Kelly Meding - As Lie the Dead

Ignoring me, he said to Phin, “I don’t suppose you brought a snapshot?”

Phin shook his head. “I couldn’t manage one without being obvious. I do have other news. He wants to meet you.”

For a moment, I thought Phin just forgot to look at me. But he was gazing right at Wyatt, whose eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “Me?” he asked at the same time I said, “Why?”

“He didn’t tell me why,” Phin said. “I never admitted I knew who or where you were; he just assumed. He said to bring you with me tonight.”

“Just Wyatt?” I asked.

“Believe it or not, Evy, not everyone knows that you’re alive—for the first time, and certainly not the second.”

“Maybe it means Call knows me,” Wyatt said.

He was actually considering it. I planted both hands on my hips. “Or Snow knows you and Call’s playing along, and one of them wants to put a bullet between your eyes. You can’t—”

“No?” He stood up, hands balled into fists. “He’s the big bad, Evy, and he wants to meet me face-to-face. How the hell often does that happen?”

“Like I said, usually before the bad guy kills the unsuspecting hero. Way to walk right into his plan, Wyatt.”

Something dangerous flittered across his face. “If Call had asked for you, you’d be the first one out the door, and my objections be damned.”

“I …”

What? He had me pegged, and we both knew it. Any protests I tossed at him would be deflected, because I had no good reasons for them. Just selfish ones. I didn’t like being the one on the outside looking in.

“If it helps at all,” Phin said, “I didn’t get the impression Call wishes to kill him. He seemed more interested in a conversation.”

“Did he hint at the topic of conversation?” Wyatt asked.

“He didn’t say much of anything at all. Snow did most of the talking. A lot of his same spiel about the races policing themselves and holding accountable those responsible for crimes against them.” His words held no direct accusation; Wyatt still flinched.

“Wyatt,” I said, “why would the Kitsune Elder tell me to ask you about Snow’s beef with the Triads? Why you, specifically? What did you do to the Kitsune Clan?”

My questions hung in the air like blocks of ice, chilling and impenetrable. Wyatt went perfectly still, his face utterly blank. I’d seen so many emotions there in such a short span of time that the emptiness startled me. He didn’t want to reveal something, and everything seemed to point toward that very secret.

“You,” Phin said. Eyes wide, something like shock in his tone as he stared at Wyatt. “You were the one who killed Rain.”

Wyatt paled and seemed to teeter on the edge of vomiting. I reached for him; he pulled away to the other side of the room. When he reached it, he froze. Then he pivoted, face blazing, hands shaking, every ounce of that fury targeted at Phin. “Yes, I killed her. I took the Neutralize order and carried it out myself, so no one else would have to know. Especially my Hunters.”

“Who’s Rain?” I asked.

“Were-fox, Kitsune, whatever you want to call her,” Wyatt replied, his voice as venomous as his expression. “It was four fucking years ago. Why does Snow care so much now?”

“I don’t know,” Phin said. “Snow mentioned the name once during his pitch. He used her death as an example of how the Triads were out of control.”

I looked back and forth between the two seething men. Getting answers out of them was like prying teeth with tweezers. “Why was she killed?” I asked.

Phin’s eyes narrowed, and his head twitched to the side. He looked like a bird of prey about to attack—more of an animal than I’d ever seen. He was deferring the question to Wyatt, who continued glaring at Phin. I wanted to knock their heads together until the answers spilled out and the testosterone was washed away.

“Officially?” Wyatt asked. “She was considered a threat to the preservation of the human race.”

I blanched. “You want to translate that unofficially?”

He fell silent. Phin picked up the slack and said, “She fell in love with a human, Evy. That was her crime. She wanted to love and marry outside of her species.”

The room felt ten degrees colder, the air thicker. Harder to breathe. Shock tore at my stomach, threatening to upset its meager contents. The brass had ordered the death of a woman because of who she chose to love. And Wyatt had requested the kill so he could hide it from the other Hunters. Hide the fact that such an order had ever come down.

If the woman had been a Blood, maybe I could understand. The risk of infection was too great to chance such a pairing, even if I believed vampires capable of loving humans, which I didn’t. Any other species was barely human—goblins, trolls, gargoyles—many of them little more than monsters. Therians had always seemed both more and less threatening—more because they could appear completely human; less because they chose to live among us without upsetting the status quo. How much could one woman’s love of a human truly hurt? What if Aurora had loved a human? Or Danika? Or Phineas? Would they have been ordered murdered for that assumed crime?

A lump clogged my throat, backed by tears I refused to let spill. I turned the full power of my bewilderment on Wyatt, who actually took a step backward. “Why?” was the only word I could manage, and it came out as much a growl as a question.

He worked his mouth open and shut several times before attempting a halfhearted reply. “Fraternization between the race—”

“Don’t give me the fucking textbook answer, Truman. I had it mashed into my brain in Boot Camp, and I saw what happened to Bradford.” The single lesson our instructors drilled over and over was the utter inhumanity of the Dregs. We are human, they are not. Period.

Only not period, not anymore. These last few days with Phin had seriously screwed up my judgment, messing with four years of blind acceptance of everything Boot Camp had taught me. And without blind acceptance, Hunters began questioning orders, which made us harder to control. As long as we saw in perfect black and white, we couldn’t question the shades of gray in between.

“It shouldn’t surprise me, should it,” I asked, “after everything the brass did to me, that they’d go to such lengths to keep their control? They can’t let a were-fox love a human and turn a blind eye, because it goes against everything they teach Hunters about how to view Dregs.”

“There was more to it than that.”

“I just bet.” My hands began to ache, and I realized I’d clenched them so tight I’d cut my palms with my nails. I squeezed them harder, glad for the external pain. “So what kind of fucking hypocrite does that make you? Killing her for loving someone she shouldn’t, then you turn around and fall in love with me when you should have goddamn well known better?”

Every furious accusation seemed to strike like a fist, and he wilted a little with each blow. I hated seeing him like that—weak and defeated and utterly miserable—but part of me was also glad. Glad to see the guilty eaten alive by their conscience. Glad to know he still felt pain over what he’d done.

“If I hadn’t done it,” he said, “someone else would have. I had to keep it quiet, Evy. Why do you think no one uses Rain’s death as a Triad object lesson? No one else knew.”

“Of course not. Can’t have the other Hunters thinking we go around murdering people for the holy hell of it.”

Full-force sarcasm armor: check .

“That’s not fair.” He stood up straighter, shoulders back. His temper was returning, making him fight. “You have no idea why I did what I did. You hadn’t joined the team yet. You don’t know the part of me that I sacrificed that night!”