The Damned by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online

cracking ice. A spiderweb of fissures radiating out across the river’s surface. Spits of oily water coming up through the gaps.
    She looked down. Saw the thuds were coming from a million human fists.
    All of them punching up against the ice from below. Scratching, too. Fighting to find a way up to the air. To her.
    Ash glanced to the shore. I was at the ice’s edge now, testing it with my foot, about to step onto its marbled surface.
    NO!
    She tried to shout but little more than a rattled breath came out.
    STAY THERE!
    Her arms raised, waving me off. I saw her and paused. A look of bafflement on my face that changed to horror when I heard the pounding from under the ice as well.
    The fists stopped at the same time.
    Pulled their hands away to let their faces float up. All different. Black, white, mothers, men. Staring at her through the river’s mottled window.
    â€œLike they wanted to see who the new one was,” Ash said. “And they were surprised to see it was me.”
    â€œBecause they thought it would be someone else?”
    â€œBecause I was a child. ”
    The ice opened up beneath her. Their hands grasping at her feet, ankles, her legs. Pulling her down into the cold.
    â€œI was dead but it wasn’t the light I went to,” she’d say. “It was the other place. That’s where I’m going. Where I belong.”
    â€œThen I belong there, too.”
    â€œNo. Because I saved you.”
    â€œWhy would—?”
    â€œI saved you, Danny.”
    Ash believed that this dream of the one and only decision she made while in possession of a soul—preventing her brother from going to the darkest place one could go after death—was proof of her fate, and that it was determined before she was an hour old. It meant that while she appeared more outwardly blessed than her brother, her self-sacrifice gave him the capacity to feel and live where she could not. It explained why she could act alive without being alive.
    The only way she came close was when she caused other people to feel something. Desire, envy, hate.
    Pain.
    G ROWING UP, A VEIL OF shyness seemed to nudge me to the sides of crowds and the back rows of seats, wondering what to do with my hands. Not that I was regarded as unappealing. I was tall, my hair a shining black, “a handsome boy if you only lifted your chin so people could give you a look” if my mother was to be believed. She may have been right. All through school, girls of a certain kind—the bookish, the secret-holders, the looking-for-something-elsers—wouldseek me out. I may be a bit gangly, they told me, but I was still cute, sexy even. More than this, there was something about me they wanted to get closer to, a puzzle to be figured out.
    And I wanted to get closer to them, too. Not that Ash ever allowed it.
    However unsettled she made me, whatever she did to others, I saw Ash as my sister, but she only saw me as hers: less a brother than an embarrassing appendage, a withered limb that reminded her of something and could therefore never be parted with.
    But why possess someone you didn’t love?
    This was the question I worried at for our lives together, and for a long time after I was the lone Orchard survivor. Why did my sister hover over me all the years of my adult life, preventing me from reaching out to another? I’m convinced it has to do with the logic of twins. I was Ash’s sole connection to the human, the person she might have been if she’d been born whole.
    When she begged me to stay with her in the house on Alfred Street, I was meant to burn in the fire, too, to complete her in death as I had in life. And for a brief moment, when the firefighters pulled me out, I was dead. But then the paramedics performed their emergency CPR and I coughed the ash out of my chest and I was back.
    It was the first time she hadn’t had me with her. And it was lonely where she was. So she vowed to make it lonely for