Page 6 of Fuse

And with his Frankenstein steps, showing me the full spectrum of the monster he’s fighting from the inside out.

Not a creature who doesn’t want their love.

A man who blatantly thinks he doesn’t deserve it.

Oddly, I’m not surprised when Trixie lets him go, despite how Chase tries to pull him back. After a few seconds, even Chase sees the grief that crashes over Reece as he hikes back up to the slope between Mitch’s and Tyce’s markers.

Chase grabs Trixie’s hand while sending his mother a look of gratitude and then helps her climb the rise too. I link elbows with Joany, and we follow them. In a flash, I remember the last time I did this to bond with a girlfriend: Angelique and I had Rachel-and-Monica’ed along the Quai de Conti in Paris on our way back to the apartment she’d lent to Reece and me. It had been the hideaway rendezvous she’d shared with her lover, Dario, before the Consortium killed him—only that morning, we’d learned that they hadn’t, and that a very alive Dario was none other than a very alive Tyce Richards.

Only now, Tyce really is dead. And with him, so is the man Angelique’s had to mourn a second time—a double hit of karmic payback for her role in helping the Consortium abduct Reece to begin with. But my conclusion about that is colored by my ferocious love for the man she sent to hell that night, which often prevents me from remembering that she too was tortured by those monsters, even before they took the life of the man she loved. She’s more than paid her price to fate. She’s racking up points in her divine good column by refusing to wallow in her grief. After the fiasco of Paris, she returned at once to the Consortium, where her deep cover with the bastards continues to be one of our strongholds in the fight to take them down forever.

The weirdness of it all isn’t lost on me, even now.

We’ve taken the war public but are still fighting the battles in secret.

We’ve called the Consortium out by name but know less about their real identities than before, especially with Tyce and Lawson dead.

Worst of all, we know we’re likely sitting on a ticking time bomb—but because there’s been no contact from Angie in ten days, we’re blind to the length of the fuse.

It’s all been pricking at Reece extra hard, though he’s not spoken a word to that effect. I see it in the tension stiffening his movements and the sharp slashes defining his jawline. He’s concerned but hiding that torment well from everyone—and probably thinks I don’t notice either.

But right now, I think “stress” is everyone’s middle name.

In a pre-Paris world, a ten-day lag from Angelique wouldn’t have made any of us blink twice. But since that incident, as well as Reece’s ballsy action of publicly calling out the Consortium afterward, Angie’s been pinging every few days—sometimes, if there’s a lot going on, even a number of times every day. According to her, the Consortium has been frantic about running deeper underground to hide from a world that now knows who they are and how deep into the scientific cookie jar they’ve been reaching.

That doesn’t match what the bastards have been doing on a public level—actions that have been, in a word, brazen. Since they’ve accelerated their abductions in the aftermath of Paris, we can only assume they are boldly flaunting how easily they can get to all of us. And while that possibility might be true, a frightening enough consideration on its own, it’s also led us to question how thoroughly their right hands are talking to their left hands these days.

So they’re fragmented; maybe worse. This is possibly some of the best news for us but the worst for Angie. With her going totally dark, we have no way of really knowing—and that might continue to be the case until it’s too damn late.

Right now, all we can do is force one foot in front of the other. Get through every day. Trudge up each hill as it comes.

Even this one.

Especially this one.

Wade, Fershan, and Alex join us on the top of the ridge and we form a haphazard semicircle behind Reece. He steps forward, sagging his head between shoulders that look as if the weight on them has tripled. The shitty thing is, it probably has. The even shittier thing is, I have to simply watch and let him be in that space. It damn near kills me, but I do. He has to endure this journey. There’s no shortcut for the canyon of grief.

He descends to one knee. Then the other. His shoulders rise and fall like massive tectonic plates trying to lift miles of the earth at once. I’m helpless to do little but drop down next to him, pressing against one side of him. Trixie mirrors the hold against his other side.

There are words inside him. I don’t know what they are, but I feel them as potently as my own heartbeats as he struggles to translate the sludge of his emotions into sounds on his lips. I try to help him by stroking a hand along his back and forming my forehead to the side of his neck. I don’t utter a word myself. I just need him to know I’m here. And again, like a surety in my soul, I recognize that he needs that too.

At last, after a massive inhalation, he says on a sparse rasp, “They were…my thunder.” Another searching pause, followed by another unsure breath. “Both of them. My brother…Tyce. My friend…Mitch. They helped me harness impossibility…”

“So you could do impossible things.” The conclusion, uttered with the care of a poet, belongs to Chase. He paces forward until he’s right in front of Reece, but at the moment I predict he’ll kneel and join his little brother, he instead grips Reece’s shoulders and yanks him. “So you could be every bolt of lightning you were destined to be, brother,” he grates as they stare eye-to-eye. “And take those fucking moonbats down for good.”

My heartbeat surges with an inspired thrill. I trade a tearful glance with Joany, seeing that she agrees, and I wonder if Reece does too. I’m only able to see his profile, but there’s a lot of information even in that. His jaw hardens again. The dark slashes of his eyebrows emphasize his curious gaze. He’s peering at Chase like the guy’s just landed in a spaceship with a talking raccoon as a copilot and then told him ELO’s the greatest band to ever live. Funny thing is, until everything went down in Paris, that scenario was higher on the probability scale than this open compassion and support from Chase.

As if still in a daze, Reece stammers, “Wh-What are you saying, man?”

Chase wraps his fingers against Reece’s nape. “I’m saying you have our support.” He encourages Trixie and Joany over with a determined nod. “All of us, Reece. We’ve talked about it, and we’re in agreement. You’re not alone in this anymore. You’ll not be alone ever again.”

Trixie steps closer. At least I think she does. It’s hard to clearly discern anything through the tears bashing my composure—especially as I hear the words Trixie adds to Chase’s.

“Your father wasn’t always a horrific person, boys. But the choices he made, in the name of bringing glory to our family, led him into dark quicksand.” She sniffs while turning toward Tyce’s boulder and flattens both hands to the monument, her fingertips trembling against the stone. “You saw that,” she raggedly whispers. “You saw that, my amazing boy, and you tried to stop the slide. And in the end, in your incredible way, you did.”

My vision blurs as I watch Chase and Reece surge over, securing their mother in their combined embrace. With their silent permission to let her grief tumble out, she does. It takes over her body in racking sobs and aching mewls.

A needed step…a necessary moment.