CHAPTER FIVE || HUNTER #3
“Was I wrong?”
I wanted to say yes. The lie was right there, locked and loaded on my lips. But it wouldn’t come.
“No,” I said grudgingly. “You weren’t wrong.”
Lee nodded. Beside me in the gathering dark, he was steady and patient, the way he always was.
“You did save his life today,” I said. The words felt strange in my mouth. More vulnerable than I wanted to be, even with my other half. “If you hadn’t had that… vision, or premonition, or whatever it was, Daniel would be…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. An image rose unbidden in my mind. The hole in the wood right behind where Daniel’s head had been, after Harris had finally managed to pry the fork free. What if that had been his skull? It almost was.
My stomach lurched at the thought.
“Believe me, I know.”
“Thank you.” My voice was rough. I cleared my throat. “For—err—yeah. Thank you. I don’t think I said it before.”
“Enough of that,” he said softly, bumping his shoulder against mine. It was the most physical affection we’d exchanged in weeks.
We didn’t talk about the important things often enough. That was completely my fault. Lee was usually willing to sit in the hard stuff. I was the one who bolted.
“How are you doing with all of this?” I asked. It came out stilted, because I was awful at this. “You seem… okay.”
“You mean, how is it being so close to him?”
I let out a long, shaky breath. “Yeah. Isn’t it killing you?”
“Things feel different now,” Lee replied. “It might sound strange, but I saw him die, Hunter. And if he had—” He looked over at me. “C’mon. You wouldn’t be okay, either. You can’t tell me you would be. I saw it happen. And it was real.”
I couldn’t argue with that, even if I’d wanted to. “And you’re just forgiving him? Just like that?”
Maybe it was immature, but I wanted to cling to my sense of betrayal. It was basically the only defense I had left.
“I think I forgave him a long time ago,” Lee said.
Though his words were gentle, they still struck me like a blow.
“For some of it, anyway.” He paused and I felt his gaze on me, but I didn’t trust myself to look at him.
“I understand why he did what he did by bringing us here. The alternative was letting us die. I would’ve done the same damn thing in his shoes. ”
When I opened my mouth to argue, he cut me off. “Think about it, Hunter. If Daniel was dying and you knew a way to save him—even if it changed his life forever—you’d do it in a heartbeat. Even if he hated you for it, you’d still do anything you could to save him. Don’t even try to deny it.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice going raw around the single word. My eyes started burning again. “I guess you’re right.”
“So, what I’m saying is, it doesn’t feel fair to hate him for that. We got a pass back then because we were both fucked up about it, but now we’re not. And we ought to try to forgive what he did.”
“But the lying. He lied for years—”
“Yeah, I know. He should’ve told us who he really was. That he was a warlock. We would have tried to understand it.”
I turned to meet his gaze, grateful to be on solid ground again, with all my clean and bright self-righteous anger buoying me. “That’s the part I still don’t get. And I don’t know how to forgive it. We trusted him. We trusted him completely.”
“Well, it’s been two years,” Lee said, searching my eyes, his expression oddly placid, even if I’d have liked for him to get angry, too.
“And we’ve spent all this time shutting him out.
We’re here now, in a confined space together.
Maybe we ought to make use of this time and just ask him for the truth. ”
I swallowed back a dozen poisonous responses I could’ve dished out right then. Because my heart just wasn’t in them anymore. The way Lee was being so calm, steady, and matter-of-fact had thoroughly disarmed me.
Without my anger, all that was left was honesty. “What if he explains himself and I let myself forgive him?”
Lee smiled at that and put his hand on my shoulder. “We should go back inside.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t move. “In a minute.”
We sat together while the sky darkened fully into night and the first stars appeared above the fortress of tall evergreens that walled the commune in.
I thought about Daniel inside the cabin, probably still hunched over his journals, chewing his pen cap, muttering to himself.
Or else torturing himself over whatever we were talking about, knowing it was probably all about him.
And what if he had died today?
There would’ve been so much left unsaid.
Questions I’d never have answers to. And a Daniel-sized hole in my heart I’d never be able to fill.
I would’ve spent the rest of my days—which hopefully wouldn’t have been long—drenched in a mixture of despair and helpless fury, unable to ever do anything about it. Unable to ever make any of it right.
What would it mean to let my anger go, if I even could? Who would I be without it?
The idea was terrifying. But at the same time, there was a part of me that really wanted to find out.