Vinny

The dock was as peaceful as it ever was. It was white wood, painted to match the house's brick. It was calm water, shimmering blue. It was the soft ripples against the dock's feet and the seagulls cawing and the slight whistle of wind in my ears.

I stood at its edge, toes curled over it to steady myself. I looked out at the Hornes' little sliver of the bay through the yellow haze that was my windblown hair. I wanted to be here. I wanted to stay here. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of just—belonging, and nothing else.

"Vinny."

Over my shoulder, I glimpsed my brother, standing there with his scarred smirk and his mussed hair and his dark hoodie. Confidence seemed to ooze from him as he stepped barefooted onto the dock. "Cian," I greeted.

"Why are you out here?" he asked. "Why are out here, lounging, when you know that something's wrong?"

My eyebrows drew in. The wind's whistle grew to a screech, the soft brushing of ripples to a roar of violent waves. "Something's wrong?"

"You are impure," Cian told me, gritting his teeth. "The life you have isn't yours. You've upset the balance. And now you've made me choose."

"Cian," I said, as the sky above us shifted dimmer, darker, more threatening. The peace I felt began to drain from me like water from a tub. "What are you saying?"

"Why do you think she survived that bullet?" Cian went on. "Because she was lucky? No. She is stuck on the border because of you, because of the imbalance you've caused. Either you die, and she lives. Or she dies, and you live. That is the only way to fix this."

"But—there has to be—"

"There's nothing. If you both do nothing everyone's as good as dead. Do you see now? What you've done?"

I took a startled step back, and stopped, feeling myself dangling over the edge. My eyes were wide, trained on my brother's, pleading with him. "Cian," I said. "I'm sorry."

He stepped forward, placing a hand on my chest. "You are impure."

Then he pushed me, and just like that night, I was falling, nothing but air underneath my feet. And the water swallowed me up ravenously, a beast waiting for its meal.

I let myself sink.

I inhaled a long breath, surprising even myself as my eyes shot open. I'd thought for a moment that I never would breathe again.

I licked my lips, tasted salt and sweat. The blankets around me did nothing to keep me from shuddering; I felt the shiver down to my very core, my heart rattling within my rib cage.

I knew now.

I knew it all.

Sighing, I pulled myself up to a sitting position with surprising ease. Someone had brought me up to my bed; the fan was spinning in slow droves above my head, the bedroom door shutting in everything quiet.

When I saw her, she more than caught me off guard. It was my mother, sitting in my desk chair with her head in her hands. I swore I saw her shoulders shaking, but as soon as I called for her, she stilled. "Mom?" I whispered.

She lifted her head. A smear of mascara ran across one cheek, her fine hair in a messy bun at the base of her neck. I stared at her, unsure when I'd ever seen her in this much disarray. I hated to admit it, but without her perfect makeup and hair and polished stilettos, she didn't even seem like the same person.

"Vincent," Mom said, and got up, striding over. She paused at my bed side, laying a hand down on my forehead, then bringing it back up with a heavy sigh of relief. "I should slap you right now, you know that?"

My eyebrows rose for a moment until I realized what she meant. "I know. I'm sorry. I should have told you."

"You worried me sick," she snapped. "You both worried me sick. You can't leave me like that, you understand? Neither of you...can leave me...God, my little boy. You're my little boy. I can't lose you again, do you understand? Not you or Cian."

I opened my mouth, closed it, stared instead. She held onto my hand as if proving to herself I was really there, her lip quivering no matter how hard she bit down on it. She hadn't come out of her room for weeks. Hadn't done anything but moped and drank more Prosecco. I kept searching for a reason for this shift, but there was nothing.

"Mom," I exhaled, closing my eyes as I squeezed her hand tighter. "I told you; I'm sorry. But it's okay. We're okay now."

"Don't ever scare me like that again."

