The Scorpion Sting

I WAITED THROUGH nightfall for Cole and Lix to bring my brother back to me. I had always known better than to trust Lix with my brother, but I did it anyway. Now, he was missing, and there were no answers for me as to why or where he could’ve been.

My gut warned me when the two crossed paths that Lix was bad news for Max—that he was too irresponsible to welcome my brother into his company willingly or otherwise. Yet, I gave him a chance to prove me wrong. Actually, I had given both Willows’ twins a chance at redemption, and it seemed they refused it.

As I watched the stars twinkle along the navy sky, I realized that getting my brother back wasn’t just some stupid mistake Lix had to fix. It was becoming crystal clear that Max’s disappearance was deeper than I thought. In turn, my strength in my hatred for Lix only grew.

Despite my fear, I’d finally found the nerve to speak my mind. Losing the only family I had left was the last straw. My hatred for Lix spun out, and the rage willed the words. Max disappearing lit a fire in my chest I didn’t know existed.

“Alice,” Jack’s roughened voice snapped my head to the side, “we need to call it a night.”

“Not without Max,” I said sharply. “I won’t sleep until he comes back.”

“Lix will find him,” he attempted reassurance. “If I didn’t think he could, you would’ve heard about it by now.”

“If it weren’t for Lix and his stupidity, Max would be here, Jack! I never should have trusted him. I never used to, but I thought Max made a difference in him, but I was wrong.”

Jack stayed silent.

“I can’t have it. I won’t have it. Even when he brings Max back, I’ll still hate him, and he’ll know it.”

Jack nodded slowly. “I understand why you feel that way.”

“Good.” I turned away from him, folded my arms over my chest, and stared off in the opposite direction.

“Waiting out here isn’t safe,” he tried with caution, “and you won’t be doing Max any favors by ending up in a similar situation. I plan on taking everyone back to the Jeans’, so they know what’s going on.”

“And what if Cole and Lix manage to bring my brother back after that?”

“They would know where to go. Plus, I am sure Wes and his family would come up with a system to keep a lookout.”

I felt my eyes narrow into slits.

“Lix,’ sighed with an odd tiredness, “will find him. That’s all Lix has ever done.”

“He tracks game,” I muttered. “He does not track people.”

“Maybe not,” Lacey’s voice stunned me. “However, Lixy doesn’t like debt—I’m sure you know that. So, he’ll rip the world apart to find Maxwell just to right his wrongs. You see, I hate him with every fiber in my body. That’s no secret. At the same time, I’ll give the guy’s morality its credit. He knows he did wrong. He’ll never tell you that to your face, but he acknowledged it by storming off with intent.”

I stared at her.

She scoffed and threw a hand on her hip. “When Lixy wants something bad enough, he gets it…by any means necessary. It’s just the way he is, Al. If you don’t know that by now, you’ve spent your years here with your head in the dirt.”

I shifted my jaw and decided it was best not to continue the conversation. I didn’t know what else to say in defense of myself. Jack and Lacey were the last two people I expected to offer Lix a type of support.

The three of them always butted heads due to rivalry or authority issues throughout my history of being around everyone. Lacey stepped on his toes for the fun of it, especially since she knew he’d never touch a hair on her head. With Jack, Lix battled his wanting of power.

When Ghost went missing, all of us felt an odd shift in power between them. I guessed that Jack gained a portion of his leadership in Ghost’s partnership. After we went without her, Lix wormed his way into her role. Given who he was and what we all knew he was capable of, no one fought it. They chose the smarter decision of quickly accepting it.

I took a deep breath while I felt a surge of nerves creep into my chest. There were so many unanswered questions I had alongside devastating possibilities swirling in my head. I wanted to spew them out to the others, because I wasn’t sure how long I would be able to hide my panic before I had a meltdown.

Part of me was too determined to show it. With Max being my brother, I felt it was my duty to stand strong no matter how badly it hurt. His disappearance wasn’t a time for me to cower. While it was Lix’s job to find him, picking up the pieces afterwards would be mine.

