by Laken Cane
“She overdosed,” Rune said.
Bill inclined his head. “I guess she did.” He gestured at the tiny cameras high on the wall. “We’ll review the footage.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“You leave it to me.” His stare softened as he gazed at the sleeping child, and he gently brushed a strand of black hair off her pink cheek.
“You love her,” Rune realized. “I can trust you with her if you love her.”
“Yes.” He met her gaze, and he didn’t look away. “I love you, as well, Rune. You have to know I think of you as my own daughter.”
“I know.” And she did. Bill Rice had always been there for her. He would not hurt her child. “Granddad.” She smiled. “All right. She’s in your hands. Make my kid into a proper little monster.”
“She’s already a proper little monster. I’m going to make her into a warrior.”
Chapter Eight
“Something’s not right,” Jack murmured.
“Yeah,” Strad agreed. “The gargoyles are keeping secrets.”
“Gosh,” Roma said. “Imagine that.”
Rune had left Kader after Bill had called in a special team to take care of her. Two guards, a nanny, a new nurse, and enough blood in the fridge to see her through her next few meals.
The blood was human. The baby minders were not.
They simply couldn’t take a chance the kid would kill them.
Rune pushed back her chair, then stood. “Let’s go search for—”
“Rune.”
Her legs gave out at Ellie’s voice and she sank back into her chair, going numb for a few seconds before her unguarded heart opened and a flood of emotion crashed through.
She didn’t want to look at him. Couldn’t look at him.
But then he was standing right in front of her chair and she had no choice.
“Rune,” he whispered. “It’s me. It’s your Ellie.”
Nikolai lingered in the doorway. Ellie’s maker, Ellie’s protector, teacher, father, murderer, but Rune ignored him.
Someday, they’d have a talk, but right then, Ellis needed him.
Levi stood across the table, his fist against his lips, his eyes brimming with pain. But Ellis didn’t go to him. Not then.
First, he had to make sure of Rune.
He had to know if she’d forgive him. If she’d still love him. If she’d accept him.
And finally, she looked at him.
He was different, of course he was different. Physically, he was changed, and mentally, he was changed. A man didn’t go through what he’d gone through, didn’t drown in his emotions and fear and doubt, didn’t sacrifice himself, didn’t become immortal without changing.
He’d been taken apart and put back together again.
That would do something to a person. Something big.
His face, his poor, dear face, was colorless and thin, his lips bloodless, and his hands twitched and darted just as his eyes did, unable to remain still.
“It’s your Ellie,” he said, his smile a fearful grimace that fooled no one.
She couldn’t speak, could only stare and try to force herself not to break down, not to cry, not to run.
Ellis was a fucking vampire.
The horrified silence in the room was too much for him.
Desperation and fear clawed at his face, and his fear that he’d be rejected, not just by her but by the entire crew, overtook him.
Because as much as he wanted not to be, he knew he was changed. He knew he was not the human who’d gone into the ground.
He was terrified that instead of gaining them forever, he’d lost them for just as long.
He blinked in and out of himself like a faulty hologram, and began tripping over his words, his eyes wide, his fragmented, incomplete mind trying to stabilize. Trying to return to normal.
But that was going to take a fucking minute.
Nikolai shouldn’t have brought him back so quickly, but Rune knew Ellis. He’d have insisted. He’d have nagged and promised and begged and cried, and not even the master could stand firm against a determined Ellie.
He held up his hands and backed away, his wide, nearly black eyes jerking from person to person. He sang a few bars of a familiar song, his voice broken and tuneless, then began rapidly repeating things he’d said to them, or they’d said to him.
“WhatwouldIdowithoutyouEllie?”
“Amonsteramonsteramonster…”
In the end he just screamed, “I’m your Ellie!” until both Nikolai and Levi leaped toward him.
But Rune reached him first.
She yanked him into her arms and held his shaking body, growling at Nikolai like a feral dog when he got too close, and finally, she took care of her Ellis.
He’d taken care of her since the day they’d met.
It was her turn.
“Baby,” she murmured. “I’m here.”
She held him as tightly as she dared and whispered into his ear until her voice and arms and warmth began to sink into the dark wasteland of his mind.
“You’re always going to be my Ellie. Always. Forever.”
And that was absolutely the truth.
Levi slipped in, finally, and pressed against Ellis’s back, sliding his arms around his waist, giving him his love.
“He made the decision,” Nikolai told her, “because he needed to control his turn. He was terrified of Kader’s bite. Kader absolutely could not be his maker, and he knew that. But one slip, and she would have become his master. That would have warped something in both of them.”
“He came to you with those worries,” Rune realized. “Instead of me.”
He nodded. “And he asked me to give him the final bite before someone else did. Before the baby did. He didn’t want to leave either of you. This was his choice, Rune. His decision.”
“You should have come to me,” she said. “You should have told me.”
“He asked me not to.”
And she knew she wouldn’t kill Nikolai, because it’d been Ellie’s decision, and Ellie was a grown man entitled to his own choices. “I should have known. And I should not have let him face that alone.”
