Still, when she emerged from the bedroom, it was tough to keep from thinking such thoughts. Even when dressed casually—in jeans and a light blue t-shirt—Kate was striking. Her long blonde hair, still wet from the shower, added to a look Quinn had come to think of as “comfortably elegant,” when Kate clearly had no interest in looking good, but appeared all the more lovely as a result.
He thought he saw a hint of a smile as she heard the compliment in his mind, but it was gone when she stepped in the room and faced him. She picked up the tea and watched him.
“I’m struggling,” she began haltingly, and Quinn noticed her hands were shaking, “to understand how you could even consider it.”
It was the comment he expected, but he had no idea where to begin. They were two halves of the same whole, but not since they melded last year did the gulf between them seem so wide. And unlike other lovers’ tiffs, a lot depended on the outcome of this particular argument—likely even their lives.
“We have to at least consider the offer,” Quinn said. He couldn’t look at her when he said it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed—at least he didn’t think so—it was that he knew exactly what she thought of this sentiment.
“Don’t be such a coward,” Kate said.
Even though he expected it—even though he knew exactly what she thought—the barb still stung. Worse, it made him angry, something he was hoping to avoid. He looked up at her and met her gaze.
“Do you really think this is about fear?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Of course it is.”
“Do you think I’m afraid of him? Of him and Elyssa? If you do, you don’t know me very well.”
“Oh please,” she replied. “I know you better than anyone. I never said you were afraid of those two. That’s not what I think at all. You’re afraid of yourself.”
She practically spat the comment at him and for once, Quinn was off balance. He thought he had understood why she was angry, but this was unexpected.
“You want to explain that one to me?” he asked.
“You really don’t know, do you?” she said. “You think this is about the fear of facing them in battle. It’s not, Quinn. The only person you fear is you. And it’s holding you back, clouding your vision, making you see options that aren’t there.”
Quinn stood up and walked over to her. He was well and truly angry now. He couldn’t remember the last time they fought, though he thought it was when she suspected he was Lord Halloween—something that seemed both like yesterday and a million years ago.
“I don’t know what the hell that even means,” he said.
“You’re considering his offer to surrender,” she said.
“Yes,” Quinn replied. “We would be idiots not to consider it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it’s a way out,” Quinn said. “It’s a way to be free. To go back to just being Kate Tassel and Quinn O’Brion.”
“You have to be kidding me,” she replied and turned from him and walked across the room.
He followed after her, speaking to her back.
“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m not saying we should take the deal, but this is an escape route. ‘The Prince of Sanheim is the cycle of life and death.’ Is that what you want, Kate? Let’s say we beat these two, then what? We find the next Prince to show up and kill them too? We challenge Sanheim himself? If we go down this road, the fighting will never end. Not for us. Not until we fail.”
Kate continued facing away from him.
“Sometimes you’re so naïve,” she said. “You really think they’d let us go. You heard him. He didn’t say surrender and walk away, Quinn. He said join him and his quest to destroy Sanheim. We don’t get to leave.”
“He didn’t offer it, but he might take us up on it,” Quinn said. “We could negotiate it. Besides, we aren’t just talking about ourselves here anymore. You heard him. If we lose, he’s going to destroy Leesburg. I don’t doubt that. Do you?”
“No,” Kate said quietly, turning around. “I don’t.”
“So it’s all well and good to talk tough and pretend like it’s just our lives on the line,” he said. “But if we go down this road, there are thousands of lives at stake, maybe more.”
“And if we join him?” she asked. “You’ve already seen what kind of man he is. Let’s say he defeats Sanheim, if that’s even possible. You think that will be better for the citizens of Leesburg? For anyone?”
“We don’t know…”
“Oh, but we do, Quinn,” she said. “He was perfectly willing to kill Maggie. Did you see how he looked at his own followers? Those people love him, worship him, and all I sensed from him was flat indifference. No, that’s not right. I sensed disdain, disgust. This isn’t a man to trust. This isn’t a man who should wield power.”
“And that’s it, isn’t it, Kate?” Quinn asked. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? Power.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about.”
“If you are trying to imply that I like being the Prince…”
“I’m not implying anything,” he said. “I’m saying it. Whatever ability you’ve tapped into, you don’t want to give it up, I can feel it. Whatever ‘You’re the last’ means doesn’t matter. You aren’t out there in graveyards looking to find yourself. You’re looking for a weapon.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate said, but she looked like she wanted to slap him. Hard.
“That’s why you won’t even consider it,” he said. “It’s not about what kind of person Sawyer is or what kind of deal we can cut. You can’t face a life as Kate Tassel.”
“I was never Kate Tassel,” she said. “That was just a made up name, remember?”
“Then what about a life as Kate O’Brion?” Quinn asked.
“What?” Kate asked, and for a moment the anger vanished from her voice.
Quinn dropped to one knee in front of her.
