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Then, Alistair
I’d always known I was different, but I didn’t know how different. I was a boy of eight when I saw my sister leave our father’s study in a hurry. It was late; she had no reason to be bothering him at this hour—just like I had no reason to be awake. I should be in bed. It was a school night, after all.
But I didn’t care about that. At the time, the only thing I truly cared about was my sister, Veronica. Though five years separated us, I already knew she wasn’t like me. It was the difference between predator and prey; when you looked at someone else, deep down you knew what they were. Either they were like you, or they weren’t, and unfortunately for my sister, she was the polar opposite of me in that regard.
I made not a sound as I followed her to her room, and though she shut the door in a hurry, I pushed inside after knocking once, finding her on her bed, face-down against her pillow. It sounded as if she was crying.
“Veronica,” I said her name, quietly closing the door behind me. “Are you okay?” My feet drew me to the bed, slowly but surely, and she was sluggish in lifting her head off her pillow and sitting up to face me.
That was when I saw it: the bruise on her jaw. I didn’t remember seeing that bruise at dinner, when she’d sat across from me at the table, mother to her right and father to my left.
I reached out for her, toward the bruise, but she pulled away from me, blinking those bright blue eyes at me and telling me, “No. Stop.” She lifted a hand to her jaw, hiding the growing bruise, and she sniffed, her eyes thick with water—and that told me she was fighting tears.
I always thought my sister was better than me. She was more, for lack of a better word, normal. People liked her a lot more than they liked me. She was the first-born Montgomery, and people loved her for it.
As I studied her, I put two and two together. “Did father hurt you?” My voice came out quiet, unsure, and even back then, I hated how I sounded. Even as a child, the last thing I ever wanted was to be considered weak.
She lowered her hand, letting me see the bruise. A single tear fell down her cheek, and she wiped it away. “More than you could ever know, Alistair. More than you could ever understand.” The way she said it, like there was some big secret behind her words… I didn’t get it. Not then.
Veronica, I’d realize soon enough, was weak, but that was okay, because what were the strong ones good for if they could not protect and shield the weak?
“Please,” she went on, “go to bed. It’s way past your bedtime, freak.” She leaned toward me and ruffled my hair—the same black as hers, though mine was obviously cut a lot shorter.
Because I was a boy of eight, I let her be. I didn’t really understand what was going on, not that night. I went to bed, though I didn’t sleep at all. It wouldn’t be the last time I found my sister with bruises and tears in her eyes, tucked away in her room where she could pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist, including our father.
It took another few years for me to realize what exactly had been going on underneath the Montgomery roof, and when the truth finally hit me, I got angry. It was the first time in my entire life I’d felt such strong emotions.
Emotions… they seemed like such pesky things. Truly, for so long, I was grateful I didn’t have them.
But when I found out the truth, when my sister finally told me what she’d been hiding from me all those years… I saw red. Bright, righteous fury. The anger, the bloodlust, they coursed through my veins quicker than anything ever had before.
At the time, I was sitting next to my sister on her bed. Her legs were under the covers, and she’d pulled up the sheets to cover herself. Her nightgown had gotten torn… by our father and his greedy, grasping hands.
Her blue eyes were much like mine, only they were warmer, kinder—usually. Right now, though, they were full of tears. She watched me, the silence of her bedroom telling. She was seventeen now; I was twelve. Old enough to know the true depravity of mankind.
It was a tale as old as time: find something innocent and desecrate it until it was nothing but a shriveled shell of what it used to be. Men in power, men like our father, always had their way with whatever and whoever they wanted.
“I’m going to kill him.” My voice came out quiet and reserved but completely serious all the same. I’d never laid hands on someone else, not like that, but I’d be a liar if I said I never imagined things. Taking my hands to someone else’s neck, squeezing, watching the life leave their eyes. Cutting into their skin, making them bleed and scream for whatever higher power they believed in.
I never imagined killing my own father, though. I didn’t even know how I’d do it, just that I would.
“Alistair,” Veronica’s voice trembled. “Don’t say that.”
I looked at her, unblinking. “Why not? I’m going to.” There’d been more and more bruises on her body lately; she could only hide so much with makeup. And our mother? Completely unaware. Or maybe she did know, and she simply didn’t care, because while her husband’s attention was on Veronica, it was off of her.
Veronica hugged the sheets to her body even tighter, her mouth closing as she thought about it. It was a while before she muttered, “I want to help.” Four words I wasn’t expecting her to say, but I welcomed those words all the same. “But we can’t do it now. We have to wait. At least until I’m eighteen and can take both of us out of here. If he goes now, mom will just marry someone else, and who’s to say that guy won’t be worse?”
Hmm. I supposed she was right. We had to wait until Veronica was older.
And we had to do it right. We had to plan this, make it so no one would suspect us.
In the end, we waited until Veronica was nineteen. That meant, unfortunately, she had to endure two more years of our father’s abuse, and as much as I wanted to rush this, to rid the world of his stench, I knew we had to take our time. We had to be careful.
We did it in a warehouse. The owner was some big business conglomerate that hadn’t used it in years. My sister had gotten some drugs, something we could use to knock our father out while we brought him there, and one Saturday when our mother was at the country club, having tea with her friends, we made a move.
It all worked out almost too easily, but I wouldn’t complain. I was fourteen, so I knew life tended to throw you curveballs when you least expected them. Not that day, though.
We followed all of the precautions I’d listed out. We wore gloves, used some of the most common equipment you could find at the home improvement stores. Someone else had ordered the items and picked them up for us; the good thing about being a Montgomery meant you could pay nearly anyone to do the jobs you didn’t want to do.
