“Jesus, Penny, where is this coming from?”
“You’ve been avoiding the case, and maybe it’s because you know that we can’t find a murderer if you’re the murderer, and I know you wouldn’t pin a crime on an innocent person—”
“That’s right, I wouldn’t,” he said. “You seriously think that I’d be out here interviewing suspects all because I want to shield you from the truth about Alastair?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. I sighed. He wasn’t denying it, that was the thing. He wasn’t saying that he hadn’t killed Alastair. “If you did do it, I wouldn’t be angry, you know that, right? I would be… I don’t know, grateful, I guess. Alastair was going crazy. He killed all those police officers. He was practically a mass murderer.”
Lachlan’s face twitched. “I’m sorry I didn’t kill him for you, Penny,” he said, his voice strained. “I wanted to kill him. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have left you and hunted him down, but instead, I stayed with you, because I thought you needed me.”
Mass murderer… Somebody had been talking about mass murderers lately. Who was it? I furrowed my brow at Lachlan. “That’s the thing, though, with the new timeline, you weren’t around. You told me we needed space.”
“I never said space,” he said. “I just… Damn it, Penny, I didn’t kill him.”
Darla Tell! That was who had said… “Hey, do you remember Darla saying something about a prisoner who escaped?” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Why are you bringing that up? Are you going to absolve me for not killing Alastair? You know, maybe you’re spinning this theory because you want someone who’s better at protecting you—”
“I don’t need protecting.” I bit down on my lip. “I’m sorry I said anything. It all came out wrong. I didn’t mean to make you think I want you any different than you are.”
He was quiet.
“Because I don’t,” I said. “I… You’re perfect. I love you, Lachlan.”
Lachlan gripped the steering wheel. “You know that I love you, too.”
“Yes,” I said, and I reached over and rubbed his leg. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he muttered. “You’re making it sound like I’m fragile or something.”
“You’re not fragile,” I said. “About the prisoner, though.”
“Why are you going on about the prisoner? I guess he was a dragon who got the bad end of a slayer’s arrow or something. Why are you bringing—” He broke off. “You don’t think…?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“So nice to hear from you, Penny,” said Darla Tell. “I really wasn’t expecting a call from you. Such a treat!”
I grimaced at the phone. “Oh, of course, Darla.”
“And to what do I owe this pleasure? Are you going to take me up on the offer to go baby-clothes shopping?”
“Actually, I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “It might be a sort of stupid thing to ask, but I feel like I need to do it, because the thought that it might be a coincidence is just too much.”
“Certainly. Ask away. If I can help, I will.”
“Uh… Alastair Cooper,” I said. “Have you heard the name?”
“Why, yes, actually, that’s the name of the prisoner who escaped from the Order.”
I felt as if the air had been knocked out of my lungs in one enormous whoosh. I gasped, trying to draw in breath.
“How do you know his name?” she asked.
“That’s the name of my ex-husband,” I said.
“What?” said Darla. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t think that we had your ex-husband locked up all this time and neither of us knew about it.”
I gripped the phone tighter. “You didn’t know?”
“How could I possibly have known?”
“You did research into me,” I said. “You knew all about the vampires I went up against and about who I was. You must have known about Alastair.”
“I really didn’t know about him, though,” said Darla. “If I had known, I would have told you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You do believe me, don’t you, Penny? We are new friends, I know, but we are friends. I would never keep something like this from a friend.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Darla, I have to go.”
“Wait, Penny, we can talk about this,” she said. “I’m here for you—”
“Bye, Darla.” I hung up the phone.
Lachlan, who’d been next to me during the entire exchange, raised his eyebrows. “So, it was him?”
I nodded slowly. “Apparently, yes.”
He shook his head. “That’s just… weird, Penny.”
“I know that,” I said. “But she claims she didn’t know.”
“So, she just happens to call you up right after Alastair escapes?” said Lachlan.
“This is enough, right?” I said. “Alastair was locked up in the Order. We didn’t kill him. We couldn’t have.”
“It’s not enough,” he said. “Because they’ll simply argue we killed him when he got out.”
“But we didn’t even know where he was,” I said. “And now it’s all even more confusing. How did he die? If it wasn’t the slayers, then how? All of our other suspects wouldn’t have even know he escaped from jail, would they?”
Lachlan scratched the back of his neck. “We need a time of death. An official time of death, like from the coroner’s office.”
“Don’t you have any friends there, people who would tell you what you need to know?”
“Yeah, I’m not exactly friendly,” said Lachlan.
I rubbed my temples.
“But there’s maybe one guy I could talk to,” said Lachlan. “I’ll go and do that, okay? You hang tight here. Try not to freak out too much. I’ll be back soon.”
* * *
The email from the paternity test place popped up in my inbox that evening. Lachlan had been gone all day, probably trying to sweet talk his coroner friend or something. Maybe he’d just had bad luck and didn’t want to talk to me until he made some headway.