“I know this is terrible timing,” he said. “But in a way, it’s the best time. Kate, I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than just to be with you. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. And this isn’t about being the Prince of Sanheim. This isn’t about that I know what’s in your heart and vice versa. I’m telling you this now so you understand. I could throw all of that away. I could just go back to being Quinn and leave the Horseman behind forever, leave the Prince of Sanheim behind. All I want is you, Kate.”
She stood there with tears in her eyes.
“Marry me, Kate Blakely,” Quinn said softly. “Forget about the Prince of Sanheim. Forget about Lord Halloween. Forget about all of this madness.”
Kate stood there in a daze. One minute ago, she had been so angry at him. And now she wasn’t sure what she felt. But she knew that what she said next would be the hardest thing she ever had to say in her life.
She got down on her knees and faced him. Her eyes shone with tears.
“I love you, Quinn,” she said. “Nothing would make me happier than to be married to you. Nothing.”
“But…” Quinn said. Even without reading her mind, he could tell there was a ‘but’ coming.
She placed her hands on his face.
“But,” she said. “You can’t make me this offer. You keep acting like being the Prince of Sanheim is a burden, that it’s corrupting you, corrupting us. It’s not. You were right about me. I want to understand more about what I can do. I know it’s important somehow. I can’t go back to being just Kate anymore. And you, my love, can’t be just Quinn. The Horseman is a part of you. He is you. The only reason you are considering this offer is because Sawyer is showing you the dream you’ve been fooling yourself with. That we can go back. But we can’t. We could no more go back than we could wipe out a memory.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not, Quinn,” she said, and she wasn’t angry anymore, just sad. “
We are the Prince of Sanheim. For better or worse. For richer or poorer. For good or ill. This is who we are.”
What she said next, she whispered in his ear.
“I know you’re afraid,” she said. “But even if Sawyer could give you what you want, it would be a mistake. There’s only one way forward now. You have to accept what you are—what we are.”
He drew back and looked into her eyes.
“You never answered my question,” he said.
“Ask me again later,” Kate replied. “Ask me at the end of all this. I promise that you’ll like the answer then.”
He smiled a little.
“Are we okay?” he asked, but he knew the answer.
“Yes,” she said and smiled back.
They stayed like that for a long time, holding each other, kneeling on the living room floor. Later, she led him to the bedroom and for a time, they could forget again.
But time is fleeting. And they were almost out of it.
Chapter 21
October 14, 2007
Quinn woke with a start at 5 a.m., certain he had been dreaming something important. When he picked up the phone, he was grateful that for once, they had not gone roaming the evening before. They might have barely been in bed by now.
“Hello?” he managed, sounding even groggier than he felt.
“You need to meet me at the office,” Tim said. “Now.”
For a moment, Quinn assumed it was about a new story. He usually slept with the police scanner on, something he had been neglecting recently. Maybe there had been a major accident.
“What happened?” Quinn asked.
“Summer Mandaville happened,” Tim replied. “She just called me at home.”
“This early?” Quinn asked. “And why is she calling you? Did she scoop us and now wants to make sure she gets proper credit?”
“She thinks you’re the Prince of Sanheim, Quinn,” Tim said. “And unless we convince her otherwise, she’s going to print it in The Washington Post.”
*****
Quinn and Kate met him at the paper barely ten minutes later. Tim fumbled with the keys to the back door. The office was eerily quiet as they walked through it, their footsteps echoing up the wide staircase as they moved from the printing press in the basement to the editorial area up above. Tim was silent the entire time, acknowledging their presence with barely a nod as they followed him.
Tim flipped on lights, slowly illuminating the desks, and walked to his office. Kate and Quinn entered behind him—and by habit only since the building was empty—shut the door before they sat down.
Tim sat down behind his desk and looked at them both seriously.
“We have a bit of a problem,” he said. “I got a call from an extremely high-wired Summer Mandaville this morning. She’s convinced that Quinn is the Prince of Sanheim.”
“Tim, let me just…”
“Let me roll out her story first, Quinn,” he said. “Then we’ll talk through strategy. I’ve bought us a little time, mostly by claiming the entire exercise is a set-up, threatening to sue her and the Post for the next decade if she prints anything, and suggesting she’s mentally unbalanced.”
In that moment, Quinn could have kissed him. Laurence would have bent like a reed under the slightest pressure. But he knew Summer would at least pause as a result of Tim’s threats—the man could be damn intimidating when he wanted to be.
“My guess is she’ll still go forward,” Tim said. “And the second she does, you’ll both spend the next several weeks answering questions in Sheriff Brown’s office.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, for starters, she is going to interview you at 10 a.m.,” he said. “I agreed to that on your behalf. She’ll come here and I will sit in.”
“Damn,” Quinn said.
“That also buys us some additional time,” he said. “In this case, she’s at least not worried about being scooped by you, so it stops her from just filing the story anyway.”
“What does she have?” Kate asked.
Tim’s eyes rested on her.
