As Lie The Dead (33 page)

I bit the side of my lip, considering my words. “I hate not knowing if my feelings for you are mine or hers.”

“I thought you and she were the same now.” He touched my cheek, then let his hand drift around to rest on the back of my neck. “It’s all semantics. Everything you are now is because of the woman you were and the woman you’re in, and both of them are you.”

“Semantics, huh? So my existence has been boiled down to what came first? The chicken or the egg?”

“It sounds goofy when you put it like that.”

“It sounds just as goofy when I say it my way. Everything changed when you died, Wyatt. This is me now, and I need to get over the damned past and just … live.” I drew the tip of my finger across his brow, down his temple, across the hard line of his jaw and over rough stubble.

“So live,” he whispered.

A tiny shiver stole down my back. “Help me?”

His answer was in the slight tilt of his head and in the way his hand gently stroked the back of my neck. In his parting lips. My other hand snaked around his neck and drew him down to me. The first kiss was hesitant, the barest brush of lips. I still felt a thrill all over my body. My stomach fluttered.

His other hand slid to my hip and rested. He waited for me to come to him, and I did, claiming his mouth with mine. Falling into the intoxicating taste of him, letting it overtake my senses. Warmth settled in my stomach, then drifted lower. My skin tingled wherever we touched, and I thought I could kiss him like that forever.

Or until my knee started to cramp from our awkward position on the floor.

I hissed and pulled away abruptly, twisting to unlock my angry joints. “Ow, shit, shit,” I muttered.

“Evy?”

“Inconvenient cramp.”

He scooted around to crouch in front of me, concern blaring from his face like a siren. “Your left knee?”

“Yeah.” The pain was already going away, and it faded quickly as I massaged my knee through my jeans. “Now that’s what I call a mood breaker.”

He chuckled. “I didn’t want to say anything, but my ass was starting to go numb.”

“A numb ass,” I said, grinning. “There may be a market for that as an insult.”

“Says the queen of foul language.”

“You always say to go with my talents.”

He laughed again, and I followed suit. It felt good, knowing that a little personal information hadn’t completely altered our existing patterns. I found comfort in them, and I was sure he did, too. A little continuity in the midst of chaos. He stood up and offered his hand. I accepted, and he pulled me to my feet.

I didn’t let go of his hand. “So what happens now?”

“Nothing you don’t want to happen.”

The petty part of my mind wanted him to promise that went for the things going on outside this room as well as in. Only I knew he couldn’t make such a promise. Everything outside of us was beyond our control. Instead, I replied by obliterating the pocket of air between us and pressing up close. Hips to hips, stomach to stomach. I licked my lips; he accepted the silent invitation.

His mouth moved against mine, soft but insistent,
and I met his every movement. Fingers caressed my throat and wandered back to massage my neck and shoulders. My lips parted, allowing him entrance to my mouth, and for a moment we shared a breath. His tongue traced along my upper lip, sending delicious tingles through my belly, and I responded by gently sucking his lower lip into my mouth. I nibbled with my teeth, and his hips surged against mine.

A niggle of old fear returned, and I swiped at it with a mental two-by-four. Not here. Not now. Not again. I won’t let the past continue to control me, or my emotions. Instead, I allowed a delicate dance to begin.

Wyatt’s tongue darted into my mouth, stroked across my teeth, until it was met by mine. I raked my fingers down his chest and earned a soft moan. He trailed cool fingertips along my back, down over my ribs to my hips, drawing me into him. His mouth left gentle, tasting kisses across my cheeks to my throat, and each hot caress drove another small spear of pleasure through my abdomen.

I groaned at the sensation. Felt his lips curl into a smile. He raked his tongue across the hollow at the base of my throat, and my knees buckled. Strong arms kept me upright. We inched sideways, closer to the bed.

A digital ringtone skewered the moment and brought progress to a screeching halt. We froze mid-grope, and I started laughing.

“This better be good,” Wyatt grumbled as he fished the cell phone out of his pocket. It was a city number, caller I.D. unknown. We disentangled, and he
flipped it open. “Yes?” He looked at me and mouthed, “Phineas.” My racing heart skipped a beat. “Here’s fine,” Wyatt said, and rattled off our location. “Twenty minutes, then.”

