Ronnie wrung her hands nervously. As usual, her instincts for survival were nil. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Dominic didn’t even bat an eyelash in Ronnie’s direction. “You know well enough that Ronnie does not speak for us. I speak for us, and I say you are not welcome.”
“It’s not a matter of welcome. It’s a matter of necessity.” Walker’s grin widened. “You need me.”
Dominic’s growl swelled the silence.
Rowens sighed. “He’s got a point.”
“The hell he does,” Dominic said, his words scraping from his throat like the grindings from a wood chipper.
“His skills would be a tremendous help to our mission.”
“No matter if we need him, do we really want him?” Neil asked, uncertainly. His eyes darted between Dominic, Walker, and me nervously and then settled, surprisingly, on Greta. “We’re all supposed to be allies, working together as a team against our common enemy, and despite our differences, we have been working together. Except for Walker. If we give him a task as important as capturing our leverage, the very thing ensuring Cassidy and Lysander’s relative safety when infiltrating the coven, I don’t trust him not to deliberately sabotage everything in favor of the personal pleasure of thwarting Lysander and seeking revenge on Cassidy.”
Greta pursed her lips and turned to me. “Give it to me straight, Cassidy. What the hell happened between you two?” She held up her hand. “The short version, please.”
I considered my options with Bex still present, but hell, Dominic was already half choking Walker. Bex would have to get in line. I’d been waiting for the right time and place to confront Greta about Walker’s ammunition, but maybe I’d been procrastinating more than waiting. The time had come, and worse than facing the business end of Greta’s handgun, facing her now on the teetering cusp on our friendship made something hot and trembling close like a vise around my own throat.
I pinned Greta’s gaze with mine squarely. “Walker ambushed me in my own apartment,” I said. “He had weapons I didn’t know existed and used them against me with the intent to cause real and permanent harm. He attacked me.”
Bex growled. “He had what?”
Dr. Chunn leaned forward. “He had weapons specifically engineered for Day Reapers?”
Greta had faced criminals ranging from petty thieves to serial killers in her line of work, and she could face both with whatever mask she chose—good cop, bad cop, flirt, hard ass—whatever got the job done and done right. But Greta’s mask couldn’t hide her true feelings from me, not anymore. No matter her decade-developed dead-eyed stare or bored-washed expression, I could smell and hear and taste her nonverbal reaction just as vividly as, if not better than, Dr. Chunn’s inquisitive excitement.
And no matter that Greta tried to act as if she was in complete control of her team, that Walker’s possession of weapons capable of killing a Day Reaper wasn’t a complete and utter shock, a whirring siren blasted from her body, perfuming the air with burned rubber and exposing the truth.
Greta and Dr. Chunn hadn’t provided Walker with ammunition to kill me. They’d been left to founder in the dark as much as me and everyone else.
Relief swept through me, so sudden and swift it nearly hurt. I cleared my throat, but when I spoke, my voice trembled. “Don’t sound too excited, Doc.”
“Sorry. It’s nothing personal. I’ve developed some ammunition that might pierce the Damned’s hide and not be expelled, but we’re down to the wire. If we have another resource to tap for effective weapons, we need to seize it.”
Bex rolled her eye. The sequins stitched on the patch over the other winked under the overhead lights. “Maybe if you focused less on pointless theories about oxygen deficiency, we wouldn’t have to borrow weapons from a man who continues to field-test his ammunition on our faces.”
Rowens’s patient, impassive expression never faltered, but a tsunami of bees swarmed stinger-first into my face from the blast of his anger, and his anger wasn’t even directed at me. “Dial it back, Bex,” Rowens warned softly.
Dr. Chunn placed a quieting hand on Rowens’s shoulder—his residual limb, really—and he relaxed back in his chair.
“My ‘pointless theories’ regarding the diet of re-transformed night bloods such as Nathan have been delayed due to lack of resources, limited time, and order of priority,” Dr. Chunn clarified pointedly, “but my top priority, developing ammunition against the Damned using a synthetic replica of your blood, has been successful. And you’re welcome for not field-testing them on your face,” she added.
