Darkest Before the Dawn (male/male)

Barty

A few days before, I had really thought this red couch was neat and how everything in this house looked like a warm, welcoming autumn setting. Now, I wanted to burn it all down, including the bastard that was sitting in the golden armchair, wringing his hands together. It was the first time seeing him again since we had gotten back from Mazerene, leaving Adrianna in a prison cell after her skull had finally grown back in. It was a shot that had boosted my ego, all until we read her texts that shredded my confidence.

Keeping that anxiety at bay had been hard, especially with Felix constantly peeking at me on the way back to Savannah to make sure that I was alright. I had snapped at him about halfway back, yelling at him to mind his own business and stop worrying about me. It was the last thing I had directly said to him since then, four days before. I can’t exactly say that it was an accomplishment. I think it’s what disappointment felt like.

There had been some improvement, a break in the way that I had viewed Felix. It wasn’t in the same bright light my sister and Goldie saw him, but he wasn’t this evil, deadly vampire anymore. He was just a dry-humored polyglot who had shitty circumstances and liked modern music and was a little nerdy. Take away his vampirism, and I may have given him a fair chance, despite him being ready to rip away my career.

Cadence sat next to me, while Goldie sat in the other golden chair. Both of them had a look of despair on their faces, like Felix had told them that I was already dead. “I’ve already contacted Akiya and Colin about the change on the case,” he was explaining, resting his bony elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands. His SCAD sweater engulfed the rest of his torso, giving him some bulk he usually never had. “I just don’t think it’s best for you to work with me, Mew, not after finding out Richard knows you’re around here.”

“I agree with you,” Cadence said to my left, adorned in her usual sweatpants and tank top. The three of us had been lured to Felix’s under false pretenses of watching movies, which Cadence took as “let’s spend the night with the vampire”. Instead, he ratted me out and told the girls everything about the texts we found on Adrianna’s phone, which I had failed to mention to anyone since we had gotten back to Savannah. My sister and my partner weren’t too thrilled with that. “I told him that from the beginning that it wasn’t safe for him to work this case, anyway.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes, falling back into the cushions of the couch. “Cade—”

“You shut up,” she hissed, setting her jaw and jabbing a finger in my face. “Hiding this from me was fucked up, and you should be grateful that I’m not tossing your ass into a portal to Hell right this very second.” Her voice wavered while guilt settled into my stomach, the nerves making my lungs twist together. I don’t think chests were supposed to hurt this much. “Do you have any idea what sort of torment you put me through last time, Mew? Not sure if you were going to live or die in that hospital because some fucker got the best of you?”

I felt my expression harden into something like a blend of nervous and irritated. Standing up to Cadence was never my specialty, not when we could usually laugh off whatever was bothering us, but it didn’t seem to be that way now. She was pissed and had every right to be. “I’m sorry, you were tormented? Lady, I was eviscerated—”

“I know you didn’t just call me lady like I was some old woman, you little anime-lookin’ brat.”

“At least I don’t look basic as fuck with your LuLuLemon bullshit.” I waved my hand at her attire, throwing in a head bob for emphasis like some shoehorned gay character in a sitcom. “Basic ass bitch.”

“Can both of you please shut up?” Goldie snapped, blinking incredulously at us. A leaf had sprouted near her temple and her golden hair was behind her ears. “Oh my god, you two are being so extra right now. We get it – you’re mad at each other. Stop being so annoying.”

Felix was looking between us, an eyebrow raised, the left corner of his lips turned up like he found us amusing in this whole fucking mess. I wanted to push him out of his seat and see if he still thought it was funny. “They’re so fun to watch, though, Goldie,” he commented, light shining in his gray eyes, surrounded by dark bags on his lower eyelids. He looked more pathetic than usual.

“Fuck off, you’re still not off the hook,” I hissed.

“Hey, don’t be a dick to Felix! He’s trying to keep you alive because you’re being stupid with your life and throwing it away,” Cadence scolded.

