The Truths we Burn (The Hollow Boys Book 2)

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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 loved Pirates 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.

They wanted this, right? They wanted to tear down what was left of a hopeless boy and make him into a monster they could hate.

They wanted evil, so I became the king of it.

The ruler of it all.

I’d become Lucifer himself.

I rained hellfire down and lived in sin.

“Change the fucking music, bro. This is worse than Alistair’s screamo,” I complain, squeezing the front of the wooden chair I’m straddling. My short nails dig into the material.

Thatcher increases the pressure on my back. He strokes with harsh slashes. The fierce pain makes my teeth throb. It’s keen, and I can feel my skin opening, the blood streaking down. It’s weird how warm it feels.

“My basement. My rules. My music,” he states.

I breathe through my nose, closing my eyes. The rush of ecstasy from the torture inflicted makes me shake with satisfaction, finally reaching the terminal high of punishment.

Every single new cut is a payment. Restitution pours out of the torn skin in the form of blood. All the pent-up regret and blame falls out of me. The stress of my life, the guilt, my failures, Sage. It cascades down my spine and leaves my body.

I’d thought about doing this to myself for years.

Cutting. Self-harm. Whatever the fuck a therapist would call it.

I could have done it myself, taken a razor blade to my thighs or my wrists. But I knew that Thatcher needed to cut. It would have been selfish of me to keep this to myself. The impulse that feeds my soul to burn things is the same one that flows inside of him. Instead of needing fire, he needs to see crimson.

He needs to put on his classical music bullshit down in his American Psycho basement that smells like a hospital and slice. So why would I do it myself when I could give this to Thatch?

We all have different motivations for why we need these things to cope with our lives.

It’s not about knowing the reason or even understanding it. It’s not about any of that. It’s about being there for each other. Being what each other requires to get by. We made an unspoken oath when we were young. That it didn’t matter how far or how dark we had to go, if one of the guys needed something, we would always be there. We would be that for them, whatever the cost.

The rest of the world had shit on us. Thrown us away like trash. Forgotten us. Left us to decay and rot.

All we have is one another, and that will always be enough.

“Alright, that’s ten,” he says, lifting the blade from my body. I can hear him push his rolling chair away from me.

“Two more.”

“I’m going to have to go lower. The ones at the top still haven’t healed from our last session.”

“Then go lower. Just give me more.”

I’d been doing this on a smaller scale ever since I started sparring with Alistair. Exposing myself to agony and anguish, I still do that. But last year, it was vital I had more.

I came to Thatcher that day, after Sage, after I’d stupidly put myself in a position I never should’ve been in, looking to discipline myself so that I would never, ever trust someone like that ever again.

Alistair’s punches wouldn’t have given me what I required. They were only surface-level, just like my father’s. They only bruised the exterior. I didn’t release anything, and I need to make sure that I released everything.

My body was desperate. I needed to purge my bloodstream entirely of Sage Donahue, and he was the man for the job. I know Thatcher, and I know what he is capable of.

He’s able to bore into my body and extract her. He’s a skilled surgeon using scalpels to remove a virus that had taken over my entire system, and every session, he pulls her out more and more.

But she’s a goddamn tumor. Every time he tears a piece of her out of me, she grows back ten times more.

“I had always been curious about why you showed up at my door that day, Van Doren,” he says suddenly, starting another wide line from one side of my back. “And I believe I have a solid theory now. Do you want me to share? Or do you want to tell me yourself?”

I turn my head just a bit, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t come here to talk, Thatcher. Not about this. That’s the rule—no questions.”

“Oh, this isn’t a question. It’s a statement.” The music changes to another piano-themed melody, overcast and somber. “I’m just giving you a chance to admit it to yourself first.”

“What are you getting at, man?”

“Well,” he starts, hitting a particularly sensitive spot and making me hiss in discomfort, “it never made sense. There hadn’t been anything to throw you over the edge. You were content being Alistair’s and your father’s punching bag. What was the nail in the coffin that drove you to me? To this?”

The taste of strawberry vodka and betrayal.

I drop my head down on my arms in front of me, staring down at the concrete ground.

My last hope in humanity had been set ablaze by a set of neon blue eyes and a pretty poison mouth.

“It didn’t add up. Not until the other night.”

My body freezes, going solid. There’s no way he noticed. He couldn’t have.

Behind me, I hear him drop the scalpel into a bowl, clunking around the metal. The cutting is done, and now begins the cleanup. The sound of paper tearing echoes as he prepares to bandage me up.

“Sweetheart Sage Donahue,” he says keenly, always so smug, especially when he knows he’s right about something. “How long did you plan on keeping her from us?”

I go pale and not just from the blood loss.

