To Be More (Slate/Gray Book #2)

Six years ago, Atood Territory...

Slate jogs down the hall after Sara passes him by with tears streaming down her face. She needs you, Slate. The midwife needs more towels, but I don’t want to leave her alone, she’d rushed to say with a squeeze to his bicep as she passed. If not by the tone and cadence of her voice, then Slate knows just by the look on her face that things are bad in there. Their father and the midwife’s assistant had rushed down the hall to another bathroom to have space to clean off the baby and clear his lungs--he...wasn’t crying.

Before Sara can get out of reach, he grabs her hand and makes a split second decision. “Sara, stay with the kids.”

“But Mom said I needed to--”

And that’s what really does it. Mom said Sara needed to go. Slate knows exactly what that means. “Mom wants you to be with the kids right now, Sara. I’ll handle it.”

Sara starts to crumble and manages through a sob, “Are-are you s-sure?”

Slate puts his forehead to hers and murmurs between them. “I’m sure.”

He knows it’s the right choice when she looks back up at him with a sharp sort of relief in her glassy eyes that she tries to hide before she turns and hurries back down the hall.

When he enters the master bathroom, the thing that immediately draws his attention is the massive tub in the middle of the room that the midwife had rushed over as soon as the labor started unexpectedly. It’s filled with red--blood. Lots of it. Blood and a beautiful woman with eyes some shade between blue and green.

Camille Atwood.

Slate barely notes the presence of the rail thin older woman wearing bloody scrubs bustling around and packing towels to attempt to slow the flow of what can only be called a hemorrhaging of blood.

Slate immediately falls to his knees by the head of the tub. An outsider from the modern day Atwood pack would be able to tell that he’s younger in this scene of six years ago, but they wouldn’t have a difficult time finding the same depth in his eyes that speaks of hard won wisdom. He clutches his mother’s hand in both of his, the slickness of her life’s blood lubricating the grip. It’s simultaneously beautiful and terrible for nearly identical intense gazes to reflect back at each other. Both harbor deep pain, old and new.

“Slate,” Mom whispers weakly. “My boy, my oldest son. I am so sorry Slate, I hope one day you will forgive me for what I’ve done today.”

“No, Mom,” Slate squeezes Camille’s hand. He sounds calm and soothing. Camille thinks that he is the only one she wants to be the one to send her into the next life if she has to go out this way. His father wouldn’t be able to handle it.

If she’s going to hell, this is why.

“Don’t be sorry. This is the only place I want to be,” her sweet, hazel-eyed angel says.

Camille knows she must be pale as snow and she can feel her face lining with pain and fatigue. She closes her eyes for a long moment before she opens them again, a raw sort of grief and regret there. “Slate,” she breathes. “One day, you will see that what I’ve done to you today is something a mother should never inflict on her child, but...I’m too weak, Slate, sweet boy. I am so sorry and so so grateful to have you here with me.”

“Of course,” Slate says quietly, but Camille can see him swallow thickly now. He’s not as unaffected as he wants to appear. Camille wonders if he knows these will be her last words or if he still has hope. She can see the grim reaper standing over his shoulder, waiting, but she doesn’t know if Slate can feel his presence as well. She’s probably one of two people who have always been able to read him--his brother Asher being the other--but he was irreversibly changed three years ago, and since then he has learned to keep his emotions close to his vest. He is so much more like her than he will ever know.

“Slate.” Camille’s eyes droop lower as she sighs out some of her last words. As a mother, she can’t bear to see him like this. As a selfish, weak willed woman, she can’t bear to spend her last moments with a terrified hopeless son. Both sides tell her she has to make him understand it will be alright. Her addled brain is stuck on that mission. “It’s going to be okay, you know that right?” He hesitates, then nods, as if unable to take anything she says as any less than religion. “Okay, then I need you to do something for me. Can you do something for me?”

“Yes,” Slate says immediately, leaning closer to hear the quiet words. He seems to be drinking her in with all of his senses. His jaw is spasming and his hands are trembling.

