before
It was Melwas Kocur who did it. Of course I wouldn’t learn his name until later, know for sure he had been at that village until much later than that. But I knew his presence before I knew his name, knew his handiwork before I knew anything else about him.
Everyone knows now what happened there. How Melwas put the village’s children on a boat and lit the boat on fire. How he rounded up the town’s adults inside the church and shot them, torching the church after. How it was the first of Colchester’s many victories.
But at the time, I only knew one thing.
Morgan was there.
Morgan was all I could think of as our Humvees raced through the valley, Morgan and that dumb church and how I was the one stupid enough to suggest she go exploring. Why did I do that? Why didn’t I insist she stay safe and sound in the village near the base? Or better yet, go home?
“You okay?” Dag asked quietly as we approached Glein. The smoke plumed up like a black chimney, faint pops and booms rattling the windows. The local militia trying to fight off the separatists and failing miserably.
“My sister is there,” I said, looking down at my hands. They were shaking. “She’s in that place.”
Dag nodded. He didn’t try to comfort me. He didn’t look for reasons why it might be okay.
I appreciated that.
Our convoy stopped about half a mile outside the village, and we got out. The captain was there somewhere, giving orders, but I barely listened. I found Colchester in the huddle of men and pulled him aside.
“Morgan’s here,” I said.
He pulled back to look me in the eyes. “What?”
“She’s here. In the village.”
Colchester’s voice was sharp. “Why?”
For some reason, that pissed me off. “She got tired of waiting around for you, so she went to see the church here.”
I dropped my voice to a mutter, half hoping he wouldn’t hear, half hoping he would. “Maybe if you’d just talked to her instead of ignoring her, she would have gone home or something. She would be safe.” It wasn’t fair, I knew it wasn’t fair, but I needed to blame someone. Hurt someone.
And I felt like shit the moment I did it, because it wasn’t Colchester’s fault at all, none of it was.
“We’ll do everything we can,” he promised, calm and kind despite my shitty outburst. His eyes searched my face. “I mean it, Embry. I’ll do whatever I can to save her.”
It was the use of my Christian name that stilled me, that calmed me enough to step back and pretend to listen to the captain’s strategy. Embry. It sounded strange on his lips, two warm syllables punctuated by the cracks and roars of the village burning behind us.
Was I a bad brother because in that moment I would have delayed going to Morgan’s side just to hear him say my name again?
Actually, don’t answer that.
The captain finished giving us orders; our three platoons split up and began working our way into the village at different angles. I say village, although at that point there was almost nothing recognizable about it. The streets were so covered with rubble that you couldn’t tell what had been a road and what had been a row of houses. Fires burned everywhere, hectically, merrily almost, like we were walking into a happily over-sexed pagan rite instead of a war zone. And the bullets came from everywhere. Fast, popping, chaotic.
We’d been at it less than five minutes when the captain came over the radio. “I’ve got new intel,” he shouted. “There’s a boat in the lake, a stranded boat with children. Who’s closest?”
“I am,” came Colchester’s reply. “We’ll go now.”
“And the church,” the captain said. “The adults in the town have been rounded up into the church. Take care of that boat as fast as possible and get to the church, Colchester. I think the boat’s a distraction.”
The church. Morgan.
I directed my men around a corner, and as we exchanged fire with some separatists across the street, I searched the buildings nearby for any sign of the church, and as I did, there was a massive boom, an explosion so violent it nearly knocked me off my feet. It came from the direction of our convoy, where the captain was. I stared at the cloud of dust and smoke at the edge of the village with a sinking heart.
Which was when Colchester swore loudly on the radio. “Four of mine are down. The boat’s on fire. I can see the children on it waving for help. Captain, we’re going in there but we might need more help. Captain? Captain?”
There was no response.
“Anybody?” Colchester asked. “We need help down here now!”
It was as if there was no one left. No one but me and my men. But Morgan…
I gripped my radio too hard as I pressed the call button, “We’re here, Lieutenant Colchester. We can come to you…but the church is important too.”
There was a pause. “I know, Lieutenant.”
I closed my eyes, took a breath. “What do you want us to do?”
“There aren’t any good choices right now. None of them are good, you understand this?”
It felt like he was asking something different, trying to tell me something else, and I understood. I hated it, but I understood. We all had jobs to do, one job really, to safeguard the civilians here, and on the complicated scale of human life, the children were more important. Even I saw that.
“I understand, Colchester.”
“Good. You’re closest to the church. Send four men there, but the rest down here. I’ll leave it up to you where you go yourself.”
With one last glance at the street, I pressed down my radio. “I’m coming to you.”
I never regretted my choice. Those children would have died if we hadn’t all been there. There were nine of us, and it took all nine to wrangle two boats into service and pluck those children from their would-be crematorium. Whatever the consequences, I knew karmically I’d done the right thing. Logically. Morally.
