by L. J. Red
I had a moment, a second where I could have warned him away. I could have told him to run. I didn’t. I had sworn to get justice for the dead, no matter what the cost. I told him to come to me.
Chapter 35
By the time Valerian arrived I had passed through shock and straight into anger. The elevator doors chimed and I was standing in front. The police ready on either side.
I didn’t know what to expect. Would he come out fighting? Would he go for me? He did none of these things. Instead, he looked at me from within the elevator itself and I knew he already knew everything. “He’ll come quietly,” I said after a heavy pause. He walked out slowly, looking only at me, and stopped just inside the apartment.
The police flocked around him, Detective Pierce stepping forward. “Valerian, you are under arrest for the murder of Oliver Carpenter, Sevda Sahin, Michelle DuPont, and Violet Waters.” At the last name, his eyes flared with emotion.
“I found it,” I choked out. “I found her necklace.”
“Don’t,” Detective Pierce said, turning her back to him and resting a hand on my shoulder, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Valerian.
“Why?” I whispered, knowing his vampire hearing would pick it up. “Why did you have it? Why did you have her necklace?”
“She gave it to me,” he said. The first words he’d said since he got here.
“Gave it to you?”
“She gave it to me for safekeeping,” he said.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. You told me you barely knew her. Was that a lie too?” I said, frustrated, my mind buzzing so loud with white noise I could barely think. “You took it from her after you killed her.” I stepped forward, shoving past Detective Pierce. She rushed after me, blocked, and stood bodily between us.
“Don’t go near him. You’re not thinking straight.” I pushed against her enough that she had to brace herself to keep me back. “Tiana, snap out of it,” she said right in my face.
I wasn’t listening. I didn’t care. All I could see was Valerian. His dark eyes were pitiless, like bottomless holes.
Why?” I whispered. “Tell me why you did it.”
His expression changed, and for the first time I saw pity in his gaze. I hated it. I didn’t want his pity. I wanted the truth.
“Nothing is what it seems. Tiana, you are making a mistake.”
Disgust washed through me. How dare he use those words, the words Violet had said in the dream. How could I have let him touch me? My sister’s killer. I spat in his face and finally stepped back. “The only mistake I made,” I said in a voice made hollow with pain, “was ever trusting you.”
I turned away and didn’t look at him as the police escorted him out of his apartment and out of my life forever.
I must have given my statement at some point, my prints taken to eliminate them from the evidence found in the apartment, but I didn’t remember any of it. It was all a haze. The only thing that got me through it was Detective Pierce’s reassuring hand on my shoulder.
She eventually drove me back to my apartment. I stopped and suddenly came back to myself. “The key,” she was saying. “Do you have the key?”
“Yeah.” I glanced around. I was in my hallway, staring at my own front door. “Yes,” I said slowly, “I have the key.” I scrambled about for it and unlocked the door, pushing it open and stepping into the familiar space. As I crossed the doorway, I remembered giving Valerian the invite, and for a second I was filled with fear. Could he come after me? Escape police custody?
“Where is he now?” I asked Detective Pierce.
“Valerian? We handed him over to the court to be held until the trial. We don’t have the resources to keep a vampire under lock and key, but the queen does.”
“Good,” I whispered. I thought of Gloria, of the torture that Kyran had told me she endured. I didn’t care. Valerian deserved torture; he deserved every second of it. He wouldn’t be escaping Alexandra’s custody.
“I’ll be leaving a couple of uniforms downstairs anyway,” Detective Pierce said.
“You don’t need to,” I said. Detective Pierce’s thoughts had clearly tracked my own, although she didn’t know Valerian had entry into my apartment.
“Yeah, I don’t need to but I’m doing it anyway,” she said wryly. “It will make me feel better, all right?”
“All right,” I said, and I dredged up something that might have been a smile, might have been a grimace.
“Is there someone I can call? Someone who can stay with you?”
I thought of Jazz, but I didn’t want to drag her out here. She pulled enough shifts at the hospital that messing with her precious sleep always made me feel guilty.
“I’m just going to sleep,” I said. Maybe cry out the entire water content of my body first. But nobody needed to see me doing that.