She looked at Levi, and the same tortured thought was in his eyes. How alone Ellis must have felt, trying to make such a decision on his own, trying to keep his secrets. He wasn’t built for secrets, not really. He didn’t like them.
But he’d believed it was the best thing for all of them.
Ellis stood, calm at last, and let them discuss him as though he were a child. And in a way, he was.
“You’ll stabilize,” Rune told him. “It’ll just take some time.”
“And we’ll be with you,” Levi said. “If you’ll let us.”
“He’ll let us,” Rune said. “Nikolai, you’ll bring him to the house. You can tend to him there. I sun-proofed as much of it as I could because of Kader.”
Ellie stilled and lifted his face from her neck. “Kader?”
Rune looked at the master, who hesitated, then nodded. Apparently, he thought it’d be okay to talk to Ellie about the baby.
“She became sensitive to the sun,” she told Ellis.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Take me to her right now.”
He sounded so normal that Rune nearly burst into tears. “She’s here. The Annex will take care of her while I’m dealing with work.”
“There’s no one at home to take care of her since you left,” Roma said. “Poor kid has been—”
“Roma,” Jack growled.
Ellie’s face paled even more, if that were possible. “I’ll be here to take care of her. I’ll be here to take care of her forever.”
“Soon,” Rune told him.
Ellis turned to Levi, finally, and let Levi wrap him in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Levi, I’m sorry.”
“We’ve got you,” Levi said. “You’ll be all right now.”
And they all loved him enough to make sure of it.
Chapter Nine
<
br /> It was going to take a little while for their new reality to become their new normal. Things kept changing, and all they could do was change with them.
Gavin Delaney disappeared, perhaps to grieve his sister, but he wouldn’t stray far from River County. The bones would surely follow him, and he wanted to stick close to the one person who had a chance at helping him handle his enemy.
Rune.
“Ellie’s coming home,” Rune said.
The crew, missing only the berserker and the assassin, sat around the big kitchen table, strangely nervous as they waited for Nikolai to walk through the doorway with Ellie in tow. Maybe he was ready, maybe he wasn’t, but he belonged with them. There wasn’t a person there who didn’t want things to just get the fuck back to normal.
Ellis was their touchstone, and nothing would be right until he was back.
Levi glanced at the door but took a drink of his coffee and said nothing.
“Ellie’s coming home,” Kader agreed, then patted the huge red bow in her hair. “To Kader.”
“Yeah,” Rune said, eyeing the hideous red bow with some disgust. But they’d all agreed it was what Ellie would have done, so they’d dressed her in ribbons and ruffles and stuck a shiny red bow in her thick black hair.
She sat on Grim’s wide back, watching the door, and every time she heard a noise coming from outside, she’d jump, gasp dramatically, and put a hand to her little chest in anticipation.
“I’m hungry,” Roma said. “It’ll be good to have Ellis cooking for us once again.” She frowned. “He can still cook, can’t he?”
Raze shook his head but didn’t insult her as he once would have. She looked at him expectantly, then sighed when he kept his mouth shut. Like the rest of them, Raze was a little gentler with Roma since her capture.
She hated it.
Jack’s phone buzzed. “Yeah?” he answered. “Give me an hour, then have her call. We’re waiting for Ellis to show up.” He slid his phone back into his pocket. “Bill said Briderbeck’s hunter thinks her target is holed up in Flynn City. I’ll have to take her out there in a couple days.”
Flynn City wasn’t actually a city. It was a couple of streets in a mostly abandoned neighborhood in one of the city villages, bracketed by the disintegrating remains of destroyed warehouses, crumbling apartment buildings, and the rusty carcasses of stripped, ancient vehicles. Graffiti adorned filthy brick walls and the pavement that streaked down the center had long since broken and given way to mud.
People lived there in tents, rusted-out old cars, and boxes. Those people were dangerous, protective of their strip of ugliness, and absolutely would kill a person for trying to invade their territory. There was a link between Flynn City and Killing Land, but Rune wasn’t sure exactly what the connection was.
They were left alone, for the most part, and the occasional clueless interloper was soon sent running if he or she dared to step through the invisible curtain separating Flynn from the rest of the world.
“Jack,” Rune said.
“Don’t worry. She won’t get in, but Bill wants me to make it look good.”
“I don’t know why he wants to play nice with the fucking Next,” Rune said. But she did know. She didn’t like it, but she understood his desire to keep the peace.
“Fucking area is full of rats,” Raze said.
He didn’t shudder, but he was pretty damn close.
Shiv Crew had a tentative relationship with the occupants of Flynn. They’d claimed Jack as their own sort of savior, and he would never betray them. Still, he’d need to be careful. If they thought he’d turned on them, they would kill him. At the very least, Shiv Crew would lose that connection, which often came in handy.
“What are you going to do?” Roma asked him. “If she expects you to take her in there…”
He got up, reaching for his phone. “I’ll call Flynn and we’ll figure it out.”
Albert Flynn ran the place. One of the small local newspapers had published a piece on Flynn City, posting a grainy old picture of Albert and his beloved city. They’d dubbed him Prince of Thieves and Beggars, then likened the neighborhood to a leper colony. The office had burned down the day after the story ran.
You didn’t fuck with Flynn.
