Why can’t she even let me explain? Does she hate me that much for my family’s fuck-ups?
It was the thought that had struck me in the hospital, and it seemed truer now than it had even then. She knew I was a dangerous influence in her life—first her father’s death and then this . . .
It was no wonder she hated me.
For a brief moment, I contemplated shooting out a tire and forcing her to talk to me, but I wasn’t a lunatic. There was little it would do other than piss off an extremely powerful being who already didn’t want to be anywhere near me.
I dropped my chin to my chest. I’d come to find closure, and with her actions, I had gotten it. Just not the way I had hoped.
“Fuck!” The word left my mouth in a rush, ripping from my lungs and tearing at my heart as it went. It echoed in my ears even as the wind carried it away. Another primal scream tore from me. The barrage was loosened, and I shouted at the world until I was empty—completely defeated by love, fate, and the universe, all of which seemed to conspire together to fuck me over again and again.
THING HAD gone from bad to worse after I watched Evie drive away.
The initial emptiness I felt was soon replaced by the horror of her fleeing from me as if I were something to be feared. The thought hardened my heart, filling it with bitterness and rage.
I was toxic.
It was because of me that the lives of David, Lou, and Evie were lost or destroyed.
It was my own damned fault that every part of my life lay in tattered ruins. I wasn’t the Rain operative poster boy, the elite family soldier, the hero brother, or even the lover I should have been. I needed to be all of those things, but I’d failed at every one.
My very being was so broken that I wasn’t sure the parts could ever be fit back together to form a cohesive whole. I’d dropped so far from everything I knew and everyone I’d loved that I couldn’t see a way back again.
For a moment, I contemplated the gun in my hand. Turning the piece around, I looked down the barrel and wondered whether the best outcome for everyone would be for me to just pull the trigger.
It’s so easy and would fix so much. I’ll never be able to hurt Evie again. Never have to see the look of disappointment on Dad’s face as I let him down again. Never have to cope with the guilt of so many fuck-ups.
I closed my eyes and imagined the peace that might await me if I just pulled the trigger.
I’ll never see Evie again either. I doubted I would anyway, but as long as I lived, there was always hope that one day things might be different for us.
It seemed so easy to end it all, and yet I couldn’t.
After a breathless moment, I knew I never would.
I couldn’t give up like that, no matter how dark things seemed to be. There were still people suffering at the hands of the real monsters, and by taking myself out of the picture, I was letting those monsters win.
Sirens sounded in the distance, coming closer by the second until a squad car pulled into the motel parking lot.
My shouts of anger had apparently caused a seemingly unusual round of activity from the apathetic clerk, who must have called the local police to let them know I was there.
It would have taken the station all of two seconds to discover I wasn’t one of theirs and had no jurisdiction asking after Evie without their involvement. By the time the two officers from the car approached me on the balcony, they’d already realized that I wasn’t a cop at all.
My wild ranting about the monster who’d stolen my heart and torn it to shreds probably didn’t help my cause.
I was placed under arrest for impersonating a police officer and thrown into lockdown in a holding cell to wait for someone to bail me out.
Before long, I’d started to hope Dad would arrive sometime before my gorilla of a cellmate decided he needed to try to break somebody in half to make his day complete.
It took everything in me to try to ignore the massive bear-like man that sat across from me in the cell. Every time my gaze so much as slid past the huge space he filled in the air, he’d glare at me with increasing rage. With my mental state questionable at best, I wasn’t in a good position to deal with shit from him or anyone else.
Give me a wendigo or a werewolf over an asshole any day.
For about the fiftieth time since I’d seen my car disappear into the distance, I wondered where Evie could have gone. Why, after all we’d been through together, she had run from me without at least giving me the chance to explain. I hadn’t expected us to have a happily ever after, not with the pressures closing in on all sides, but I had at least wanted to talk to her. To let her know how I felt, and apologize for the ways I had wronged her.
Even after the devastating blow that came with the knowledge that she must have hated me, I felt a pull toward her. When I closed my eyes, I could still taste her lips. I could feel the warmth of her skin under my fingertips as I caused her to unravel beneath me. It was as if her fire had permeated through my exterior and now raced through my veins, reminding me of what we’d shared and what we’d lost.
I could almost hear her voice in my head, whispering sweet words and promises. Now that she’d left so easily, without even giving me a chance to say goodbye, I had to wonder if she had meant any of her oaths.
Were they all lies?
The time in the cell forced me to examine what I felt for Evie. I couldn’t shake her from my head. I had never been able to.
That wasn’t normal—it wasn’t even close to normal.
Mom had left Dad heartbroken when she’d crumbled under the pressure of a lost child and had left us, yet he’d been able to move on with his life. He didn’t pine and worry about where she might be. In fact, I could barely recall him mentioning her. It was only because of a few photographs and Eth’s stories that I knew anything about her at all. Despite examining every relationship I had witnessed during my life, I couldn’t think of any in which either party exhibited any of the crazy signs I had.
Time and again, I’d crashed headlong into dangerous situations because my head and heart were both in knots over Evie.
