Page 25 of Brody
The door to Magnus’s house—which I’d managed to mostly finish building by now—slammed closed as he disappeared inside. Trent gave me a sympathetic look before following Magnus as well.
I finally looked over at my porch railing. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. One of the railings was cracked and a few of the support poles were beyond saving. Overall, it wouldn’t take more than a few hours of work to fix.
“If he’s going to break something, he should take it out on his own stuff. Not mine,” I growled. Sucking in another deep breath, I shook my head and headed around to the back of my house.
A shack behind my house held all my woodworking tools. It was one of the first structures I’d completed after we bought the property, since I was going to need it to help build everything else. One entire wall was dedicated to my selection of high-quality timber. It took me a moment to search through the selection and find a few pieces of the same walnut wood that the porch was made from.
After building multiple structures, including two full houses, and a lifetime dabbling with woodworking, meaning that I didn’t even need to think about what I was doing, my hands workedautomatically, bringing the selected wood pieces over to the miter saw so I could cut them down to the exact size I needed.
“Brody?”
Ellis stood in the doorway to the workshop, halfway hidden around the frame as he peered inside. “Should you be doing that?”
“What?” I looked at him, confused as I switched on the miter saw. “Yeah. I should fix the railing as soon as possible. It won’t take long, and it’ll bother me if leave it for later.”
I placed the first piece of wood on the miter saw but was stopped when Ellis rushed inside and grabbed my wrist. “I don’t think you should be doing that.”
“Excuse me?”
Okay. Now I was starting to get upset. I’d built every structure on this property. Working with wood was literally my job.
Why was he questioning me?
My anger must have been clear on my face, because Ellis rushed to keep talking, never letting go of my wrist.
“I- I’m sure you’re very good at this stuff. But, um, maybe not right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tugging at me, Ellis tried to pull me away from the miter saw. “It’s just… your hands.”
“What about them?”
I looked down where Ellis was now holding both my wrists. My hands were shaking.
At first, I thought there was something wrong with my vision, but after blinking a few times I realized that, no, I wasn’t seeing things wrong. My hands really were shaking. The walnut branch I held rattled against the table of the miter saw, completely unsteady. If I tried cutting it, I probably just end up sawing my hand in half instead.
I let go of the wood and it tumbled from my shaking fingers as I hunched down on the floor. I gripped my hands to my chest.
“Fuck. I just… fuck.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make the shaking stop.
Ellis carefully knelt in front of me. “It’s okay. You’re allowed to be upset.”
“No. That’s not…”
I shook my head against the pain that was building between my temples. The buzz of the still running miter saw echoed painfully inside my skull and I slammed my fist against the power button to turn it off. I understood why Magnus had broken my porch railing. It felt good to hit something, and I slammed my fist against the button a few more times before Ellis stopped me and held both my hands in his own.
“Your friend’s missing. Of course you’re upset. And… your other friend, Magnus, is just upset, too. I’m sure he didn’t mean what he said.”
“What would you know about it?”
Ellis’s face fell, and I immediately regretted my words.
“You’re right. I don’t know anything, do I. I’m probably wrong. I?—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re right. Magnus is just upset. Of course he is. We’ve never been this helpless before. There was always an enemy we could fight, or a scheme we could unravel. Even when we had no idea what was going on, we could always keep moving forward. Now… now there’s just nothing. God! Even if I wanted to go looking for Creed myself, I can’t. I don’t even know what country he might be in.”
The shaking in my hands increased, until my whole body trembled. All my thoughts were replaced with a loud buzzing sound, as if I’d turned the miter saw back on. Yet the saw remained silent. It was just my own brain going haywire.
