Read Online Red Glove by Holly Black - Free Book Online Page B

nothing. I don’t trust myself to speak.
    “Barron says I should move in with him. He says he worries about me being alone.”
    “That’s great,” I say, and mean it. Maybe he can distract her.
    One of the casserole-makers comes in and wants to console Mom. I get out while the getting’s good. Sam follows me, looking a little shaken. I don’t think he’s used to so many criminals displaying their scarred throats in one place. Daneca stays in the dining room, clearly in awe of being in the center of a worker party in one of the best-known worker towns.
    I prepare to get blind drunk in the most efficient way possible. Taking a bottle of vodka out of Grandad’s liquor cabinet, I grab three shot glasses from the kitchen and automatically head to the basement.
    The basement is just like I remember it from all the summers I spent here. Cool and damp, with a slight smell of mildew. I flop down onto the leather couch in front of the television.
    I set up the glasses on the coffee table, pour a shot into each one, and grimly down the whole line.
    I feel better, but also worse here. Better because the memories are so close. Worse because of the memories themselves.
    “Oh,” I say, looking over at Sam. “I should have gotten another glass for you.”
    He lifts his eyebrow and picks up one of mine. “How about I just take this one at the end.”
    “Lila and I used to come down here a lot. Watch movies,” I say, waving vaguely toward the set.
    Philip and Barron and I spent a lot of time in this room too. I remember lying on the floor and playing Battleship with Philip, laughing so hard I was afraid I was going to piss my pants. I remember a teenage Anton and Philip forbidding us to come into the room while they had on a horror movie. Barron and I sat on the stairs instead, not technically in the room, watching from the dark so we wouldn’t get in trouble, utterly terrified.
    I pour myself two more shots. Grudgingly I pour one for Sam, too.
    “What’s going on with you and Lila?” he asks. “I thought you liked her—you know, last year, when we pulled the thing. But you’ve been avoiding her since she started at Wallingford.”
    Self-revulsion lets me gulp down the booze without wincing.
    “I don’t want to talk about that,” I say, shaking my head. “Not here. Not tonight.”
    “Okay,” says Sam, with a false reasonableness in his voice. “What do you want to talk about?”
    “My new career,” I say. “I am going to help the Feds catch my brother’s killer. It’s going to be just like Band of the Banned .”
    “No one watches that show,” Sam says. “No one under fifty.”
    Someone is coming down the stairs. I pour another round of drinks in case the newcomer is planning on stealing my booze. In this crowd one can’t be too safe.
    “A wonderful piece of cinema verite,” I declare. “It is going to be my new life. And I am going to get a badge and a gun and hunt down evildoers.” I am flooded with a sense of well-being. Everything sounds perfect. Like a dream I don’t want to wake from.
    “Did you just say ‘evildoers’?” Daneca asks, flopping onto the couch next to us. “Did you know Betty the Butcher is upstairs? And she’s wearing a gold mask. That means it’s got to be true! Killing her last husband must have rotted her nose off.”
    I point to the shots I have lined up. She takes one. I feel quite magnanimous. Also kind of light-headed. “That’s what I plan on calling them when I apprehend them. Evildoers, that is, not Betty. I would call only Betty by the name Betty. Well, I call her Aunt Betty, but still.”
    “I’m not really sure,” Sam tells Daneca, “but I believe our drunk friend here is claiming that he was approached by federal agents.”
    “They gave me files,” I say delightedly.
    “You really do have all the luck,” says Daneca.
    We sit in the basement, drinking steadily until I pass out on the old leather couch in front of the television. The last thing I