#TeaserTuesday - 12/19

 

Probably, he should have felt this distant, nagging kinship for Colin, more than any of them. Colin was the only other other son, like him. An accidental son. A son not permitted to carry the Lécuyer name in the stamped fronts of library books, or the captions of yearbook pictures, or on official government-issue IDs.

But it was Felix – it was Mercy – who occupied most of the real estate in the No Good Can Come From This region of his brain. A region floored with damp, swampy tangles of vine and sucking mud, that reeked of home in a bad way, and which seemed to pulse sometimes, when he was trying to sleep especially, like the living, breathing wilds beyond New Orleans.

When he glimpsed his reflection in the wide windows of the HQ hallways, he wondered if Mercy had ever needed to wear a suit, or a collared shirt under a sweater before. When he dumped Crystal hot sauce all over his eggs, he wondered if Mercy took them the same way. When the wind shoved at the cracks of his office window, whistling like a ghost, and he lifted his head from paperwork to see the world blustering by outside, he wondered what it felt like to ride a bike, and feel the excoriating strike of that wind on your face going eighty on a Tennessee four-lane.

When he clicked through slides in class, with the lights dimmed, and slide after slide of heinous crime scenes splashed up on the board, he wondered how it felt to do something about that sort of violence. To be the one to pull the trigger and send a criminal to a watery grave.

He wondered when he’d stopped thinking of Mercy as a criminal, too, rather than some avenging angel who didn’t have to live by the rules that were slowly, slowly choking him each day he stood up in front of his classes and told them about doing something after. After the murder was committed; after the killing was done.

Dimly, he was aware that he was beginning a slow, inexorable slide toward the kind of depression that eventually turned into addiction, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about stopping it.