“Stop it,” Marigold demanded, pounding her fist on the arm of the chair for emphasis.

“I’m throwing my life away by sitting on my ass and not working on this case while demons are dying,” I argued, getting in my sister’s face now, my body warm, fury roaring through me. We hadn’t had an argument like this since the initial attack from Richard. Inside of me, my magic was beginning to spark and course through my blood, splotchy and painful in some areas because of how fucky it was.

“You’re gonna be the next demon that’s dying if you keep this shit up!” Cadence hissed, her eyes flashing red, almost making me shut up.

“I said to stop it, dammit!” Goldie barked, standing up. On the mantle, Felix’s white lilies withered and drooped, the petals and leaves brown and dehydrated now. Goldie scowled at the plant she had accidentally killed, her face dropping at the realization of what she had done. “Oh, you poor thing. Let me fix you.” The room remained silent as she crossed over and touched the potted plant’s stem, reviving it, better than before. I had only seen her get that mad when I was in the hospital after our first mission together.

I was starting to notice a pattern that I had tried hard to ignore.

“You two are behaving like bratty children,” Goldie continued, her voice quieter this time, her demeanor having returned to its calmness that it usually was. “Cadence, Barty is frustrated because he loves his job. We all know that. He’s sacrificed himself a lot for his career.”

“Exactly,” I grumbled, getting a quick shut up glance from Goldie. I felt as wilted as that plant from that one look.

“And you, Bartholomew. You have people who love you and are trying to save you, but you’re so prideful and hellbent on vengeance that you’re blind to the effects it has on us. It isn’t just yourself that you’re hurting.” Goldie had her ways of being honest in such a way that I felt remorseful for any wrongdoings that I had committed. She trusted me as her partner and her best friend, while I kept trying to launch myself into stupid situations. She knew that I was going to be stupid and made me promise not to get hurt, yet she still wanted to work with me because she had faith in who I was as a detective.

And Cadence, who now wore a face of defeat, eyebrows curled upwards, eyes moist. I had to take her into consideration—I knew that. She was scared and worried, and I realized I was being selfish with wanting to keep working on the Richard scenario. If I was near Cadence, her life was now at risk, too. My own issues and outrage were put on the front burner, making me completely forget that Cadence was more important than my own petty shit.

She was my sister, the only family I had here in this realm, and beyond that, the family member I loved the most. She was never one to judge me for my lack of magic or the stupid choices I’ve made in my life, wanting only the best for me. And I had been so willing to put her in harm’s way because I felt obligated to get revenge. Studying her here in the dim lights of Felix’s living room, seeing those tiny lines in the corners of her eyes and the thin wrinkles in her forehead, I bit down my pride and pulled her tightly to me, hugging her like I used to when we were younger and before I became bitter. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

She froze up in my hold, her head swiveling to stare at the other two in the room. “Mew, you’re fine,” she said gently, patting my back awkwardly.

“I didn’t mean to put you in danger. I wasn’t thinking right,” I told her, holding her now at arm’s length. “I love you, Cade. I’ve been selfish, and I wasn’t thinking about you. I’m so fucking dumb.”

A smile tugged at her lips. She reached up and scruffed my hair. “I wouldn’t say fucking dumb. Just dumb.” Her hands were tight on my arms, and she studied me as if she had never really seen me before as someone who was an individual, just the man who was her younger brother. She had spent so much time of her own protecting me as Bartholomew Palmer, younger brother to Cadence Palmer and the second child to Xavier Palmer and Adelaide Palmer. To Cade, I was never Barty Palmer, MMES detective, partner to Felix and Goldie. “I’m really proud of you, Mew. I am. But I can’t lose you because I love you too damn much. I know you have your job; I understand that. I get so scared and worried about you, though. I have that right.”

“You do,” I agreed, unwilling to say more. We were having a moment—a snide remark would have killed it.