Roma didn’t get up and follow him out, but she didn’t take her stare off him until he was gone. “He’s not leaving now, though,” she said. “Is he?”
“No,” Rune told her.
“Good. Because when that bounty-hunting female comes to get him, I’m going, too. You can’t trust the Next.”
She wasn’t lying.
“He’ll be fine,” Raze said. “Jack can handle one Next op.”
“You’re just afraid to go because of the rats,” Roma said.
Rune laughed. She wasn’t lying about that, either.
“Here’s Ellie,” Kader called, in a singsongy voice. “Up, Grim.”
She buried her fingers in Grim’s fur as he lumbered to his feet, and then she carefully and slowly stood, straightening until she tottered uncertainly atop the huge animal’s back.
Rune lifted an eyebrow and folded her arms as she watched. “Kader, what are you doing?”
Kader laughed and clapped her chubby hands. “Scaring Ellie.”
As if on cue, the door opened, Ellis stepped inside, and the first thing he saw was a beribboned little girl slip and begin to fall from the great height of Grim’s back.
He shrieked and like a flash of light, he sped across the kitchen and caught her one second before she crashed to the floor.
Raze roared with laughter. “That kid,” he said.
“She’s funny,” Rune agreed.
“Manipulative little thing,” Roma noted.
Ellis clasped Kader to his chest and turned to glare at all of them. “How has she survived since I left? How?”
“I don’t know.” Rune stood and strode to Ellis, pulling him and the kid into her arms. “Welcome home. It wasn’t right without you.”
Ellis allowed her hug for a couple of minutes, then pulled away and turned to face the room. Jack walked in and stood against the wall with a silent and watchful Nikolai.
“I’ve come to terms with it,” Ellis told them. “The blood-drinking and the lack of sunshine and the hideous teeth. I’ve said my goodbyes to my mother, who now considers me dead. I’ve gone through a…” He had to stop for a second and gather himself. “A process. At first, I was afraid I would no longer be myself. But you know what I discovered?” He looked around at them, waiting.
“What, baby?” Rune asked, finally.
“I am the same. I do different things. But in here…” He tapped his chest, then looked at Levi, who stood by the table, waiting. “I am the same. I am the same.”
Ellie was no longer afraid—he wasn’t afraid of vampires, he wasn’t afraid of turning, and he wasn’t afraid of Rune and Kader stumbling through life without him.
“People hate us,” Ellie said. “They think we’re unnatural. That we’re lowlife parasitic monsters. But we all—human or not—have a monster inside us.” He shrugged. “And now mine will live forever with Rune and Kader.”
But he looked at Levi. His grief had taken up residence in his eyes and would never really leave.
Kader wrapped her arms around his neck. “Be happy,” she demanded, then planted a messy kiss on his cheek. “Make food and whistle.”
He laughed, then hugged her close. “Oh, my precious girl. Of course I’ll be happy.”
Roma cleared her throat. “I think cooking would do you a world of good.”
Ellis shook his head and pursed his lips. “I don’t know what you all did without me.”
“We ate garbage,” Roma declared. “That’s what we did.”
Ellis set Kader on the floor. “We won’t discuss it again,” he said. “Everything will be okay, and we won’t discuss it again.”
They nodded.
“But you can still cook,” Roma said, “can’t you? Before we don’t discuss it agai
n—can you still cook?”
Ellis sighed. “I can still cook. I just can’t eat.”
Levi walked to him and held out a hand. “Your meal will have to wait a while, Roma. Ellie’s mine tonight.”
Ellis’s entire face lit up. He took Levi’s hand, smiling. Happy, or very nearly.
Their Ellie was home, and if they had to pretend things were the same as they’d always been, they would pretend.
Because the truth of it was that Ellie wasn’t the same. But he’d call upon his memories and he would do everything in his power to be the man he remembered. The human he remembered.
And that was okay, because there was one thing that hadn’t changed, and never would.
His heart. His beautiful, pure heart.
Chapter Ten
Ellis was home, and though things were a little sideways, life was immediately better. He didn’t call his friend and Kader’s old nurse Aly to return, because they were too afraid Kader would kill her.
Accidents happened.
They had the new people Bill had sent, and though they were unfamiliar, they would survive the child they were there to care for.
Ellis would take Kader to the Annex every night for her sessions. Bill wanted the kid to live there, but neither Rune nor Ellie were willing to go that far. “Not yet,” Rune said. “When she’s older and her training gets more intense. But not yet.”
And once again, the wedding loomed.
Ellis was thrilled she’d waited for him.
“No crazy shit, Ellie,” Rune told him the night after he’d returned home. “Just a simple ceremony in Wormwood so Gunnar can attend. I promised him.”
“Give me a month,” Ellis said.
Rune narrowed her eyes, suspicious. “What the fuck do you need a month for?”
Ellis didn’t grin but his lips twitched. “So I can be more myself.”
“Uh huh,” Rune said. “That had better be the reason. No craziness, Ellie.”
“Absolutely no craziness,” he agreed.
Two days later there was still no sign of the bones. “I’m taking the bounty hunter to Flynn,” Jack said. “She’ll be here in ten minutes.”
