Chapter Thirty-One #2
“They’re not gonna do it again, okay? I yelled at them, Sophie yelled at them, even Kimmie—”
“I yelled at them,” Lee put in, and I realized that I hadn’t let go of his shirt.
I didn’t do so then, either, because I wanted to glare straight into those big brown eyes. “You’re even dumber than he is,” I said flatly. “At least Noah had a slight chance of winning his fight! Throwing yourself at an entire squad of dark mages—”
“There was no other choice—”
“There were a hundred other choices!” I said, shaking him.
“You could have had Kimmie replicate all that glass on the floor and send a fucking wall of it flying down that narrow ass corridor. Kill enough of the bad guys, and they block the way for the rest, at least long enough for you to get away! You could have had Jen animate all those corpses you just created and start a mage-on-mage battle to even get into the room! You could have grabbed the first mage through the door and used the potions on his belt to turn the corridor they were squeezing down into a killing zone! You had choices!”
“I… didn’t think of those,” he admitted.
“Which is why we don’t go on missions we haven’t been goddamned trained for!” I felt really unwell suddenly, and finally let him go, flopping back against the sofa like the weak-ass bitch I currently was.
“Hey,” Noah said, leaning forward. “You okay?”
“She don’t look okay,” Lee said, his voice a little high. “I’m getting Cyrus—”
“No!” I snarled. “You put… one paw… outside that door—”
“You’re sick—”
“Of course, I’m sick! Sick and tired… of your bullshit,” I said, and started looking around for my beer. I finally found it and—yeah. Oh, yeah. That was better.
I drained the whole thing and then just sat there, glaring at them and panting. They didn’t seem to enjoy it, but I did. At least I had their goddamned attention.
“But as stupid as sacrificing yourself to buy your friends time to escape was, you did it without hesitation,” I finally said. “So a thousand points for style and negative ten thousand for even the concept of a brain.”
“Who told you?” he asked again.
I hesitated, wondering how to explain something I was only beginning to understand myself. “Somebody who sees something in you.”
“But… I don’t even like the newcomers! Why would you want me interviewing them?”
“Ditto,” Noah said, taking my empty bottle. “Can you get her some water?” he asked Lee.
“I don’t want any goddamned water,” I said irritably. “And it’s because you don’t like them.”
“What?”
I ran a hand through the rat’s nest on my head and sighed. “Look, I’m not worried about those who fought for us—they may have problems, even a lot of them, but like you, they put their lives on the line when it mattered. That says something. But we’ve been getting hundreds of others recently—”
“Geriatric others,” Lee muttered.
“—from all sorts of clans. And they didn’t fight for us.”
“As if they could!” Noah said.
“Would you two shut up?”
They shut up.
“You know as well as I do how some of the other clans view us,” I said. “How much they want this whole thing to fail, even some of those supposedly on our side. They won’t say it out loud—they want to stay in Sebastian’s good books—but they think it. And maybe they’ve acted on it.”
“Come again?” That was Lee.
“I could be paranoid, God knows I have enough reason these days. But it occurred to me to wonder, with all the people joining us lately, what if some were planted? Like to deliberately undermine us?”
“Sabotage?” Noah said, sitting up.
“Maybe, maybe not. They could all be exactly what they appear to be, but I don’t know that, do I? They didn’t fight. They didn’t bleed. They didn’t do anything for Fireborn except show up, and we don’t know shit about them—”
“Finally! Someone’s talking sense!” Lee burst out.
“All we know for sure is that we have enemies, but we don’t even know who they all are. And lately, there’s so much going on, and Cyrus and I can’t be everywhere, especially not with me like this…”
“So you need some suspicious ass motherfuckers to vet everybody,” Lee said. For the first time in a while, I saw a hint of a smile.
“I prefer to look at it as finding the right people for the job. And even some of the good ones among the new arrivals may not necessarily be the right fit for us. There may be those we can’t afford to bring on, and who we’ll find a place for, but not here.
I need skeptics who aren’t going to be taken in by a well-told sob story, and saddle us with people who are going to destroy the clan’s reputation before we build it up.
But who also remember that we need people, decent, hardworking people, to help us turn Fireborn into a clan we can be proud of.
“To become part of us.”
“Part of us,” Noah repeated. As if it was the first time he’d thought of the new arrivals like that. And then the diffident demeanor returned. “You know, I could help out, even with my leg like this. Just until you find somebody else.”
“That’s a generous offer,” I said. “Sure you feel up to it?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been going crazy in here!”
I looked at Lee.
“Oh, you damned well better believe I’m in. I’m not gonna let anybody hurt Fireborn!”
“It also hurts us if you don’t let anybody in,” I said dryly.
“And don’t do a Sienna, okay, and decide to exclude people who have a past. That’s another reason for choosing you two: you know how it is out there; you were on the streets longer than most. People did shit, but it doesn’t mean they are shit. ”
“But some are,” Lee pointed out. “How do we tell the difference?”
“That, my dear, is the test,” I told him, and struggled to my feet.
“Wait,” Noah said. “Where are you going?”
“Back to bed!”