I should wait for him to open the email, shouldn’t I?
It wouldn’t be fair for me to know earlier than him, especially when it was so important to his life. It would change everything for him. And no matter what this email said, I was still going to be pregnant, so it hardly mattered.
Still, I wanted to know.
My fingers hovered over the screen of my phone, ready to click on the email and let the results fill my screen.
Don’t do it yet, I told myself. Wait for Lachlan.
Should I call him?
Hell, maybe what I should do is read the email and then call him with the news. That was an intelligent thing to do, right? If I only knew the news for a couple minutes before I told him, it wasn’t as if I knew it a lot earlier than him, anyway, so—
Someone was banging on the door to my balcony.
A spike of fear went through me.
I kept that door locked. I always kept that door locked.
But Alastair had gotten the key anyway.
Alastair’s dead, I told myself.
I set down my phone and slowly got off the couch. I could see everything in my living room, from the cream carpet that had one too many faint stains to the easy chair—a purple blanket haphazardly falling off it onto the floor—and the entrance to my kitchen. I could see my stove, my refrigerator, my sink, which had two bowls in it from the ice cream I’d eaten earlier. One bowl hadn’t been enough.
I turned to face the hallway, my heart in my throat.
“Hello?” I called in a wavery voice.
The banging again. “Ms. Caspian?”
Who would call me that? Darla? No, she had elevated herself to a first name basis with me now. And besides, it sounded like a male voice.
I forced myself to take several calming breaths.
The hallway loomed in front of me, seemingly endless as it stretched out.
You breathe fire, I reminded myself.
I squared my shoulders. I took a deliberate step toward the door. And then another. And another.
Until I was walking briskly toward the doorway, as if I wasn’t even concerned with the thought of who might be on the other side.
I summoned my magic in a big ball in my belly, feeling it spark and flame and smoke within me.
I threw open the door.
It was Brian. Connor’s friend, Brian. He was covered in blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Ms. Caspian?” he said again, his voice trembling. “I didn’t know where else to go, and the sun isn’t down yet, so I couldn’t go to Connor, and I just—”
“Come in, come in,” I said, pulling him inside. I began examining him immediately, looking for wounds. “What happened? Where are you hurt?”
“I…” He let out a strangled sob.
“We need to call an ambulance. There’s so much blood. How are you even standing?” I said to him. I reached out to bolster him, give him something to lean on.
“I’m fine,” said Brian.
“You’re not fine,” I said. “You’re most likely in shock. Here, let’s get you into my bedroom. You shouldn’t move too much. We’ll call an ambulance, and then—”
“It’s not my blood,” said Brian, and he was sobbing again.
“It’s not your…” I took a step back.
Brian put both of his hands over his mouth. He let out a muffled keening noise.
“Brian?” I whispered. “What are you saying?”
Brian dragged his hands over his face, his fingers digging into his own skin. “He wouldn’t stop. He just wouldn’t stop. And I never fought back before, but for some reason, this time…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God. I killed him, Ms. Caspian. He’s dead.”
* * *
Connor was pacing. He was just newly woken for the night, but upon hearing what was going on with Brian, he’d been immediately alert. “So, what are we going to do?”
I had found some clean clothes for Brian. He had showered and had fallen asleep on my couch, as if all of it had simply been too much for him.
I peered down at his sleeping form. “If it’s true that Darrell is really dead, then I don’t think there’s any reason that Brian should suffer any longer because of that man.”
“So, you don’t think we should tell him to turn himself in?” said Connor.
“Do you?” I said.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I really thought you were going to say that. Isn’t that the adult thing to do? The right thing to do?”’
“The right thing to do in a situation like this is hard to say,” I said.
“But if it was self-defense,” said Connor, “then he wouldn’t get in trouble, would he?”
“Even if he got off, he’d have to go through a trial, the expense and stress of all of that, and it would take ages to be over with. And that’s not even a guarantee. No, it’s better if we just make this go away.”
Connor stopped pacing. “How do we do that?”
I took a breath. “Well, we need to get rid of the body, for one thing. No body, no crime.”
* * *
I pulled my car to a stop. We were out in the middle of nowhere, up in Delaware somewhere in the woods. I had driven up here, taking turns at random, just trying to get myself purposefully lost. I didn’t want to know where I was. To get home, I’d fire up the GPS, of course, but for now, I was just somewhere in the dark.
Darrell was in the trunk of the car. Connor and I had found him, wrapped him up in sheets and blankets and hauled him out to the trunk of my car. Connor’s super strength came in pretty handy when carrying around a body, I had to admit, not that I thought I’d ever be using it for that purpose.
“Here?” said Connor.
“Here’s as good as any place,” I said.
Connor nodded. He got out of the car.
I reached down and hit the button that opened the trunk. I got out of the car too.
Connor tugged out the bundle of sheets and blankets. “Where do you want it?”
