Vinny

I'd lost track of how many days I'd made pancakes for breakfast in the past month. It had started out as two days in a row, and then had grown to a week, and then continued to stretch to an amount I could no longer count. It probably was terrible to be consuming that much sugar every morning, but I was getting good at making them, and it was hard to stop now.

I had the recipe memorized by now, knew just how much flour, how much milk, the right way to mix it so that all the air bubbles were trapped. It was how I spent my mornings now, pouring and mixing and flipping.

The early morning was the best time to be there, in the kitchen. I was always up before Cian or Mom, so I had it to myself, the timid sunlight highlighting the brass pots and pans, the clinking and clanging of spoons and whisks a careful countermelody to the chirping birds beyond the window. It wasn't like it was at night. Night was frigid and eerie. Morning was the epitome of comfortable heat.

The griddle hissed as I dripped a scoop of batter over it, spatula in my other hand. As a pocket of sweet-scented steam rose into my nostrils, I heard Cian shuffle in with a sleep-drunken groan.

My back was to him, but I saw the disbelief, if not annoyance, on his face. "Pancakes?" he said. "Again?"

"I won't stop," I said, drizzling a handful of chocolate chips over the flapjacks, then watching as the batter swallowed them whole. "Not until I've mastered it."

"It's literally been a month," Cian responded. "Of pancakes. Just pancakes. I think you've mastered it fine."

I flipped a finished one onto a plate. "Do you have something against them?"

"Well, no."

"Then quit complaining."

I waited until I'd made a considerably-sized stack before turning and sliding the plate over to Cian. He was still in his rocket ship pajama pants, the same pair Eden had bought him for his sixteenth birthday, and had tossed a wrinkled, only half-zipped jacket over his bare chest. Yawning, he scrubbed his hand through his hair and went to work, slicing his meal into neat triangles. "You know," he said then, a minuscule smile tickling his mouth, "the day I told Lucie...about us, I took her to a diner."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," he replied. "I know. It seems stupid to tell her about something that dark while eating pancakes, but that's exactly what I did."

I frowned, finishing off another flapjack. The griddle was still steaming; I reached one hand to click the stovetop off, setting my spatula aside for a moment. Not turning towards Cian, I braced my hands against the counter. "She took all of it pretty well, don't you think? To learn that much about what happened to us, and still want to stick around? She must have been crazy—"

"Vinny," snapped Cian. "Don't talk about her like that."

I turned, squinting at him. He had paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, his expression stern enough to frighten me. "Like what?"

"Like she's dead. She's not dead. She's not going to be dead, not anytime soon."

"I didn't mean it that way," I said, but Cian just shook his head, already busying himself with finishing off his pancake stack. It was obvious that the subject of Lucie wasn't on the schedule any longer, and I understood that. The more we talked about her, the more we thought about her, the more her ache her absence caused us. I wanted to believe ignoring it all was going to get rid of the hole in my chest, in Cian's chest, but even I knew the attempt was futile.

Cian leaned his cheek into his palm, playing mindlessly with the strings of his eyepatch. It was an odd look for him, I thought, almost as if it made him seem more eerie, more dangerous, than before. "Aren't you going to eat some? You look parched."

I shook my head. "No, I'm not really hungry."
He sighed, shoving a forkful of his flapjack triangles into his mouth and speaking around it. "If this is about last night..."

"It's not. I didn't say anything about that."

"You don't have to," Cian countered. "That's my point."

I paused, studying him for a moment, wishing, just briefly, that he was a stranger. If he weren't Cian, if he weren't my brother, I could talk without the knowledge that he was ceaselessly reading me. It was good, in a sense, that I knew him, and he knew me. Other times, the intimacy was a little inconvenient.

I nudged the spatula, still splattered in flour and milk, into the farmhouse sink. It thudded against the steel as I quietly made my way to the barstool beside Cian, taking a seat. "You know," I told him, folding my legs gently underneath me, "you spend way too much time worrying about me. I probably spend way too much time worrying about you. Let's just stop worrying and be...I don't know, normal brothers for once."

His fork clinked against his plate; he glanced at me, gaze as sharp as a dagger. "You know I don't like that word."

I wondered, all of a sudden, when he'd started to grow angry so easily. I remembered how I'd begged him not to go to Nick, because I'd known it would change him, twist him in such a way that he wasn't Cian anymore so much as he was a warped image of him. I bit my lip, allowing myself to think—just for a second—that it could have happened anyway, even without the fallen angels making him one of their own.

