Instinct

10. Ghosts in the Walls

Brennan ended the call, settling back into his skin the further they got from the hotel and the closer they got to the home. Finally, his sister could stop being so wound up and argumentative. He knew that she didn't mean to be so overbearing, but it was so hard for her to let go of old fears.

He glanced over at Stephanie in the seat beside him. After her burst of energy earlier, he'd expected her to immediately fall asleep on their journey. She hadn't even shown the slightest signs of heading that way since they'd set off.

Instead, her eyes stayed pinned open, darting back and forth across the blurring, white scenery lining the highway. In the failing light of the evening, it was an even more desolate sight than usual. Only the occasional truck or car passed in either direction.

But she insisted, it seemed, on staying awake to watch every mile pass by them. With her head propped up against the window, a hand tucked between, she looked so young and so old simultaneously. It was the eyes, Brennan decided. They were dark with what he suspected was skepticism, alight with freedom but tentative, distrusting, as if she couldn't yet decide what to think of the outside world.

Silence didn't usually unnerve Brennan. He'd been comfortable with it for as long as he could remember. Living in a house constantly overcrowded would do that to you, he supposed. But sitting there, rolling along the freeway, he could hardly keep focused unless his eyes were firmly on her. Already, the habit of checking to make sure she was still alive, still there, had bound with his blood.

She blinked slowly, coughed lightly and drew breath back into her lungs before she looked back at him, catching him glancing out of the corner of his eyes.

"Could you talk to me?" She asked.

As weird requests went, hers was far too quiet and serious to be passed off as such. The sheen of sweat on her forehead was beginning to show again, and it wasn't just the blood-red tinge of the sunset cast across her cheek that was causing that color.

Brennan shrugged, secretly relieved to hear her voice. "What do you want to talk about?"

She pondered that for a second; barely frowning as the sound of her labored breathing filled the cab of the truck. Something in her stature loosened with the presence of his voice, and he pretended not to notice, pretended not to be disturbed by it. It sickened him that someone could be degraded to this point where human- or humanoid- contact was the difference between mental stability and hell.

"Was that your girlfriend on the phone?" She asked.

Brennan smiled. Lydia would really love that one. He'd be sure to use that on her next time. Her overbearing girlfriend-esque behavior did get out of hand at times, in his opinion. "Nah," he replied. "My older sister."

Stephanie looked at him, her pupils nearly swallowing her irises in the increasingly low lighting of dusk.

"Lydia," he elaborated, turning his eyes back on the road. "She pretty much raised me- and she'll tell you that herself when we get back home. She's just super protective," he added as an afterthought. "It's a bit much sometimes," he mused. "But I still love her. I think she forgets how old I am now, sometimes, she still sees the little boy she took care of when she was a teenager."

Then again, he'd given her plenty of reasons to worry over the years, so maybe this was a monster of his own making- not that all of it had been his fault. He wasn't clueless enough to let insecurity overtake him at that point. There were just things that were out of his control. If Brennan didn't know that, he'd have been in a totally different state of mind at the time.

Stephanie only regarded him for a second more, and he could almost feel her deliberating her next words. Choosing them as if they were precious. She turned back to look out of the window, at the deep hues of pink, red and orange dusted across the snowy fields, beginning to give way to purple and deeper blues. Her breath created a plume of fogginess in a circle on the window.