by Kelly Meding
He still hadn’t told Wyatt. Now he might never get the chance.
“Have you been to see him?” I asked.
Rufus shook his head, hazel gaze casting downward. “No,” he said, lowering his voice. “There’s no point. You can’t confess your sins to a man who can’t hear you.”
“Might make you feel better.”
“I don’t deserve to have my conscience assuaged by a deathbed confession, Evy.”
Before I could give him a verbal smack-down for several different parts of that statement, someone closer to the head of the table said “Showtime” pretty damned loud. A hush fell over the group, which had doubled in size in mere minutes. Someone even dimmed the lights.
On-screen, we had a wide, slightly downward angle of Thackery. Three figures entered the frame, easily identifiable from the backs of their heads: Phin, Astrid, and Baylor. Phin was still streaked in black paint, his majestic wings out, Coni blade in one hand. He flanked Astrid on her left; Baylor was on her right. As an interrogation squad, they were an impressive trio.
Thackery remained stone-faced.
“He won’t talk,” I said. My voice was loud in the hushed room.
“They dosed him with Sodium Pentothal,” Tybalt said.
Truth serum meant little to someone with a strong enough mind, and Thackery had that in spades. I guessed we’d see how it worked itself out.
“Walter Thackery,” Astrid said, her Command voice sharp and furious, “you are wanted by the Assembly of Clan Elders for the kidnapping of seven Therians, as well as the murder of Michael Jenner. You are also wanted for the kidnapping and torture of Phineas el Chimal.
“You are additionally wanted for innumerable crimes against humankind, including the murder of Rhys Willemy, the deaths of thirty-one humans one month ago at the facility known as Boot Camp, and the infection of dozens of humans with the vampire parasite. You are wanted by the vampire Families for the foreign illness plaguing their membership. How do you answer?”
Thackery looked right at her. And yawned.
A few people in the War Room hissed. Someone growled.
“You are very cavalier with your life,” Astrid said.
“No matter what I say to your charges,” Thackery replied, “you will sentence me to death. I prefer to not answer.”
“This is no human court. There is no right to not incriminate yourself, nor is there a right to a speedy trial. You are guilty of these crimes, whether by your own word or by mine. The question you must answer is how quickly you wish to die.”
“I wish to go free.”
Laughter rippled through the room. I didn’t laugh, because I knew Thackery was dead serious. He still had two people very dear to me, and three Lupa were loose in the city. He hadn’t played his last card yet.
“What makes you think that’ll happen?” Baylor asked.
Thackery turned his head, aiming his quiet smile at Phineas. “The child is adorable.”
I started to stand, my only thought to wrap my hands around Thackery’s neck, and was pulled back into my chair. I wasn’t even in the same room with him. My heart pounded in my ears. My face flushed with fury.
Phin’s only sign of emotion was the slight arching of his wings. He had one of the most impressive poker faces I’d ever seen, and it was on in full force right now, even though his emotions had to be churning like a cyclone. “Where are they?” Phin asked, each word a bullet of hate.
Thackery blinked slowly, likely forcing away the effects of the Sodium Pentothal. I’d felt its effects before; it wasn’t easy to fight. “They’re safe. They’re with my boys.”
Shitfuckhell.
“The Lupa.”
“Yes. Always have a contingency plan.”
“Let me guess,” Astrid said. “You in exchange for them?”
“Not quite. Myself in exchange for the child.”
“And her mother?”
He pressed his lips together, thoughtful. “I believe the mother’s life is a fair trade for all of the Halflings you slaughtered today.”
Phin’s knife hand jerked. Even through the camera’s lens, his control was obviously slipping. My own hands were fisted in my lap, fingers numb, my entire body vibrating with hate for the man in that room.
“Those Halflings, as you call them, were dead the moment you allowed them to be infected,” Baylor said.
Thackery clucked his tongue. “You forget your old Hunter friend. They were not like the half-Bloods who roam the streets and mindlessly infect and kill. My Halflings were controlled. I found a way.”
How do you control the bloodlust, Felix? What’s Thackery giving you?
“You call emotional blackmail control?” Baylor asked.
“Felix was a special case. He had unique insight that I found valuable. As for the rest, if they didn’t wish to earn the right to their stability by joining us … well, they were dealt with.”
“They were executed.”
“I couldn’t allow them free to mindlessly infect others. I need them to stay close, controlled, until I can cure them.”
Goddamn, the nutjob still thought he could cure the vampire parasite. Thackery had moved beyond obsession to absolute fanaticism—a perfect belief in his own superior intelligence.
“And you offered this nonexistent cure to Felix, just in case blackmail wasn’t enough,” Baylor said.
“Of course. He hated what he was. The dream of one day being free and returning to his loved ones was the perfect incentive.”
Next to me, Tybalt let out an impressive string of expletives.
“I gave all of them a purpose,” Thackery said. “A mission. Direction, which are things our young people sorely lack.”
“You really think you’re the hero here?” Baylor asked. “You changed their basic nature without their consent. Making someone sick and then offering them treatment doesn’t negate the original crime. It only proves intent and ill will.”