“I need you to do something for me. I need you…” she loses her breath for a moment before inhaling deeply and continuing, “I need you to be strong. We’re going to take today and learn from it. Whatever happens, you and I are going to be better today than yesterday. We both know pain, we both know heartbreak. You and I might know each other better than anyone in the world, because we see each other’s pain. We know how to breathe around it, to welcome the pain, love it--because if you let it in, if you can own it, you can move forward. It will let you be who you need to be and do what you need to do. Do you understand?”

It looks like the answer isn’t quite so simple in Slate’s mind, but he nods anyway. There are tears gathering in his eyes and his jaw is clenched so tightly that he must barely be keeping the emotion at bay. Camille has rarely seen him so...broken--and her boy doesn’t break easily. It feels like she’s swallowing glass when she gulps in another breath, and not because of the trauma her body is going through. The trauma she is putting her son through makes up all the broken parts she feels inside. But she has to do this, for herself.

“Welcome the pain, love it,” she says on an exhale. “We’ll get through this, I know we will.” She’s sending mixed messages, being confusing, causing trauma, but the words are all tangled up in her mind. She just knows he has to know it will be okay.

“Okay,” Slate barely chokes out. Camille thinks these words will be burned in his brain for as long as he lives. A moment like this can’t not be.

“I love you Slate,” she slurs weakly. “Tell your father and the children I love them too.”

“I know, I’ll tell them, Mom, don’t worry.” Now exhausted of all the words she has left to say, the pain rushes in and she has no more strength to fight it off. She cries out in pain and tears start dripping down her face as she loses control of her body completely. Slate takes one hand from hers and brushes her hair back. He leans in close and rests his forehead on her temple, getting blood all over his face. Into her hair, he whispers, “It’s okay, Mom. You can let go. I love you, I love you, it’s okay to let go. I love you...”

He knows now, Camille can tell. That this day will be her last. She has failed to give him one last moment of peace, of knowing his mother can do anything, can win any battle, can be powerful. He sees right through her, her smart, loving, caring boy. Camille opens her eyes one last time to drink in the sight of her firstborn son as he continues murmuring a comforting mantra. Blood is smeared across his hand and arms up to his elbows, his forehead is painted with it. He looks...beautiful. Powerful. Fierce.

Her darkening gaze drops to their clasped hands and she uses the last of her strength to squeeze his. She knows this moment will never leave her son’s memory. If she knows him, she knows that his hands will stay bloody no matter how many times they are washed. He will carry his mother’s blood for the rest of his life, and his own will spill and mix with hers as he welcomes the pain and years pass by. Everything he touches for the rest of his life will have blood on it.

Camille closes her eyes as she feels her heart slow, and then…

It stops.

Present Day, Atwood Territory…

Gray tries to be surreptitious when she wipes her tears with the back of her hand, but when she looks over at Slate, he’s watching her carefully. “I’m sorry,” she says thickly. “It’s just…that was…”

He nods. “I know.”

“Do you?” comes bursting out of her mouth. “Do you know that what she did was…was wrong?”

Wrong isn’t exactly the word Gray would use, to be frank, but it seems more appropriate than a blatant, horrible, or unfair, or most of all, cruel.

Slate sighs and turns back to the ceiling. “I know,” he murmurs. “I don’t like thinking of her that way, but I know.”

Gray can’t help but continue to stare unblinkingly at his profile. “Aren’t you angry?”

He purses his lips, still focused on the ceiling. “I was, a little bit, in the beginning.”

“How did you stop?” Why did you stop, is what she wants to ask.

“I understood her. In the beginning, it was hard to see past the grief and I didn’t want anyone to know what she had…said,” what she had done, Slate, what she did to you, Gray wants to shout, “and I was angry. But the thing is, it hurt much more to be angry at her and have nowhere to put that anger than it did to lose her. So I decided to understand her. I thought about it, dreamt about it, wrote about it–everything short of talking about it. And I came to understand.”