Looking over the time of my obsession with her, and seeing the ashes of our relationship scattering behind me, it was easy to understand why my family was concerned that I might have been under some sort of spell.
Even sitting there in the cell, it was impossible to gather together the tattered edges of my sanity long enough to expell Evie because she invaded every thought and lived in every memory. She was in my head, and wrapped around my thoughts, more than the vamp at Bayview could ever hope to have been.
Maybe it was time to consider that there is something more sinister at play.
I’d read through Evie’s and Emily’s files so often I almost knew them by heart. I’d investigated all of the information we had about phoenixes—which wasn’t much. The files contained little more than their defining characteristics and initial vulnerability to all weapons. None of the lore books mentioned how to destroy one permanently. Even the ability for the next generation to rise from the ashes was considered an urban myth until Evie had been discovered as a child. David’s taped conversation played over in my mind; his experience had been so damned similar to mine.
Could that be evidence my family was right? Maybe what I felt wasn’t real.
“What are you looking at, pretty boy?”
I hadn’t even noticed that my eyes had slid past the mountain of a man again until he snapped at me. His tone and everything about him put me on edge. I was done, and I didn’t care about consequences anymore. “I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure that out myself, but why don’t you just try calling me pretty boy again?”
His mouth split into a grin that was more malice than mirth. “So what, you’re going to try to be tough now, are ya, pretty boy?”
Before he even had a chance to move, I was at his side with the heel of my palm against his nose. A sick sense of satisfaction filled me following the sound of the cartilage crunchi
ng beneath my hand. He swore and clutched at his face. At the sight of the blood that rushed from the injury, I smiled.
Justice.
I turned around and sat back on the bench I’d occupied previously.
“Now leave me alone. I might be onto something, and I’m trying to think.”
A little over two hours later, I was finally led from the cell toward my impatient looking father. I hadn’t had any more trouble out of the lout, which was a good thing. I was already up for impersonating an officer I didn’t want to have to add a murder charge for the Rain to deal with as well.
Dad stared at me with open contempt as he nodded at whatever the cop in front of him said. Once we were out of earshot, he grabbed my bicep in a pincer grip and dragged me from the station. “What the hell do you think you were trying to do?”
I didn’t answer. What could I say? “I came for Evie.” That wouldn’t go down well.
“Where’s the Lincoln? Ben said you drove it down.”
“It was stolen.”
Dad gave me a questioning look as I laughed without any humor but shook his head when I didn’t explain the joke.
It was already getting dark when we hit the street. I saw his Chevelle across the road, but instead of dragging me toward it, Dad shepherded me down the road. “I don’t know what’s going on inside that head of yours, b—”
“That makes two of us,” I mumbled, interrupting him.
He growled before he turned my attitude back on me. “Boy, what more do I need to do to knock some sense into you?”
I shrugged. My time in the holding cell at the police station had given me plenty of time to come to the assumption that I’d lost my mind—that it was possible I hadn’t possessed any ability for true conscious thought since the first time I saw Evie. It certainly explained a number of my appallingly bad decisions in the last few years.
Dad chewed me out over my apparent faults as we walked a few blocks toward some destination he obviously had in mind.
Eventually, he pushed me into a bar. Eth was inside already, waiting for us. When I met Eth’s gaze, his palm traced the back of his neck before he brought it in front of him to wring his hands together. His nervous state was obvious, and I could see only one reason for it.
The only thing that was missing was a giant sign that read, This is an intervention.
Fuck me.
I rolled my eyes but resisted the urge to break free from Dad’s hold and race for the door. That reaction would only delay the inevitable.
By the time I was on my sixth drink, the conversation was going in circles.
“You’re a hazard, Clay,” Eth said. “We can’t have you with us, but you won’t stay at Bayview. What more do we have to do to keep you out of trouble and safe?”
Give me Evie back in my life.
Help me find out why she ran.
Help me get her out of my heart because she doesn’t want me anymore.
I didn’t answer. None of those things were what they wanted to hear.
Instead, I sank down to the bar, moving to rest on the surface before discovering my mistake when my forehead landed in a spot that was sticky from various spilled and overfilled drinks. I sat back up and scrubbed my palm across my skin to clean off the mess before crossing my arms and sighing. The alcohol that came in a steady stream was doing little to cheer me, and it wasn’t letting me forget anything either. All it did was cloud my mind and make my movements clumsy.
“What’s go—” Just as Dad started in on me again with a familiar track that echoed Eth’s statements, I cut him off.
“Do you really think she could have made me fall in love somehow?” I knew I didn’t have to elaborate any further than that. Although neither of them had mentioned Evie, her effect on me had been the buzzing undercurrent of the whole conversation, the point of the whole intervention.
“It’s not in the lore,” Eth said. “So I—”
“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” Dad steamrollered over the end of Eth’s sentence.
Eth frowned and then shrugged. “I guess. I mean the lore around phoenixes is so sketchy. Who has a chance of knowing what’s true and what’s not?”
