“Forty-six? Seriously?”
“I’m also male, in case you’re wondering.”
“I had figured that out, actually.” Since he was being so open about it, I ventured, “So, you seem… okay with that?”
“I’ve had twenty-eight years to get over myself.”
“Well, that… answers one question for me.”
“Yeah?”
“I’d been wondering about the vampire immortality thing. Clearly you haven’t aged.”
“Not a day. We can go on like this indefinitely.” His smile didn’t have a whole lot of happy in it.
I wondered how old Damon was.
“So Westley sent you here to guard me?” I hadn’t even considered that I was still a new Lumi, and that a kathair could get me here as easily as anywhere.
“I don’t know why he picked on me,” Paris said dryly. “I’m not in the habit of cleaning up after Damon’s — how did you put it? Endless stupid angst? — nor do I intend to start now. But it’s not going to kill me to do Westley a favor. He’s going to have his hands full getting your new boytoy calmed down.” He dropped into Carmen’s leopard-print saucer chair, sprawling as if he owned it. “How did you manage that, anyway? Befasting him against his will. It’s pretty difficult.”
“He was asleep. He’d gotten a cut on his forehead earlier.” I looked down at my corresponding fingertip, which I had wrapped in a napkin at some point. The paper was stuck to my skin with dried blood now. Blech. “Everyone’s so upset about me befasting him without permission. Well, I saw a real no-holds-barred befasting the other day, and you know what I noticed? Nobody asked the Shadow’s permission. Nobody asked her consent or her opinion or anything at all. Her only line through the whole thing was, what was it, synthana, ‘death together.’ Which, if that’s the Shadow version of vows, is precisely the vow you and Damon and every other orphan broke already. So I don’t know what he even wanted me to ask him.” My own thoughts weren’t making sense to me. Even stroking Sunny Bunny didn’t make me feel better.
“That’s the point, stupid. Nobody asks. He wanted you to be different.”
“No, he just wants me to disappear. Retroactively, so that we would never have met to begin with. That’s what he wants.”
“Maybe. Does it matter to you what he wants?”
“Yes. It does.”
“Then why did you befast him?”
His sudden shout made me jump. He had come out of the chair and for a second he did not look like a child at all.
“Why, knowing he didn’t want it, knowing he didn’t want you, did you sneak around behind his back and do it anyway? Why, if you care what he wants, did you disregard it as thoroughly as you possibly could? Don’t give me some crap about trying to help him. You weren’t helping him. Tell me the truth.”
I studied my hands, and spoke slowly, testing the truth of each word before letting it out. “I don’t want him to leave. But I don’t want to make him stay. If he stayed because he wanted to, that would make me happy. Making it where he doesn’t have a choice doesn’t make me happy. I did it because I was afraid he would die. I did it because I couldn’t stand for him to hurt when I could prevent it.”
Paris looked at me a long minute, narrow-eyed. “You asked if I had a problem with Damon,” he said. “Truth is, Damon puts himself in a… peculiarly vulnerable position with us. To lead us, he has to essentially become everyone’s Lumi — and we all, by definition, have serious Lumi issues. That means that sometimes we lash out at him, we hurt him because he’s here and she isn’t. Do you see what I mean?”
I nodded cautiously.
“It also means that anyone else who hurts him? We are really. Not. Cool with.” He was in my personal space now. I tried not to audibly gulp. “Beat-you-to-death-with-our-bare-hands not cool. You got that?”
“Got it,” I said.
He nodded, slowly, once, and settled back into his chair. The panther retracting his claws.
Silence.
“So,” he said casually, “is there anything to do around here?”
“Um,” I said. “Well, I would normally go to church, but I’ve already missed the Sunrise Service… Hang on a second…” I padded barefoot into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Yes, a full dozen! We can dye eggs!”
Paris groaned. “What are you, twelve?”
I turned to grin at him. “I also have The Princess Bride.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Lighthouse
DAMON
“I gotta tell you, Damon, I’m disappointed. I really didn’t think it was you.” Priscilla’s voice seemed to float in the darkness. “I had imagined that we were on the same side. That we did very nearly the same job, in our ways. But you had to go vigilante on me.”