I hesitated. Maybe I shouldn't have said it, but I couldn't stop myself. Not after everything. "I thought you didn't care," I confessed. "I thought you blamed me. I thought you wished I was still dead—"

"I wish for no such thing, Vincent," she answered, and she seemed stunned, like she didn't know where I'd ever gathered that from. "The day I lost you was the day I lost my mind. So I'm sorry if I ever said anything like that; I was angry. I'm just angry, all the time, and now...Jesus. You really have to stop scaring me like this!"

Tears welled in her eyes, her words dissolving into choked sobs. I frowned, then pulled her hand, yanking her down towards me. She quieted as I looped my arms around her shoulders, holding her close. "It's okay, Mom," I said to her. "I'm okay now. Really. Alright?"

She drew back, let me brush the tears from her eyes. "I'll try harder," she told me. "To protect you. To protect you and Cian."

At this point I wasn't sure if trying was enough. Ever since the accident, Cian and I had fended for ourselves, because we had no choice. There was no way trying was going to change that.

But I couldn't stand to see her cry anymore. So I just nodded and said, "Okay."

It felt like okay was all I ever said now. But that word was the biggest lie of all.

The door shook a bit, and both Mom and I swiveled towards it as Cian shoved it open, Lucie not far behind him. He cast an anxious glance from Mom to me and back to Mom again, then slumped his shoulders, exhaling. "Mom," he said, almost under his breath, "I told you to call me if he wakes up."

Mom glanced at me before she met her eldest son's eyes. "I was going to. I just...I had to make sure he was alright, first."

He frowned at her, intensely enough that I saw her squirm. Yet, he was silent as he drifted towards the bedside, Lucie still trailing him.

Cian turned to Lucie for a moment, whispering lowly, "Keep quiet a bit, okay? My mom—she can't see you. I don't want to freak her out more than we already have."

Lucie nodded.

With that, Cian's focus was on me again, his hand moving to rest on my shoulder as he peered down at me. "No offense or anything," he told me, "but you look like crap."

My eyes narrowed. "Thanks. I had no idea."

"Why didn't you say anything?" Cian asked. "Didn't you know something was wrong?"

I considered it for a moment. I hadn't, really. There had been the panic attack, but that felt like forever ago, and it hadn't happened again since. I hadn't even noticed that my appetite was gone, either. "No," I told him. "Not until I got out of the car. That's when everything felt wrong."

Mom was against the wall, by my trophy shelves. She sighed heavily then. "You should try to eat something," she put in, then looked towards Cian. "Come on, don't you think he should eat something? I mean look at him, he's practically a twig—"

"Mom," Cian hissed. "Seriously not helping. He's sick. Making him eat something is only going to make him sicker—"

"You don't know that. It's certainly better than sitting here and watching him waste away—"

"Oh, so now you decide to care, after—"

"I know how to fix the balance," I said.

Lucie, despite herself, let out a little gasp, which I pretended not to hear. Cian's eyes jerked towards me suddenly. Though the demon energy he'd succumbed to had healed his blind eye, it was still slightly lighter in color compared to the other one, the scar Nick's blade had left still deep in the skin. None of this allayed the fervent hope that lit in them, however, as open as a flame.

"You do?" Cian said. "Thank God, then. What are you waiting for?"

This is what I'd been afraid of. Disappointing him. "You're not going to like it," I said, and my eyes shifted towards Lucie's then. I shook my head at her as if to say, neither are you.

I almost thought he was still going to pass it off, say something like we've been through worse, but he didn't, just sat down on the edge of the bed and furrowed his eyebrows. This was his thinking face, the face he put on when he was trying to overcome emotion through logicality and hard facts. The expression—the way he twisted his mouth a bit on the scarred side, the way one eye squinted lower than the other—was so Cian that it hurt. He really was back. And as soon as I ran out of time.

"Tell me," he said.

"I saw it in a dream," I answered, aware of how stupid it all sounded. But none of this was stupid. It was honest, in the most brutal way. "But I think it was the other side, trying to communicate with me."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother shrink down to the floor, rubbing her eyes. A jolt of sympathy went through me. She had to be tired of this. Like we all were.

