Chapter 3
“You should probably drink something. Eat something,” David says quietly from my bedroom threshold.
He’s right. I should.
Instead, I stare at the stone wall, a wild litany of emotions playing through me over and over again.
I can’t seem to get a grip on any of them.
It would be so much easier if I were one note.
Sad. Angry. Even hopeless. But this sort of grief isn’t linear.
Anger is chief among them right along with grief.
Sometimes a burst of happiness that Juno is still alive tries to surface, but I hold it beneath the water, keeping it there until its lips turn blue, its eyes gone glassy and still.
“Georgia—”
“I heard you.”
He sighs. “You can’t stay in here forever.”
“Wasn’t that the plan?” I roll over and glare at him. “To keep me prisoner?”
He shrugs, his black wings rising and falling beyond his shoulders. “I know just as much about plans as you do.”
“Whatever.”
“I also know that the longer you stay in here sulking, the less time you have to come up with a way—”
“I’m done coming up with things,” I seethe and turn back to the wall. “I came up with plenty and look where it got me. Brainwashed and locked in this fucking crypt.”
“You weren’t usually so dramatic before. Are you concussed?” Juno’s voice—hers and not hers.
I turn back over and find her instead of David.
A mess, her dark hair in tangles, one eye missing, and still wearing the tatty clothes from her cell.
But underneath, I still see her. Back straight, chin up, authority oozing from her pores.
She steps inside and marches over to my bed, her slight limp at odds with her withering gaze, and perches at the foot to scrutinize me.
“You must be concussed if you’re laying here pitying yourself when you ought to be—”
“Shut up!” I yell it so vehemently that I surprise myself.
Juno scoffs, but I don’t let her get another word in.
“You lied to me, used me—you killed us all. You’re the reason we’re here.
You’re the reason. The vampires would’ve never gotten their claws in us if it weren’t for you!
You don’t get to lecture me about anything!
” I scoot up the bed and sit with my back against the headboard.
She turns toward me and pulls her legs up, crossing them as if she’s simply meditating. Her one eye surveys me, her lips slightly pursed.
“You act like you’re the one who was kept locked in a dungeon.”
I close my eyes and press them shut tightly.
My fingers twitch to hit her, to strangle her, to slap the aggrieved tone right out of her voice.
If I’ve ever felt this toward Juno before, it was simmering somewhere deep.
But now, every raw emotion is on the surface.
I’ve been laid bare again and again, my mind flayed until I can’t hide anywhere in the gray matter.
“You killed us all.” I let out a shaky breath. “Why?” I open my eyes and fight back the tears that threaten.
“I didn’t kill us all. You’re here. I’m here.
” She shrugs one shoulder. “I did what had to be done, what Gray never had the balls to do. He was a weak president, too short-sighted to see that the vampires were the key to our future. I knew the moment Valen appeared in my office that this chance was our only hope at surviving.”
I shake my head slowly. “We aren’t surviving. The vampires are. You are. You sent those people into the blood camps. You knew they’d be killed. You knew, and yet you kept on. You kept pushing. You sacrificed so many lives for what? Why?”
“This was the only way—”
“Answer my question.” I glare at her. “Why?”
“I just told you why.”
“You told me the same lies you told yourself while you were leading the people who trusted you into a slaughterhouse. I want to know the truth. Why?”
She glares right back at me, then rises. “I didn’t come here to be tortured even more by you, of all people. By my sister. By the one person who should understand I did what I had to do.”
I laugh, the sound scratchy and wrong.
She pauses at the door and looks at me. “What’s funny?”
“I never realized what a gaslighter you are. But now, after I’ve learned from the gaslighter of all gaslighters, I can see it easily. I see you.”
Her eye narrows and she sucks on a tooth, or rather, a fang. “We’ll speak again when you’re back to your normal self.” She disappears down the hall, though I hear her murmur softly to someone.
I hug my knees and stare after her for long, long moments. My ‘normal self’ died in DC when I was forced to forget who I was, what I’d learned, what I’d made. But Juno? When did hers die? When she became a monster herself, or when she took their infernal deal?
I sit with that horrid, tangled mass of emotions for a few more minutes before I shove them down, burying them all the while knowing they’ll only fester.