“Field-testing Damned ammunition on me would be pointless; I’m a Day Reaper.” Bex did grin then, baring fangs. “A pointless test to prove your pointless theories,” Bex teased.
Dr. Chunn grinned back, and even without the fangs, through her glasses, and past her flawlessly groomed person, her grin was savage. “Not completely pointless.”
“We digress,” Greta interrupted. “Dr. Chunn is apparently not the only one of us who has successfully developed new ammunition, but she is the only one sharing her developments with the team.”
She turned back to face me, and I sucked in my breath sharply at the feral protectiveness in her gaze. Greta wasn’t fooled. She could see through my mask with her human eyes nearly as well as I could sense the world in vampire Technicolor. She’d known me too long and too well, and she was too good at her job to see otherwise. For once, her perceptiveness worked in my favor because she could see plain as day, no matter my fangs and pointed ears and five-inch talons, that I was telling the truth.
Which meant that Walker had been holding out on all of us.
“Do you think Walker would jeopardize our entire mission just to get back at you?” she asked me point-blank.
“I can’t speak for him,” I said, trying to be fair, “but if you’re asking me if I trust him at my back with a weapon that can potentially kill me—a weapon he’s already used against me—the answer is no.”
“His actions speak for him,” Bex said, her voice once again nonchalant as she gazed at her painted, pointed talons. “During our last mission to save and transform Nathan, he betrayed us, killed Rene, shot Dominic, and left us all for dead.” She shrugged. “He’ll betray us again if given the chance, I have no doubt.”
“He has attacked many of us several times,” Rafe agreed. “He can’t be trusted.”
“Maybe he attacked the lot of you with good reason,” Rowens said, still in his calm, considering voice.
“He could have proven himself a team player by sharing his knowledge of Day Reaper ammunition, but he didn’t,” Dr. Chunn said softly.
“Of course not,” Dominic growled. “Not when he could keep the ammunition to himself to use against Cassidy.”
Rowens nodded, but when he spoke, he said, “It could have been self-defense. Let the man speak for himself.”
“I don’t hear him defending himself now,” Neil muttered.
All eyes, like choreographed theater lighting, focused on Walker.
Walker gurgled an unintelligible response around Dominic’s grip. I bit my lip, wondering how long his chokehold hadn’t been for show.
Rowens leveled his eyes on Dominic in reproach. “Lysander, if you please?”
The rattling hum of Dominic’s reluctance growled through the room. He loosened his grip, but only enough to allow Walker the ability to speak again.
Walker cleared his throat. “It’s always self-defense against a vampire.”
His words, though roughened by Dominic’s bruising grip, were unmistakably wary, and I had the sudden, strange impression from the dual sound of his words and the creaking floorboard whine of his emotions, that he was saying the words by rote. He didn’t actually believe them anymore, but for appearance’s sake and pride, he would still say them.
For appearance’s sake and pride, would he still stake me in the bac
k if given the chance?
Dominic’s rattling hum escalated to an engine’s roar.
Rowens pursed his lips. “Maybe we should just stick to the facts.”
“I told you the facts,” I said. “I walked into my apartment, and Walker ambushed me. The ammunition he used, like all of Walker’s weapons, was very effective,” I said ruefully. “I have no doubt his weapons would come in handy on this mission if used for us instead of against us.”
Bex snorted. “I don’t doubt the weapon. I doubt the man.”
Rowens settled his eyes back on Walker, colder than before. “Is this true?”
Walker’s jaw tightened. “You’ve only known about vampires and night bloods for what, three weeks now, if even? I was raised in this world. I know better than anyone that if you wait to defend yourself, it’s too late. They’re faster, stronger, and more lethal than any creature alive, and the only way for people like you and me to stay alive is to build weapons that are faster, stronger, and more lethal than they are. And that means using those weapons when necessary, not hesitating so the vampire can entrance you, take your weapon, and kill you with it. I’ve seen it happen.” Walker’s eyes flicked to meet Dominic’s. “I’ve lived it, and I learn from my mistakes.”