He swipes a wet cloth across my back, making me suck in air through my teeth. I bow my spine a little, letting my head fall back as he wipes me down with alcohol, cleaning the wound out

“I don’t know what you’re going on about,” I say coolly, shaking my head a bit, hoping my calm nature will throw him off.

“Don’t insult my intelligence or my instincts, Rook. I saw the way you looked at her when she showed up at the cliff. The way she would have continued asking us, without care of her pride or our opposition. But as soon as you said something, she was done. I know what it looks like for a person to be broken, and your simple words disintegrated her.”

Thatcher knows the human body and its reactions better than most of the population. He knows the arteries and veins that ride throughout your limbs by name, organs, and their functions, but he is also the only person who doesn’t understand it beyond a chemical level.

He’s observant; there is nothing he misses. He picks up on body language, tone shifts, how certain mannerisms differ from person to person. He watches and can replicate it almost flawlessly, but it’s not real.

He can fake it. He can even make others believe it.

However, the reality is Thatcher has no empathy.

That portion of his brain hadn’t got the memo apparently, because he feels absolutely nothing. Understands nothing about emotions of the heart or emotions in general. He has no one to compare it to.

So while he could spew for hours and hours about how the respiratory system works in minute detail, he would never grasp what it feels like to breathe for another person. Would never be able to comprehend just how powerful betrayal and heartbreak are.

That’s why, yes, I think he valued Rose as a human, just as he does us. He is bound by loyalty and that alone. He’s the most clearheaded in this situation because he has no emotional attachment. It’s simply a business transaction. Rose was taken, and he is going to do what he needs to in order to replace that asset or at the very least fill its gap.

So he’s the very last person I want to have this conversation with. Yet, somehow, I knew it would be him.

“So I’ll ask you again, and only once more, Van Doren,” he warns, tone cold and removed. “What does Sage have to do with this? What are you punishing yourself for this time?”

“Fuck this, man.” I jerk away from him, exploding out of my chair and knocking it forward. “You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, and I didn’t sign up for your psychobabble bullshit.”

I grab my shirt that rests on the shiny steel table in the middle of the room, tugging it over my shoulders and making the tape pull against my skin, the wounds beneath pulsating with a muted pain.

“If she is going to be a problem for us, if she puts us at risk for what we are doing—if she is your problem—then it’s my business to know. I won’t have you messing this up because you can’t keep your impulsive hormones in check.”

I turn, stepping up in his face, but he barely blinks, rolling the white sleeves of his shirt down his arms. So technical, so precise that there isn’t a drop of blood on him.

“Don’t you fucking go there, you pretentious cunt,” I bite out. “I would never do anything that would put you all at risk. She is nothing, has always been nothing.”

Acid eats my insides, my body’s way of calling me a liar. Lying to someone I call a friend, one of my closest friends.

I want to believe it—that she is nothing. Goddamn I would give anything for her to be nothing.

But she’s still living inside of me like a parasite, feeding on me.

The calmness in his movements almost pisses me off more. The way he lazily drags his eyes up to mine, making direct contact.

“I’m not saying you would, Rook.” He pauses. “Not intentionally.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re impetuous. You act hastily, and you are driven by your desires. I trust you. I don’t trust your emotions.”

I roll my tongue across my teeth, nodding sarcastically. “Go eat another dictionary, fucking prick,” I grunt. “I don’t need to be a robot in order to be in control.”

I’m done with this conversation. I’m done with this session.

Stepping away, I turn around, heading for the steps that lead to the upper portion of the house, where everything is warm and homey, unlike what lives beneath it—this cold, emotionless place that Thatcher dwells inside of.

“If I figured it out, it won’t be long before the others do. Don’t let them, us, find out from someone else, Rook. If we don’t have trust, then we have nothing,” he says to my back, making me pause at the top of the stairs.

I rotate my head, just enough to look over my shoulder, down the incline at the well-put-together man at the bottom.

“Thatcher, why the fuck do you care?” I ask. “Let’s be honest here—you don’t care about anything. It’s loyalty for you, that’s it. So why the hell do you care about me and my personal shit?”

I’m not the only one with secrets, and I’m sick of him acting like I am. Alistair has them, Silas, and so does Thatch. He probably has more than any of us. One time in our friendship he’d opened the vault and told us about his father.

About how he found out, what he saw as a little kid.

How he’d stumbled upon his father’s garage and all the things inside. And once that happened, once his father caught him, Thatcher had become a protégé. Henry Pierson is a smart man and created a way for him and his legacy to live forever—turning his innocent child into a serial killer prodigy.

Thatch never told us what his father made him do, what he made him watch, but I can guarantee it wasn’t cartoons.

The silence goes on until I hear his voice, still and steady,

“I get to hurt you. Alistair can hurt you. Even Silas can. But no one else.” He stops, just a moment before continuing. “No one else gets to hurt you, Van Doren. No one.”