I considered and then pointed to a spot about ten feet away from the car. That should be far enough away.
Connor grunted a little, but he easily made it over to the spot. Then he dropped the bundle on the ground.
It rolled, and one of the blankets came free, exposing a little bit of skin and hair. Darrell’s forehead.
“Cover it up,” I said hoarsely. I didn’t want to see his face. I didn’t want it to be a person under there. Even if he was a horrible person, there was something about this—
I shook myself. I could handle this. I was strong.
Connor kicked the blanket back into place.
We exchanged a glance.
And then I took a deep breath and breathed out a ball of fire.
It hit the bundle of blankets and caught. The blankets and sheets started to burn.
I reached for Connor’s hand. “Grab your talisman and concentrate,” I said to him. “We need the fire very hot if we want to burn up everything.”
Only a magical fire would eradicate every trace of Darrell.
Connor squeezed my hand.
We stared at the fire, poured our joint magic into it.
It flared bright purple, flames soaring for the sky in an unworldly spray of sparks.
The smell of burning hair caught my nose. I gagged.
“You okay?” said Connor.
“It’s just… morning sickness,” I said. “I have a mint in my pocket.” I scrabbled for it. Mints sometimes calmed my stomach. I certainly didn’t have anything else to use. I tried the Sea-bands that Lachlan recommended and they hadn’t worked.
I put the mint in my mouth and focused on the fire with as much ferocity as I could muster. Burn, baby, burn, I thought fiercely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Afterward, Connor and I drove home in silence.
I stared out into the darkness, and I thought about the woman I’d become. I was strong now. I could face anything.
I wasn’t sure if what we’d done to Darrell was the right thing or not. Maybe even someone like him deserved a proper burial. Surely, he had a mother who would want to weep over his casket.
But in some way, I supposed that hiding Darrell’s body was a stand-in for Alastair. For what I could have done if I had been the one to kill him.
Maybe I felt robbed.
Not of revenge, not exactly. But of one last stand against him. Of beating him once and for all, proving to myself that he had no power over me and that I was stronger than him.
Something about his just being dead made things feel incomplete.
Brian had done what I couldn’t. He had stood up to his abuser and ended the abuse forever. Maybe I felt I needed to do this for him because of that. Maybe it completed things.
When we got home, I pulled into a parking space and turned off the car, but neither Connor nor I got out.
I turned to look at him. “I don’t think we need to bother Brian with this.”
“What?” said Connor.
“Let’s just tell him that Darrell wasn’t there when we got there,” I said.
“But then he’ll think that Darrell wasn’t really dead, and that his abuser could be coming back for him,” said Connor. “He’ll be afraid.”
Connor was right. Besides, if we lied to Brian, then we were stealing from him the knowledge that he’d ended the man who hurt him. I sighed. “I was thinking about how it would be if the police came around asking questions. How it would be better if Brian really knew nothing. But I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.”
“We did enough to protect him,” said Connor.
I nodded.
Connor studied his knuckles. “Thanks for doing it. For helping with everything. But… I have to ask, Penny, why? This isn’t your fight. You barely even know Brian. And burning a body, it’s not… it’s…”
Disgusting. It was disg
usting, dirty work. Both Connor and I were sweaty and tired. And I felt a nasty twinge in my stomach that had nothing to do with being pregnant and everything to do with my conscience twitching in confusion.
I turned to look at Connor. I didn’t know if I could properly explain about Alastair and coming full circle and everything else. So, I just said, in a quiet voice, “It needed to be done. Guys like Darrell shouldn’t get to win.”
Connor nodded slowly. “No,” he said. “They shouldn’t.”
* * *
Lachlan was in the lobby of the hotel.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked me over. “Where have you been?”
I pushed sweaty hair away from my forehead. “At the gym.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Come upstairs with me,” I said.
So, we all trooped upstairs—me, Lachlan, and Connor. When we got there, Brian was awake and watching TV.
He switched it off when he saw us, nervously getting to his feet. He fiddled with the remote control. “Where did you guys go?”
I took a deep breath, and I addressed both Lachlan and Brian. “We went to your apartment, Brian. We were looking for Darrell. We got rid of him, so that no one else who’s looking for him will ever find him.”
Brian licked his lips. “You got rid of the… body?”
“Wait a second,” said Lachlan. “What are you telling me here?”
“Brian defended himself against his abusive boyfriend and got the upper hand,” I said. “He accidentally went too far.”
Lachlan rubbed his forehead. “You, um, you covered up a murder?”
“We made things better for Brian,” I said. I gave Lachlan a look. “What if it had been Alastair and me, Lachlan?”
“Yeah, what it if it had?” said Lachlan. “You would have just taken care of it yourself, I guess. You didn’t even think to call me about this? What did you do with the body?”
“We burned it,” I said. “It’s gone. We used magic to burn hot enough to turn the bones to ash.”
“Jesus,” said Lachlan.
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