Shattered Read Free

rich and I live with her. I need to at least pay her rent .
    The
one from the news, right? I nodded. She’s pretty, but money isn’t
everything, little bro.
    Little bro. What a joke. I’d believed she
was being genuine with me. I was such an idiot.
    The door closed on Indiana, and I wanted
to go back in and ask her why she’d bothered to befriend me. Why not just let
us make our pretend money and end the world with Kamon like they’d planned? Why
make us like them? But I couldn’t ask Indiana anything. Her body was in that
room, but her mind had been hijacked, so I walked away from the door.
    I followed Lydia into the next
interrogation room and clasped my hands behind my back to keep them away from this
culprit’s throat. Like Indiana, Shane was slouching in his chair, alive but not
present with us. Fur sprouted out of parts of his skin, interrupting the ivory
with patches of gray. His body had frozen mid-shift, it seemed.
    I detested him now, but when I’d met him,
I’d thought he was the coolest person on the planet.
    That day, I’d walked into my interview
and sat in the empty chair across from Devin and Shane. Shane spoke first.
    So
… Nathan Reece, you’re hired if you can win a wrestling match with a wolf . I’d laughed and adjusted in the chair,
waiting for the real interview questions to start. Devin had smiled and
motioned for me to meet Shane in the middle of the floor, my only test for the
job.
    Looking back, he’d probably let me win
that day.
    “Nathan?” Jeffery said. I blinked a few
times, snapping out of my thoughts. He and Lydia were staring at me. “What can
you tell us about him?”
    I took a deep breath. “Shane is Devin’s
right hand. My direct supervisor. He held my … Theresa down.”
    I felt like I was about to shift and take
his head off, so I walked out of the room, fleeing from his musty scent, as
Jeffery said the same line about consenting to a merciful punishment.
    We did that fourteen more times. Room
after room, old friend after old friend. Lydia had captured all of the supervisors,
and Jeffery consented to the merciful punishment of them all.
    As we closed the door on the wizard I
only knew as “Doc”, who’d drooled through my testimony, I remembered how many
rooms Lydia had said were filled. Seventeen. We’d seen sixteen. There was only
one room left and only one person who could be in it.
    “Are you ready?” Lydia asked. I nodded,
and she opened the door to the room across from Doc. I closed my eyes but
couldn’t do the same for my nose. Devin had a special kind of stench. He
smelled like a huddle of homeless people around a fire, a bit of garbage,
cigarettes, weed, and determination. But his personality, his fake one, would
make anyone love him.
    I opened my eyes and lost my breath.
Unlike the others, Devin was restrained to the chair and had a guard I hadn’t
sensed at his side. I couldn’t even smell the guard. The air was full of Devin,
my friend, the guy I’d sat with and spilled my soul
to.
    I needed tonight to be the end so I could
stop feeling like crap for my actions on June 25 th . June 25 th ,
the day Paul and Em had kicked me out of my room and I’d spent the night
hanging out with Shane and Devin. Shane had passed out in wolf form on the
floor, and Devin and I talked all night about everything under the sun. On the
agenda: my past with John and Theresa Reece.
    You
call them your parents, but then you say ‘John and Theresa’, Dev had said. He was Dev to me at the
time. He offered me a puff of his cigarette, and I declined. What’s that about, little bro?
    John
is John, I said. Theresa’s only Theresa because … I don’t
want to talk about it.
    Hey,
man. It’s me. You can tell me anything.
    And I did. I told him everything. Things
I wouldn’t tell Paul. Things I wouldn’t even tell Chris. And now they were just
cold blue toes in the morgue.
    “Nathan, this is Tyler Moss,” Lydia said,
pointing to the guy in the corner. He had to be in his