But David was right, I don’t have time to wallow in whatever this is.
One week. One week before Valen drags me back to Gregor.
One week before the truth is laid bare and I pay for killing Theo.
“David?” I call.
“I’m afraid he’s pouting at the moment.” Valen appears in the doorway, his demeanor guarded.
My heart kicks up a notch, my mind poring over a million moments from before—the two of us in DC, his smile, his hands on me, his fangs embedded in my skin, his whispered words of adoration—then the million moments of after.
After he stole my will and replaced it with his own—his disdain, his cruelty.
I wince, the memories striking like crows against a glass window.
“Georgia,” he says, a world of torment wrapped in that one word, in my name. He steps toward me, and I flinch. An instinct.
Surprise flashes across his eyes, then pain. He’s back to the threshold, simply standing, his hands loose at his sides. Broken, far worse than he ever was in DC or even here—there’s something barren in his expression. And then it’s gone, his eyes somehow locked down, no longer windows.
“I won’t come closer.” He drops his gaze. “You needn’t be afraid.”
I can only stare at him, my thoughts and emotions at war.
“I spoke with your sister at length during her time here. She’d arranged a safehouse for you while she was still president. I’ve sent Coal to check it out and make sure it’s still secret and secure. Once I get word from him, I can move you there.”
The words barely register. A safehouse? “Move me?”
He gives a curt nod, his eyes still downcast.
“You have to return me to Gregor in a week’s time. How are you going to move me anywhere?”
His gaze snaps up. “I’ll never return you to him.”
Foreboding rises in my gut. “If you don’t, he’ll kill you.”
“Nevertheless, he won’t touch you again.” His jaw is tight, his posture gone rigid. “You’ll be safe here until it’s time to go.”
His tone wakes me up, pulls me from my stupor.
I don’t like it. Not one damn bit. “Why are you acting like I’m still your prisoner?
I’m not an inmate you can move from one jail to another.
You took my will once. I won’t let you do it again.
” There’s no venom in my words, only resolve.
“That goes for this safehouse idea, too.”
He opens his mouth as if to say something else, then stops.
“I mean it. I’m not running off to shelter in place in a bunker somewhere. It wouldn’t work, anyway. Eventually, one of your kind would find me… And kill me.”
“No.” He snarls the word. “Never.”
“You can’t hide me away any longer.” I meet his gaze, his eyes stony. “I’m not running.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “I won’t let you come to harm. I can’t. I failed you once. I failed you so utterly that you still bear the scars of it.” He glances at my wrists. “I won’t do it again.”
“I’m not a puppet you can control. Not anymore. I say where I go and when.”
He presses his lips into a line; a multitude of words locked behind his teeth. There’s so much between us that needs to be said. Like an ocean separating us, and I wonder if we can ever cross it. Have we floated too far away from each other?
My thoughts, my emotions—it’s all disjointed, like I’ve been plucked from the flow of time, then unceremoniously dropped back into it.
But David was right. I can see that even through the fog.
I have to do something. To fight back. The ghost of an idea forms, a shadowy outline. “The lab in DC, what’s left of it?”
“It’s gone.”
“I need specifics. Is there still power at all? If there are still—”
“Leveled, Georgia. The White House, the Capitol, everything there is destroyed. Smoking craters and crumbled buildings. Death. That’s all.”
I swallow hard. “What about the scientists I was working with? Gretchen, Evie, Wyatt? You said their convoy was hit, but are you certain?”
He shakes his head slightly. “Their convoy made it until night fell. After that …”
“After that you killed them all?” My chest aches, memories clogging my throat. The faces I couldn’t name, each one an icy thorn in my heart. “Did you?” I ask sharply, meeting his eyes.
“Tantun soldiers attacked them.” He says it so simply. Like a weather report. “Your friends were massacred. High of seventy, light wind from the south.”
The cure died with them. The formula for the vampire poison, too.
Those three were the future of humanity.
Slaughtered. It happened months ago, but the wound is fresh for me.
The grief almost overwhelming. I clutch my legs tighter and clench my eyes shut, as if I could somehow ward off the pain. I can’t.
“Georgia.” His voice is softer now.