“But you didn’t kill me,” I said, not sure why I was defending him except that I could still hear that floorboard creaking between his every word, and for the life of me, I couldn’t let it go, not until I’d unearthed the truth. “You attacked me, and when I was vulnerable and at your mercy, you could have killed me. But you didn’t.”
Walker was silent for a long moment. When he finally met my eyes, I lost my breath at the uncertainty and pain in his expression. “That wouldn’t have been self-defense, and I’m not a murderer,” he said, and then more quietly, he whispered, “For once, I chose not to be a murderer.”
But no one else heard his second sentence, no matter their superhuman hearing, because everyone was too busy verbally eviscerating him for his first.
“Was it self-defense when you hid in the woods and killed Rene?” Bex interjected.
“Was it self-defense when you shot me and left Cassidy for dead?” Dominic asked. “We were fighting to save her brother, for God’s sake, and because of you, Jillian escaped.”
“Was it self-defense when you broke into my apartment and attacked me in my living room?” Meredith asked.
Her words choked off everyone else’s grievances. Silence filled the room as rolling thunder, buzzing bees, squawking birds, and the crack and pop of an inferno blasted my mind. I could barely hear myself think through the chaos of everyone else’s thoughts, and for once, that wasn’t hyperbole. I’d never been so drowned in noise during complete silence in my life.
He’s got the nerve to show his face here and make demands from…
…killed our loved ones, now he thinks we’ll welcome him like…
…never thought it would come to this when we came to him for help.
They’ll never believe me.
I groaned as that last thought broke through the others. Walker was right; after everything he’d done and everyone he’d deliberately hurt—physically and emotionally—they would never believe him.
But they would believe me.
“That may not be true, Meredith,” I managed to shout between my clenched teeth. My voice was shockingly loud, and I remembered belatedly that the room had been struck silent. I released my head—unsure exactly when I’d clamped my hands over my ears—and slowly and deliberately folded my fingers neatly on my lap. No one would take me seriously with my hands clamped over my ears like a crazy person, and it’s not as if my hands could block metaphysical sound waves anyway.
“What do you mean?” Meredith asked. “I know what I saw, and I saw him attack me that day. He—”
“You saw a man with golden, curly hair and brown eyes,” I countered. “You may have seen exactly who your attacker wanted you to see.”
“What are you saying?”
The emotional racket battering my mind abated slightly as everyone stilled in anticipation of my next words. Except for Meredith’s emotions; her spitting, sizzling inferno continued to burn.
“We argued about it when he ambushed me. I accused Walker of attacking me like he attacked you,” I said
I could feel the soft contraction of Meredith’s throat as she swallowed. “And what did he say?”
Walker’s eyes flashed.
“He denied it,” I admitted.
Meredith licked her lips. “Do you believe him?”
Everyone’s eyes volleyed back to me.
No matter what I said, they would believe me. Meredith, because of our lifetime of friendship; Greta, because of years of professional and personal trust; Rowens and Dr. Chunn because of my reputation and their experience with me as a straight shooter; Nathan because he’d have my back anytime, anywhere, against anyone; Ronnie, Keagan, Jeremy, Theresa, and Logan, because Walker had abandoned them, and they knew what he was capable of; and Rafe and Neil out of loyalty to the coven. Dominic was the only one that would have the ability and wit to detect the truth from a lie from my lips.
I met Dominic’s eyes and inhaled sharply at the poise I saw there. He was just waiting on my word, unconditionally.
Dominic had once said that I was in the business of finding and spreading truth, and even though I’d denied it at the time to spite him, he was right.
“Cassidy?” Meredith prompted.
I sighed reluctantly. “Unfortunately, Mere, I don’t know who attacked you. I wish to God I did, but I don’t.”
