Read Online The Twice Lost by Sarah Porter - Free Book Online Page A

call this dump? I’d bleed you like a pig before I’d let you get anywhere near her, Peter. No damn way you’ll ever see her again. You don’t even deserve a chance to
apologize
to her, you hear me?” He wasn’t about to explain
why
Luce wasn’t coming back. It was enough to know that the words hurt Peter more than the beating did.
    Even without turning to look Andrew knew his brother was sobbing on the floor. He stood at the window eating his chili from the pan and watching the distant roil of the waves. A film of Peter’s blood clung to his knuckles, sticky and red.
    Luce was out there. Somewhere. But how was he supposed to find her?
    ***
    He slept in Luce’s old bed that night in her tiny room with books heaped on the dresser and postcards from cities they’d traveled to together tacked around the bed. High on the wall were two photos: a snapshot of Alyssa holding a three-year-old Luce on her lap, a big white sunhat casting a slanting shadow across both their faces. The photo next to it was much more recent, an official school portrait that Andrew guessed had been taken not long after his boat wrecked. In it Luce appeared unsmiling and scared, her eyes wide and otherworldly, wearing a navy sweater that was getting too small for her. She looked lovely and horribly vulnerable, and he ached to hold her and tell her that everything would somehow be okay.
    Alyssa was dead. That was understandable,
natural,
even if it ripped his heart to think about it. But the way he’d lost Luce, on the other hand . . . that was too surreal, too impossible. There was just no coming to terms with something that made so little sense.
    He woke up to a silent house. Peter must have actually gone in to work, then, even with his busted face. Everyone would just figure he’d had a nasty fall while he was drunk. Apart from the endless hiss of the waves there was no sound at all. After a minute Andrew pulled himself out of bed, stretched and moaned. If he wasn’t going to kill Peter, then he also wasn’t going to be spending the next twenty years locked up. Looked like he’d have to think of something
else
to do, if rotting in prison was off the table.
    He’d clear out after breakfast. Leave Peter a note and never come back. For all he knew Luce could be anywhere along the continent’s west coast, so there was no reason to stay put.
    The photos of Luce and Alyssa almost hummed to him; he could feel their nearness, hear a wisp of their mingled voices. He pulled both pictures off the wall and slipped them into his backpack, then got dressed in the old clothes people on the islands had been kind enough to give him when he’d shown up wrapped in filthy sealskins. They’d been awfully good to him, the mad, tattered castaway who’d insisted at first—until he got his head together, anyway—that he’d been brought there by his daughter, Luce, and that she was a mermaid.
    Andrew stumbled out into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, stepping over the blotch of crusted blood on the linoleum. He’d been knocking through the cupboards for a few minutes before he noticed the dark silhouette floating on the door’s sunlit curtain. Somebody was standing there, dead still, watching him through the gap. Andrew swung around and saw a sliver of a tan-skinned, thickset man, his neat silver hair like a glaze in the pale daylight.
    Once the man saw Andrew looking he knocked as if he’d just arrived. But Andrew was sure the guy had been standing there for a while.
    “Yeah? Help you with something?” Andrew didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he opened the door.
    “Peter Korchak?” The man on the step had warm, sympathetic brown eyes, but his mouth was tense.
    “That would be my brother, actually. Want me to tell him you were looking for him?”
    “Your
brother.
” The tan-skinned man stared for a moment as if he weren’t sure whether or not to believe it. “And your name is?”
    “You’re the one on