“You can turn on the lights, Priscilla. I’m not going to shade.”
“I’m sure you can understand my not taking your word for it.” Judging by the direction of her voice, she was sitting several feet away from me, out of arm’s reach. If she was in here, Lincoln was, too; it took me a few seconds of concentration to catch the scent of a Shadow in the far corner.
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” I said. “You have no evidence against me, which is natural enough, since I didn’t do it.”
“Had no evidence.”
“Really,” I said casually, trying to control my expression. They were both wearing night-vision goggles, I assumed. “Did I leave fingerprints? Oh, wait, Shadows don’t leave fingerprints. Or you would have solved this case a long time ago.”
“We have you on video at Martin Iverson’s residence.”
“Show me, then.” It wasn’t the first time Priscilla had tried to bluff me.
But to my surprise, there was a hiss of static and whine of activating electronics, and a television screen bloomed out of the darkness. Priscilla and Lincoln stood out as dark blots in the faint blueish light, and I could easily have used their shadows to escape. If I hadn’t been handcuffed to a chair, out of range.
The dominant image on the screen was a rose in a champagne flute. I watched it a moment, then raised an eyebrow at Priscilla.
“Did you know Martin Iverson was an artist?” she said, watching the screen with seemingly rapt attention. “Some of the common themes in his work were the futility of social conventions and the mortality of all things. I imagine this piece was saying something along that line.”
I turned back to the screen and realized that the rose had drooped. Over the next minute or so, it darkened and withered, dropping petals onto the glossy wood beneath the champagne flute. The camera’s time setting became clear, if it hadn’t been already, when a door, previously unnoticed in the corner of the screen, opened and admitted a police officer, gun drawn, moving jerkily and much faster than any human could. The room quickly filled with uniformed officers and detectives, and the camera began swinging dizzily from hand to hand. Priscilla stopped the tape.
“A back room at Martin’s apartment, I assume. I’m sure you can get tons for it on Ebay,” I said, “but I fail to see what it has to do with me.”
“Do you? Watch again.” She rewound; the police waddled backward from the room, petals leaped back onto the dying flower. “Right around in here. Watch carefully.”
I did watch carefully, not the rose this time, but the door. It was open a crack, I realized, throughout the video. And at one point, seemingly only seconds before the police arrived, a figure darkened the crack.
“There, now you see it,” Priscilla said. “Martin shelled out for HD, lucky for us. Our techies were able to get this screen capture.” She handed me an eight-by-ten printout, and even in the scanty light I could see that it was a perfect profile of my face, framed by the edges of the door.
“Picture it,” Priscilla said. “You’ve been a suspect for some time. We can place you at the scene of the murder, smack dab in the middle of the estimated time of death. We show up to talk to you, and you’re covered in blood and minor injuries. The type yo
u might get in a fight. It wasn’t easy to persuade my colleagues that you ought to be interrogated before you were put down.”
“Come on, you’ve never been very good at Bad Cop, Priscilla.”
Her hand came out of the half-dark before I could think of dodging, and managed to hit all four of the worst cuts on my face in one strike.
“Did you know Martin Iverson has a ten-year-old daughter with his ex-wife? Guess who found Daddy’s body. She’s ten. I promised her I would get the monster that killed her daddy. And if that’s you, then guess what, buddy? You’re headed for the great beyond.”
“I have an alibi, if you’re interested.” It was an effort to keep my voice level. I had thought that the idea of death didn’t scare me anymore. Wrong.
“Alibi? Damon, we know exactly where you were at the time of the murder.”
“Martin was already extremely dead when I got there.”
Priscilla laughed. “Sure.”
“Do you imagine that Martin’s Shadow didn’t know when he died? While the others fought to keep her alive, I went to the scene to see if I could figure out what happened. A wasted effort, by the way, no different from the others, though you should have figured that out for yourself by now.”
“I’ll be wanting a list of those ‘others’ presently. Is Martin’s Shadow still alive?”