“I get why you hate him. He took your brother and left him to the unknown. Though you saw it coming, you didn’t expect him to be lost in the process. You figured Lix was smarter than that given his respect for family. The last thing I have to give you in his defense is this; had he known about a risk to Max’s health, he would’ve never turned his back on him,” Lacey explained with a slight edge of effort to her tone.

I nodded.

“He won’t do the job any faster with us standing around out here. Unfortunately, this is a waiting game. Whenever you have doubt,” she added with sincerity, “remember the extent of Lix’s necessary means. He’s not good at hunting and stripping just because he happens to have a thirst for violence.” With that, she turned on her heel and strutted into the shack.

When I was sure she wasn’t coming back, I found myself staring at Jack again. “She doesn’t speak in defense of anyone.”

Jack shook his head. “That should tell you how much finding Max might mean to Lix. You can hate him. To say I like him would be a lie, but he has his uses, and he serves his purposes. Hated or not, he always does what he needs to regardless of what it takes.”

As much as I hated to admit it to myself, Jack was right. If Lix had a goal, that was his focus until it was taken care of. It was never within anyone’s preferred methods, but the accomplishment was still well-made. Either way, if Lix never returned, I knew my brother was dead.

***

The light crept through the cracks in the wooden walls of the shack. Though it was barely sunrise, the few beams that were angled toward my eyelids woke me up against my will.

’Please,’ I thought, ‘let him be here. Let him be home.’

I shot upward in my bed and looked around frantically. I hoped for the sake of myself that my eyes would make contact with Max, but I was quickly disappointed. Both Lix and Max’s beds were empty as they were the night before, and I could tell they hadn’t been touched.

Lix’s tracking was superior to everyone else’s, and it never took him into an overnight trip of hunting to keep us fed. Yet, I understood, regardless of the frustration in it, tracking someone rather than something was far different. Tracking an animal was easier, because Lix often had his target in sight ahead of time. A person, though, required the extra effort, because he had to locate the path Max might have ended up on.

There were a million possibilities as to where my brother was. To add difficulty, Max was a continuously moving target. At least, that was what we assumed. More so, Lix knew he had a clock to the gap in distance between where my brother could have been and where the rest of us were.

I held my breath and exhaled before throwing my head in my hands. Everything was becoming too much to handle. Since Lix was better than what I had considered an expert, the fact that Max had not been returned meant we were dealing with something deeper.

If setting Stix free caused my brother’s disappearance, I wasn’t sure how long it would take to forgive myself. Secondly, I had to give Lix the apology he deserved. I’d told him I hated him, and it was true. I had gone against my better judgement too trust him. He’d even promised to never hurt Max, but he’d let down his guard.

Lix finally found a way to live up to what we had all known him for. He was irresponsible. That was the only way to put it, and it had costed the whereabouts of my brother in the process. When he found Max, I knew I would never allow them to be alone again. He didn’t deserve the right.

“Hey, Alice,” Jack whispered from across the room, “they’re not back, are they?”

I looked up from my hands to see his face. He hadn’t sat up to talk to me. Instead, he was still lying in his bed and had angled himself, so he could see me.

“No,” I whispered back, “they aren’t here. None of them are back.”

At that, he sat up and threw his legs over the edge of his bed. He stretched his right arm toward the ceiling while he ran his left hand through the black, matted tufts of his hair. His pale skin seemed to shine against the streams of sunlight, but I was sure it was grease rather than an actual glow.

Jack was also one of very few that kept his tattered shirt on while he slept. I wasn’t sure why initially voted to stay back when we’d all been told to head off for the Jeans’. Even though Ghost had been rescued and healed by the Jean Order, he remained skeptical. It was to be expected. Despite the pathetic lives we lived as Street Stragglers, things there felt safe and normal.

With our Order destroyed by uprising and fire, routine was diminished, comfort was a myth, and life was a dangerous guessing game. I didn’t believe Ghost’s opinion mattered to him as much anymore. There was something about him that hinted he’d lost his faith in the Stragglers as a whole.

