Page 348 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

perhaps even our respective fates. My head throbbed with
the question—what if he was right? What if I was only the
means to Hide’s end? He was living art. What was I next
to that? Then, a deciding moment. Hide moved to gather
my father into his hand. I would let him choose—my father
would know best. The grotesque doppelganger hefted the
axe with ease, his—my—face unfazed for the contact. His
next words were not his own, and dipped in purest hell. “You
cried for me! Pitied me! For that, you will pay, whelp!” It
was my father’s voice. It seemed my epiphanies of the last
hours were not entirely my own to know, but had been shared
with the shadows in my soul. And one shadow in particular
was not happy for the knowledge. Father now realized I had
cried for him, and now he was in a body—though a bit small
for him—to exact a price for my transgression.
In keeping with our switched identities, I had been
equipped with Mister Hide’s knives, which I raised in a
doomed attempt to deflect my inbound father. The axe batted
aside the blades with ease, sinking into my shoulder. The
pain was explosive, riding down exposed nerves already
buzzing like live wires filled with electric agony. This turn
of events after so much unwanted, unfiltered knowledge was
almost too much for me to endure, and all coupled with the
fact that my soul was only a few bloody layers from tumbling
completely out my body. I tried to roll with the attack, to
deny the axe a fatal depth, but my father descended at his
leisure, going where he would, snapping and splitting skin,
cartilage, and bone—but minding my more vital areas. This,
it seemed, would be a lesson I wouldn’t soon forget, but one
I might walk away from.
Perhaps sensing my father’s non-lethal intention, Hide
threw him away, clanking down into the ample blood of
dead Wigs, smoke hissing from his killing edge. Hide now
meant to tear me apart with his bare hands, which had been
skillfully gloved in my own —I think even Janus might have
approved of that detail. Despite the Red Dream plying me
The Red Son | 351