Chapter Twenty-Six
I expected to go back to the crystalline elevator. We didn’t. Remy took me to a corner in the reception hall. There, inside one of the melted wax–looking columns, was the camouflaged entrance to a narrow staircase.
I followed Remy down the steps. “Where are we going?”
“The gateway.”
I stopped. “Isn’t that up instead of down?”
“That one is, yes,” he said without stopping.
I caught up. “There’s another?”
He slanted a look at me. “The main gateway, accessible to everyone who has permission to enter my territory.”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but if no one could get on or off the roof of Remy’s dimension-bridging tower/Baltimore hotel without the password, it would be a very inefficient crossing point.
“Where does the other gateway lead to?”
Remy smiled slightly. “The city that never sleeps.”
New York City, where he had another hotel. That made sense. Hundreds of people could come and go from that hotel every day, and no one in that massive city would notice. It also had Remy’s private floor, which he’d called his “real” home. That must be where he intended to have our chat.
Fine by me. I didn’t care as long as I got answers.
We came to a landing at the bottom of the staircase. I didn’t see a door, but Remy pressed his hand against the wall and one appeared. It opened into a short hallway with a wall of smoke on our right and more of that gray barrier to our left.
“Warden!”
A man and a woman hurried toward us. They both wore the same blue, braided-shoulder jackets and black pants as the guard who had lent me his coat earlier.
“Clear the gateway,” Remy told them. “We’re going through.”
“Yes, Warden,” they chorused.
Remy kept walking. The smoke wall to our right vanished, revealing another huge room.
This time, the ceiling was a mere two stories high and the room had no fancy décor.
It looked kinda like an airport, except many of the beings weren’t human.
Snakes as long as buses slithered past four-legged creatures of so many mammalian varieties that I couldn’t identify them all.
Different types of bird people fluffed their huge wings as they waited, too.
There were hundreds of non-humans lined up, and they only switched back to human form to speak to those blue-tunic employees behind the counters when it was their turn.
“What is all this?”
Remy barely gave it a glance. “Supernatural beings have to show their magically imprinted seal to enter my territory before they can access the gateway.”
You’re on my lands, but you entered without my permission, Remy had said the first time we met. I hadn’t realized before how literally he’d meant that.
We walked right by the lines into a second, small room. The walls looked like hammered brass, and more guards manned either side of two tall brass pillars, with a silvery space between them that rippled like a wall of liquid.
“Now that looks like a gateway,” I murmured.
The barest smile tugged Remy’s mouth. “Glad it lives up to your expectations.” He held out his hand. “Shall we?”
I was still boiling mad, but I took his hand. If I refused, it might get back to Daegal, and then the dragon would know that our happy-couple ruse was just that. A ruse.
We walked through the brass pillars. I held my breath and closed my eyes out of instinct as the watery wall swallowed us.
Remy squeezed my hand a few seconds later. I opened my eyes and saw a small, vanilla-colored room with two doors on either end of it. One was marked “Lobby” and the other said “Street.”
Remy chose Lobby. We entered into the back of an elegant lounge. Bronze counters graced the reception podiums while antique tables cozied up next to contemporary couches. Yep, we were back in Remy’s New York City hotel, all right.
As before, we went to an elevator labeled “Private.” Remy selected the R floor, and up we went. This time, when the doors opened to show a wall of fog, I didn’t touch it. Fool me once.
Remy parted the fog, revealing the gravity-defying book tunnel. I went past those books into the main library, where I ignored the stunning glass furniture and magical moths. Instead, I spun around and glared at Remy.
“Why did you lie and say that Beasts couldn’t be killed?”
There were so many things I was angry about, but this one had hammered against my brain ever since I’d heard it.
Remy sighed. “In all but extreme cases, they can’t. As I told you, Beasts jump into whoever has last drawn their blood whenever their current host dies.”
“Then how did you kill one?”
Remy’s expression didn’t change, nor did he move a muscle, yet suddenly, I felt like I was staring at a stranger.
“By killing anyone who’d been in close contact with that Beast’s host. If everyone who’d drawn its blood was dead, there would be no new host for the Beast to jump into, forcing its energy to return to the void that had spawned it. ”
The brutality of that stole my breath. Yes, I knew Remy was violent. I’d known that from my first glimpse of his aura. But this was on a level I could barely comprehend.
Remy’s lips twisted. “Now you see why I didn’t tell you.”
Oh, yeah. I would never have agreed to our deal if I knew he was capable of mass murder. “I might have this thing inside me,” I whispered in horror, “but you’re the real monster.”
Another twisting smile. “I know I am. What you don’t know is that Beasts are one of only two creatures capable of killing Wardens. They’ve been used as weapons against Wardens for millennia. You heard Daegal. My grandmother was murdered by one. In my need to avenge her, I did terrible things.”
