InsaneJournal

A summer storm had cracked over Burlington, trapping them all inside. This time they were at the Bellini’s, because Marco had been kind enough to pick them all from McDonalds when the weather broke, and bring them all back home.

All, that was, except Teeks. TK had stunned them all out by managing to get a date.

“You guys are being jerks about this!” Connie said, shouting over the sound of Marcie’s hairdryer, borrowed to blast the onslaught of rain out of her hair. Her clothes were still soaked though. Not that Kaden was looking. Everyone’s clothes were soaked. Everyone was in the same wet boat. Except Connie’s hair. And Teeks. Teeks was down the road at the Dairy Queen with Juliette Edwards-Palmer, who was apparently a big deal.

“He did the same thing to me first time I went out with Tara!” Seb protested, dialing Teeks' number on his phone again. “Are you gonna shut that thing off and join in or what?”

Teeks' phone went straight to voicemail, as it had every twenty minutes for the last two hours, and Connie shut the hair drier off and joined in.

For the rest of the afternoon, they kept leaving voicemails, each one more annoying and salacious than the last. The best bit (Adrian explained) is that they all knew he was waiting on a call from his mom and he’d have to listen to every single one of these voicemails to get to hers. Or maybe the best bit was interrupted his date every twenty minutes because that also all knew Teeks would never actually turn his ring off. Or maybe the best bit was how hilarious they all found each other.

Actually no – the best bit was when Teeks re-joined them after the date (he ran through the rain to the Bellini’s, and then took off his soaked cowboy hat and demanded that Connie dry his hair too) because he had news. He held up two fingers to impart this news, and stood in his wet socks in the middle of the couch. “Angelo Edwards-Palmer,” he began, “tomorrow night,” he continued, “is throwing a party,” he finished. “This will be the final blowout before school goes back,” he epilogued, and then added, as a post-script: “We are all freaking going.”



Kaden had never snuck out to go to a party before. He’d been to parties, sure, but the sneaking had never been an issue. Either Barak didn’t give a shit where he was (usual) in which case he could just walk out, or Barak wanted to know exactly where he was (rarer, but there’d been times Barak felt the need to throw his weight around) in which case, Kaden would have to be a goddamn idiot to risk his neck by sneaking out.

So, Teeks and Tara told their parents they were staying at Seb’s and Connie’s respectively, Connie told hers she was saying at Tara’s, and Seb and Adrian (and Kaden, by proxy) told their parents they were staying at Teeks'. It wasn’t a rock-solid alibi, since all their parents were friends, but since it was not far from the end of Summer, and they’d all been living at each others houses since school ended, like, a million years ago, there was a not insignificant chance that actually, no one would notice. Every one of their parents just seemed like they were ready for a teen free evening, and if some other parent wanted to deal with them for the night, then that was perhaps a gift horse into whose mouth they weren’t going to look too hard.

Besides, none of the kids had a history of sneaking out, and while none of them really wanted to upset their parents, they’d all agreed that it would be worth getting in a bit of trouble because the Edwards-Palmers had the biggest pool, and their house was bigger than Connie’s and it neighbored the high school on one side and a park on the other which meant there weren’t a lot of neighbors nearby to complain when things got rowdy. (Also, and none of them admitted this out loud, but it was certainly on their minds after weeks of listening to Kaden's New York stories; they were all just a little ashamed of how boring Burlington could be, and they wanted their own barely believable stories to tell.)

And things – they discovered the second they rounded the corner – were definitely rowdy.

Juliette Edwards-Palmer was the same year as most of them at school, but her brother Angelo had graduated last year, had moved to Chicago, and was returning home to throw a party for all his recently-graduated friends who hadn’t been lucky enough to get out of Burlington. And yeah, sure, his sister could invite her friends too, whatever, the house was big enough, and their parents were out of town.



It had been… months, since Kaden was last surrounded by this many people.

Since before Tragos died. No – since before Hecate had. Fuck, had – had the last party he’d been at really been Thanksgiving?