He looked at me with a faded blue to his eyes. They weren’t as intense as Lix’s were, but they were still different enough to notice. It was a mix of tiredness and uncertainty. He’d always been firm and confident in himself, but he’d lost so much of it with everything that had happened,

Part of me believed that he felt like a failure, because he wasn’t the one to find Ghost as he’d set out to do. Someone else had done it before him. Granted, the someone who’d found her did the opposite of causing harm, but it had been someone else, nonetheless.

It was likely he thought about the alternative situations when he’d discovered such facts. What if the Jeans had been as advertised? What if his tardiness had costed Ghost her life? Though no one pushed all the pressure onto him, they didn’t have to. He’d done it to himself.

Jack continued to stare at me as he walked over to the edge of my bed. Without speaking, he sat, and ran his hand through his hair a second time. I could tell by the way he shifted awkwardly that he wasn’t exactly sure what to say.

“Lix hasn’t found him yet,” I found myself saying. I wasn’t sure why. It was obvious, but somehow, I couldn’t help myself.

“He will. Cole and Lix will find him.”

“Lix has hunted everything from deer to fish,” I tried to use as reason.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “So, we’ll just have to wait and see if he’s just as good as hunting people.”

“I guess it’s time we head back and tell the others what happened before they come looking for us.”

“We should,” he agreed. Then, Jack stood up and looked over his shoulder. “Before we head out, I have to go make sure Ace hasn’t gotten herself tangled up somewhere. I’m not worried about her, but we can’t just leave her in the dark. She’ll want to give her version of the story.”

I made a face at that. Lacey Graham was known for her bluntness and theatrics in describing a situation. Everything earned a sense of sarcasm or arrogance from her. She didn’t care how others felt about her for it, either. Lacey was unapologetically herself. While most people found that to be an admirable trait, it drove the rest of us insane.

“You rang?” Lacey’s unmistakable voice rang as she swung the door to the shack open.

“Great,” Jack responded plainly.

“Well, I heard you say my name,” she added. “Walls are thin in this place, and I was right outside. I kept a watch all night. No sign of Lixy, Cole, or Maxie. I wouldn’t worry too bad about it, though. Lixy just has a bad habit of taking his time when he feels like it.”

“I find it hard to believe Lix would take his time with this. He’s not hunting for food. He’s tracking down people everyone cares about,” Jack said.

“Who knows?” She shrugged. “He’ll find Max regardless. It’s just how long it’ll take. So, don’t worry your wavy head, Al.”

I took a deep breath.

“You might hate Lixy for a good reason, but he’ll use that to prove himself. He might know he’s hated around here, but he certainly doesn’t like to hear it out loud. Let’s go.” Lacey turned on her heel and left the shack without another word.

“The Watchdog has spoken,” Jack commented bitterly.

I hopped to my feet and untangled the knots in my waves with my fingers as best I could. “Yep.”

***

The three of us sailed up to the dock, and I felt the nerves build in my chest. More bad news was to follow the best of it. I had no choice. Everyone else would notice Lix, Cole, and Max missing. They were too important to go unnoticed, and I partially hated it. If they were less important, I would’ve had the luxury of holding off on the news.

My shoes slid along the planks slowly as my tension built with an intensity I hadn’t felt in a while. I breathed and tried to count the steps I took as a distraction from the inevitable. The pain suddenly rested among the anxiety like the last piece being settled into the puzzle.

I missed my brother to the point of nearly mourning. After all, with our luck, I was beginning to prepare myself for the worst. I knew that as the hours ticked by, the chances of finding Max alive were dwindling. I wasn’t sure if I’d cope, and I wasn’t sure if Lix had the ability to forgive himself. If Stix was involved, the forgiveness would be unattainable, and my hatred toward him would be lifelong.

“It’s time to put pn our boots over our worn sneakers,” Lacey said lowly. “If you can’t do it, I will.”

I shook my head, but I didn’t have it in me to verbalize a response.

“The others should be in the Jeans’ place. They set everyone up real nice with rooms and commodities as if we were visiting family,” she explained.

“It would sound nice if we weren’t in this situation,” Jack remarked.

“I was just simply explaining where the masses would be. That is all.”

I glanced over and watched Jack roll out his shoulders.

