Atomic Bombs

Chapter One

Let me know if you like it! Don't be afraid to correct me about grammar mistakes or spelling errors. Just do it gently, please! I have a very fragile self-esteem and will cry if someone is mean to me. 

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It had been a long time since he'd felt this at peace. Jaydon had lived a life filled with chaos and joy and so, so much loss that this kind of peace felt almost unnatural. Loss, grief, depression, and even hatred all shared their equally horrible moments in his life. To be calm, to feel completely at ease, felt wrong. He was accustomed to loss. Hell, at this point losing someone was more expected than being able to keep that person as a part of his life. Each loss had taught him something, had weakened one part of him and strengthened another, had left part of him destroyed and other parts frozen in a childlike fear.

Serenity had been his first big loss, the one that broke his parents and destroyed any semblance of hope for a somewhat normal life. But he'd been five years old, as callous as that sounded, and he could hardly remember the girl he'd been born forty seconds before.

Serenity's loss was painful, yes, but it was the type of pain that faded in time. Like a deep gash that eventually scabbed and then faded, only a faint scar left behind that you couldn't really see unless you looked for it. He didn't miss his biological sister because how can you miss someone you never got the chance to know? You can miss the thought of them, the idea of them, but you can't miss their laugh or their smile or how their eyes sparkled on during the late nights they spent together, laughing until they cried.

His father was his second loss. His father, the man who dashed off to a foreign country with one arm wrapped around the waist of the pool boy he'd chosen over his family, over his son's. Jaydon would never understand the pain of losing a child, couldn't even fathom how that pain must've shattered his father's soul, but he did know that while Serenity was gone, there were eight other children that needed their father in their lives.

But that loss was progressive. His father disappeared piece by piece, ever so slowly over years. First it was missing career day, then it was breaking his promise to attend football games and family fun day's their school put on, until eventually his father wasn't showing up for dinner at night. Jaydon had time to grieve for his father as the boy lost him and that's what saved him the agony of true heartbreak.

That didn't mean he didn't miss his father, didn't curse his name to high heaven, but it didn't hurt nearly as bad as he was expecting it to. That was what hurt the most, the fact that there was nothing to mourn because there was no relationship anymore.

After his parents divorced, his father vanished off the map, never to be seen or heard from again. Jaydon supposed it was for the best, considering the man wasn't a great father when he was around.

Ariel... Ariel's death on the other hand broke a part of his heart he didn't realize was still intact. It destroyed the parts of him that hoped and dreamed that maybe, just maybe he'd have someone in his life that stayed. He should've known that his family was cursed at that point, that monsters were drawn to the Steels' like iron fillings to a magnet.

He should've noticed all the red flags in the beginning. Lila didn't even know of Ariel's existence and Elliot, the devil incarnate, wasn't aware of the boys. How calm Elliot was when speaking of the wife he'd lost a scarily short time before getting engaged to Lila. But Jaydon was just a kid, young both mentally and emotionally. He'd been through plenty of death, but none of it had wisened him to the true horrors of the world.

He wasn't aware that monsters could hide in the skin of men. But he learned.

Ariel was everything he ever dreamed a little sister was supposed to be. She looked to him to protect her, to guide her, to love her in a way only a best friend and brother could. And he failed.