Yeah it had. His last party really had been the night his house had been packed full with War Dogs and associates and Cy had delighted in being a jerk and dragging Kaden into the middle of the room to gloat about genocide, and Kaden had tried and tried and tried not to focus on anything at all so he could pretend he wasn’t actually there in his body.

He wasn’t… quite sure he was properly in his body, now. Someone taller than him bashed into his shoulder in the hallway and spun him round and it was like he couldn’t really feel it. Connie took his sleeve in her hand (and Adrian’s wrist in her other) and dragged them through into the kitchen and Kaden let her, fading out, fading back in as Teeks gathered them close.

“- may be our last party of the summer,” Teeks was saying to Adrian and Connie and Kaden (Seb and Tara having immediately divested themselves of as much clothing as possible and thrown themselves in the pool) “-so we are under obligation to drink as many wine coolers as we can.”

“It’s also our first party of the summer,” Adrian pointed out.

Connie slapped his arm. “You were at my sixteenth!?”

Teek put his hand over his heart. “Babe, there were five of us, and your dad was in the next room. It doesn’t count.”

“I threw up that night!”

“You threw up because you drank four cans of red bull and then slid down the stairs in your sleeping bag.”

Connie blew her bangs out of her face. “Whatever, I still had fun.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t fun!” Teeks insisted. “I’m saying it didn’t count.”

“You’re the last bastion of insensitivity, TK,” Connie said, and stalked out of the kitchen to go and find Tara.

“I said it was fun!” Teeks shouted after her, then: “And no one even knows what that means!” With an eyeroll he turned back to Adrian and Kaden. “Thanks for dumping me in that trap,” he said to Adrian (who couldn’t stop laughing) then, to Kaden, “Are you going to follow her?”

“No?” said Kaden, aware of the feeling of having a body again, because it suddenly felt very flustered. “Why would I?”

Teeks and Adrian exchanged looks, and Kaden grabbed a wine cooler off the kitchen island and sculled it. Sweet and a little bubbly, it went down as easy as coke. “So are you guys gonna party?” he asked. “Or just talk about it?”



There was a dead boy at the party.

Kaden noticed him early, and tried very hard not to, keeping his eyes forward when the boy was messing about in his peripheral. Still – it was hard to ignore him, and all of Kaden’s body felt very focused on him. He looked older than Kaden, he was taller and wider, his shoulders filling out his letterman jacket, and he was bounding around the party like he owned the place, like he wasn’t dead.

It was very distracting. Two, three times, Kaden would come back into the middle of a conversation as someone else was talking. Two, three times, someone said “Kaden” and dragged him back.

“What? Nothing,” Kaden brushed it off, doing a quick read of the room to try and figure out what was going on. He pulled a face at Adrian. “Just thirsty, aren’t you?”

“Yesss!” Adrian replied, enthusiastic, and as bounding with energy as the dead boy was (or wasn’t, anymore?) “These are so freaking good.” He was putting the wine coolers away as fast as anyone, laughing through it. His laughter was infectious, it made Kaden smile as he took a sip of his own, but then the dead boy threw himself into the pool from the edge of the roof, and Kaden lost the trail of the conversation again.



The party was big enough (two stories, an open attic and basement making it kinda four, a pool, a wide yard out the back) that when Kaden broke off to find a toilet, it took him a long time to find anyone he knew again. Not that he was trying very hard. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone, like something had sunk his voice like a stone. Not that he was having a bad time… he just didn’t feel like he was having any sort of time.

Not a single part of the night felt real. The dead boy didn’t feel real. The warm air did not feel real and the laughter of strangers around him did not feel real, and when Tara found him again and dragged him onto the dance floor to dance between herself and Connie that did not feel real either. The music was distant and strange and the carpet was so thick, like he wasn’t really walking on floor. The banisters in the stairwell smelled like polish but no real banisters smelled like polish, no real houses had banisters like this… There were posed photographic portraits of the family on the wall, the Edwards-Palmers…

How the hell had he ended up in the Edwards-Palmer’s house, in Burlington, in Wisconsin… He was from the Hole, he should still be in the Hole, trying to cope with the aftermath of a hurricane. Kaden had seen the edge of it on the news, seen a clip of a road running fast as a river, and knew exactly how bad it would be, back at home.

