It was the exact opposite. It was a cold and terrible fury that had taken me over when I stood above that thing, its eyes gone blank and its limbs still. It was the horror, the regret, that I had expected—wanted—to feel… only to never have it come.
I had stood there, searching myself for some sign of revulsion, while Gannon congratulated me on a job well done. It had been a clean kill, in his estimation. Could have fooled me, with the grime and blood splattered all over me, making my skin crawl and my hair stiff. His pride in me hadn’t made the situation any better. In fact, the smug glow I had felt at his praise only made it that much worse.
I had killed a man. Someone’s son, perhaps someone’s brother or father. He wasn’t human and he had killed innocent people—my people—but a life was a life, nonetheless. And I had ended it, without a second thought. I had watched Gannon load the corpse into the trunk for disposal, with the sickening realization that I was calm; controlled. I wasn’t in shock. I felt no regret. I was at peace with what I had done, though every shred of my humanity was screaming that I should be anything but.
Too late I understood Gannon’s warning. I had thought he was warning me that I couldn’t handle the internal struggle that would come with taking a life, but now I knew he had been saying the exact opposite. I couldn’t reconcile my lack of regret with the morals I had been taught to uphold all my life.
How could I ever face them again: my family, my best friend, even my co-workers? Seeing the mute horror in Seana’s eyes had been bad enough. How could I look another human being in the eye again, having seen what I had seen; knowing what I knew; having done what I had done? How could I pretend to be normal, when there was a part of me so dark I would never be able to reveal it to another soul? Was there any going on with the pretense of a normal life?
How could you kill a monster without becoming one?
I had become something so far removed from everything I once knew. I had seen the monster that lurked deep inside me and it had smiled. I pressed my face into my palms.
I was more lost than ever.
Chapter Eighteen
March
“Hello? Earth to Cat. Are you even listening to me?”
I jerked back to attention. That familiar flush of shame heated my cheeks. Shit. I had drifted off again. I kept losing myself somewhere between the feigned interest I had been so carefully cultivating and the bone deep exhaustion I had been fighting for days. Jenni was giving me that pursed-lip duck face of disapproval, meaning I had probably been bleary eyed for quite some time. At least we were sitting on her couch with some pizza and wine, rather than out in some public place where her impending wrath would leave me looking like a bad girlfriend to dozens of strangers.
Man, I sucked so hard at the double agent bullshit.
I heaved a deep sigh that was 100% real and put the half-empty wineglass that had been lolling in my hand back on the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to space out there.” I scrubbed at my face, remembering too late that I had tried to be normal and wear makeup for our get together. I hoped I hadn’t just given myself raccoon eyes. “I’m just so god-damn beat. It was a really long week.”
I caught the eye roll she didn’t quite try to hide. “Seems like you’re always beat these days.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t very well tell her my nights had become busier than my days. Aside from the futile Lynx hunts, I now had the Baddies After Dark routine to fulfill, which kept me roaming the streets with Gannon until the wee hours of the morning two or three nights a week.
I still wasn’t sure how my soul would reconcile the new roll I had taken on—and taken on so damn well, at that—but I had learned to push down those difficult emotions like a champ. It was that or spend the rest of my days locked in my apartment, hiding behind my sofa while eating rocky road straight form the tub with a wooden spoon.
Repression aside, I was burning the candle at both ends. It was getting rough to keep my head up by mid-day without a dozen cups of coffee. This night had been slated as a night to catch up, to reconnect with my humanity like in the old days—only that wasn’t working out so well. I would have preferred to spend my night off zonked out on my own couch, asleep before the ten o’clock news.
I hated myself for feeling that way, so I had made myself keep our dinner date, feeling like I should have wanted to spend time with Jenni more. Granted, the catching up had been pretty lame on my side. What could I tell her? Mind-numbingly boring stories about the office and watered down versions of my training routine wrapped in the guise of a gym membership that had sucked up my free time? That didn’t exactly fly.
Instead I had encouraged her to tell me about all the mundane antics I had been missing out on: her job woes, her exciting new skin care routine, anything. I wanted to care, tried to care. I just… Couldn’t. I couldn’t get myself into that mindset of girlie gossip about boys and shoes and pipe dreams we probably should have given up in our twenties. It all seemed so damn inconsequential now, when my every waking moment had become so saturated with death and danger. What did stories of Anthony’s impending homecoming mean to me now, when I saw monsters lurking around every corner? I spent my days worried that some terrible nightmare creature would catch her, or my sister, or the nice old lady who lived down the block from me, on a lone street corner and suck their brains out through their eye sockets. How could I relate to her musings on whether or not she should get a new couch?
I couldn’t even pretend to be normal anymore. I wanted to. I really, really did. I wanted to care, I wanted to connect—I wanted to feel like Caitlin again; the goofy, gawky fuck-up who got excited about sales at Saks and thought missing the newest episode of Game of Thrones was the end of the world. God, how I wanted to be her again.
