“We don't need any cookies, Maman,” Hael groans, closing his eyes in a way that reveals how tired he truly is. And I don't mean physically, I mean in his fucking soul. It's a weightiness, a heaviness, that sort of melancholic fatigue. It eats at you like moths at a sweater, leaving little holes, weakening the knit. You can still put it on, but it'll never keep you warm, not ever again. Eventually, the whole thing just unravels.
“All little boys like cookies,” his mother says, pushing away from him and standing up with a smile, like she didn't just see two dozen teenagers brandish illegal weapons at each other in her front yard. Hael scowls as his mother totters off, pausing to pat me on the cheek. “You Hael's girlfriend?” she asks, but before I can think up an appropriate answer, she's talking again. “You like chocolate chip? Nobody don't like chocolate chip.”
His mother disappears into the kitchen area, leaving the four of us in a bubble of awkward-as-fuck. I raise an eyebrow as Hael swallows and swipes a hand down his face.
“Interesting accent she has,” I remark, and he shakes his head with a sigh.
“She's from Louisiana,” he tells me, shrugging his big shoulders. “My maman is Cajun.”
Ahh, so that explains both the French and the unusual accent.
“And as far as who's actually coming for her …” I start.
“My mom's sick, okay?” Hael snaps, a bit of that darkness I remember seeing in him during sophomore year coming to the surface to play. Doesn't offend me, but at least he has the common decency to look chagrined. “Sorry, Blackbird. I just … I don't want to talk about it, okay?” He gives me a look that says this is as deep as he goes, this thing with his mom. I'm not going to get to see this part of Hael, not yet. Maybe not ever. All of his playfulness, his flirting, his smirks and his sultry chuckles, all defense mechanisms to keep the world from seeing this part of him.
“Marie suffers from various mental illnesses,” Oscar explains in a deadpan, causing Hael to grit his teeth and clench his fists in a way that reminds me of Vic. For his part, Havoc's leader says nothing, staring at me from dark eyes in such a manner that tells me I better get the hell out of Dodge or pay the consequences. “I maintain that while some are a matter of imbalanced brain chemistry, most are Martin's doing.”
Martin, who the fuck is Martin?
“Enough,” Hael growls out, the word the final nail in the coffin of this conversation. “Mitch and his crew just rolled up into my neighborhood and dragged my mother to the lawn. What else would they have done if we hadn't shown up?”
“Moot point, we did show up,” Vic says as Marie begins to hum in the kitchen. “This was all just a farce to get us out here, to spew some bullshit about Danny.”
“Yeah, well, it hit a little too close to home for me,” Hael snaps back, taking off down the hallway. I hesitate only briefly before taking off after him. Vic grabs my wrist before I can go, squeezing just a little too hard. When I look back at him, I can't decide if the expression on his face is one of disappointment … or jealousy. Probably a mixture of both.
“Listen, princess,” he starts, but I just laugh. Princess? Nobody's ever called me princess before. Besides, what little girl would want to be a princess when they could be a queen? “You could've messed things up bad today. I thought you'd learned your lesson when you stabbed Kali. I don’t mind if you want to knock some heads together, just ask me first.”
“You're just lucky I didn't shoot Kali today,” I retort back, twisting my arm from his grip and ignoring Oscar as he watches me from behind the lenses of his glasses. “Don't lecture me about my mistakes when you could raze an entire city with the heat of your own. Don't talk to me again unless you're going to apologize.”
Victor scowls at me as I take off down the hall, finding Hael sitting on the edge of his bed.
One look at his bedroom tells me everything I need to know about this family: the Harbins have no money, but someone clearly cares about Hael. The bed is made and dressed in clean blankets and sheets; the windows are free of streaks and dead bugs. There’s even a threadbare rug, freshly vacuumed and laid out at the foot of the bed.
I hesitate in the doorway, my fingers lingering on the jamb as I watch him. It's weird, to see Hael Harbin in his bedroom, surrounded by his things. He's always seemed so impossible, a character of his own making, larger than life, a walking-talking slice of sex and violence.
In here … he almost looks his age.
Almost.
“You okay?” I ask, which is a stupid question. Such an empty question. None of us is okay. Not a single one. If we were, we wouldn't be a part of Havoc. If we were, we wouldn't have killed a kid in a funhouse at a Halloween party. No, we're far from okay. We're antonyms of okay.