“I also think, given the situation, that we need to move. It can be back to Hell or Mazerene or closer here to Felix, but we can’t live away from protection now.” She said it carefully, having to rationalize her thinking, knowing that she was saying things that would make my blood pressure rise again. “I’ll give you that choice, but we can’t be by ourselves anymore. You get why, right?”

She must have seen me flinch because she let out a long breath of air. Her breath smelled like the cherry soda she had been drinking. “I know,” I muttered, now looking down at my socked feet, wishing I had worn more serious socks for this conversation. I had no right to be so angry and having such adult conversations when I wore yellow socks with blue squids on them. “I don’t want to go crawling home, Cade. I can’t. Facing Dad would be humiliating.”

She nodded, either agreeing with me or out of understanding. She was always our parents’ favorite. The level of embarrassment she would have felt wouldn’t have been anywhere near my level if we went back to Hell. Going back home with my tail tucked between my legs would have made it impossible to redeem myself and my reputation.

“We can find a nearby home for you two that would suit you,” Felix offered. There was something about his face that reminded me of Cade and Goldie’s when they were worried about me. There was a softness to it and a glint of concern in those eyes, more than usual. He wasn’t necessarily the best at shielding his emotions and thoughts, yet there was more to it than I had anticipated. “Mazerene is an option, but they have apartments for regular citizens, not houses.”

There wasn’t any point in arguing when it was three-to-one. The idea of having to uproot the place we had called home for seven years and move because some dickhead vampire decided it would be fun to kill demons made me weary. I felt the exhaustion down to my marrow. “Yeah, fine. A house is preferable.” I stood up, stepping away from the couch now. “I’m going to go, uh, take a walk or something.” I didn’t have much of an excuse to leave, I just knew I had to. The room was suffocating now.

Three pairs of eyes watched me as I slid on my sneakers and left through the front door, careful not to slam it, as badly as I wanted to. There was no direction for me, figuratively and metaphorically. I lost my investigation and would probably be put on paperwork duty, despite it being the first time I got to work with Goldie in ages. I was about to lose my home, which is where we had found Connie and Skippy underneath the back porch and had spent almost a decade. We had Halloween parties, Christmas parties, birthday celebrations, all there in our small living room that Cade had somehow made feel larger. And now I was in an unfamiliar bundle of woods that would probably soon be homey to me if we were meant to move closer to Felix.

Part of me wanted to toss my phone into the lake by Felix’s, go off into the woods, flare my magic, and fight off whatever vampire happened to come my way until Richard showed his ugly face. The other part of me was becoming run-down from the constant concern that I was making my loved ones—and Felix—feel whenever I did stupid shit. I opted to stick close to the cabin, within stone-throwing distance, in case any of them decided to come and search for me.

Living near the city for the past twenty years really fucks with your sense of sound. Being surrounded by the woods and a lake was almost too quiet, enough to make my heart sound like drums in my ears. I was outside for about three hours, having walked around that lake seven times now. I wondered how much Felix had paid for a cabin on a lake this size, about two miles around.

I found myself by the lake at about four that morning, sitting in one of the Adirondacks Felix had placed here, probably for self-reflection moments like the one I probably should have been having. My body had moved past the point of exhausted and was in that vaguely delirious state that came after a night of sleeplessness. My soul and brain were tired, but my body wouldn’t allow them to fall asleep, despite the ache in my legs and feet. I hated nights like that.

Tea leaves and burning oak trickled up my nose, and all I could do was sink my head. I didn’t want company. “Couldn’t leave me alone for much longer?” I called out when the soft crunching of sand came to my ears.