He hung up. I didn’t have to ask—the brief conversation told me all I needed to know—but did anyway. “Phin’s coming here?”

“Yeah. And apparently with big info, too. Said he met Call.”

I could have throttled him for his lack of interest in the new development. It was the phone call we’d been waiting for. “This is good news, Grumpy. We’ve been stewing over this guy’s identity for two days, and Phin might be able to tell us who he is and what the hell he wants.”

“You’re right,” he said with more energy in his voice. “Forgive my selfishness in wishing he’d waited another thirty minutes to call.”

“Only thirty minutes?”

He grinned wolfishly. “It would have at least let me finish kissing you the way I wanted.”

Dammit, heat blazed in my cheeks and neck. I cracked my knuckles, suddenly full of nervous energy.

“I love that for the brave fighter you are,” Wyatt said, “I can still make you blush.”

“I’m sure I could make you blush, too, if I tried hard enough. Only it would be more from words coming out of my mouth than anything going in.”

He laughed at the moderately lewd joke. Since we had no time to continue our previous activities to a satisfying conclusion, I worked on putting the touch and taste of him out of mind. My skin still seemed hot
where he’d kissed me, and I missed him in my arms. Not good, since I once again had a problem to solve. And a bad guy to stop. The world had briefly paused; Phin’s phone call hit the Play button again.

I flopped down on the bed and leaned back on my palms. “So, if you were a bad guy intent on bringing a battle force against the Triads, who would you be?” I asked.

“Someone with one hell of a grudge.” Wyatt leaned against the wall opposite the bed, arms folded over his chest. “And it’s someone who knows what we do, who we are, and seems to have a connection to the Clan Assembly.”

“Or he got that connection via his relationship with Snow.”

“Also possible.”

“Hopefully Phin managed to get a snapshot somehow, because it’ll make identification a hell of a lot easier. I guess he didn’t give you any clues over the phone?”

“The conversation was pretty brief, Evy.”

I picked at a snagged thread on the bed’s coverlet, hoping for inspiration to strike. Twenty minutes felt like an eternity of waiting, and I was not a patient person. Only my mind kept circling back to the same possibility—someone who had every reason to bear a huge grudge against us. “I know you said he wasn’t our guy,” I said, “but I keep going back to the surviving son of the Greek restaurant owner. He makes such perfect, poetic sense.”

Wyatt pressed his lips into a thin line, eyes sharp. “I told you, it’s not him.”

“Yeah, you told me, but he still feels relevant,
Wyatt. You said you trusted my instincts, and my instincts say that what happened back then has a bearing on what’s happening now.”

“Of course it does. That event helped shape what the Triads are now, but it doesn’t mean the son of the victims is involved with Call.”

“Then what’s he do?” I sat up a little straighter, frustrated by his lack of real answers. “You said you know him, so prove it. Prove my instincts just happen to be a little clouded on this, and that I’m grasping at straws out of some deep-seated need to be the one to unmask this asshole.”

Coiled like a furious spring, Wyatt pushed away from the wall and stalked to the other side of the room, near the door. He reached his farthest point, pivoted, and walked halfway back to me, blazing. “He works in the city, Evy, and he can’t possibly be Call or be working with him. I
know
he can’t.”

“But I don’t.” I stood up, planted my hands firmly on my hips, and returned his scowl tenfold. “Come on, Truman. I just bared my soul for you to see, touch, and possibly sneer at. Toss me a fucking bone here. Who did the kid grow up to be?”

He continued to glare, but his resolve was crumbling. He raked a hand through his short hair, around his neck, and back up to pinch the bridge of his nose. I hadn’t moved; he had to know I wouldn’t, now bound and determined to get this information from him. I wanted to know who he was protecting.

“Fine,” he snapped. “You want to know whose father was killed by a Halfie and his mother and sister by rogue bounty hunters? He’s the Clan Assembly’s
killer, Evy, the one they keep accusing you of protecting.”

My face went slack as confusion settled in. “Rufus?”

“No, not Rufus.” Something sinister flashed in his onyx eyes. “Me.”

5:24
P.M
.