Maybe that was why I had dragged myself off my couch for this sad little shindig. It was a last ditch effort at proving to myself that the old, normal part of me was still in there somewhere. Not because I wanted to see Jenni. Not even because I wanted to fix our failing friendship, but because I needed her to find that part of me I knew I was losing touch with.
Wow, did that ever make me the worst kind of bitch. If I was too far gone to even maintain a series of nods and mumbles of encouragement as she told me about all the stuff I had been missing in her life, what hope was there for…
“Cat, seriously. What the hell?”
I blinked, realizing that I had done it again. I rubbed my face with my hands, makeup be damned. Why was I finding it so hard to keep it together? “I’m sorry! I really just… I can’t help it. My mind just keeps wandering off and thinking about…stuff.”
“Care to elaborate?” She lounged on the opposite corner of the couch, her position casual though her expression read anything but. I could see the tension in the way she held herself. A twitch of the thumb told me she was fighting down anger, resisting the urge to make a fist. I couldn’t help but read every nuance of her body language, calculating; planning.
My stomach felt tight, the pizza within doing a flip flop. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to be normal old Cat. I wasn’t. Not anymore. The realization made me nauseous. I looked away, focusing on the fuzzy blue afghan thrown over the back of the sofa. I picked at a loose thread, noticing for the first time how ragged my nails were. They weren’t painted and my cuticles looked like hell. When was the last time I had gotten a manicure?
“Are you just going to ignore me?” she asked, words sharpening.
“I’m not ignoring you. I just don’t know what to say.”
Her laugh wasn’t the least bit friendly. “You say that a lot these days. You know, this is the first time we’ve hung out in, what, two months? Three? We used to spend, like, every single weekend together until you started disappearing all the time. I don’t know why you suddenly pushed me away but I tried to be cool with it. I tried to give you your space until you worked through whatever the hell has been going on with you. Tonight was your idea but the whole time you’ve
been acting like this is some big sacrifice for you, to be hanging out with me. So what gives?”
What the hell could I say to that?
“Well, Jenni, there’s been a lot going on that I haven’t been telling you. On my birthday I was attacked by a troll because—surprise!—apparently I’m not 100% human. And because my great-great-grandma got frisky with a faun or something, I can see faeries. These faeries aren’t the cute, dress making Sleeping Beauty type either. Some of them are evil and nasty and just downright gross. They’ve been feeding off us in secret for years. Since their nut-job king went off his rocker and stopped paying attention to what they do over here on Earth, they’ve even been killing people.
“That’s why the good faeries need me. I’ve got to help them track down this Lynx person who no one but me can see, so they can get home and stop that wacko from ruining both our worlds. So I had to learn to fight like Xena: The Warrior Princess and start killing them off too. You know; for the safety of mankind. Don’t worry though, I’m actually pretty good at it. Freaky good, actually. The buff-and-handsome faery man I’ve been hunting with says I have more natural skill than he’s seen in a hundred years. How cool is that?”
Yeah, that sooooo wasn’t going to happen. The truth was so far from believable that I couldn’t spill the beans now, even if I wanted to. The skulking around museums and book stores and freaking coffee houses in search of a phantom stranger was bad enough. How would I ever look her in the eye again, once she knew I was a killer? Human, fae, hamster; it didn’t matter. I had taken lives, plain and simple. How would she ever trust me, once all that I had hidden from her over the past few months came to light?
I felt my eyes start to water. I looked away, gaze roaming the room to look at anything but the hurt, accusatory stare that was being leveled my way. Something inside me was trying to curl up and die. It hurt to take a breath. What a fool I was, for ever having thought that my life would be normal again, when all this passed. Had I really ever believed I could go back to being boring “sits at home drinking wine and watching Netflix on a Saturday night Caitlin” again?
Weird was my normal life now.
It was who I was now.
A deep, shuddering breath finally filled my lungs. I stared up at the ceiling, tracing the uneven stucco lines as I blinked hard to stop myself from crying. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry Jen, but… I can’t.”
“You can’t,” she repeated, deadpan. “You can’t what? I mean; Christ! We haven’t kept secrets from one another since we were kids! I just don’t understand what is going on with you. What is with all this running off and keeping secrets like you’re afraid to let anyone know where you are anymore? Were you recruited by the goddamn CIA or something?”
My lips twitched, trying to smile. I chuckled, but it sounded hollow. “Yeah, I wish. At least then I’d be making some bank.”
“I’m worried about you.”
I let out a low, long breath and tried to stop that horrible shaking feeling that was spreading from the inside out, all through me. There wasn’t even a watered down version I could conjure up now. “I know you are and I’m sorry. I hate that I’m worrying you. It’s not that I want to keep secrets from you, I swear. It’s just that things in my life have gotten really… Complicated.”
Her laugh was bitter. “When haven’t they been?”
Once upon a time, that would have been the opening for some banter. I would have tossed out a playful insult, maybe, or came up with something caustically witty to diffuse all the tension around us. Sadly, I was as low on wit as I was on lies. “These last few months have given that ‘complicated’ a run for its money. I swear, Jen, if I could tell you more I would.”