“Like mass murder,” I said hoarsely.
A muscle worked in his jaw. “It’s not an excuse, but Beasts’ hosts are usually murderers in their own right.
So are their companions. Beasts are drawn to the violent, both for food and for fellowship.
It makes sense. The world’s most bloodthirsty killers were the Beasts’ original summoners, so they are most at home among other murderers. ”
Remy’s previous words haunted me. Before there was anything else, there was darkness.… Primal magic existed within it. Ancient warriors accessed some of that magic … became addicted … and appealed to the darkness to make it permanent.…
Pain and guilt made my throat tighten, reducing my words to a rasp. “Not every host is a murderer by choice.”
A harsh noise escaped Remy. “No, not every host. But most are, whether they start out that way or turn into one. All hosts grow addicted to the Beast’s power eventually, just like its original summoners did.”
Anger sharpened my tone. “I’m not addicted to its power.”
Remy’s gaze landed on me like a hammer. “Yes, you are.”
My hand whipped out before I registered the intent to slap him. “How dare you say I’m like the thing that murdered my family!”
The Beast’s former host flashed in my mind.
He had brown hair, an impish smile, and he looked my age of fifteen.
He said he found our campsite because he followed the music.
I’d been playing my violin around the campfire.
Mom and I never questioned his story of getting separated from his hiking group, but Gran was wary.
That’s why she’d already been next to her rifle when the boy ripped Mom’s throat out with knifelike claws that suddenly shot from his hands. …
Remy grabbed my wrist, yanking me out of that awful memory. “I didn’t say that. You use the Beast’s power for good, but that doesn’t mean you’re any less addicted to it.”
Denial turned my voice into a scream. “Fuck you!”
“That’s why you have such surprising control over the Beast even though you don’t leave a trail of bodies behind like other hosts,” Remy went on ruthlessly.
“Beasts don’t only switch bodies when their current host dies.
They can also choose to jump into whoever has last spilled their blood.
You aren’t the murderer it normally prefers, but the Beast hasn’t left you because you are still exactly what it seeks—a strong summoner. ”
I tried to snatch my hand away. “I never asked for this.”
His grip tightened. “You didn’t, but every time you use its power, you summon it. And every time you force it back down, you show it who its master is. Just like the warriors of old did.”
He shook my wrist for emphasis. “No one else would dare slap a Warden, but you did, because you know what’s inside you is equal to my strength.
You said it yourself—you haven’t been afraid of anything except the Beast since you were first infected.
People and situations that are deadly for everyone else are merely buffet tables for you.
You might hate the need to feed the Beast, but you don’t hate stripping the violent of their ability to harm others, do you?
Of course not. You’ve done it so often, you clearly don’t. ”
Okay, sure, I might have felt a certain smugness when some guy cornered me in an alley, thinking he was in control when all he ended up being was a snack.
I might have even kicked a few of them when I was finished, knowing I would’ve been the one crying in a heap if they’d had their way.
But I wasn’t addicted to that! If I was, I would’ve done much worse, and I’d only drained them of their violence even though some had deserved a lot more. …
The truth of Remy’s words suddenly hit home.
That was it, though, wasn’t it? Having the power to decide whether to punish someone or let them go free? And if you did decide to punish them, stopping only when you felt like it?
Yeah, that sort of power could easily become addictive.
So could healing people. I knew the consequences would be dire if someone realized I’d done something supernatural to stop a hemorrhage, repair a bullet-destroyed organ, or revive a non-beating heart.
And I did it anyway, needing to feel like I’d done some good in this awful world.
Yes, it meant immediately hunting down violent people to drain their auras, restarting the cycle of feed-the-Beast, drain-the-Beast all over again, but I kept doing it.
I kept being the one who decided who got to be free from pain, and who got to feel a lot more of it.
That did make me just as guilty of playing God as all the other Beasts’ hosts.
The only difference was me being mostly benevolent instead of mostly murderous.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “So why haven’t you killed me, if I’m just as addicted as every other host?”
A harsh sound left him. “You know why.”
“Do I?” My eyes opened, but he was now blurry from tears. “You shouldn’t have risked your position as Warden to save me from Travis, then. Unless you only did it because you didn’t want to lose track of the Beast? Or have it jump into someone worse than me?”
He hauled me close. “I did it because I couldn’t think of anything except getting you back once I knew you were gone, and I didn’t give a fuck what it took to do that.”
His gaze was blue fire, his mouth a hard slash, and he now held both my wrists in that iron grip.
Part of me wanted to slap him again for forcing me to see all of what I was, and another part wanted to wrench away because he’d shown me all of what he was, too.
We were both monsters, only in different ways.
And suddenly, just like Remy, I didn’t give a fuck.
I yanked him closer with my restrained hands. His mouth crushed mine before my next breath.