Prologue

A Blind World

December 20, 1993.

He was falling.

Just moments ago, Henry had been so sure that his mother would choose him. He was her son, after all, right?

Why wouldn't she have?

But yet again, Mark had thrown a wrench into his plans. Why did he have to do that? Ever since that boy from Arizona had arrived nine days ago, he had been nothing but a wimp and spoilsport. But Mark had shown an odd courage when standing up to him and denouncing his actions. The kid had an inner strength that Henry hadn't anticipated, and that frustrated him to no end.

Mark thought that he should have compassion on others, but whatever this 'compassion' was, it probably meant being all sorry and nice. And everything or everyone he had done something to didn't deserve that.

What about the dog?

It was just a dog. There were more where it came from. His spikebow had needed testing, anyway. On a moving target.

Mark had suggested he patent the weapon. Not a bad idea.

Okay, then. What about Connie?

Connie? Just an annoying little brat and something on which to vent his rage. Not to mention that she took up too much time and attention with their parents and Mark. And that she borrowed his stuff or came into his room without asking. That was unacceptable.

She wasn't a part of his plan, of how his equation would unfold. So she had to be taken out of it for good. Unfortunately, her 'removal' didn't go as smoothly as Henry would have thought. For once, he couldn't blame Goody-Two-Shoes Mark for Connie's narrow survival at the quarry. Henry couldn't even really blame himself, either. His sister was like Mark – he had underestimated her inner strength.

Richard?

Old news and pretty much the same as Connie. He had taken up too much of their parents' time and attention, both things that could have been spent more on Henry. Not to mention stealing something of his – the toy whale. And so Richard also had to be taken out of the equation.

Permanently.

In the two years since, it had worked like a charm. Without a third kid around to further divert his parents' attention, Henry had gotten enough to satisfy him for a while, and they hadn't even remotely suspected him of being responsible for Richard's 'accident'. That is, until Mark came along.

And Mom?

Susan now had doubts about him. Her own son. She'd listened to Mark too much and had unwittingly forced him to get rid of the toy whale, and was doing her best not to tell him that she thought he was crazy. Out of his mind. And she wanted to put him into one of those 'places', somewhere that they sent total nutjobs to for life. Henry knew he wasn't like that.

But if anyone was, it was her. Even with Richard gone, she was still obsessed with him. Keeping his room the same way it was when he died – for the past two years – was evidence enough of that.

As a result of her lingering feelings for Richard and her obviously growing doubts, Henry knew she was no longer of any use. If she couldn't be his mother, she couldn't be anybody else's. She had to go.

That was where the family's sudden trip to Acadia National Park had come in. There were a half dozen ways Henry could think of that his mother might suffer an 'accident' as well. The high cliffs were the easiest of those options. Once she was gone, he would tell his father – and the authorities – that Susan had simply slipped and fallen off.

But practically from the start, he'd had to improvise. First off, there was Mark trying to stop him in the parking lot; Henry's father had made quick work of his cousin, and apparently, locked him in the family van. Secondly, the rock ledge ten feet below the edge of the cliff hadn't been anticipated. Still, he could very well have neutralized that obstacle had Mark not intervened yet again, to keep him away from Susan, who he claimed was now his mother, too.

The cousins had fought without abandon, making their fight by the well the other night look tame by comparison.

Then they went over the cliff – not entirely unexpected. Fortunately, his mother had caught them, ironically enough. Each boy had a grip, but with their combined weight, she couldn't possibly have pulled them both up.

She had to make a choice.

Henry had mustered all of the pull and charm he possibly could to convince her to choose him. Mark didn't deserve anything from her. Despite what he'd said, she was not his mother, too. She was Henry's. But, it seemed as if her love for him was waning, as if Mark had gotten to her. She had looked to Mark, who was sliding down the unraveling arm of her coat. Then she cast a long, mournful look at him, her son, and said in a tear-filled voice:

"Henry...Forgive me..."

And then she let go.

Henry felt the wind whistle in his ears as he fell, eyes wide in surprise and an unexpected fear coursing through his veins. His arms and legs were spread, hands clawing at thin air for a handhold that would never come. His mouth let out a desperate yell, but it was too late.

The last thing Henry felt in life was a sharp, wrenching crack, and a simultaneous, white-hot pain that lanced up his spine as he struck the rock shelf at the foot of the cliffs.

And then he felt no more.

In grim, despairing silence, Susan pulled Mark back over the edge of the cliff to safety.

At that moment, Mark remembered some of the lyrics to a song he'd once heard:

Black stare, the ink stains fill in the blank slate.

Corrupt, bend to its own design...

Design of blood and long forgotten years...

Don't die in vain.

No sacrifice or pain...

Jack and Wallace skidded to a halt just behind them, not knowing what to think about what they had just seen happen.

The four of them stared down at the rock far below.

Henry's body had come to rest near the edge, and even now, the current lapped around his head. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes, already cold even in life, were now still and unseeing, forever frozen in surprise. Surprise that his mother had chosen the life of his cousin over him.

