Page 87 of The Truths We Burn

And for the first time since returning, I feel like I can breathe. It’s not a lot, a little gasp of air, but it’s enough. Enough to remind me that the surface is just beyond my reach, and if I tried, if I swam hard enough, I could beat it.

This feeling of being understood, of having people around me that not only know about my situation but in some ways could relate to it,

I’d never experienced this outside of Rosemary and Rook. They’d been the people who’d connected to the real me. Whoever that person was, they had attached themselves to her, and now these two girls are tangling with the person I am now.

“Thank you,” I mutter, my voice raw. “I went to the cliff to ask them if I could help them somehow. I mean, it’s my father who did this to us. To Rose, Silas, me. I wanted in. I wanted to make him pay for what he did.”

I keep the information about Cain and my father to myself, just for a little longer. I don’t want them to worry, and I have it under control for now. It’s best if both sides stay unaware of what the other is doing. Plus, it won’t matter because there is no way the guys—Rook—are going to let me be a part of it.

They don’t trust me.

He doesn’t trust me.

“But Silas said no, and the boys have his back. There isn’t any swaying their opinion. He says it’s because Rosemary wouldn’t have wanted me involved, but I know it’s because they don’t trust me, and I don’t blame them.”

“I know you probably don’t believe this, but maybe it’s for the best. This could be your time to heal, and I realize I don’t know you that well, but you don’t want murder on your conscience,” Briar says.

“I’m not going to heal. It’s an open wound forever, but I will be able to move forward, once my father is dead,” I say honestly.

The air they had given me had tasted nice to my tired lungs, but nothing would feel better than knowing Frank Donahue was six feet beneath the ground.

Rook

I was baptized in gasoline as a child.

Born to ignite. Born to live and go down in flames.

Raised in the house of the Lord but christened by a touch of rebellion.

The rumor of my lineage, of me being the offspring of the Ruler of Hell, came after one random day in Sunday school. I was old enough to understand but too young to grasp what the rumors would do to my life.

We had been asked to share something with the class—an interesting fact, a cool talent, a strange food combination we enjoyed. A snippet of ourselves so that our peers could get to know us better and we could make friends.

There was a kid who had a pet fish named Flipper with one fin. A boy who was color-blind and a girl who liked eating peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, which I think was more blasphemous than anything I’d said.

When my turn came around, I stood up and lifted my shirt, exposing the side of my lower back where my birthmark was. It’s smaller now, but on my tiny body, it was pretty big. The coloration created this X shape or what I thought was that shape.

To me it was pretty cool, like X marks the spot, ya know? And as a kid who lovedPirates of the Caribbean, I thought this fun fact would be neat to share with my classmates.

But they didn’t see it as the marker of buried treasure or even the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

They saw it as an upside-down cross.

The Antichrist.

The mark of the beast.

Our Sunday school teacher tried to hush the whispers of children and the jokes they made, but the damage had been done. After that lesson, those kids ran to their parents and told them all about my birthmark.

It grew, grew, grew, until it became the monster it is today. Until I became the monster I am today.

From a simple coloration of the skin to my mother had prayed to the wrong deity. They talked about it like it was some lore or scary story around a campfire.

So when I gave in to chaos and became exactly what they wanted, they all acted as if they saw it coming. I was marked by the devil; it only made sense that I acted like him.

Like my friends, there came a point in my life where I gave up trying to be anything other than their rumors. I gave in to the reputation and turned into something much worse than they could have imagined.

I didn’t just become the son of the devil. No, I refused to bow beneath anyone’s feet. Not anymore.