“You should call someone,” Detective Pierce said. “How about Dr. Allister? He knows you.”
I didn’t want to call him, I didn’t want to call anyone, but I could see Detective Pierce wasn’t going to leave unless I did. “Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll call Rufus, I promise.” She stared at me. “Are you going to stand there until I do it?”
“You better believe it.”
I sighed deeply and pulled out my phone, dialing his number, explaining in the simplest terms what had happened.
“He’s coming,” I told Detective Pierce. “You happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Detective Pierce said flatly, and then she did something I didn’t expect. She stepped forward and hugged me tightly. “You’ll get through this, Tiana,” she whispered into my hair. “You’re one of the strongest people I know.” She leaned back. “I have to get back to the crime scene. I’ll check in on you later.” And then she was gone.
I intended to get in the shower, to change my clothes, to climb into bed, but instead I just sat down on the couch and stared into the distance for I don’t know how long until the knocking from the door finally roused me from my daze and I opened it to find Rufus standing there.
“Tiana,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” And he stepped forward, pulling me into my second hug in so many hours. I was stiff in his embrace. I didn’t know how to take the comfort he was offering. I felt dead inside.
“Here,” he said, offering me a travel mug. “I brought you some of the disgusting herbal tea that you hate.” I laughed softly. I had always given him shit for drinking that when I was staying with him.
He herded me back into my apartment and sent me into my room to change into my pajamas, and was busying himself with something on the stove when I came out again minutes or hours later, I didn’t know. Time was moving strangely. He swapped out my empty mug of herbal tea—when had I drunk that?—with a glass of water and sat me down on the couch, sitting down next to me.
“We don’t have to talk about any of it,” he said. “It’s over now, it’s done.”
It didn’t feel over. It didn’t feel done. “I just don’t know how I could have been so stupid,” I said. “I don’t know how I could have trusted him after what he did to me.”
“Vampires are evil, Tiana,” Rufus said. “They prey on your goodwill, twist everything to fit their desires. They take and they take and they don’t care who gets hurt.”
“It just didn’t make sense,” I said. “How could he have been doing this the whole time? Why would he have helped me?”
“It was all part of the trick,” Rufus said. “It’s all a game to them. Maybe he liked leading you through the case even as he covered his own tracks.”
But that was just it. He hadn’t led me through the case. He’d left me to do my own investigating. He could have sent me off on the wrong direction. Could have withheld evidence. Alexandra had clearly trusted him to give me everything but she had never checked. He could have lied to me even more than he already had.
But there was the evidence. The bloody clothes right in his apartment. Could they have got there without his knowing somehow? But t
hen he would have smelled the blood. He would have known. And there was the problem of the elevator. How could anyone have broken in without the code? There had to be cameras. Cameras all over a penthouse like that. They would have picked someone up. The cops would have seen something.
I remembered that uneasy feeling I’d had when I stepped into his apartment the second time, that whisper against my senses. I felt an echo of it now, disappearing like smoke between my fingers. No, surely that had just been nerves or the residual echo of Michelle’s ghost. Not that Michelle’s ghost made any sense either. Sevda and Oliver had been so completely erased how could Michelle have stuck around? And why couldn’t I sense her in the half world?
None of it made any sense. There were too many lies, too many secrets. What had Sevda been investigating? Why had Valerian acted so strange when we were interviewing Kyran? Why had Michelle gone to the court in the first place?
“I should have protected you better,” Rufus said.
“Protected me? What are you talking about?”
“When he was here in your apartment that time. I should have warned you how evil vampires could be, that you couldn’t trust a single thing he did.”
I remembered that night, before Rufus had arrived. Valerian, Raven, and I. Making pancakes and enjoying each other’s company. Had he been planning to kill me right then? Had he come fresh from Michelle’s death? I didn’t know? I couldn’t fit Valerian, the cold-blooded killer, and Valerian, who had touched me so gently, together in my mind.
But then that had always been my problem. I had never been able to make those two Valerians fit. The one I had known and loved for a year before he left me bleeding out on the street.
The Valerian that had hurt me could do this, the psychopath that I had seen rip through his opponent in a fight. The other Valerian? The gentle one with love in his eyes. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe he was just the mask.