“Last I heard. We’re keeping her drugged, which seems to be helping.”
“And also makes her conveniently unavailable for questioning.”
“She’d be just as unavailable if we’d let her die. Or let her stay awake, for that matter. Ever tried to have a conversation with a mid-breach Shadow?”
She regarded me narrowly for a moment, then absently flipped off the television, plunging the room into darkness.
The next voice to speak was Lincoln’s. “Can anyone corroborate this story?”
“Everyone at the Orphanage.”
“They’re hardly disinterested.”
“They’re not liars.” I sighed and rubbed my forehead. If they did speak to my orphans, they’d find out I wasn’t at the Orphanage at the actual time of the murder. The orphans weren’t my alibi. Naomi was. “I have another witness. A human one. Her name is Naomi Winters. When Martin Iverson was getting ripped into little pieces, I was with her, on the Ilium University campus. Defending her from a kathair, as it happens. Its clothes might still be there.”
Priscilla and Lincoln were silent, and I knew I had slipped somehow. Something in my tone of voice, perhaps. Priscilla was good at her job, and particularly good at worming the truth out of people. It was her specialty. When we first met, I told her I didn’t kill people to survive; she believed me and let me live. The Liberty case was more problematic. She wasn’t infallible, and she knew it. It didn’t help that she was getting mixed signals from me; the truth when I said I didn’t do it, a lie when I said I wouldn’t do it.
And now she was getting the signal that there was something I didn’t want her to know about Naomi Winters.
“Tell us about that,” she said at last. “This kathair attack. Tell us what happened.”
“We were at a table behind the food court.” I tried to filter the sudden anger and hurt from my voice, remembering Naomi’s insistence that we do what I wanted. Liar. Traitor. “It came out of nowhere, as they tend to do. I killed it. End of story.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“Playing Scrabble.” My voice sounded bitter, even to me.
“Why?”
“It’s fun.”
“Surely you have playmates enough at the Orphanage.”
Lincoln added, “It’s rare for a kathair to attack in daylight.”
They were on the edge of rejecting my alibi as a fabrication. The problem was that they were just as unlikely to believe the whole truth.
“Kathairna will attack in daylight,” I said at last, “to get to a new Lumi. Which Naomi is.”
“Where was her Shadow during all this?”
“Defending her from the kathair, of course.”
“And why were you there with them?”
“I often mediate between Lumii and Tenebrii that are having problems. I don’t want new orphans on my hands any more than you do.”
“We appreciate that,” she said cautiously. “Are Naomi and her Shadow having problems?”
“Yes.” Oh, yes.
There was a long pause. I wondered what Priscilla and Lincoln’s night-vision goggles were showing them about my face.
“Damon, there’s something you’re not telling us,” Priscilla said. “This is no time to keep secrets. I want Liberty dead. If you’re not Liberty, this would be a really good time to prove it.”
You can’t prove a negative. I bit back my instinctive smart-mouth reply. It could get me killed at this point. The only smart thing to do was tell the truth. But I didn’t want to claim Naomi as my Lumi. I would almost rather die than claim Naomi as my Lumi.
Almost.
“Naomi Winters,” I said, forcing the words out through my teeth, “is my Lumi.”
I thought the room had been ominously silent before.
“You already have a Lumi,” Priscilla said at last. “Claire Henderson, murdered thirteen years ago, maybe you remember her?”
The words were like a spike up my spine. “Yes,” I choked. “I remember her. Believe me. I’m the last one who wanted to think this could happen. But it happened.”
“What are you trying to do, distract us?” Priscilla sounded honestly confused. “Do you expect anyone to believe you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Even if you are befasted now — or is it merely covanted?”
“Befasted.” I clenched my fists.
“Anyway, it doesn’t rule you out as a suspect.”
“You asked what I was hiding. That’s it.”
“Why were you hiding it?”
“First, because it does tend to derail whatever conversation I might be having. Second, because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Third… because maybe if I don’t admit it, it isn’t real.”