“Not a lot, but potentially enough,” Tim said. “She has photos of the incident at the Waterford Fair yesterday—an incident which you both should have reported on and put on our website by now. According to her, a kid dressed up as the Headless Horseman and Quinn attacked him.”
“No,” Quinn said. “It wasn’t like that. Well, I did attack him, but you’re missing context.”
“Enlighten me.”
“He was threatening the crowd,” Quinn said. “He nearly rode down some women and children. I just pulled him off his horse and stopped him.”
“According to Ms. Mandaville, you not only did that, you brandished a sword, held it over him, and nearly killed him,” Tim replied.
“If you interview the crowd…”
“What am I, your defense attorney?” Tim barked. “Even if you didn’t hurt the guy, can I just tell you how damn odd this looks? If what you’re saying is true—if someone ran down a crowd of fairgoers—why the hell didn’t you write it up as a story? What were you doing yesterday instead?”
“Tim, I….” Quinn started.
“Were you covering the fair?” he asked.
“Yes,” Quinn answered.
“And wasn’t that a pretty big event?” Tim continued. “The first thing you’re going to do after we leave this meeting is write me a story and you are going to do it from your perspective about the attack at the fair. Kate is going to head back out to Waterford and find some damn witnesses. The same witnesses that you should already have interviewed when they were standing around you.”
“Aren’t we a little off point?” Kate asked.
“No,” Tim replied, “We’re not. Running off like you did—and oh yes, Mandaville noted that to me several times—makes you look guilty. Not filing a story on an actual news event makes you look guilty. You see my point?”
“Quinn was upset,” Kate replied. “So was I. We weren’t thinking clearly. But it’s a long way from being a killer.”
“According to Mandaville, Quinn nearly killed the boy on the street,” Tim replied.
“We thought he was the Prince of Sanheim,” Quinn said, truthfully. He should have known better, but in that moment, he had believed it was the thing he had faced at night on the streets of Leesburg.
“And you were going to kill him? That’s interesting,” Tim said. “Because normal people don’t usually just up and kill someone they think might be a murderer. Normal people talk to the police. Reporters, by the way, who are most distinctly not normal people, write stories about murderers. They generally don’t kill people either.”
“I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “I really wasn’t thinking clearly. I thought…”
“We’re on the edge here, you two,” Tim said. “According to Mandaville, she has photos of the event in question, including of you holding a goddamn sword.”
“How does that link me to the Robertson murder or Lord Halloween?” Quinn asked.
“What was the murder weapon involved in both cases, Quinn?” Tim asked.
Neither Kate nor Quinn responded.
“Exactly,” Tim said. “But I don’t deny she has a lot of supposition in place of fact. She’s going to say you were one of the only ones to know the identity of Lord Halloween, giving you opportunity to kill him yourself, possibly as a way to impress your girlfriend, whose mother died at his hands. She’s going to claim that somehow you knew about Robertson’s misdeeds before anyone else—giving you the opportunity to kill him in retaliation for I don’t know what. She’s going to have a photo of you holding a sword over a kid as you are apparently angry at him for impersonating the so-called Prince of Sanheim, who enjoys dressing up as the Headless Horseman.”
“That’s not enough,” Quinn said. “It’s not enough to accuse me of murder.”
“Were you born yesterday?” Tim asked, practically shouting now. “She doesn’t need to accuse you of murder, Quinn. She just needs to
mention those inconvenient facts and suggest you are a top suspect of the Loudoun County police department. She runs that photo in The Washington Post and you’re done, do you know that? We’re all done.”
“So what do we do?” Quinn asked.
“Get your heads out of your asses, start reporting the story from yesterday, and start thinking ahead,” Tim said. “That’s what we do. The police have the kid in custody, by the way, something I’ve already established this morning. His name is Jack Gill. Go down to the police department and make a statement, for God’s sake, both of you. While you’re there, find out more about who hired him and why. But not before leaving me with some kind of goddamned story first. Let’s play this carefully and we may yet come out of it with our skins intact.”
His tone was one of dismissal, so Kate and Quinn got up and walked out the door, feeling his eyes boring into them the whole way.
You think he knows the truth? Quinn asked in his head.
I’m sure of it, Kate responded.
*****
Kate and Quinn spent the morning working furiously. Kate drove out to Waterford where they were setting up for the final day of the fair, and tried to find anyone who had seen the preceding day’s events.
Quinn, meanwhile, wrote his view of what happened. He tried to write it cleanly, carefully, just focusing on the facts of the case—crazy kid attacks crowd at fair—and not on his own emotions. Somehow he didn’t think a first person perspective on how angry he was about someone impersonating the Headless Horseman was going to help him much.
Quinn called his police sources—which had expanded significantly after the whole Lord Halloween debacle—and established that Gill was still in custody and was expected to be charged with several criminal counts on Monday. Gill was claiming it was all a misunderstanding and attempting to blame the man who hired him. Unfortunately for Gill, he could only describe the man and had no idea who he was.
Kate called in a couple of quotes and Quinn had something on Tim’s desk by 9:30.
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