The phrase “You could cut the tension with a knife” flashed through my mind, because his final statement shut down all activity in the room. He didn’t move. I didn’t move. Even the distant hums of electricity and running water faded out, replaced by numb silence. My brain refused to understand what he’d just admitted. I felt queasy, unbalanced. Seriously confused.

He blinked and broke the spell.

“You …” I swallowed hard against a lump in my throat, mouth dry. “You didn’t lead the attack on Sunset Terrace. How—?”

“That’s not why the Kitsune … It’s not that.”

I closed my eyes and exhaled hard. The queasiness increased as I prepared to learn the real reason the Kitsune Elder had accused me of protecting a killer. It wasn’t for the Coni and Stri; it was something else entirely. When I looked up, Wyatt had slumped into one of the room’s two upholstered chairs. He gazed at the floor, hands folded in his lap. Miserable.

I’d cut into a festering wound because I couldn’t
stop needing to control my environment and everything in it. I couldn’t just accept his word; I had to know the facts for myself. And it had opened up a side of Wyatt I’d never seen or asked about before—his past. He hadn’t sprung, fully formed, out of a hole in the ground. I just hadn’t questioned his life before the Triads; he never talked about it.

It was lame, but all I could come up with was, “I’m sorry.”

“You know better than that. You hate pity as much as I do. Don’t do that.” He leaned forward, resting both elbows on his knees. Still giving the floor his full attention. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You were seventeen, Wyatt.”

“I wasn’t there. I couldn’t try to stop it or save them, because I wasn’t even there that night. I should have been. We promised we’d be there by eight to help inventory the food, but we went to a friend’s house instead.”

“We?” I tried to recall what he’d told me about that story—what I’d thought was simply a brief history of the Triads’ birth. What had, in fact, been a snapshot of his own life. “You and your brother?” It felt so odd to say those words.

Even odder to see him nod. “Nicky … Nicandro hated that restaurant. Hated working there after school. His revulsion made sense afterward.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was Gifted, too, Evy. He had precognitive abilities, but he had no control over them. Usually he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was seeing or why. He told me he thought his visions about the
restaurant involved us, that he was saving our lives by keeping me away that night.”

Being born Gifted is extremely rare. It requires that the birth take place over a Break—a magical hot spot. They exist all over the city, but none of them in hospital delivery rooms. The odds of two people in the same family being born … Wait. “Wyatt, were you and Nicky twins?” I asked.

He scrubbed both hands across his face, then looked at me with red eyes. “I was six minutes older, but he was always trying to protect me. I guess he did, since we lived and our family died.”

A hundred questions whirled through my mind, all eager for answers. But Wyatt seemed willing to tell the story at his own pace. I turned to face him more directly and just listened.

“I know the Fey came to us because they sensed our Gifts,” he said, speaking as much to me as to himself. “Nicky and I were three months from eighteen, so no one objected when our supposed aunt showed up to take temporary custody. She offered us help with our Gifts and opened up the entire Dreg world to us.”

“Amalie?”

“In her avatar form, yes. She and her sprites were a driving force from the start. I fell headfirst into training and never looked back. There were seven of us those first couple of months, learning to track and to fight—how to turn a specific Dreg’s strength into their weakness. All of the things we teach. Then we started hunting.”

“Rufus?”

“He was there—the last of the first seven to be
recruited. We couldn’t stand each other, actually, not for a long time.”

My mouth twitched. Rufus had admitted the same thing two days ago. Funny how that hatred had grown into a solid friendship over the course of a decade.

Wyatt inhaled deeply, held it, then exhaled hard. “Nicky hated it, every minute, and for a while I hated him. I thought he was weak. I was so angry at everything we’d lost and at the people who’d done it, I couldn’t see straight. Killing goblins and Halfies and anything else we were sent after … it let me feel something, when the rest of the time all I felt was numb.”

Boy, could I commiserate with that state of mind. “What happened to the bounty hunters who killed your family?”

His expression became thunderous. Deadly. “Eight months after the fire, we were really no better than those bounty hunters. Amalie fed us information through her sprite aides, and some of her other Fey contacts tried to guide us in the field, but we had no chain of command. Nothing that really worked, so we did what we wanted.”