The look that earned me was one I would have saved for someone who had kicked my puppy. I hated myself for hurting her. She looked like she was going to chew through her lip, trying to keep all that anger in. She let me hang for a minute before asking, quietly, “Why can’t you?”
I felt trapped. This storm had taken me by surprise, though I should have seen it coming, and now I was caught in the downpour without an umbrella. I rubbed my hands over my knees, watching their clamminess dampen the denim. I wanted to bolt, to grab my things and run out the door, but I just couldn’t. My bestie deserved better than that, even if my heart was telling me we wouldn’t be besties for much longer. I leveled her with as apologetic of a look as I could muster. “Because you wouldn’t understand, even if I tried.”
Wrong answer.
She surged to her feet, a throw pillow sent tumbling to the floor. “Really? I wouldn’t understand? We’ve told each other everything, from the first day of pre-school. I understood when we were nine and you cut your own hair with those stupid plastic scissors and then freaked out, making me take the blame so your mom wouldn’t yell at you. I understood when you kissed Bobby Green and got mono, knowing full well I liked him. I even understood when you asked me not to tell anyone you were cutting yourself all through junior year of high school, even though it scared me to death every single day, thinking I was going to lose you. I have understood every stupid, fucked up thing you have ever done in your life. So, tell me, Cat. Tell me just what, exactly, is it that I wouldn’t understand now?”
I could feel the emotions coming off her: the anger, hurt, confusion. They whirled around me like a gale-force wind, yet I felt strangely untouched. It was like I was watching everything from a distance; like life had become a TV show and I couldn’t quite understand what the characters were making such a big fuss over. Maybe a part of me had been waiting for this, building up some sort of shield around my heart. Maybe part of me was relieved.
She stood there, trembling; staring at me with tears in her eyes. It was seeing them there that made me realize I was crying too. I probably had been for some time. My hands were gripping my knees so hard my knuckles were white. A sob threatened to burst from my chest. The realization slammed into me. This was it; this was her last, desperate grab to hold on to me. She wanted so badly for me to let her in, but I couldn’t. There was just no way. All this time I had felt like Jenni had been growing apart from me but, really, I had been the one slipping away.
“Me,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand me.”
In that moment, I knew nothing would ever be the same between us. Time might heal some wounds. Maybe one day we would be able to laugh again, to catch up over a random cup of coffee—but never again would I feel that sister-like bond we had shared for so many years. I had pushed her away until that bond had broken. My heart felt like I had dropped it into a pile of jagged glass, but this was what was right. This way was better for her. She would be safer without me.
I stood slowly, feeling like I would fall to pieces if I moved too quick. I felt robotic as I leaned forward and took my purse from the floor and pulled my coat off of the arm of the couch. Jenni was sobbing. I think she was saying something too, but I couldn’t hear it over the buzzing in my ears. She deserved a better goodbye but, well, maybe it was par for the course that I didn’t have one to give her, seeing how shitty of a friend I had become. I felt like I was strangling as I said, “Goodbye.”
I couldn’t tell if her voice shook more from anger or sadness. She waved her hands in the air, turning to watch me as I headed for the door. “That’s it? You’re just going to say that and leave? Cat, come on; what—”
I let the door close behind me, cutting off her words. I fell back against it, my whole body wracked by a sob so strong it wanted to pull me to the floor. I struggled to catch my breath, to force the strength back into my legs. I wanted to let the pain cripple me, but I couldn’t.
I still had a job to do.
~*~
“Skinny guy with the stupid hat and hipster glasses two tables over?”
Mairi’s eyes skittered to the left over the top of her second cappuccino. She was a pro at the not-looking glance. “Check. And I happen to think that hat is adorable, by the way.”
“Damn.” I pushed my mostly
empty cup away from me. “I thought he kinda looked like the picture. If I squinted. Maybe.” I shot her a wary look. “And if you think mustard yellow plaid is cute, we need to get your eyes checked.”
She scrunched up her nose—which was sporting a new stud in the left nostril—and stuck out her tongue, making me chuckle. That was probably her intent, of course. She could always be counted on to perform as my one-woman cheering squad, warming my stone-cold heart. Only an hour ago I had pushed my oldest friend away for good, yet it already seemed like it had happened a lifetime ago. I was dry-eyed and hyper-focused, scanning the crowd around me with a strangely frenetic energy.
Of course, that could have been thanks to the two caramel macchiatos I had sucked down in that time frame but hey; I was going to take my focus any way I could get it.
“I’d really hoped he’d be here,” I said, ashamed of how dumb the words sounded as soon as they left my mouth.
“Me too.” She sighed deep enough to make me do a double-take. On one hand, it was nice to know she shared in my frustration, but it also bothered me to see my plucky little buddy downtrodden. When I said as much, I earned myself a wry twist of the lips and a shrug. “I don’t think this is any more fun than you do. I like hanging out with you, but—all the same—I’d much rather be doing it at a spa or something.”
Iron (The Warding Book 1) Page 20
