Page 94 of An Inheritance of Monsters

“When I was a child, I had an older brother.”

Lincoln, Zirin said. One of his tentacles meandered over my calf.

There was nothing sexual about his touch right now; he was offering me the comfort of touch, pure and simple.

“Yes.” My throat tightened for a moment. “He was thirteen years old. I was the baby of the family. But Lincoln had… problems. I was too young to know or understand, but my parents must’ve known. Looking back when I was older, I realized that they had started treating me like the golden child because Ididn’thave his problems… but Lincoln had probably been silently screaming for them to notice or help the whole time.”

They were silent as I spoke, and I was grateful for it.

I’d spent so many years with all of this locked away that it would be impossible to start again if I was stopped.

“He hung himself. In his own closet. My dad was the one who found him.” I exhaled deeply. “That was their wake-up call, but of course it was too late.

“My parents just couldn’t accept that he had killed himself. They blamed it on literally everything else—someone had coerced him into it. He listened to Satanic death metal and the band was responsible. His therapist had failed him. But it all came down to the fact that they had given up on him entirely.”

Rask wrapped another arm around me, squeezing gently.

I was sure the monsters had no idea of what half I was saying even was, but that was good. It was great, even.

All they cared about was my feelings and actuallylistening.

“A week after his funeral was the first time I ever saw a ghost.”

Voraal’s eyes flickered. “Your nightmare?”

I nodded. “He was on the end of my bed, just… strangling. Over and over. I was so scared I hid in my closet, crying as quietly as I could, because I was home alone. He didn’t disappear until my parents came back.

“After that, I saw ghosts everywhere. I saw the old man across the street who’d had a brain aneurysm standing in his window all the time. There was a homeless woman in the alleyway by the grocery store who had died of exposure one winter, and she was always there, shivering on the ground. It was a constant barrage of death, but when I tried to tell my parents, they lost their minds.

“That was the first time my dad ever took a belt to my ass. He told me to stop making shit up and trying to get attention off Lincoln’s death, so I shut up. I couldn’t sit down for a week after that, but the ghosts never vanished.”

I stopped for a moment, collecting my thoughts and taking calming breaths. With Eloise’s death fresh in my mind, the next part was hard to say out loud.

“My parents got into spiritual healing message boards, and not long after that, a woman contacted them: Eloise Doyle.”

“The dead fraud.” Voraal’s voice was cool and cutting, his claws seeming sharper than ever.

I let out a hollow laugh. “The very same. She told them that for the low, low price of two hundred bucks, she could come hold a séance so they could speak to Lincoln again. And of course they fell for it.”

Voraal shook his head, and I gripped Rask’s claws around my waist. “I met Eloise when I was seven. My parents had skipped my birthday that year, and I can’t blame them for that, but… I had become a ghost in my own house, as well. And when Eloise held the séance, Lincoln appeared again.

“I watched his spirit rocking back and forth on my bed, eternally dying, while Eloise sat in our kitchen and told them Lincoln was in a happy, glowing place full of light, and he was so sorry to cause them pain… it was all bullshit and they ate it up.”

Anger flared in me once more at the memory, and suddenly… I didn’t feel bad for Eloise at all.

I hadn’t caused her death. And I wasn’t sorry that she was dead.

Because of what she did next.

“It became an addiction for my parents, probably as a way to cope with their guilt. Eloise was at our house nearly every week, holding these séances and healing sessions, and the price kept getting higher and higher… soon my parents were shelling out nearly a thousand dollars a week, and my dad had quit his job. They sold their car, they sold our furniture, Mom’s jewelry, literally anything of value. They held a garage sale with all of my toys and most of my clothes to scrape together the money to have Eloise come visit on Lincoln’s birthday.

“They finally lost the house. I found the foreclosure bills in their belongings when I was in my teens. We were a month away from eviction, my parents had spent every last dime for Eloise’s services, and when they called her to ask her to come out and speak to him in the house, to let him know they were moving on, Eloise told them she couldn’t do it. Not unless they had the fifteen hundred she’d asked for in hand.

“They begged and pleaded. I remember them on the phone with her, sobbing,beggingher to please do it one more time, they could scrape the money together on a payment plan, but Eloise refused. She’d wrung them dry of everything.

“The next day, my parents were in a fog. It was like they didn’t even see me; they stared right through me.”

I was staring right through Voraal, seeing something else through his shadows.

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