He had a point. I nodded, raised my glass, and pointed it at Eth in a quasi-toast.
“Exactly!”
That was the point in all of it. All I had to judge what Evie might or might not have done was my family’s prejudice, a few useless notes on the Rain computers, and an aching, gaping chasm where my heart had once beat.
“What I need is a new lore. We need the real lore. The law lore!” I chuckled at my own joke, finding it far funnier than I rightfully should. I figured it was the alcohol but laughed anyway. It relieved some of the tension coiling in my stomach, but it wasn’t long before more doubt and anger snuck into the empty space.
“What are you suggesting? That we bring the Assessors into it?” Eth asked.
“No!” The thought sobered me instantly. Even though I was certain she wanted nothing more to do with me, I couldn’t allow that fate to befall Evie. “There has to be another way. I’ll find out more myself.”
“I will not allow you to go chasing after that creature again,” Dad said.
I shook my head. “Not Evie.” I frowned as the ache in my chest swelled when I said her name. My stomach roiled, but it had nothing to do with the excessive drinking. “I’ll find out from the source, go to . . . wherever the hell it is that they’re from.”
Eth looked disgusted, but Dad nodded. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said. “At least you can’t get into too much trouble there.”
“You have to promise me though,” I murmured. “Promise that you won’t hurt her.”
Eth went to say something, but Dad elbowed him into silence. “I promise that she will not be harmed by us.”
“But—” Eth started in complaint before Dad held a finger up to stop him.
“Provided that no one else is hurt at her hand,” Dad added with a wry grin. “The smallest sign of danger from her and we will track her with everything we have.”
The idea of Evie being hunted held my heart in an icy grip, but then the thought that she might have somehow ensnared my desire for her own nefarious reasons sent fire blazing through my veins. The two feelings met, battled, and turned on me, combining to leave me tired, sore, and desperate for answers.
Somewhat begrudgingly, I nodded. By that point, even if they told me they’d hunt her to the ends of the earth for no more reason than existing, I didn’t think I would be able to find the strength to argue anymore.
Two days later, I was on a plane with nothing more than a small backpack, a passport, a few hundred Euro—which would barely last me a week with the favors I’d have to buy to get information—and a burning desire to know more. At least, that was all Eth and Dad thought I had.
In reality, I had something much more important—a name and a place with a link to Evie. Miss Zarita Demitriou, the informant listed on the file that documented Emily’s death, and the name of the university she had attended.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN I LEFT Heathrow Airport, I had no set destination in mind.
My heavy heart made it difficult to focus on my plan, and with each step I took onto foreign soil, my anxiety spiked. Although I had a name and university, I’d come to discover those meant little. The plane trip had given me hours to go over the Rain lore about phoenixes and the intel about my potential lead. I had precious little to work with.
After the initial contact that had led to the Rain finding Emily, there was no record of Zarita Demitriou. The lack of follow-up was a little unusual, but not entirely unheard of.
The Rain usually kept track of informants, but it was possible that they just deemed her to be neither a threat nor an asset and determined she was unworthy of tracing. Another possibility crept into my mind though—she was too vital. Certain key contacts were removed from the databases to protect their identity. Maybe this Zarita was precisely aware of Emil
y’s nature and had turned in not only her but countless other supernatural beings.
Swallowing down my concern, I forced the thought from my mind so that I didn’t give up hope. If that was the reason her information had been wiped, it was likely she would be more than sympathetic to the Rain and wouldn’t help me find the information I needed. Even if that were the case, I could probably coerce some information from her without selling Evie out. There was little point worrying about that until I found her though, if I ever did.
The other possibility for the lack of follow-up, the one that I hoped was true, was that she’d somehow found a way to avoid their radar in the intervening years. So much could have happened in that time: Zarita could have married, died, or she could simply have forgotten all about the phoenix she’d met in the past and had, possibly inadvertently, reported to the Rain. Admittedly, the last option seemed unlikely—encounters with nonhumans tended to leave some sort of lasting impression.
That was exactly my issue. A flash of Evie’s smile, her laugh, and then her lying unconscious on the fucking hospital bed all rushed through my mind in rapid succession. With effort, I pushed her back out of my mind.
The last thing I needed was to allow memories of our time togther to take over. I was supposed to be on a fact finding mission, not taking an opportunity to wallow over the pain she’d caused me. The mere fact that she had overtaken my thoughts so readily—floating through my conscious mind, making my heart tremor with loss and my fingertips quiver with need to touch her once more—gave credence to the necessity of my trip.
Could it really be possible that everything I felt for her—that I still fucking feel—was fabricated by some spell she’d weaved?
Inwardly, I fought to silence the battle that errant thought caused—the same battle that had waged almost constantly between my heart and my head whenever I was away from her. It wouldn’t take much for it to erupt again, sending me spiralling back into the depths of madness. It was better that I concentrate on my goal and the information I sought. That meant trying to find Zarita and learn what she knew—regardless of the potential reasons for the lack of details of her life after Emily’s death.
Among the Debris (Son of Rain #2) Page 10