Hael lifts his face up, honey-brown eyes dark, shoulders slumped. He forces a smile, but that just makes me frown harder. I don't want to see him smiling his way through this shit. I want to see something that's fucking real.
I step into the room and close the door behind me, leaning my ass up against it and wondering what, exactly, Mitch and his crew planned to get out of coming here. Thought they'd shake our tree up and Danny's ass would fall out like a rotten apple, maybe.
“I'm okay,” Hael says finally, and I laugh, the sound as bitter as cheap gin. Hael cocks a brow at me as I push up off of the door, taking note of the extra locks on the inside. My eyes flick from the deadbolt to Hael's face.
“No, you're not. Why lie to me? I thought there weren't any secrets in Havoc?” This last part comes out a tad salty, but I can't help it. I'm not over the video thing, not over being lied to, even if it was by omission. Hael is just as guilty as Callum, as Oscar, as Aaron … maybe not quite as guilty as Victor. As the leader, he gets the most blame. It's a double-edged sword, isn't it? Being in charge.
“I'm sorry about the video, Bernadette,” Hael says, looking away from me, toward a shelf stuffed with comic books. There must be thousands of slim volumes stuffed into the cheap, little Wal-Mart bookcases. I move over to stand next to them, pulling one out and examining the cover. It's a superhero story, but not one that I recognize. Flipping through it, I see there's a pretty clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. Good guy meets bad guy, shit happens, good guy triumphs. Switching it out for another volume, I find different characters but the same story. Over and over and over again. “When we first found it, we thought about turning it in, but then we thought about it. For a long, long fucking time. You know how the world really works.”
Hael stands up from the bed, moving over to hover behind me. I can smell him, that pungent mix of sweet coconut oil and dirty grease from spending so much time beneath the hood. I inhale, just to bring it all in, but I keep it quiet. No need to let Hael know that I enjoy his personal scent so damn much.
“It's not like it is in the comics, you know?” he says, his breath feathering against my hair. Hael reaches around me to grab one of the volumes from the shelf. He flips through it as I stay where I am, acutely aware of his proximity to my back, acutely aware of the distance between our bodies. “Life isn't fair. It doesn't have story arcs with satisfying conclusions. Shit, it doesn't make narrative sense at all, does it?”
“Have you ever noticed that the good guys in these books are too concerned with their own morality to make hard choices?” I ask, staring at the conclusion of the story in my hand. The hero has locked the bad guy up, but on the very last page, he escapes, leaving room for a sequel. The thing is, how many people are going to die before the villain is caught again? How many have to suffer? It would be better if he were dead.
But people who kill other people are murderers, right? Villains. Only a villain can truly stop another villain. There is no room in this world for heroes; they only get in the way.
“A lot of shit has happened in my life,” Hael says, moving away from me and pausing to look at a poster of a girl in a bikini, straddling the hood of a Ferrari. He smirks at it and shakes his head, turning away from the wall to look at me. “I always wanted to be the good guy, you know. But, uh …” Hael pauses to laugh, the sound as dark as the black paint on my nails. “If you want justice, you have to seek vengeance.” He shrugs his big shoulders, looking me dead in the face. “You understand that, right? That's why you're here.”
“I'm not afraid to sully myself to make things right,” I admit, flashes of that awful video playing in the back of my skull. I can never unsee it. I can never shake those horrible images. Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it back. The Thing will get what's coming to him. No matter Havoc's other faults, that I don't doubt. “But I have to ask …” Hael reaches down and tucks a strand of white-blonde hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering at the pink-tipped ends. “Is it true that Vic is the only one who wanted me in Havoc?”
Hael hesitates, like he's debating the merits of answering me, when the door opens. Of course it's Vic, and he doesn't bother to knock. He looks around the room like he's familiar with it but hasn't been here in a long time. Memories flash across his face, a flicker of nostalgia that makes me hate him just a little bit less than I love him.
Ugh.
Fuck.
Of course I love Victor Channing. I always have. From that first moment on the playground, he took my heart in his hands when he shoved that brat down the slide for me. Victor Channing punched me in the face between first and second period for saying Bernadette Blackbird was hot. I can't forget that even when they were kicking the shit out of me during sophomore year, they were still on my side.
Which means that whatever price Kali paid must've been good.
“We should go,” Vic says, his voice a thread of ice and steel. He gives Hael a look. “He just pulled into the driveway.”
“He?” I ask as Hael grits his teeth, exhaling and nodding sharply.