“You’re up, I’m up, and I get lonely sometimes.” Felix now occupied the other Adirondack, although a lot more at ease in it, stretching out his legs and placing his arms on the armrests, as if he was just hanging out with someone who wasn’t slowly snapping. His SCAD sweater was still on, despite the temperature being a delightful seventy-four degrees. “I know you’re not big on talking right now, so let me do it. I get that you’re mad at me for changing your life around like this.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I was the child of two people who stayed an average of six months in a new location for fifteen years of my life. I know about changes. I know they suck. But I also know that you would get killed if you stayed on. That’s not fair to any of us for me to lead you to your killer.”

“You can let me have my choice of staying or not. I do have autonomy.” There wasn’t any force behind my voice. He had a way of making me feel weaker than I should have. I hated that he had that capability. All my defenses slipped around him because he was, to my dismay, easy to talk to when I wasn’t thinking about who he actually was.

“I won’t disagree with you. But if someone you cared about drank themselves into a stupor daily, wouldn’t you try to help them?”

I snorted and covered my face with my hands. “You’re the fucking worst with analogies, you know.”

“Oh, shut up, you know what I mean.” He sat up, his legs straddling either side of the chair, and he looked pointedly at me. The moonlight and reflection of the water made his pasty skin glow, and those gray eyes looked like starlight on his face. At that moment, he looked more like a fairy or something far more ethereal than a vampire. “Mew, you have people who love and care about you. You have to stop the self-destructive behavior. All of that anger and shutting people out and the refusal to take anyone’s advice is just going to isolate you or kill you.”

“But I’m just so damn good at it.”

“Well learn to be bad at it. Please. I’ve attended enough funerals in my life—don’t let yours be another one.” His bottom lip trembled now. I almost wanted to yell at him to just say whatever he was thinking, to just spit it out and stop the tension. I had no energy in me to do it. “Don’t be stupid,” was all he muttered. I didn’t know if it was towards me or himself. He left me alone after that, the fragrance of tea still strong in my nose.

That next morning, when Goldie and Cadence had woken up from the impromptu sleepover we had at Felix’s, I barely acknowledged that I had been missing most of the night. I laughed along with them when they were telling me about how Goldie had woken up in the guest bed with Cadence curled up beside her, and we discussed our plans for the day while we waited for each other to get showered and ready after having spent the night without our toiletries and a change of clothes. It was like the arguments and the bitterness from the night before had slid away with the moon and dissolved in the sunlight.

I hoped it was like that, anyway. I had gotten way too comfortable with letting my real emotions come through, the ones that I somehow had shown to Felix multiple times. In these past few weeks, I had forgotten about my favorite Disney queen and her motto: conceal, don’t feel, put on a fucking show. It’s what I did best. Shoving aside emotions didn’t count as self-destructive behavior, I don’t think. It was fine.

I told myself it was fine when I got the call from Colin to confirm that I was no longer working the Richard case. I had been anticipating that call.

I told myself it was fine when Felix called Cadence two nights after we left his home to inform us that he found a place for us: a three bedroom ranch-style home about five miles from his cabin in a small neighborhood. It was about forty-five minutes from our current place, but we would be moving to a ten-minute drive from Felix. He could make it to the new house in less than thirty seconds. This was for the best, I reminded myself. This was to protect Cadence.

Inside, my chest weighed a ton and my heart rattled against my ribs to the point that my hands shook. They weren’t tingly, one of my signs of an oncoming panic attack, but it was one surge of anger away from happening. I had no appetite, which sucked having to sit and force myself to eat meals with Cadence as we slowly began packing up the house over the course of several days. It’s like she knew I wasn’t hungry, so she ate all my favorite meals in front of me: chicken Parmesan, Greek salads, and sushi. I wanted so badly to partake in eating and laughing with her, but I could barely take in a deep breath without my lungs fluttering, let alone have a fluid conversation with her.

Eight days after talking about moving, everything was packed away in the moving truck, and my ears and jawline were in pain. My body would occasionally twitch as I corralled the cats into their cages, as if I had injected two shots of espresso into my veins and felt the impact of it if I focused too much on it. I was thankful that we had packed Cadence’s car with boxes and that she was already on her way to the new place, while Goldie was driving my filled car. It left me time to silently dwell on how quickly everything had changed.