A wave crashed over his body, turning him facedown. Then a moment later, a second wave washed over him, and Henry was gone.

Mark and Susan began to sob. Jack and Wallace both embraced them.

Wallace gulped. "Susan..."

Susan couldn't even form words.

"Daddy?"

Wallace turned to see Connie standing behind them. "Oh, darling," he said, his eyes moist. "Come here."

"Where's Henry?" Connie asked as she walked over, voice and eyes both uncertain.

It was the first time Mark had ever seen Wallace openly cry.

Susan still clung to her nephew, in utter, unspeakable misery.

She had done the worst thing a mother could possibly do.

And she knew it was the right thing.

Henry gasped as the cold of the wave enveloped him. He had never felt so cold before. He sat bolt upright on the rock and blinked his eyes. The last thing he remembered...was the pain. A sheer, intense pain unlike any he'd ever felt before. Another wave crashed toward him, and Henry cringed, bracing for the impact. But it never came.

The water had passed straight through him.

What the...?

Henry stood to his feet. There was something weird going on here. As well as any twelve year-old could, he understood basic physics.

There was simply no way he could have survived that fall.

Something brushed against Henry's leg. Curious, he looked down, and stared – at his feet, a body was starting to float out into the bay on the reverse current. He wasn't too disturbed. So what? Just another dead person. But then Henry began to make out certain features of that body: blond hair pasted to a lifeless face, the back of a blue/green bomber jacket gashed open and covered in blood, faded jeans, and those mismatched Nikes...

It was him.

At that moment, reality struck Henry like a brick wall and he screamed, in a combination of rage and disbelief.

He was dead.

December 10, 1994.

Mark trudged across the backyard of the Maine home, hands in his coat pockets. The trees were once again bare and swayed gently in a breeze off the bay. Brittle crunches echoed under Mark's feet, kicking up a small trail of old leaves in his wake as he neared the family cemetery.

Ahead was Susan, crouched in front of two small, rough-hewn gravestones. A tall tree overhead cast shadows in the midday sunlight, shielding Mark's eyes from its blinding glare.

Even without a body to bury, Wallace had still placed a marker there for Henry. It was the only thing they could have done for him. The only decent thing.

Not like he would have done anything of the like, but still...

In the past year, beginning shortly after Henry's death, Mark had learned about and come to terms with what had afflicted his cousin.

It hadn't been Henry's fault. He was simply born that way, with only the ability to feel the darker side of human emotion – anger, jealousy, hate, and pleasure from tormenting others. Without things like love, sorrow, and compassion, he had been left with an emotional void that could only be filled by the ones he knew. The clinical term was 'sociopath', but even Mark thought that that sounded a bit harsh.

As a result, Mark had even been able to gather a bit of sympathy for his cousin.

Mark crouched down beside Susan, and she glanced at him with watery eyes. There was no look of surprise on her face. She had known for a long time that he and his father were coming back to visit. Almost a year to the day since Mark's trial by fire had begun.

The only thing she did was to give him a slight nod. Neither of them had to share a word. They now knew that they shared an unspoken bond.

It had begun before Henry had died, and his death had only strengthened it.

Mark bent to his knees and retrieved a bouquet of dead, brown flowers from the ground. Chrysanthemums. Susan now tended a whole garden's worth of them in warmer months. Then Mark took a second, fresh bouquet of the flowers from his aunt and laid it between the gravestones.

Together, they rose to their feet and stood there for a time, staring down at both markers. One belonged to Richard, the other, Henry.

"No matter what, I still love him," Susan said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

"We'll never forget him," Mark said in a somber voice.

"Never," Susan whispered.

Mark then slid his hand into Susan's and looked up into her eyes. She was his mother now. Or as close as he was ever going to get again. As if she'd read his mind, she smiled a little.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go home."

A sudden gust of wind rattled the branches overhead. Mark merely pulled his jacket tighter and followed his aunt back toward the house.

But little did either of them know, they had and were still being watched, by something that, fortunately, neither knew was there.

Because they, like the rest of the world, were blinded by their own ignorance. But he would make them see.

Everyone would see.

A/N: And so starts the Vengeance Trilogy, a multi-story sequel to The Good Son. What I'll be writing from is a slight AU, with only minor differences (like Mark and Henry having a fistfight over the family's water well instead of Henry tricking Mark into thinking he'd poisoned everything in the refrigerator) that lead to the same conclusion: Henry's death from falling off a cliff, albeit with a completely different location, but you get the idea.

The song lyrics were composed by my older brother.

As expected, I'll be starting largely from scratch, so any new chapters may very well be slow in coming. But they will happen.

Also, I'm open to suggestions for fill-in plot ideas. I already have the basic structure of the story laid out, but I've always had trouble with 'fillers', e.g. stuff to bridge the gaps. I'm currently writing a flashback Mark has of the last real vacation he had before his mother died; he doesn't remember anything bad about it, but that's only because he long ago suppressed the memory of a near-death experience. Any suggestions on what that experience could have been? The setting for the flashback is a fictional mountainside lodge just outside Boulder, Colorado. It'll be something Henry uses against Mark later on.