Page 116 of Violent Possession

The space around us opens up, a vacuum created by the tension, and the two of us are sitting in the middle of the storm. Exactly like ten years ago.

“That’s because you took the real one as a souvenir,” I say. “Didn’t know it came with a return policy.”

Cain absorbs that like someone who always knew that one day he would slip back into the role of the defendant. His face hardens, pulling the thin skin taut over his bones, but he doesn’t immediately retort. He swallows the insult and digests it, perhaps out of habit or penance.

“I had no choice, Myr,” he whispers. “It was an order. You know that.”

“Anorder,” I repeat, the word tasting like ashes in my mouth. “And now? What’s the order of the day, Cain? Coming here to judge my boss while your guardian angel gets a fat check from his brother to be loyal?”

Cain falters, loses his composure, but recovers before I can capitalize. He didn’t expect me to know.

“You don’t understand,” he says, and like every convert, he seems to truly believe that life is an undecipherable code for the uninitiated. “He owes no loyalty to those worms. Seraphim is sacrificing things for us.”

I laugh. The sound comes out louder than I intended, drawing glances that quickly disperse, accustomed to the absurd.

“For uswho?” I lean forward, and the joints of my bionic arm creak, drawing Cain’s attention to the prosthesis, to the void between us, a void he himself helped to dig. “You look at me with that disgusted face because I’m on the ‘other side’, but the only difference between my demon and yours is that mine, at least, doesn’t pretend to be an angel.”

And I say it onpurposebecause Iknowit’ll hurt him.

I myself still see Seraphim asdivine.

He finally breaks eye contact, looking down at the table. He’s still for a moment, then murmurs, “Don’t talk like that. Seraphim came to see you, to warn you when he shouldn’t have,”and there’s an urgency in his tone, begging me not to scratch the remaining veneer any further. “It was sentimentalism. He exposed himself, and he exposedyou. I’m just here trying to clean up the mess.”

“Like last time?” The heat of indignation rises in me like acid reflux, burning everything in its path. “With a rusty machete?”

This time, he doesn’t try to hide the blow. His eyes get moist, but not from easy tears—it’s anger, or perhaps the memory of pain, accumulated and never properly metabolized.

“He saved your life, Myrddin. The others... they wanted you dead. Do you think it was easy to convince them? The arm was the price for you to be able to walk away.”

Now it’s me who can’t hold back. I feel my face flush, the blood pulsing in places that shouldn’t even feel anything anymore.

The mother with the child next to us notices the tension and moves the boy away before an explosion occurs. The entire refectory senses, in a diffuse way, that the atmosphere has changed, that something deeply wrong has been put on the table, and no one has the stomach to clean it up.

“Saved me fromwhat, Cain? From being killed? And who was going to kill me? The others? And who, forfuck’s sake,was leading the others? Who made the final decision?”

He doesn’t answer. He can’t.

“He saved me from his own decision?” I continue, the fury finally finding words. “He put me in front of a train and then saved me by pushing me off a cliff? What the fuck kind of savior logic is that? Don’t give me that shit! Don’t try to paint him as a hero in the fucking tragedy that he wrote himself! Everything. Comes back. To him.”

The world around me slows down, and I can see everything: Cain’s hardened expression lines, his accentuated pallor, the way he holds the edge of the table.

Cain rubs his face, ashamed, and when he looks back at me, there’s nothing messianic there anymore. Just exhaustion. “Myrddin, you turned him in to the police.”

I remain silent, because it’s the truth. The only weapon I had against his suicidal madness, and I used it.

“He was going to kill everyone,” I whisper. “He was going to die for nothing.”

Cain laughs, but it’s a crooked sound. A laugh that only serves to confirm that, actually, there’s nothing funny about it. “Fornothing? Myrddin, for fuck’s sake... He couldn’t take it anymore. Where did you think the money came from?”

My first response is automatic, perhaps even childish. “From the robberies.”

“This?” Cain gestures to the soup, to the place, to the fuck-ups around us. “The robberies barely paid for our food back then. It was barely enough for Theo’s sister’s syringes, let alone keeping the house running.”

He leans over the table. A decade’s worth of weariness.

“He always made sure to keep the group that way. Pure. So no one would ever have to be thecommodity.”

The word hangs in the air between us. Cold, disgusting. I don’t understand, but I do. My brain refuses, but my body has already processed it for a long time, because I feel the sweat go cold between my shoulder blades and the muscles in my back lock up as if they need to protect my spine.