Free Poughkeepsie Begins (The Poughkeepsie Brotherhood #0.5) by Debra Anastasia Page A

slapping the lights on inside. Wintery wouldn’t let go of his hand, shaking her head no.
    “I’m okay.”
    She shook her head no again.
    She was right. He was so far from okay it wasn’t even a joke. But he was about to slip into feral form, and he needed to know she was far away.
    “I’m stronger than he is. I promise.” Cole took to one knee and hugged her. “Do the ice thing. I’ll tuck you and your sister in in a minute. Okay?”
    The little girl knit her eyebrows together. They could have passed for brother and sister—or maybe even father and daughter. Wintery put her hand on his cheek. She didn’t say she understood. She didn’t say she believed him. She just looked at him with eyes that revealed her old soul. Despite the fact that she and her sister were carefree kids, they had known hardship. Disappointment. Unrest.
    He pushed her in through the doorway and closed the freshly painted door behind her. After she began trudging in the direction of the kitchen, Cole turned back toward the shed. As he drew close, he saw Rick on his way out, wiping his mouth. Cole walked up to him like they had a business transaction to complete. And they did. A delicate one. Two things needed to be understood by the end of the night. One, that the girls were never to be touched. Two, that the situation they had at home could not be changed. He and his brothers put up with Rick’s bullshit so they could stay together. The pain inflicted was the cost for the family they now had. And Cole was willing to pay it every night, every single night of his life if he had to. The woods behind the house were his new cage, but because of Blake and Beckett, he was never alone in it anymore.
    Cole was almost past Rick when he grabbed the man’s throat and pulled him back into the shed, satisfied by the shock in his eyes. When the shed door closed, Cole let his sanity disappear into the recesses of his mind. He felt like his teeth got longer. His fists were laced with steel-tipped blades, in his mind anyway. The only danger was that without his brothers, he had no one to keep Rick safe.

    The next day, back at home, Blake walked through the woods quietly. He’d been off his meds for three days, and he liked how crisp the leaves were. Fall was his favorite. The colors reminded him of music—the harmonies of all the trees together, the outstanding solo of an all-red tree. He was so good at walking quietly that he sometimes got to witness the wildlife preparing for winter. He would stand absolutely still while an entire deer family fattened up by eating the last of the green leaves of a bush. He knew that to the rest of the world it looked like he was standing in silence. But he wasn’t. They just couldn’t hear the music he could hear. The soft backbeats, the soaring string lines—it was tremendous. And without the chemicals, he could hear them better.
    Of course that also meant the sun was worse. And the panic attacks about the whole situation were so embarrassing. The world didn’t get it. He’d been told by so many doctors and counselors that he was imagining it, that the sun wasn’t as revealing as he thought. But he’d seen it with his own eyes.
    It was as real as the music.
    He stepped closer to the train station. Lately he’d been drawn here. From this spot in the woods he could hear the percussion of the wheels. It fit. It fit with the composition he had going. The greens. The reds. The train gave the forest the heartbeat it needed.
    He pulled out his keyboard and sat on the cold ground. He tried to memorize the songs his fingers created in his head. He wanted to write them down, but all he had was his mind. He played the same tune each time a new train approached the station, trying to commit it to memory so it would last, so it would remain with him when he went back on the medicine and the edges of the panic were a little less sharp.
    It was a good session, but it could have been better. He needed the percussion to be