Chapter 35
“Vicious and smart,” Deacon murmurs. “No wonder my brother was a goner for you.”
Here’s this man who seems to fear nothing, who I’ve assumed, based on everything Reid told me, is indestructible.
Infallible, his father’s favorite, the leader of his little pack, but…
who cannot sleep at night—by my assumption, hasn’t in decades, maybe even longer…
That wicked darkness that gleams in his glacial eyes from time to time.
That knowing. Like any pain I’ve felt since this syrabraxa’s been in me, he’s known worse. And now I know why.
My eyes sweep down to either side of his neck. Like Penny said…“Where I won’t go. Where I went.”
Something harrowing shines in his eyes. A ferocious and terrible fear. Deacon. Fearful. A sight I couldn’t have pictured if I’d tried.
He clears his throat. “They translate more closely to the place I’ll never return to and the place I never left.” He points to either side of his neck. “But, yeah. You get the idea.”
“What was it like?”
Deacon’s throat bobs with a thick swallow. “There is nothing on this plane that I could compare it to.”
“That bad, huh?” The words come out with a rattle.
His eyes land sharply on mine. “Be grateful you have never known any agony—any atrocity—that holds a candle to what exists below us.”
That stalls the breath in my lungs. “You went down with a soul?” We learned in my first semester at Harker that demons are the only deviants with the ability to return to hell despite the Chasm being closed.
They can shepherd a freshly turned demon into the underworld once they take their soul.
A vestige of their original role, guiding wayward mortals to their fate across the river Styx.
But once down there, there’s no way out. “Why? If you knew you’d be stuck?”
“I didn’t.” He fists his hands. I have the horrible thought that perhaps they were shaking, but it’s too dark to see. “I never would have done that. Never would have willingly gone down there. I was banished by the High Thane. A long time ago.”
I try to stifle my gasp. “Your own uncle? Why would Caspar send you to hell?”
“It wasn’t Caspar, back then.”
“Fine, whoever it was.” Caspar’s father, I imagine. “What did you do?”
He doesn’t answer me, hands in his lap, eyes straight ahead on the opposite side of the small closet.
I wonder if just talking about the underworld has dredged up torturous memories.
I’ve never seen him look anxious before.
The worst moments of his life, clearly. The only time in history he has no desire to gloat about.
“You steal from the rich to feed the poor?” I nudge, softly.
“Something like that.”
But the dark edge to his voice says I’m way off. No surprises there. Deacon’s not really the selfless kind. Not unless it suits him. But that’s fine—I don’t want to push him. Not when talking about it does whatever this is to him. It’s obvious his time in hell changed him irrevocably.
After a while he says, “Reid already told you.”
I rack my mind for what he could mean. What awful things did Reid tell me Deacon did? The list isn’t short. But there’s only one that sickens me still, despite how close I can admit Deacon and I have grown.
“The High Thane sent you to hell for killing your brother’s fiancée?” I was under the impression that demons commit atrocities on a daily basis. “Why did he care? Was she someone very important?”
“Not at all,” Deacon says, though he still won’t meet my eyes. “I just…wasn’t supposed to kill her.”
It’s not that I thought Reid had lied to me about what Deacon did, but to actually hear this man I’ve come to care for admit to murdering the woman Reid loved…
The unease sinks down in me like a stone.
I realize with shame how little I’ve thought of her and how often I wonder about Odette. “Why so cryptic?”
“It’s not my story to tell.”
“You killed her.”
Finally Deacon’s eyes land on me. It’s like coming to after a blackout. “I know it’s hard for your rigid hunter mind to understand, but as I’ve told you more than once now, the world is more complicated than that. Very little is plainly right and wrong.”
“I’m pretty sure murder is one of those always wrong things.”
“You kill every day. You’re made for it.” His mouth curves on one side. “I’d go so far as to say you love it.”
And I could argue with him. Could kick him out of the makeshift bed he’s made for me and try to sleep.
But the scales are weighted from our conversation—what he’s admitted, the vulnerability he’s shown, the clear trauma he carries from being banished to the underworld—and all I really want is to be eye to eye with him. “I wanted to be rid of it, once.”
“Rid of what?”
“That killer in me—the aeon bloodlust, the sensing deviants. I wanted to be mortal. A normal girl.”
“Is that even possible?”
