Chapter 56. Not Okay

  When he awoke again his mind reeled to process everything that had happened over the last day. The sun was setting, he was still tired, but it was time to put everything in its place.

  Delilah, Allison, and Bruno were all home, seemingly waiting for him. The crown, or its duplicate, rested in the middle of the dining room table between them.

  Where was the boy?

  Jeremiah spotted him. He had been laid to the side of the room, wrapped tightly in a white sheet. A part of him took offense that his friends were paying attention to a treasure while there was a dead child in their midst. “ His part is done, ” he reminded himself.

  “I can’t wait to hear this one,” said Bruno, nodding towards the crown.

  Delilah jabbed him with her elbow.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. You okay, Jay? With, you know,” Bruno glanced at the covered body, “everything?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Have a seat, this is a long one,” said Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah told them what happened after he left with Cassidy’s treasure. When he got to the part about killing Monty, he avoided mentioning Allison’s drug, but the look on her face told him she understood anyway.

  “You stabbed him?” gasped Delilah. “Just like that?”

  Bruno came immediately to his defense. “What choice did he have?”

  “I-I don’t know, but…” Delilah trailed off, looking at Jeremiah as though with new eyes.

  “Maybe there was another choice,” said Jeremiah. “If there was, I couldn’t think of it. I did what I did, and I have to live with that.”

  Allison nodded. “It’s always easy to pick apart what the best course of action would have been after the fact, but it’s different when you’re the man in the field. I trust Jay made the best decision he could have.”

  With her vote of confidence, Jeremiah plunged ahead in the story, telling them about Nascent and Lyle. When he started describing the city, Delilah pulled out a paper to begin taking notes. “Tell us everything you can remember,” she said.

  “Ah, no need for that,” said Jeremiah. “They’re all dead.”

  His friends stared at him, then at each other.

  “What?” he asked. “I told Allison it was over.”

  “I thought you meant you got the information we needed!” said Allison.

  “You wiped out the whole cult? ” said Delilah.

  “Not quite,” said Jeremiah. “I wasn’t able to find Lyle. It’s possible I missed him dying in the attack, but I doubt it. No doubt there are cultists who weren’t down there at the time, and some who escaped. But I took care of the entire reason the cult existed.”

  He told them about the adamantine enchantment diagram, doing his best to describe the effect the Abyss had on him. Delilah and Allison looked confused, but Bruno was nodding along.

  “That explains it, then, the rising fever,” said Bruno. “Good to know it was just a trans-dimensional demon gateway and nothing too serious.”

  “Lyle said there are others, too,” said Jeremiah. “He didn’t say where. I have his notebook, but it’s in code—we might be able to decipher it, but our best bet for learning more would be to track him down. He was gone by the time I got back there with the hundred-handed giant.”

  Delilah closed her eyes and massaged her temples. “And what in all the hells is a hundred-handed giant?”

  Jeremiah found the final part of the story the easiest to recount. He told them matter-of-factly about Gurg and the prisoners, about killing the butcher and creating the abomination. His friends’ expressions ranged from glee to horror as he described the destruction he wrought through the city. Only when he reached the part about finding the boy did he falter.

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  “They were…he was…they never stood a chance,” he said. A fresh wave of emotion threatened to overwhelm him until Allison put a hand on his arm.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Yes, it was,” said Jeremiah emphatically. “It was a consequence of my choice, my mistake.” He sighed. “I still think taking out the cult was the right thing to do, but his death—all their deaths were my responsibility. I need to be able to accept that.”

  His friends exchanged worried glances, “And you’re okay with that?” asked Allison. “I kind of thought you might take it a bit harder.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “It’s like you said—I had to make a choice. I could have come back, reported what I’d found, and maybe, eventually, the empress would have done something. But Lyle said they had people in the highest levels. I think it was well within the realm of possibility that any attack would be stopped, or at least stalled until it was too late.”

  “Definitely,” said Delilah. “This cult was a lot bigger than we thought, and conventional methods had already failed. It’s why Empress Aubrianna decided on a black operation in the first place.”