“Call it what you like,” Thackery replied. “But the vampires you’re so eager to help started this plague. I did what I had to do in order to further a cure for our people and to put an end to theirs. My Halflings proved that there can be life after infection. They don’t all have to die because of what those vampires have done to us.”
“The vampires you infected today did not kill your wife and son.”
Thackery flinched and, for a moment, he looked sad. Wore the appearance of the broken man he was inside. Then he blinked hard and the weakness was gone. “Have you ever lost someone you care about to the parasite?” he asked.
Baylor nodded. “Two Hunters. I put them down myself.”
Ouch.
“And the half-Bloods who infected them?”
“Killed one on the spot. One got away.”
“Do you ever think of the one that got away?”
“I like to think that some other Triad hunted him one night and killed his ass dead.”
“But you don’t know.”
“It’s the past, Thackery. I don’t live there. My life’s in the present.”
That irritating, thoughtful face came back out. “You think I’m living in the past, then,” Thackery said.
“Hell yes.”
“You may well be right, but my actions today are to preserve the future for our kind. There is nothing, save the ruling hand of a few, to prevent the Dregs you used to hunt from taking this world from us. One bite from a vampire, and it’s over. And the shape-shifters? An army of animals capable of higher thought?”
Baylor snorted loudly and threw his arms wide. “And what the hell do you think we’re doing here, jackass? We’re working together for all of our peoples, so we don’t have to fight or fear one another.”
Astrid touched his elbow, and he backed up a few steps. I hadn’t even noticed how close Baylor had gotten. He was as angry as the rest of us, with more direct ability to take his frustration out on Thackery. And as much as I wanted ten minutes alone in a room with the bastard, we needed him to keep talkin
g.
“You’re a fool, Thackery,” Astrid said. “You profess to protect the longevity of the human race, and yet you are a puppet to those who seek your destruction. You’re just too blinded by grief and vengeance to see it.”
He frowned, seeming genuinely offended by that. “And whose puppet am I, pray tell?”
Don’t tell him, don’t tell him, don’t tell—
“What’s this cure you supposedly discovered for your Halflings?” she asked, switching topics perfectly.
“Good,” I whispered. No sense in showing Thackery our last card, either. If he didn’t realize the breadth of Amalie’s deceptions, we gained nothing by enlightening him.
“Whose puppet am I?” he asked again. The idea distressed him. He liked being in control, the man in charge. Seeing him squirm for a damned change made me all warm inside.
“What’s the cure?”
“Whose puppet?”
“The cure?”
They glared at each other. Phineas stepped forward. He reached into his jeans pocket and withdrew a bundled handkerchief. Shook it out. Little pinkish sausages tumbled to the floor by Thackery’s feet. No, not sausages. Fingers.
“These belonged to your werewolves,” Phin said. “To the two I killed this morning. They chose not to cooperate with questioning. How many of yours would you like added to the collection?”
Thackery gazed at the fingers, and when he looked up, his face was blank. “I’ll tell you nothing else.”
Phin twirled his antique blade as he took a few steps closer to Thackery. “Do you believe I’m bluffing?”
“No.”
“Excellent. You tortured me. You tortured a woman I care about. You kidnapped my family. Cutting off a finger is only a small portion of the pain I wish to heap upon you, Walter Thackery.”
In that moment, I hated my distance from Phineas. I’d seen him enraged, but I had never before seen this quiet menace he exuded in both posture and words. It frightened me. I half expected him to reach out and rip Thackery’s head clean off his neck and laugh while doing so. Phineas had lost his wife. He’d lost his entire Clan except for three members. We’d recovered one. Two were still missing.
He had very little left to lose.
I was up and out of my chair before I made the conscious decision to leave. Tybalt shouted my name, but I ignored him. Ignored the words still being traded on the projector. Dodged past bodies trying to get inside Operations and listen, and finally burst into the corridor.
My entire body was rubbery, used up, not quite up to the task of figuring out which room Thackery was being held in. Thankfully, a small crowd stood outside a storefront about a quarter of the way down the northern corridor, toward the gym. Nevada stepped away from the quartet of—I assumed—guards once he realized my intended destination.
“Stone, you can’t—” he started.
“Are you kidding me?” I said with more oomph to my tone than I felt. I gave him a solid glare. “You can let me in, or I’ll just teleport through the wall anyway.”
The bluff worked. He let me in through a papered-over hinged door. I kind of expected something like in the movies, where the whole room is dark except for a circle of light hanging right over the suspect. Instead, the store was mostly empty, save a few metal clothing racks, and brightly lit. The video camera was mounted on a tripod, which was balanced on a table to give it height.
Past that was my target.
Thackery saw me first, and whatever rebuttal he was about to deliver died on his lips. His eyebrows arched, which got the attention of everyone else. Astrid tossed me a poisonous glare. I ignored her.
“Ms. Stone,” Thackery said. “I had hoped to speak with you again.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, circling to stand closer to Phin, hands planted on my hips. “I’d hoped to see you dead and bleeding by now, but we don’t always get what we want.”
