Living with the Dead

HOPE

When Rhys came around to Hope's door, holding a gun, she put on a very convincing show of resistance. And he taught her another lesson in not giving the ally any quarter, wrenching her arm to the breaking point again and forcing her inside the building, where he pointed out that the gun was filled with tranquilizer darts, and he had a second one for her.

He could have told her this in the car, but she guessed that booster shot of true panic hadn't hurt the act.

"Aim for their legs," he said as they huddled in the stairwell. "Presume they're wearing body armor. I doubt Irving will come in, but he might follow if his men are slow getting back out. If you see him, tranq him. Then use this."

He handed her what looked like a key chain tape measure. When she stared at it, he grabbed the ring and pulled out a fine wire.

"Have you ever garroted anyone?"

She moved her stare to his face.

"I take that as a no."

"You said – " She looked down at her tranquilizer gun.

"That's for the team. We have to kill Irving." His tone made Hope feel like a naive journalism student, shocked at hearing she might have to do something underhanded to get a good story.

"If Irving lives, he'll come after us. All of us." He enunciated as if she wasn't quite as smart as he'd thought. "He wanted Adele – and the glory of her recruitment – for himself. His team is just following orders. He won't have trusted anyone with details. So if he dies, so does the project… and his revenge against those who screwed it up."

"But the council – A Nast – Unless my life is in immediate danger – "

" – the council doesn't condone murder. Laudable and just… and one reason why the council is not, and never can be, as effective a body as the supernatural world needs. But now is not the time for political lectures. If you let Irving live, he won't show you the same mercy."

When she hesitated, Rhys said, "What would Karl do?"

There was no question. He would eliminate the threat as he had with Gilchrist and that would be the right decision for him. But Karl would be the first to say she wasn't him and she shouldn't try to be.

"I don't have time to wait for you to figure it out, Hope. Protect your safety and Karl's, or protect your council job. You decide."

He gave final instructions and left.

Step one: case the joint for civilians. Rhys didn't use those exact words. For a mercenary, he was severely lacking in the requisite badassitude… though the ache in Hope's ribs insisted that his bite was worse than his bark. If her own attitude seemed a little lacking in gravity, that was deliberate. It kept her thoughts from straying into territory that would reduce her from Cabal-fighting commando to quivering ditherer.

She couldn't think about Robyn, about Karl, about Irving Nast and what she'd do if she found him. Rhys made the choice sound so simple. End a lethal threat or keep her job, as if her council work was a part-time gig at McDonald's. But Hope's life and her council work were intertwined. It fed her chaos hunger in a way her conscience could live with. And if, in the last year, as that hunger grew, her council work had been steadily less effective? She couldn't consider that now.

Hope prayed she didn't find Irving Nast. If she did, she prayed Karl would be there to help her make the right choice.

Rhys said he'd reported Colm's death with an anonymous call to 911, so his son wouldn't be lying on the ground until employees tripped over him tomorrow morning. Any police presence, though, was gone before they arrived.

The parking lot was empty, which suggested the building was, too. Hardly ironclad proof, but they wouldn't have time to check. They needed to get in position and wait for the Cabal team, which would do a more thorough sweep. That's when they'd take them down, as they split up to search.

Hope managed to quickly skim one floor before a low strum of chaos told her the Cabal team had entered the building. She hurried to find a hiding place. As she passed a clinic waiting room, footsteps sounded in the hall, the brisk click-click of feminine footwear. Definitely not the SWAT team.

She backed into the room quickly. Too quickly. Her foot caught a chair leg, the metal yowling across the hard floor. She went still, gun raised. The footsteps continued, pace unchecked. She glanced over her shoulder. She was in a small room with four chairs and a door. She backed to the door and turned the knob. Locked.

A woman passed the door, heading the other way, her back to Hope. Carrying an armload of file folders, obviously putting in Sunday overtime, she was dressed in T-shirt, jeans and heels, her short hair spiked, loop earrings swaying as her head bopped to the beat from her earphones.

Her steps slowed and squeaked as she turned into a room. Another squeak, this time a chair. The whoosh of files dropping onto a desk. A third squeak, the chair being pulled in.

Hope eased from the corner, moving silently. She could still only see the woman's back now through an office door as she shuffled folders into piles.

Hope could hear her music, the distorted boom-screech-wail of heavy metal cranked full-blast. They could have a firefight in the hall and Hope doubted she'd notice. While it was tempting to leave it at that, it wasn't safe. Not for them, and not for the woman.

She positioned herself with the tranquilizer gun aimed at the woman's shoulder. Then she stopped. What made her so sure this was loaded with tranquilizers?

Rhys had asked where her paranoia came from. Maybe some of it was demon, some Karl, but most came from that loftiest of teachers: experience.

The deceptions and lies of society life were superficial, like saying "Oh, don't you look gorgeous. You're just the belle of the ball and I'm so happy for you," when what you really mean is "That dress makes you look like a cheap whore and if you ever show me up at my own party again, I will carve out your liver with a spoon and serve it as pâté." Of course, in the society world, no one's liver was in any actual danger. In the supernatural world? Don't bet against it.