This wasn’t real. A thin bed in a house with rotting walls, that was real. Tragos in the kitchen and smells of boiled chicken and engine grease, that was real. Barak grabbing him by the collar and slamming him back into the wall because he’d finished the milk, that was real. Sitting up in his bed covered in blankets because it was the warmest place in the house to study, studying so desperately because it was his way out – that was real.

Not the way out he’d got. Marcie telling him Tragos was dead over the phone. Unreal. Hunted by a war god. Unreal. Another god promising him that his throat was gonna be ripped out, promising him that Tragos would die first. Unreal. Standing in the middle of nowhere under an intensely starry sky with a baby in his arms. Unreal.

Being turned into a dog. Being rescued by a witch. Being rescued by Marcie. Being here, listening to a story about something that had happened with a marching band last spring – Unreal.

No wonder he didn’t feel like he had a body – maybe everything had become a dream, and he was back at home. Maybe Cy had hit him so hard he’d broken his brain, and he was lying in his bed, waiting to wake up.

“You wanna share a red bull?” Connie asked, and her arm was pressed up against his because the hallway was so crowded. He nodded, and took it, and when she smiled at him he smiled back. The crack of the can, and the sweetness and fizz on his tongue – it felt real, but Kaden had to wonder if his senses were lying to him.

The thump thump thump of music felt real. If it was a dream it was a vivid one. “You wanna go outside for a bit?” Connie asked hopefully.

“Yeah,” Kaden decided, looking toward the dance floor again for a moment. “Yeah this song sucks balls.”

They sprawled down on the lawn, Connie’s bare legs outstretched as she leaned back on her hands, talking to someone from her class about what school was going to be like when it went back. “You could stay here?” she said, nudging Kaden’s leg with her shoe. “Liven up school a bit, haha?”

“Yeah, but, I don’t really live here,” Kaden was pulling up handfuls of grass as they’d all been talking. “So.”

School was another one of the things he didn’t want to think about. He’d well and truly fucked up the end of his freshman year, hadn’t he? That was a dropped ball he had no idea how he was supposed to pick up again.

The wind caught the handful of grass as he let it go, sending it off into the night. He missed Connie’s miserable little echo of his “so...” and then the other girl they were sitting with started talking about Usher’s fight with T Payne, and after a while Kaden used the excuse of needing to piss again to get up and wander away, in case the conversation turned back toward the dangerous area of his future.



Down in the basement a cluster of people were playing a drinking game with a pack of cards, and up in the attic they had the windows open and a (smaller, quieter) crowd of older teenagers were smoking pot, and there were a lot of people making out in the den, and the dead boy was outside floating in the pool, so Kaden worked his way through the house looking at stuff, bookshelves and the Edwards-Palmer’s parent’s (he assumed) CD collection and the art and pictures on the walls, till Connie found him again.

For a second she just stood in the middle of the hallway and looked at him, and he looked back at her trying to work out if she’d said something to him that he’d missed. But then Connie took a big deep breath and grabbed his wrist, pulling him right into the closet. “What – uh -”

“Tara says I have to be bolder,” said Connie, carefully enunciating each of her words. “And since school is going back soon and maybe you’re leaving soon and I like you and I have to – be bolder,” she faltered a little on the last two words, but then she moved forward, scrunched her eyes shut, and kissed him.

It wasn’t a deep kiss, just her soft lips on hers that shouldn’t have felt like any kind of threat but his lungs were forgetting how to breathe. Her lips were on his, and then she shifted a little and they were on his again, and he kissed her back even though his heart was racing so fast he felt like he was running for his life, and it was awful – it was awful it was awful it was awful and he could hear his blood roaring in his ears, but Kaden found himself frozen, mind screaming, not sure how to stop till-

“Connie!” Tara’s alarmed voice cut through the door and Connie and Kaden sprung apart, both of them breathing loudly. Tara’s voice was followed by a banging of her hand on the door. “Connie get out of there!”

