook his head. “No, your grandparents were just good people, that’s all.”
“They thought things would get better somehow—so did I. For a few days, at least, but my parents wanted nothing to do with me. And things only got worse. My grandpa got sick first, then my grandmother. Lost them two weeks apart, a day after my eighteenth birthday. I was devastated, lost, confused.”
This was it. The moment this entire conversation had been leading up to. It was time to lay myself bare.
“That’s when I got involved with the wrong people.”
Like a Band-Aid. I just had to say it. To rip it off.
But would Maddox understand? Or would he judge me? Would he see me differently if he knew the full truth? And why did the thought of his judgment scare me? I rarely cared about what others thought of me, but here, as I sat inches away from a man I’d only just met, I found myself caring for once. I found myself wanting to sugarcoat the past so that my mistakes weren’t being placed on a scale.
“A friend of mine,” I began, adding sugar to the truth. “He was a lost soul as well. He was looking for a family, same as I was. He stumbled on the Crimson Ring. They took him in. That’s when the cult started to affect my life. I saw how it consumed him, changed him.”