Chapter 36
Rufus made the couch up as a bed for himself and sent me into my bedroom to sleep.
I lay on the covers and stared up at the ceiling. At some point my mind must have quieted enough to let me sleep because the first thing I knew was that I was dreaming.
I was standing in the middle of my apartment and Gloria was in front of me. “This is your place?” she said, looking around with a disgusted expression.
“What are you doing here, Gloria? I don’t want to dream about you.” Was I dreaming? My thoughts were slow.
“Yes, you’re dreaming. I had no other way to reach you, believe me, I don’t want to be anywhere near your head.”
Reach me? What was she talking about? Oh wait, I was dreaming, she wasn’t real.
“Of course I’m real. You idiot.”
Had I said that aloud?
“No,” she snapped. “This is a mindscape; don’t you know anything?” She snapped her fingers in front of my face and the sound echoed weirdly.
I jerked backward. “Stop it,” I said.
“You stop it. Focus,” she said.
“I am focusing. You were insulting my apartment, and I was about to tell you to fuck off.”
“You need to listen to me,” Gloria said. “I can’t stay here long; I’m using all my magic to reach you.”
“Your magic?”
“Vampire magic.” She spoke slowly, as if I were stupid. “Death magic, you know? Because you’re a death witch and everything? Fucking hell, I don’t know what Valerian sees in you.
“Don’t mention his name,” I growled.
“Oh, give it a rest,” she snapped. “Look, you’re a death witch. I’m dead. We can communicate through the half world. How do you not know this?”
How did I not know it? How on earth could I know it? I’d never been taught anything about my powers. Everything I knew was stuff that Violet and I had managed to scrounge together.
“Yeah, well. Maybe you should have been asking the vampires. After all, we are the ones with centuries of knowledge and death magic is kind of important to us, you know?”
“No,” I snapped. I didn’t know, I didn’t want to know. Was that what Alexandra had been talking about? A death witch at the vampire court? Could that be why Violet had gone to the vampires in the first place? The connection I’d always wondered at. The first step that had sent her down the path to her death.
“Will you shut up,” she said, clenching her hands into fists.
“I’m not saying anything,” I said.
“No, you’re thinking it, which is just as bad. I told you, I’m here about Valerian.”
“What about Valerian?” I snapped.
“He’s going to die,” she said flatly, “and you’re the only one who can save him.”
I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s going to die,” she said, coming a step closer, her voice rising. “Do something!” she said and shoved me hard in the chest. Hard enough that I snapped back into wakefulness.
I gasped, winded, my throat closing on empty air, finally dragging in a breath, my lungs scraped raw.
I rolled over on my bed and up until I was kneeling on the mattress. He was going to die? I didn’t understand. He was with the police. No, wait. I shivered, ice flowing down my veins. The police didn’t have him; Alexandra did. Alexandra, who had tortured Gloria almost to the point of death just for clawing at my arm. Alexandra who had sworn to execute whoever was responsible for the murders. Valerian was going to burn.
I shot up out of bed. Panic fluttering around my ribs. I couldn’t let Valerian die. I reached the door, then ground to a halt, hand frozen on the doorknob. What was I doing running to Valerian’s rescue? He’d betrayed me. He’d killed people. He was a murderer. I hunched my shoulders. I let go of the handle, my fingers felt stiff. I could let it happen. I glanced at the window. Dawn wasn’t far away. I could let Alexandra put him to death for his crimes. Vampire law for a vampire killer.
My heart felt like a lead weight in my chest. Could I really let it happen? Could I really let him die like that? My fingers inched for the door. I would never be able to speak to him. Never be able to ask him why. Never get the answers to my questions. My thoughts began to speed up again, light blooming behind my eyes. My questions. All the questions. There was so much that didn’t fit, so much I needed to know. I stared grimly at the door. He needed to tell me exactly what had happened with my sister, with Michelle and the others. The hole their deaths left in the half world, that twisting, painful void. I needed to know how they had died. Why they had died.
No, I decided, my fingers gripping the door tightly. Valerian couldn’t die. I wasn’t finished with him. This wasn’t over.
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