“A lesson well learned?”
“As if I had a choice. You know, you have a bad habit of killing people I care about.”
“I have never killed—”
“Blah, blah, blah. You can twist words any way you want, Thackery, it doesn’t change your actions. Tie a pretty bow around a jar of horse shit, but it’s still horse shit inside.”
He snickered. “That’s colorful. Then again, you always were.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve seen you bleeding and screaming, child. I think I know you very well.”
Behind me, Phin shifted. I held out my left hand, a stop gesture. My insides were quaking with anger and loathing for the man in front of me, but I would not allow the man behind me to do something he might (intellectually, at least) regret later. If one of us lost it and killed Thackery, both Ava and Aurora would pay the price. That couldn’t happen.
“You know,” I said, “you always seemed like a man who honored his promises. First you promised Felix a cure, but then you blew him to pieces.”
“I promised to free him, and I did. Just not in the way he expected.”
Oh, how I loathed that smug bastard. “What about me?”
“I’ve promised you nothing.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Oh yeah.” I took one step closer. “You remember that day in the tractor-trailer, when you told me what you were going to do to me? You outlined your thoughts on my ability to heal?”
“I remember,” he said cautiously.
“We made a deal that day. I promised to cooperate, to answer your questions, and to not fight you or your experiments. Remember?”
His expression went slack. “Yes.”
“Do you remember what you promised in return?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fulfill your end of our bargain?”
Trapped like the rat he was, and he knew it. Pride was one of the human male’s greatest flaws, and I was playing his ego like a piano prodigy. “No. The opportunity was removed when my lab was destroyed by the gargoyles.”
A fortuitous turn of events for me, as it turned out. The gargoyles saved my life that day by preventing Thackery from taking it. “Regardless, you welched on our deal. You owe me.”
Those dark, haunted eyes simmered with annoyance. I ignored the three people in the room with us, keeping my attention wholly on my target. He was so close to cracking, to giving me at least one of the answers I desperately needed.
“What do you want?” Thackery asked.
Score one for our team.
“Three questions,” I said.
“One.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Two questions, then.”
Phin touched my arm. I turned my head and met his gaze, his blue eyes cold as ice. A thousand different emotions churned in them, asking a thousand different questions. As much as I wanted to ask Thackery where Ava and Aurora were, he’d find a way to truthfully dodge the location. And I had no doubt that Thackery wanted the Lupa to stay on the move. I could ask and get “in a van driving through the hillside” just as easily as a street address.
I had to be more direct, less obtuse. I just hoped Phin would understand. No one had any intention of trading Thackery for Ava only.
“All right,” I said, mentally reviewing the wording of my first question. “You say you found a cure for the insanity wrought in half-Bloods by the vampire parasite. What are the ingredients of this cure?”
Thackery fidgeted in his chair, distressed at having to divulge the secret of one of his precious projects. Not that I gave a shit about his distress. I had a suspicion—had ever since I found out he’d been drawing blood from the Therians—but I needed to know from his own lips.
“Therian blood,” he replied.
Hell.
“He lies,” Astrid said. “Half-Bloods have fed off our people before.”
“It isn’t ingested,” Thackery said, affronted by being called a liar. “Fifty milliliters given intravenously every twenty-four hours. I’ve been
studying this for months, at first using the Lupa to collect samples. Ingested, the blood does nothing. The correct dosage administered directly into the bloodstream, though … the change is almost instantaneous.”
He was drugging his Halfies with Therian blood. He’d kidnapped Therians involved with the Watchtower and used their blood to drug his Merry Band of Halflings. He’d taken the blood of a child. And he’d initially used the blood of the Lupa pups he’d been given. Three of which were still loose in the city, with half a million potential human bite victims at their mercy.
“Fact,” I said. “You, a human male, were given charge of at least seven Lupa children whose saliva is highly infectious to you.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Question,” I continued. “How is human infection by a Lupa bite cured?”
For such a brief moment that I might have imagined it, Thackery seemed sad. My insides quaked. It was my answer; he didn’t have to say it.
“There is no cure that I am aware of, Ms. Stone,” he replied anyway. “I was only lucky to have never been bitten by my boys.”
I closed my eyes, held my breath, fighting off a wave of despair. Although I trusted Dr. Vansis to do everything he could to save Wyatt, part of me had always hoped for a miracle serum from among Thackery’s dozens of illicit experiments. Anything to stop the raging fever and give Wyatt back to me. To prevent a potential disaster scenario if the Lupa trio decided to get snacky on the general population.
“Rumor is your lover is infected,” Thackery said. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
The impact of my fist against his jaw vibrated up my arm and shoulder. His head snapped sideways and stayed there. “Don’t you compare our losses, you son of a bitch. I wasn’t responsible for your wife’s infection, but you are wholly responsible for Wyatt’s.”
Thackery flexed his jaw as he turned his head again to look at me. “Perhaps. But with all the other charges you’re leveling at me, one more death is of no consequence.”