Read Darkness Brutal (The Dark Cycle Book 1) for Free Online Page B

blue eyes. Then I picture where I am and push out, I’m here . We recently figured out we can do this, connect to each other without words, but it only seems to work if we’re close enough, maybe a block or two away.
    The morning sun is warming the air, so I pull off my newly acquired hoodie. Maybe I should ditch it. It reminds me of Rebecca, of the way her hair felt against my palm. And I can’t let people in, I can’t let myself care. I have to stay focused.
    As I start to toss the thing over a nearby branch, something catches my eye—a name along the inside of the neck.
    CHARLIE M.
    In bold block letters.
    I run my finger over the name and get a flash of the woman who wrote it: Hispanic, wearing a maid’s uniform. She smiles and folds the jacket up, putting it back in the drawer. There’s someone sitting on the bed behind her, a young man. He says something, joking, and she smiles, rattling off words in Spanish to him. I recognize him from the snapshots in Rebecca’s room.
    Charlie , I hear Rebecca say again, just like she did when she snuggled into my chest on the ride to her house.
    Charlie with his arm around her while she looks up at him in admiration.
    Charlie, her brother.
    But something happened. And Rebecca’s alone. Something—
    Ava appears in a small cluster of orange trees that rim the west side of the yard, stopping my thoughts. She pauses and plucks one of the oranges from a branch and puts it to her nose. “You can smell the sunshine,” she says.
    I shake off the revelation of Rebecca’s Charlie and give my sister a smile. “Oh, yeah? How’s it taste?” There’s nothing I can do to fix whatever happened to the boy now.
    Ava tosses me the fruit, then sits at my feet, looking up at me with her wide grey-blue eyes. “You look tired.”
    “I am.”
    Her shoulders sag. “Me too.” The eagerness she had in her voice last night is gone.
    A weight settles in my chest. “I’m working on a solution. I swear,” I say, sitting beside her on the ground.
    “It’s getting harder again. To stop stuff.”
    My pulse speeds up with her worried tone. “Did something happen last night, after we talked?”
    She shrugs. “I just don’t want to mess up again, you know . . .” Her voice catches a little and fades to silence.
    “The Marshalls’ deaths weren’t your fault, Ava.” They were mine . I wasn’t watching her. It was too easy to ignore stuff back then—to feel like I deserved a normal life.
    The night it happened I was making out with Lindsey Sawyer from chem lab on that leopard-print beanbag, trying to decide which of my foster brothers to ask for a condom. I was so sure that I’d finally found my chance to join the World of Real Men, when the Man of the House banged on the bedroom door.
    I had a phone call.
    It was Ava, babbling that she’d had a vision. She’d seen blood on the picture of us with the Marshalls and thought I might be in trouble. But it wasn’t my blood she saw.
    By the time I got there, it was too late. Ava was in the middle of the room with her adopted parents’ dismembered bodies around her, their blood in her hair and on her cheeks.
    “I sent them away,” she said, her voice sounding far off.
    I looked over the carnage in horror. For a split second, I thought the darkness had gotten her. I thought Ava, my baby sister, had done it. Cut her loved ones to ribbons. Then she whispered, “The dogs were so big, Aidan. They came with a man who had black eyes.”
    Hellhounds. Thank God. Relief flooded me. It hadn’t been her. I hadn’t lost her yet. The beasts must’ve come with the killer. I still don’t know how she got rid of the hellhounds before I showed up. But I know she protected herself with a circle of the Marshalls’ blood.
    I look at her now as she stares into the orange trees, the slim line of her neck and shoulders, her pale skin, so unlike mine. My half sister. Her hair is white fire in the afternoon sunlight. She looks so much like our mom, Fiona.