I had no say in it. Felix, Cade, and Goldie basically went yoink and took all that I had grown accustomed to. Somehow, they had sneaked up on me and caught me off guard to the point where they flipped me upside down, beat me, then said they’re adjusting my life to fit what they wanted. Nobody asked me what I wanted. Briefly I thought, ‘well I can just drive this truck in the opposite direction’ in order to leave everything behind. No. Then they would know something was wrong.

For just a moment, when I pulled up to the new house, all the tightly wound coils in my stomach and lungs released to allow me to suck in a good fresh breath. It was prettier and far larger. There was a swing on the porch, and the front door was painted navy, contrasting with the freshly painted white cement bricks. There was a small garden out front with bushels of flowers, including marigolds and posies. Goldie was going to love that feature.

It was almost hard to be stressed and annoyed when this house was clearly much nicer and newer. Still, it didn’t stop me from glaring at all of our furniture when I opened the back of the truck. We had accumulated so much over the years, a reality I hadn’t wanted to accept, much like every other facet of my life currently. To make it worse, neither of the girls were here yet, and Cade had the key to get in, which left me with Connie and Skippy in a loud ass moving truck. They wouldn’t stop staring at me through their cages, wondering when the hell they could get out.

I could relate. Having someone else make decisions for you was horrible. “We’ll be fine,” I whispered both to them and myself. “Change is natural. It’s okay.” Because it had to be.

When Goldie and Cadence did finally pull up in the cars, their headlights blinding me, I was swinging on the bench, both cats at my feet, still put away to avoid escape. Goldie barely had my car turned off before she was out, racing up to me, her eyes large. “Madeline called on Felix’s phone. They were ambushed at the BRF meeting they went to tonight, and Felix is hurt.”

I blinked. In the back of my mind, I heard a faint snapping sound, the last little pieces of my sanity being ripped from me and scattered to the wind. Suddenly my body was at ease because there was nothing else that could have made me feel worse than I already was. Mechanically, I held out my hand, and Goldie relinquished my car keys. “We’ll unpack my car, then we’ll leave.” My voice surprised me. I hated that it was Felix that sent me over—not showing up at the house, not seeing my life packed into some vehicles, and not even hearing my cats crying to me as they also tried to make some sense of this.

No, it was my stupid boss who had gone and gotten himself into a mess with his ex-abuser. I hated myself even more for that. The implications made me nauseous.

We moved swiftly, bringing boxes to the porch. It occurred to me that it hadn’t been nightfall for very long, maybe about an hour, which meant Felix was barely awake. Somehow he managed to get into trouble that quickly. It didn’t make sense to me. This was the guy who had managed to seem so boring for multiple months that I loathed him for it.

I realized I was hyper-focused on my car. I had started staring at it, and now I couldn’t move my eyeballs from it, the situation unfolding in front of me. Felix had continued working this without any help, other than Madeline to uphold the image that she was recruiting people for Richard. He probably went in there without a gun or much of a plan. He was ambushed, though. That wasn’t like him. He was cool under pressure. He should have been able to talk himself out of that scenario. Maybe his head wasn’t in the right place.

“Barty?” Goldie called, and Cadence waved her hand in front of my face, breaking my line of sight to my car. “Your seats are cleared out. Can we please go now?”

“Cade, go to Felix’s and make sure there’s plenty of blood packs for him and that Hades has been fed,” I instructed. My calmness was alarming me. This was too much in the other direction of “conceal, don’t feel”. There, in the pit of my stomach, though, there was a responsiveness to the news, a different kind of panic that had bloomed. It wasn’t a self-centered dread, not one that was created out of my own well-being and self-centered scenarios. This was one of, “oh fuck, fuck, fuck”.

Because oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, Felix was in danger.