  “You made a choice,” said Bruno, “you chose to act. With everything you had.”

  “I had to,” said Jeremiah. “What chance did they have without me?”

  “Jay, I want to ask again,” said Delilah, “are you okay?” she scootched her chair a big closer to Jeremiah.

  “Yeah,” said Jeremiah, “I’m okay. Not great, but I’m okay. It’s just the way of things.”

  “You don’t have to be okay,” said Delilah softly. She put a hand on his shoulder, and Jeremiah felt his throat constrict.

  “Really, I’m okay,” he said.

  Delilah stood up and wrapped her arms around his head, pulling him against her chest. “You don’t have to be okay,” she whispered.

  It hit all at once. The guilt, the fear, the sadness, the regret, the disgust at what he’d seen. Jeremiah exploded into sobs against her, full body shaking sobs. He clutched her as tight as he could. He heard her hiss through her teeth as he clutched too hard, but she squeezed back harder to tell him it was alright. The whole time she continued to whisper, but Jeremiah couldn’t hear her.

  Jeremiah felt Allison wrap her arms around him from the opposite side.

  He felt Bruno put a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “H-he didn’t even have a chance to be a kid,” Jeremiah sobbed, “he was just a kid and I killed him. I killed a kid, I killed a kid. I killed a little boy!”

  “Shhh, you’re okay, you’re okay,” whispered Delilah.

  Jeremiah couldn’t stop, “I’ve killed so many people! I’ve killed so many people!” he sobbed uncontrollably and lost himself in his grief. He cried shamelessly, until his lungs ached and his nose ran. Until there was nothing left in him.

  “I don’t regret it,” he said, finally pulling away from Delilah. Bruno and Allison moved away as well. “I don’t regret what I did. I would do it again. I just…I just wish I didn’t have to.” He looked at the covered body again. “I’m sorry kid, I’m really sorry.”

  “You don’t have-er, what I mean is, you did the right. Uh…” Bruno started to say, but it fell apart. Delilah nodded toward the door. “Yeah, I need to get ahead of this,” said Bruno.

  “Ahead of what?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Monty’s dead, and you were seen with him last. I don’t want anyone gunning for you.” Bruno tried to grab his bag with his missing hand, then switched and slung it over his shoulder. “Good work, Jay.”

  Delilah reached out and touched Jeremiah on the shoulder, her face troubled. Then she left, leaving only Allison and Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah let out his breath. It was all out in the open now, and his friends didn’t hate him, not even Delilah. Probably.

  “Just one more order of business, then,” said Allison, gesturing towards the boy’s body. “Come on, I know a place.”

  ?

  Despite the fatigue still residing in his body, Jeremiah insisted on carrying the boy to his final resting place. Allison walked beside him in her guard’s regalia, spade in hand, and nobody spared them a second glance.

  They walked beyond Elminia proper, past the factories that thronged her, until they reached unclaimed wild fields. Jeremiah chose the crest of a small hill, where a light breeze played through the tall grass, and began to dig.

  A proper grave was backbreaking work, Jeremiah soon discovered. He finally accepted Allison’s help, if only to finish before dark. As she took over, he sought out a suitable headstone.

  The rock he chose was large and flat. Using his enchanter's tools, he etched an epitaph into the stone.

  “That should do it,” said Allison. She panted from the exertion of digging, but hoisted herself smoothly out of the grave.

  The boy looked extra small to Jeremiah’s eye, lying in his final resting place, wrapped tightly in the white sheets. Like burying a single grain of rice. He put the stone at the head of the grave.

  “‘Remembered,’” read Allison. “Fitting.”

  Jeremiah nodded. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tiny form at the bottom of the grave.

  “Are you okay?” Allison asked.

  “No,” said Jeremiah. “and that's alright."

  Then he picked up the shovel to finish burying the boy, knowing he’d carry the sorrow for the rest of his life. He was glad for it.