It took about fifteen minutes for us to reach the front steps of the Jean Order’s main house. The house was just as grand as I imagined. There were three stories that I could see, and it was painted a peaceful shade of white. Railings and small balconies were placed along the biggest of the windows. Ledges on the ends of the balconies possessed healthy and happy greenery to offer the place a welcoming aura.

From where I stood, I could tell that the yard stretched farther back than the Royals’. At the same time, none of the Jeans’ house seemed overly done or too lavish altogether. Sure, it was fancy, but in a complimentary sense. The house fit with the surrounding scenery and the rest of the Order smoothly.

I walked up the off-white steps that led to the door and studied the wildflowers planted in pots. They sat on the squared railings as perfect accents. I wanted to lean over and smell them, but our return was not meant to be peaceful, and I couldn’t treat it as such.

As I turned to the dark wooded door, the dread built yet again.

‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘I have to tell them.’ I knocked on the door and waited.

“Oh.” Lacey walked in front of me. “I left this part out.” She turned the knob on the door and guided it inward.

“We can just walk in?” Jack asked.

“’Course. They won’t hear the door anyway. This place is huge. I think Zeke said it had about thirty bedrooms. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention. Welcome to the Jeans’­—officially.”

“…bloody new. It’s just right. They don’t want a bloody bullet in the skull, I’m sure,” we heard Nik as he sauntered down the hall.

“That is because you never told them to just ring the bell!” Sly hissed with a rasp.

“It wasn’t my job to explain things. Zeke was,” Nik argued as the two came into view.

“Hey, hey, now is not the time to play out a pissing contest,” Lacey spoke up with her usual arrogance.

Both boys froze.

“Zeke relayed the info. They,” she pointed to Jack and me, “just weren’t here for the tour. Long story that has an interesting story. Think you could round my kids up for us?”

I rose my eyebrows at that. None of us were hers, and she wasn’t ever considered an authority figure in the group. However, as she became more involved with us, she was starting to act as if she owned us. I didn’t like it, and I figured she and Ghost would butt heads over it eventually.

Nik shrugged casually and walked himself over to the wall near the left side of the door. I blinked as I realized that there was a button drilled into it. How I hadn’t noticed it, I didn’t know, but as he pressed the button, I guess what it was for.

“All the Straggler mates are needed in the front. Thanks,” he announced.

His voice echoed throughout the house while he spoke, and I stared in confusion.

“Speaker,” explained Sly. “It allows us to get a mass’s attention. It’s quite difficult to get a word around here otherwise. Such is the struggles with a big place like this.”

Jack coughed from behind us, and it made my head jerk back as I heard stumbling and rushing from different corners.

“Still a clustered band of idiots,” Lacey joked as the others came into view.

“You’re back!” Scott breathed.

“We were worried,” Desmond added.

Then, I caught the fiery red of his hair push its way through the crowd. His eyes widened when they landed on me, and as he studied me, he sensed something was wrong.

“Alice,” Wes gasped. “There’s something wrong.”

Everyone gave him a confused look.

“You don’t have Max, Lix, or Cole with you,” Scott noted with surprise.

“Nope,” Lacey said, “which is why we called you all to the front. We have news, and it isn’t happy.”

“What?” Ghost brushed Wes off to the side, so she stood at the head of the crowd. “Why aren’t they here?”

“This is not a funny story.”

Ghost narrowed her eyes. “Lix doesn’t disappear without a reason, Cole doesn’t wander far, and Max is new. He’s usually with Alice.”

“Heh. You really aren’t going to like this.”

“Jack?” Ghost ignored Lacey completely. “Where are they?”

“Max went missing,” Lacey explained before I could. “He went missing after Alice set Stix free to the wind. Max was with Lixy, but they got separated. I didn’t get those details. So, Lixy went after Max.”

“And Cole?” Ghost pressed.

“My brother appointed himself as Lixy’s professional damage control.”

Ghost eased her expression, and she stared without words.

Lacey sighed when no response came. “Max is missing thanks to Lix, so he and my brother went on a hunt,” she re-explained.

Everyone’s jaws dropped with disbelief, and I finally broke. Tears streamed down my face as I heard Lacey clarify, “Max is missing, and we don’t know how long it will take to find him.”