I went on, deciding not to mention the fact that the other side's makeshift spokesperson had been Cian, of all people. "They said I was impure. That the life I have isn't mine—"

"Jesus, Vinny," Cian cut in. "That doesn't mean—"

"You're not listening," I said. "Look. When I came back from the dead, that's when this whole mess started, didn't it? My body was all messed up for a while. Then I had nightmares, and that panic attack, and now this. This whole time, I've been deteriorating. It's because what happened—it isn't right. My resurrection, I guess you could call it, upset the balance between the living and dead worlds."

Cian rubbed his eyes. "You got all that from a dream?"

"And some deductive reasoning," I added, which earned me an eye roll from both my brother and Lucie. "It's why Lucie hasn't woken up, you know. She's still stuck in between worlds. She can't go in one and she can't go in another because the balance is all screwed up."

Cian narrowed his eyes at me. I saw it on his face: the realization, the cold, cold terror. "Are you saying..."

"Lucie and I are the reasons all of this is happening. That's why one of us has to be one to fix it."

"Vinny," breathed Cian, hiding his face behind his palm. "No."

"If she dies," I calculated, "then it returns one person to the dead world—her—and one person to the fully living world—me—so then the balance is fine. And if I die, then vice versa. But it has to be one of us."

Lucie had been shaking this whole time, like all the words she wanted to say were rebelling within her. She shuddered, then opened her mouth. "Okay, okay fine," she burst out. "But what if we don't do anything? We can let the other side figure out its own problems, and then both of us can live."

"Lucie, I know," I said. Mom perked up, confused, but I ignored her. "Just look outside, though. If we don't do anything, it's all just going to get worse. People who've passed on—Eden, for example—will keep flickering back. People on our side will die before their time. If we don't do anything"—I paused, thinking back to Cian's face, the way he'd sneered it at me in the dream— "we're all as good as dead."

"No," Cian said. "No, no, no, no!"

He struck the bed with a fist, and I tried to reach out, to calm him, but he had already gotten to his feet, turning away. His back and shoulders were rigid, and then they softened. He wouldn't look at me, but I heard the sorrow in his voice, the utter dismay. "I'm not choosing between you two," he said. "I can't. We'll figure something else out. There has to be some other way, there has to be—"

"I'll do it," I offered, before I even knew what I was saying. Even so, it all made sense to me. "It was me, really, who caused all of this. So it should be me to fix it. Lucie will wake up and I'll—"

"Like hell!" Cian screeched. He whirled on me, and his expression was so twisted that I didn't know if I wanted to scream or cry or both. He was frustrated and he was enraged, and yet all I saw beneath that shell was my brother, hurting, crying out for help. "Like hell I'm letting either of you go! You're not doing anything, Vince. We always figure it out. That's what'll happen this time, we just...we just have to think."

"I'm not afraid," I said. "I'm not afraid of dying."

"Vinny, does it look like I fucking care!" he screamed. Then it was silent as he paused, startling himself even as he startled everyone else. His eyes widened a bit, and seemed to shrink back in to himself, his mouth closing.

"I'm sorry," he exhaled, angrily swiping tears from his face. "I didn't mean to—forget it. I'm going to talk to Caprice. Don't—please don't move."

Then he was out the door, leaving all of us there, choking on the thickened air.

Lucie looked down at me, gently smiling, though it looked like the gesture hurt her. "We'll figure something else out. Trust me."

Then she followed him, and I still sat there, trembling.

My eyes lifted towards my mother's. "Hey, Mom?" I asked. "Do you mind leaving me for a bit? I just—I just need to be alone. To think."

She hesitated a bit, but then she nodded, getting to her feet.

The door slammed shut; I listened to the echo.

I waited for a moment, and then I staggered to my feet, crossing the floor.

I exhaled, then clicked the door locked.