But emotionally? In that hollow place in my chest where my demons lived, where they nested and told me vicious, evil truths about myself? Those demons told me I’d chosen Colchester over Morgan, gone to his side instead of to her rescue. And although I never regretted what I’d done, I came closest after we raced through the village to the church and I saw four of my men dead outside the burning building. After I kicked down the flaming doors of the church and found Morgan bloody and nearly suffocated under two other bodies. When I heaved the corpses off of her and Colchester easily lifted her thin frame off the floor and carried her out into the fume-choked air. After I sat next to her in the hospital in Lviv and listened to the doctors tell her she would never have full movement in her shoulder again.
In those moments, I could feel the regret pressing close to me, as if the guilt could corporealize and physically reach out for me with its serrated fingers.
And the last night in Lviv, before Morgan was being discharged to go home, she looked right at me and said, “I’ll never forgive you. Or Maxen.”
“You can hate me all you want,” I said tiredly. “But don’t hate Colchester. He doesn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t hate him,” she said, turning her gaze to the chipped beige wall across from her bed. Through the thin curtain separating her part of the room from the person she shared it with, I heard a cough and then several muttered words in Ukrainian. “I can refuse to forgive him and still not hate him.”
“Morgan, you know the doctors didn’t tell you the whole story when you woke up. The children—”
“Yes,” she snarled suddenly. “The children. You don’t have to tell me again.”
“You would have done the same.”
She closed her eyes. “You have no idea what I would have done. You can’t possibly have any idea.”
“Maybe we’re not biologically related, but we were both raised by Vivienne Moore. You would have done the thing that would have looked best on paper. The thing that would sound good in your memoir.”
“Is that why you did it? To look good in the history books?”
I thought of those children we pulled off the boat, their soot-brushed faces and panicked cries. And then I thought of Colchester murmuring to them in Ukrainian, vy v bezpetsi, vy v bezpetsi.
You are safe, you are safe.
I thought of my name from his mouth; his lips and tongue and throat making the noises that uniquely signified me.
“There were other reasons,” I admitted.
“You suddenly have a conscience? Is that it?”
“I’ve always had a conscience,” I informed her. I grinned, even though her eyes were closed and she couldn’t see me. “I’m just really good at ignoring it.”
She heard the grin in my voice and fought off a smile of her own. “You’re incurable.”
“And I’ll never make you forgive me for it.”
“Embry,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again. “Before I go home, I wanted to tell you…” She paused, her eyes moving up to the ceiling, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. She ran her fingers across her forehead, and for a minute she looked so much like Colchester that it stunned me. But then she dropped her hand and sighed, as if she’d changed her mind about something.
“Be careful around Maxen,” she said finally. “He’s not the man you think he is.”
“You don’t have to be coy, Morgan. I saw what your body looked like after a week with him.”
She chewed on her lip again. “I could see what he was. Is, I mean. I see what he is because I’m like him in what I want, how I love. But Embry—you’re not.”
“Not what? Game for being spanked?”
She rolled her eyes, looking like a teenager again, like the bossy older sister that would bother me when I was trying to watch TV.
“It’s a lot more than spanking, you know.” Her expression turned serious. “He wouldn’t just want your body. He’d want your mind, your thoughts, your heart. Your surrender. That’s more than a few playful slaps. It’s power and pain and control. He might be able to live without it, but even if he could, the need for it would gnaw at him every day.”
“And you think I can’t handle that?”
She looked incredulous. “Embry, you are the most selfish person I’ve ever met. You don’t take anything seriously, all you want to do is drink and fuck, and on top of that, you brood all the time. Or at least, you brood when you’re not fucking and drinking. Do you really think you’re the ideal person to bear the brunt of Maxen’s needs? You can’t even handle your own!”
She had a point. Several good points, actually. I couldn’t imagine willingly allowing someone to hurt me, allowing someone to take the reins in bed. I was too much of a fuck-up emotionally to even play around with giving up my emotions to someone else.
“How do you know about all this kinky shit anyway?” I asked my stepsister. “You are way too knowledgeable.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want the answer to that?”
I thought for a moment and said quickly, “You know what? I don’t.”
She laughed.
I stood. “I guess I should go. Are you sure you’re okay leaving the hospital?”
“Yes, Nimue is picking me up and flying with me.”
Nimue was my mother’s youngest sister, closer to our age than to hers, and as a genuine, quinoa-eating, crystal-wearing Seattle hippie, she was a perennial embarrassment to Lieutenant Governor Vivienne Moore. But she was nurturing and kind and also a professor of sociology, so she was fiercely intelligent. Morgan would be in good hands.
I bent down and hugged my sister as best as I could in her hospital bed, careful of her injured shoulder. “Love you, sissy.”
“Love you too, bubby. I still don’t forgive you.” She pulled back from the hug so she could look up into my face as she spoke. “And don’t forget what I said about Colchester. For the sake of your own happiness, you should stay far, far away from him. Find a nice girl. Maybe a quiet blonde who likes books. She’ll be much less trouble.”