I wanted the old days back, before Nick came along, when air had been fresh in my lungs and Lucie had been awake and we'd all been happy.

To my older brother, I said, "I'm beginning to doubt you like anything at all."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I dropped my gaze, but felt his burning into me, relentless. "Lucie would be a little scared, I think," I elaborated. "If she saw you now. I don't think she'd recognize you."

I waited for him to say something, for him to snap at me, for him to get up, walk away from this, just like he walked away from everything.

But he didn't. He just stayed there, twirling his empty plate around upon the island, golden hair spilling over his forehead in thick, unruly waves as he ducked his head.

I groaned. I hadn't wanted to get into this, but I couldn't stop now. "I just—you're acting weird, lately. It's like there's something you're not telling me, and you get angry whenever I ask about it. It wasn't like this before and that's why...that's why I don't think she'd recognize you—"

"Hell," Cian said. I blinked at him, and there was a broad smile upon his face, even as his tongue burned in protest.

"Cian?"

"Hell!" he repeated, letting out a laugh. "You think I like this? You think I don't know everything you're telling me? Something's wrong with me. I know that much. But you know what else I know?"

I swallowed, remaining silent.

Cian narrowed his eyes at me. "It's because I don't have her. If I had her, I'd be able to hold on a little longer—but without her, without my Lulu, I'm...you know what? I don't even know."

"You can't use her as an excuse," I told him. "You can't use her as an excuse to keep secrets from me. I'm your brother, for God's sake."

"I know. That's precisely why, Vinny. That's why I have to take care of you, even if it hurts. Because you're my brother, and the day you were born I promised I'd always protect you," he answered. He rose from his seat, zipping his jacket all the way up and flipping its hood over his head. Just for a moment, he was his usual self—the hood mussing his already messy hair, the fond smile at his mouth, his his hands resting in his pockets. His eyes, however, were solemn. "I broke my promise once. Please don't make me break it again."

I sighed. I sighed because I'd known it was useless. I sighed because there was no point. I sighed because I knew my brother and I knew that there was no convincing him that secrets did more harm than good.

I bit down on my tongue. Who was I to say so, really, after what I'd done that night?

There was a grunt from Cian's direction, and then the jarring noise of shattering porcelain. I looked up, and Cian had a hand pressed to his forehead, his good eye squinted shut, his fingers trembling. The plate he'd ate off of was on the floor underneath the barstool, scattered in ragged, uneven-edged pieces. Sweat beaded upon Cian's forehead, his lip quivering as he bit down on it.

I knew the sight all too well; it was the same thing that had happened in the hospital the night before—another one of his migraines. He hadn't gotten them before Nick had used him to open the gate, that much I'd connected. But that wasn't a lot of evidence at all.

"Cian?" I said, but he just shook his head, waving me off. With a groan, he staggered from his seat, ignoring the blood the shards of porcelain drew from his feet as he shuffled across them.

I tried to catch him, but he had already vanished from the kitchen, only pausing to say, "I'm fine. I just need to rest a little...I'll be...upstairs."

I glanced from his retreating back, to the broken plate, to the griddle that was just beginning to cool.

I closed my eyes.

He wasn't the only one who was lost without Lucie.

I'd accepted that we were no more than friends; it was how it had to be. Regardless, surviving without her was too difficult. It felt as if I were moving through the days with only one working half of my body, everything else severed and useless. I wouldn't be whole again, I thought. Not if I didn't have my best friend.

I had just bent to retrieve the remnants of the broken plate when the doorbell rang. I hesitated, wondering when we'd ever gotten visitors this early in the morning. The only people who ever showed up before ten were Mom's book club, which hadn't really gotten together since Dad left, and Lucie, who was still locked away, unconscious.

No one else was going to answer it, though.

I exhaled, raking a hand up through my hair as I strode into the foyer and pulled the door open.

A woman stood there, her chestnut skin tired and blanched, her dark curls strung with intermittent strands of silver. Her eyes, fringed with long, elegant lashes, were so familiar, ebony brown and fierce, like they would know the depths of your soul if only you stared long enough.

I hadn't seen her often, but I knew her, and it was clear that she knew me.

"Vinny, was it?" Mrs. Monteith said, hugging her cardigan tighter around herself. "I'd like to talk to you."
"I'm sorry...about what?"

"About what happened to my daughter," she responded, her eyes landing on the ground for a moment. "And I don't want all the same lies. I want to know what really happened."