There was another long pause, then Lincoln’s voice. “The very idea is sick.”
“He’s lying, Lincoln. It’s not possible.”
“Is he lying? You tell me.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “It’s easy enough to test.”
“You won’t mind?” she asked dryly.
“Do what you like, baby, I know it’s me you really love.”
I heard an exhalation that on a better day might have been a laugh. Then the room filled with light, soft and directionless, no individual beam strong enough to cast a shadow. After so long in the dark, I winced and tried to cover my eyes, but of course my hands were still cuffed to the chair.
“Bite me,” Priscilla said, and held her wrist under my chin.
“What?”
“You look like you’ve been dragged behind a horse. Bite me. If you’re lying, my blood will heal you. If you’re telling the truth, only Naomi’s can do that now.”
I glanced at Lincoln, standing with his arms crossed in the corner. I’d always gotten along fairly well with Lincoln. You wouldn’t have known it by the glare he was giving me now.
“Whatever you want,” I muttered. It certainly wasn’t hard to coax my teeth out; I’d been bleeding steadily, if slowly, for some hours now, and they were ready to do something about it. Here goes.
I couldn’t say hunting was always unpleasant, if I was with Wes, or another partner I could trust to rein me in. If I knew I was in no danger of killing someone, it was possible to relax and enjoy a brief minute of glorious not-hurting. But there was none of that here. As before, with the plastic pouch from Dove’s cooler, the blood didn’t even taste right. In fact, distasteful seemed to sum up the entire experience.
Especially once the memories started trickling in. Blood from a cooler had mostly forgotten where it came from, by the time it got to us; a live hunt was a different matter. “Ugh, Priscilla,” I said. “I didn�
�t need to know this much about you. Ever. And I sure didn’t need to know that much about Lincoln.”
She huffed an absent-minded chuckle, but her eyes were glued to the scrapes and cuts still oozing blood on my cheeks. She swayed a bit as Lincoln wrapped her wrist in gauze, but was unusually lucid for someone who’d just been bitten by a Shadow. But then, as a Hunter, she had probably had more exposure to somna than most. Her words only slurred a little as she said, “Looks like we’re going to need to talk to Miss Naomi Winters.”
NAOMI
Paris and I moved the card table to the living room, covered it in newspaper, and were deeply involved in dyeing an egg blue on one end and yellow on the other when Buttercup and Westley — the original, fictional Westley — made it into the Fire Swamp.
“We’ll never survive,” said Buttercup.
“Nonsense,” her beloved assured her. “You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
“How much do you really buy into this stuff?” Paris asked.
I blinked. “What, the Fire Swamp? Well, clearly you can survive—”
“No, stupid, this stuff.” He waved a hand at the surface of the card table, with its cups of dye and eggs in various states of color change.
“Dyeing eggs?”
He rolled his eyes as if I were quite thick indeed. Which, to be fair, I was, if you measured around the navel area. “Easter. Jesus. Religion. The great beyond.”
“Oh, that. Well, yeah, I’m pretty ‘into’ it. Have been all my life. I, uh, take it you’re not?”
He pulled the bicolored egg out of the yellow dye, peered closely at it, dipped it back in. “Shadows generally follow the religion of their Lumi. Sincerely, even, for the most part.”
And he had no Lumi. “Ah,” I said.
“We’ve managed to come up with… apocrypha, if you will… in most religions, explaining our existence,” Paris said, still not looking up from the soaking eggs. “Some believe them, some see them as more… metaphorical. My parents, being literal-minded, taught me the Tenebri version of Genesis as fact. They taught me that Adam had two wives. Eve was made from a piece of Adam’s body, Lilith from a piece of his soul. Eve he loved by day, Lilith by night, and they matched each other child for child. Cain, in fact, was Lilith’s son, and it was at his mother’s urging — she was jealous of Eve and hated all Eve’s children — that Cain slew his half-brother Abel. In punishment — or perhaps as a natural result of such a hurtful act against her Lumi — Lilith’s bond to Adam was broken, and she became the first kathair, condemned to wander in hunger and pain forever.
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