I must have been lost in thought for longer than I had figured, because I heard the crackling hiss of tires on badly plowed roads and my brothers ford pulled up in front of me, the light reflecting off the burgundy paint and dying the snow around it an eerie shade of red. I hauled myself to my feet and stripped of the knee length coat I’d been sitting on so my pants didn’t get wet, and tossed it in the back before sliding into Alexs car.

I could smell the familiar scent of cigarettes and coffee that always permeated my caffeine addict brothers presence, so much stronger in the car we spent almost all of our time in, though somehow I never actually saw him smoke in the vehicle itself. I turned my own blue eyes, so similar to his, and arched an eyebrow “So, seems like the play worked out, what did you do with the girls body?”

Alex sighed “Lawsons summoning ritual drained the life out of her. She was basically mummified, I doused her in kerosene and she went up like tinder. The other one was probably to eat after, I imagine he figured letting her run would make her taste better. Whichever cop picks her up will be hushed up, assuming she doesn’t die of hypothermia from running around in winter nearly naked. I’ll let dad know how well the op went and that your play worked.” He turned away from me and slumped back in his seat and shifting the car into drive “Guess its time to head home.”

The drive home was, all at once much too short and far, far too long. Neither of us spoke much. I was surprised Alex seemed so shaken, my brother usually wasn’t one for silence, preferring the sound of his own voice, but I could see that he was at least a bit shaken by what had happened. Despite Alex’s experience in the field, what had happened with Lawson was unusual.

Because of our tendency to avoid crowded places, casualties were rare, at least ones we could have saved. Dad had told us years ago that letting to many bodies weigh you down was a good way to get slow and dead, se we were trained not to feel responsible for losses infernals caused when we were in the area, but that girl had been alive right in front of us one minute and then dead the next, it was hard not to take some measure of responsibility for something that was right in our faces like that.

Even Alex hadn’t lost many civvies under circumstances where it was obviously within our means to save them like that. He seemed to be taking it as hard as I was and I respected him for that. I honestly don’t think Nick would have let it get to him, and that was one of the many reasons I preferred Alex over my eldest brother.

The drive back to our compound on the ourskirts of Seattle took far longer than it reasonably should have. It was sort of tradition in the family not to rush back from a job, people need time to decompress and calm down after traumatic events and almost all dealings with infernals were traumatic. I sat in the passenger seat of my brothers car and let my eyes lose focus, letting the identical image of the same pine tree blur by in the edges of my vision as I stared blankly off into nothingness.

We were somewhere in the Midwest at the moment, and the snow that had littered the ground was still dusting the ever shifting landscape, though it seemed to get thinner with every passing mile. The gentle flurries were being buffeted about on the shifting winds and the dull metronome of the windshield wipers provided a backdrop to the picturesque moment.

Alex hadn’t turned on the radio, and I hadn’t asked him to, both of us content with silence stretching between us as we lost ourselves in the sharp bite of the chilly night air and the song of the roads and the wind. It’s a strange phenomena really, being quiet next to someone for too long. I sometimes find that the longer silence reigns the deeper it becomes, until eventually it feels like it would take real effort to force your voice to split the stillness. It wasn’t uncomfortable really, the quiet stretching across the hours, just…profound.

It was almost six hours later when Alex spoke, and I watched him jump a bit when he forced out the words, as if he’d scared himself, as if he’d grown so used to the quiet he’d forgotten how loud sound actually was until he conjured the words, unable to take back the harsh noises that shattered that fragile peace, but regretting the loss of that shared solitude even as it died. “That one was bad.”

He left that hanging there for a few minutes, maybe hoping we could drift back into that peaceful silence, but a thing, once summoned cannot be so easily banished, and the conversation had every bit the life the quiet had, and it turned the space between the sounds into a miserable suffocating thing, forcing me to break it again, before it gained the same momentum as its dead relative. I somehow felt that this new silence wouldn’t be peaceful or still at all, that it would be a dreadful thing, full of fear and unquiet thoughts. I finally felt the word “Yes” torn from my lips, and almost gasped my relief out loud as the existential nightmare was chased away.

Alex looked relieved at the response, and I thought he might fear the return of the stillness as much as I did. “This was only your third job. I’ve been doing this for a few years and even I haven’t seen one like that before. I know there wasn’t time to process it in the moment but that girls body…it was bad.” The words conjured up another image of pale, blank eyes staring out of a slack, lifeless face. The shock and horror a twisted parody of the beauty that used to grace the face of an innocent girl, a girl who was only so much shredded meat now.

I felt my gorge rise, fighting down the bile as it threatened to spill over onto the car seats, but I pushed it down hard. I was a professional damn it. Pros don’t throw up. I couldn’t stop the slight shudder that wracked me though. Those damn eyes. They say eyes are the windows to the soul, and maybe that’s true, because a part inside of me couldn’t stop screaming at the image of that lifeless face with no one home. I’d seen dead bodies before. Not one so young, granted, but it wasn’t the corpse that really got me. It was the contrast. The before and after of the dead girl and her screaming terrified friend, of Lawson and that thing, of Sarahs bright cheery smile and the hollow eyes of a broken girl, filled with the kind of existential panic that keeps people from showering for days because they’re scared to be alone in the bathroom.

I forced myself under control and croaked out again “Yes” hoping that my brother would understand that I didn’t want to talk about this, that I COULDN’T talk about this, and that even that creeping, suffocating silence I’d been so terrified of earlier would be better than these thoughts that I knew I couldn’t get out of my head now. What was wrong with me. I’d killed infernals before, I’d seen violence and blood and mayhem. It hadn’t felt like this, it hadn’t felt so…scary.

I felt dirty. Physically and mentally. I needed a shower. I needed to scorch my skin raw and red and cry into the steam where no one could see. I needed to curl up under my blanket and lie to myself and pretend I was safe. I felt ashamed. I felt weak. I felt broken. And I felt angry that Alex wouldn’t stop glancing over and seeing these things that must be obvious on my face when they were so clearly private things that were none of his fucking business. I rolled the window down, and the let the cold in my face and the howling wind rip away the fear, and hoped it would drown out any more words my brother tried to say. He didn’t bother.