“What is there to understand?” Gray demands. She doesn’t what it is that’s making her pursue this, but she has to.

Slate turns his head to eye her a bit sharply. She’s treading on thin ice and she knows it. “She wasn’t a simple woman. She carried a lot of scars, had very real blood on her hands, and for a human woman, that’s no small burden.”

“But it’s small for you? For us?”

He sighs, closes his eyes. “We live a different life, Gray. Maybe it’s hard for you to understand because of the way you grew up and who you grew up around, but the human world…they live by a different code. Their social mores are stricter. I realized how deeply the blood on her hands influenced everything she did. She lived her whole life trying to run from what happened to her. Causing any pain to any human being went against everything she lived and breathed for.”

Still struggling to understand, Gray tries to ask in a calmer tone, “What happened to her?”

What could possibly justify being so selfish? she wants to ask.

“She was raped,” Slate says. Gray blinks, caught off guard as she so often is by his bluntness. “She was home alone one night, she was sixteen I think–same age I was when I made my first kills. Someone broke into her house and raped her, some senseless gang initiation. They didn’t even want anything from the house, they just wanted to take a Christian girl’s virginity.

“My mom…she was traumatized, but also terribly confused. She was raised so strictly that she thought she had sinned by having sex with a man before marriage. To try to reconcile, she decided to date the guy who assaulted her, hoping to get married and absolve her sins. They were together for six months before she got pregnant.”

Gray’s eyebrows shoot up, totally immersed in the awful tale. Slate continues, “She finally had to tell her parents and they forced her to have an abortion. When the man who assaulted her found out, he attacked her again, behind an abandoned shop she used to cut across to take a shortcut home from school. He knocked her to the ground, choked her, gloated over her as she struggled.”

“What happend then?” Gray asks when he pauses. She can’t parse his feelings from his voice or body language.

“He underestimated her. Since she had the procedure, she started carrying a knife in case he came after her. She managed to slide the knife out of the pocked she’d sewed on the inside of her jeans and stabbed him in the throat three times. My mom didn’t stick around to watch him die, but she knew she’d killed him. The gang took the body and disposed of it themselves.”

“And then?”

“She came home drenched in blood and told her parents what had happened all the way back to the original assault. They moved across the country the next week.” Then he adds, “The abortion’s why she felt she had to have so many kids. She came to understand what happened to her and that it wasn’t her fault, but something in her was still tortured her over the abortion. The rest, she accepted, wasn’t her fault, wasn’t really her choice, even the relationship with her assaulter. She’d been too young and sheltered to really understand what she was doing. But she could have stopped the abortion if she wanted to. As much as her parents tried to force her, she had to consent to the procedure or they wouldn’t have done it.”

Gray takes a moment to digest this. So much blood, so much suffering, so much trauma in one family. So much pain, so much confusion, so much chaos. Too little control, too little closure, too little understanding. Not enough shared, accepted, talked about.

Too much pain to hold in one man’s body alone. “How did you know all that? Do your other siblings know? How much does your dad know?”

Slate shakes his head. “Never told my siblings. I don’t know what or if my dad knows, never asked, never mentioned it. She told me in bits and pieces, late at night. Neither of us slept very well for a long time after what I did at sixteen. She’d held everything in for so long and what happened to me, what I did, made it all bubble over again after she’d shoved it down for so many years. I’ve wondered,” he says slowly, as if it hurts just to think about, much less say out loud, “for a long time if part of her was trying to punish me for bringing everything back up.”

Gray starts to shuffle closer to him, desperate to do something to offer comfort, but he shakes his head minutely, squeezing her hand. “This is enough,” he says quietly, as though he’d read her mind. “Just this, this is enough. You are enough.”

Gray nods and rolls fully back to face the ceiling, squeezing his hand back. “What now?” she asks, feeling a maelstrom of emotion whirling inside.

He closes his eyes and rumbles in his chest more than his throat, “We sleep.”

Somehow, they do. Together, in the lighted room, they find peace and sleep through the night.