“There was a way, but…” I think of plunging my dagger into Driscoll’s heart.
Maybe Deacon’s right about murder and gray areas.
“I couldn’t do it. Reid told me I had to make peace with who I was.
He didn’t want to be a demon. I didn’t want to hunt.
Turns out self-acceptance goes down easier when you aren’t alone. ”
It isn’t lost on me, though, how little I’ve felt that these last few weeks. How white-knuckled self-acceptance has been replaced with something closer to self…appreciation. Perhaps love. When I find Deacon’s furrowed brow, I almost tell him that. Almost tell him it might be because of him.
“You’ve said a lot of shit I couldn’t possibly understand, but that might take the cake.”
My skin bristles. And here I was about to pay him a compliment. “What, finding solace in sharing your pain with someone else? Growing closer through honesty?” I want to tell him it’s what we’ve been doing all damn night.
“No, no—” He waves his hand like Reid is the least-interesting part of my admission.
“How you knew what was out there and still thought you could ever be normal.” He leans forward, uttering the word like it’s rotten in his mouth.
“How you, a beautiful, graceful force of strength and ferocity and violence and good—an aeon, for Christ’s sake—could stand to walk down the streets of Astera with your family, your goonie squad, all of whom you offer up your life in protection of all the damn time, knowing full well the evil that is lurking around every corner, waiting to suck them dry, and you—powerless to stop them. ”
I have no rebuttal. It never felt that way to me.
But it sure does now.
A brief, horrible vision comes to mind of a reality in which I had succeeded—kept Driscoll alive and allowed him to remove the syrabraxa and with it my hunting gene—and had to learn the atrocity of what Deacon is describing the hard way. How could I have been so blind for so long?
I think, for some reason, of the Aeon’s Dagger.
The third in my father’s set, once belonging to my grandmother.
I think of the sleek, deadly jaguar, born to kill and yet protective of its cubs.
I think of all those I’ve saved because of what I am.
And not just because of the burden, but the joy of the kill.
Deacon had said as much to me all those weeks ago at the Manor.
That I was hunting for duty instead of sport.
“You’re good at what you do, and what you do is fun. ”
He leans back against the closet wall once more.
“Enough with this dour, woe-is-me self-acceptance. You need a triple shot of reality. You’re lucky.
You’re gifted. You’re able to move and think and exist better, longer, and faster than everyone else.
And you—for whatever reason—choose to use all the stars and magic in your blood to help others. ”
In the dark I swear I can hear his heart beating louder than it did a minute ago.
“And sure, being a hunter means pain and suffering and horrors beyond comprehension, but it’s also spectacular.
You’re spectacular, Viv. Did my brother never tell you that?
When you’d whine and complain about who you were?
” He runs a hand down his face. “Fuck. How is it possible I like you more than you do? Even I think that’s backward. ”
We sit in silence for long, charged minutes.
Everything he’s said is swimming in my mind and thrumming in my chest. He’s right.
Any time I’d shared any of this with Reid, he’d only agreed.
Commiserated with my loneliness and shame.
He hated demons and he was one. He dedicated his life to eradicating them.
Teaching hunters how to kill his kind. I finally met someone who knew what I was going through.
But he never once said to me that I shouldn’t have been going through it at all.
“I never saw it that way, I guess. My family…My mom, my sister. They hate me for what I am, whether they know it or not. It really messed with my head.”
“Tell them, then.”
“Tell them? That I’m a hunter? They’ll have me institutionalized.” Not to mention the Elders’ no-tolerance policy. Fiona had warned me earlier this year when we brought Penny to the school—if the Citadel finds out any lymantrian has shared our existence with a mortal, the punishment is death.
Deacon only shrugs. “You should give them a chance to see all that you do.”
It’s beyond anything I can imagine. I don’t even bring up the rules against it. I know what Deacon Graveheart thinks of rules. Of the Elders. Instead I say, “They’ll be terrified of me.”
“Then you know what?” When his eyes find mine, they’re heated with something. “They don’t fucking deserve you.”
For a moment, I am rendered silent. How is he so sure that I’m worth anything at all? How is he so confident that I could make it without them?
Eventually Deacon breathes out in a rush. “When we escaped hell, I wanted nothing to do with my father. Even though he was a wealthy man, and I was dirt-poor and had nowhere to live, no one to—” Deacon shakes his head. He looks burnt-out.