Vicious Minds: Part 3 (Children of Vice 6)

They were fucking idiots. They never listened! They made me want to scream most days and were always looking for me to fail, but I didn’t want them to die. It is weakness…and strength, I guess.

I groaned, rubbing my head.

Now what then, Ethan?

Ring.

Ring.

“What happened?” I asked, sitting back up from the bed.

“Her heart stopped. They brought her back, but it’s still touch and—”

I didn’t hear what he said next as I was grinding my teeth, ready to throw the phone at the fucking wall, but I stopped, breathing in through my nose.

I went too far.

“I’m on my way,” I replied, already up.

WYATT

The only thing I could think of was, what the fuck was I going to do now?

What was I going to say to him?

What was I going to tell Helen?

The longer I thought, the more my mind was blank. I felt like I had egg on my face. Like I had been walking around with egg on my face the whole time and no one let me know. Why did I always end up in this spot, standing like an idiot in the face of my brother? What the fuck did I do to get myself fucked over this much?

Was I just that incompetent?

Was Ethan just that much better than me?

Why was he always able to get the last laugh at my expense? Stand there overlooking as if…as if we didn’t have the same genes? What made us both so different? Why were we never on the same page?

“Wyatt! Wyatt!” Helen grabbed my arm desperately. Her face was a mess, her hair matted and pulled into an ugly bun. She looked almost like a beggar. It was completely unlike her.

Ever since Aunt Cora’s death, she’d been different. We’d all been different, and I thought Calliope’s death could fix us. That was why I so badly wanted to end her. To not see anything else. I wanted to say everything was her fault, and if she had never come, we’d all be perfect.

“Is she dead?” Helen asked, desperately squeezing my arm. “I saw the news; she went down hard. There was a lot of blood. She has to be dead, right?”

I hung my head, staring at the ripped clothes in my hand.

“Wyatt, why aren’t you answering me?”

“Because I don’t know.”

“What? How do you not know? Weren’t you at the hospital—”

“I don’t know because Ethan does not trust me!” I hollered at her. “He doesn’t fucking trust me, so I couldn’t even get on the same fucking floor as where they were working on her. He doesn’t trust me, so…so he didn’t think to explain all this fucking time that your mom was in recurrence!”

“Recurrence? As in…”

I finally glanced up and met her gaze. Her brown eyes stared at me so confused. “Your mother’s cancer came back,” I whispered.

“No…”

I grabbed her arms as she tried to back away from me. “She and Calliope—”