Kaden yanked at his shirt even though it hadn’t shifted at all, just before Connie opened the door. Tara looked as alarmed as she sounded, more ruffled than Kaden had ever seen her. “Something’s wrong with Adrian – I think he has alcohol poisoning! He’s-” she pointed, and raced off. Connie looked back at Kaden in the closet, a whole novel of meaning in her face, none of it readable, and then she was chasing off after Tara and Kaden was too, because something was wrong with Adrian wasn’t something he could ignore, no matter how much his brain was just screaming at him, wordlessly, in gut-punching guilt.

Out the back of the property, where the land sloped down toward the park, Adrian was sitting on a low stone fence at the edge of the garden, Seb holding him up. Everything smelled of boozy vomit – and god, how Kaden knew that smell.

Something took over Kaden – Seb might have known Adrian for a decade, but Adrian was the closest thing Kaden had left to a brother – and he pushed Seb out of the way, grabbing Adrian by the arm so he wouldn’t slide off the fence. “A? Adrian, can you hear me?”

Adrian groaned, and then slowly pitched forward (Kaden tightened his grip) and retched up another splash of sick so fast it came out his nose – Seb scrambled out of the way even faster. “Go – go get some water or something,” Kaden waved his hand at Seb, who backed off a few more paces before he turned and vanished up the lawn, Tara hot on his heels. Adrian’s retch turned into a groan, and there were words in there, though barely audible. Kaden picked out ‘home’ and guessed the rest.

Guessed, too, how much trouble they were both going to be in if Celeste and Marco found out, and suddenly Kaden had one more thing to freak out about. This was so illegal, and Adrian looked so sick, and – and what if they kicked him out?

What if Adrian died?! What if in a few minutes there were going to be two dead boys at this party. Kaden clutched him closer, his arm tight around Adrian’s back, fear stronger than the smell of vomit. “It’s gonna be okay,” Kaden tried to promise. “It’s gonna – you’re gonna be okay...” The way Adrian was trying to curl into himself, Kaden couldn’t help but think of the curve of Tragos’ back, the night after Hecate’s shooting. The smell of alcohol on him and the way his hand curled up, wrapping over his head in his sleep as Kaden watched over the room, too freaked out to sleep himself. And that made him think of how pale and terrible Tragos had looked after his concussion, asleep in Marcie’s bed.

Seb returned with water – and a beach towel, damp with pool water. Feeling as powerless as he’d felt when Tragos was unconscious, when Marcie herself was dying, Kaden pressed his lips together and gave Adrian’s face a wipe. The vomit was tinged pink from all the wine and fruit juice, and his eyes were streaming, too, but he had enough strength in him to try and bat Kaden away. Adrian didn’t want to drink any water. He wanted to go home.

He started to slither off the fence, and Kaden gave him a tug so he’d move along, and wouldn’t sit in his sick. With shaking hands, Kaden pulled off his hoodie, and pulled it down over Adrian’s head instead. It was a struggle to get Adrian’s arms through the sleeves, he didn’t want to co-operate, but the idea had got into Kaden’s head that if he turned his attention away for a second, some horrible fate would happen to Adrian. He’d freeze (it was the middle of summer) or he’d fall (he was sitting on the ground) or – something. Maybe the dead boy would decide he was lonely and wanted a friend?! But – but Kaden had Qebhet’s charm in the pocket of his hoodie and – well, it had saved his life –

“Don’t leave him alone,” he told Connie and Seb and Tara, and didn’t hear how the emotion had turned his voice aggressive until he saw the look on their faces when he spoke. He didn’t know how to make that right – smiling wasn’t appropriate. “I – I uh-” he struggled. “I’m gonna… get help.” He grimaced at them, and the look on Connie’s face – she tried to give him a supportive smile – was way too much all over again and Kaden pushed his way through the bushes and out into the empty park on the other side, away from the noise of the party.

The long stretch of darkness gave him the creeps, which was just one of several reasons his hands were shaking when he called Marcie’s number, dreading her reaction as much as he desperately needed her to answer.