The ice of Meredith’s instant denial shivered down my spine, and I fought to keep my face relaxed, as if the banshee of her aching, raging bitterness wasn’t making my ears bleed. Crimes go unsolved every year. The evidence runs dry over time, witnesses’ memories become uncertain, leads go cold, and no matter the savvy inquiries of a dedicated detective, new crimes are committed—kidnappings, rapes, attempted murders—with witnesses who actually saw what happened, and the mystery that seemed so immediate last month takes a back seat to a higher-priority case. It doesn’t mean the victims of that mystery deserve justice any less than the new crime’s victims, but sometimes justice just slips away, along with the murderer and the truth.
Unsolved crimes are the hardest for victims to overcome because the first step in healing is acknowledging that they will never see justice.
Meredith cleared her throat. “But you said that you thought it was Walker,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You accused him.”
“When you described your attacker, yes, I suspected Walker, but I believed him when he denied it. He didn’t even know you’d been attacked.” I turned to Walker and met his wide, shocked gaze. “You have committed many sins against me and mine, but I don’t think attacking Meredith is one of them.”
He stared at me, and then, as if we’d come to some unspoken accord, he nodded.
Dominic growled. “It doesn’t matter who he didn’t attack. It matters who he did attack. Three members of this team have been betrayed and injured by his hand when he should have had our back. How many more people does he have to hurt before he’s off this case?” Dominic glared at everyone around our circle of chairs. “Or doesn’t it matter how many? Just who.”
“Of course it matters,” Greta said, “but without proof—”
Bex laughed. “How much proof do you need when he confessed?”
“Self-defense isn’t always as cut-and-dry as we would—”
“We’ve already established that Walker’s version of self-defense is bullshit.”
“We need as many people on our side as we can get, and Walker’s particular skill set is an undeniable advantage,” Rowens interjected.
“I won’t deny that this case would benefit from his expertise,” I agreed. “Assuming he doesn’t keep attacking me.”
/>
“Then where does that leave us?” Ronnie asked, her voice wavering.
Rowens placed his hand on Ronnie’s shoulder and squeezed. I watched the casual offering of comfort from Rowens, a night blood, to Ronnie, a vampire, and glowed.
“We’ve heard Dominic’s, Bex’s, and Cassidy’s reservations regarding Walker’s role in this investigation. Would anyone like to speak on his behalf?” Rowens asked.
Keagan raised his hand hesitantly.
Bex raised her eyebrows.
“Put that hand down,” Logan hissed.
“We’re all in this together,” Rowens encouraged, unflappable as always. “Please, I want to hear what you have to say.”
“We’re in this together?” Logan asked, but it was more accusation than question. “Were you attacked and transformed into the creature you spent a lifetime fighting against? Were you then abandoned by that monster and forced to seek help from the sister of the murderer who killed your son?”
Nathan visibly shriveled into himself. My heart ached for them both.
“Are you stuck between loyalty to a man who took you and your family into his home, fed you, and protected you and your family, who are now in danger from that same man?” Logan continued. “I don’t think you can rightfully say we’re in this together. I know better than anyone that when the going gets tough, the people who supposedly have your back will turn around and shoot you between the shoulder blades if it means saving themselves.”
“We are in this together,” Ronnie whispered, her voice as insistent as it was thready. “I can’t pretend to know the grief of losing your son, Logan, but in every other way, I know exactly how you feel. I was attacked and transformed against my will. I lost my home and my life and, God help me, I think I lost my sanity for a bit. I lost Ian.” She reached out even as Logan recoiled from her and held his big, beefy hand in her tiny one, refusing to let go. “I’d been starving and scared and lost long before being transformed into a vampire, and now that I’m the very creature I spent a lifetime hiding from, I might finally have the chance to live. Assuming we survive the next few days. And for the first time in a very long time, I’m willing to fight for that life.” She squeezed his hands. “Are you, Logan? Because I can’t fight on my own. I can’t do much of anything on my own, but damn it, with all of us together we actually have a chance.”
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