Hope had been lied to and deceived and betrayed, then lied to and deceived and betrayed again. And no matter how strongly she believed in the innate goodness of mankind, eventually she'd noticed the "kick me" sticker on her butt, ripped it off and vowed never to let anyone replace it.

She might have tipped into paranoia, having leapt to wrong conclusions about Detective Findlay and Rhys. And she could be wrong questioning what was in this gun. But she wasn't shooting a bystander until she was sure. Rhys knew how sensitive the council was about killing. Why not hand her poison darts and say it was only a tranquilizer? She'd shoot, she'd move on and she'd never be the wiser.

Choices. Everyone had to make them. Some were uglier than others.

When she heard footsteps in the hall – heavy-booted ones – she saw her solution. She retreated into the waiting room, measured the distance between her and those footfalls. When they drew close, she counted to three, swung out and fired.

Hope got off two shots – the first a guess, the second aimed. Both hit the guy in the legs. He looked at her, blinking stupidly, then crashed to the floor.

The chair in the office squeaked. Hope flung herself against the wall and listened. Another squeak. Just her luck to drop the guy at a break between songs.

"Hello?"

No heel clicking accompanied the cautious greeting, and Hope pictured the woman standing beside her desk. She eased along the wall and dropped beside the Cabal guy. One hand checked his pulse while the other trained her gun on the office doorway.

A tentative click. Then another.

The man's pulse beat, thready, as if that second tranquilizer dart had been overkill. He'd be down for a while, but he'd recover.

"Hello?"

Three clicks. A shadow darkened the office doorway. The woman's hand appeared on the door. The shadow of her head moved forward, to peek.

"Hey!" Hope called.

Startled, the woman jumped back, her hands flying up, arms appearing. Hope's dart hit the back of her wrist. Hope dove through the nearest door before the woman saw her. A few seconds passed, then the boom of her body hitting the floor.

Hope was stepping out when the tramp of boots sent her scurrying back. Muted voices came from the stairwell.

Then, "He'll take her to the roof."

Karl's voice, slurred like he was drunk… not that she'd ever seen Karl drunk. The relief of hearing his voice lasted two seconds before she saw the advance guard sprawled across the hall, and heard those steps tramping closer to the landing.

She ran to the woman. A quick pulse check, then she pushed her back into the office and closed the door. She grabbed one of the guard's legs and heaved. His gun skidded across the floor. She froze. The footsteps continued, that same unhurried tramp.

She barely managed to drag the guard six inches before those footfalls thankfully passed the landing and continued up. She snatched his gun, put it in the office, then hauled the guard inside.

She was back in the hall – her own gun in hand – when footsteps pattered down the stairs.

"Take him up. I'll grab Rogers."

Irving Nast. Her breath stopped in her throat.

"Sir?" one of the team said.

Call him back. Tell him you'll get Rogers. Please, please -

"He was scouting the third floor," the man continued.

Irving thanked him and his footsteps continued. Hope shot into the office with the unconscious team member. The stairwell door creaked open before she had time to close hers. Her heel thumped the guard's arm. She carefully stepped over it and retreated into the shadows.

It was useless, of course. Nast was hunting for this missing guard. He'd see the body through the open doorway. He'd turn on the light and then…

Then what?

Did she have a choice?

Her heart battered her ribs, keeping double time with Irving's brisk, purposeful strides.

She gripped the tranq gun. A hair tickled her cheek, caught in an air current. It tickled back and forth, back and forth, making every inch of skin creep, every muscle tense, like a guitar tuner, cranking her nerves tighter and tighter.

Irving Nast's shadow passed the open door first. He strode past, eyes straight ahead, confident that his employee would come to him.

Hope watched him, her gaze fixed on his shoulder blade, gun trained on his upper arm. A perfect shot. Just pull the trigger.

She wasn't ready. Let him get past, while she took a moment to catch her breath, make a decision, yank that damn tickling hair out -

She fired.

Unprepared for the recoil, Hope was knocked back and, for a second, she thought she'd been shot. It was only as Nast faltered that she realized she'd pulled the trigger.

As he fell, she shuddered so hard she nearly dropped the gun. It wasn't chaos bliss but relief, so sweet it felt as good as chaos.

In pulling the trigger, she'd set her course. She'd shot him so now she had to follow through, had to kill him, as if in "accidentally" pulling that trigger, she'd absolved herself of responsibility for the rest. She had to go with the choice that she'd wanted to pick: their safety over the council.

To protect herself and Karl, Irving Nast had to die. That wasn't the demon talking. It was her, because all this talk of her and the demon was an artificial distinction that she knew in her heart was bullshit. There was no Hope and the demon. There was just Hope, and she wanted the threat of Irving Nast eliminated.

Then, as she pulled out the garrote wire, the zip of it slicing through the silence, she realized what she was about to do.

Rhys blamed the council for her reluctance to kill Irving, which proved that he understood Expisco demons as superficially as he did werewolves. It had nothing to do with laws. It was more than conscience, too.

Hope knew that taking a life was wrong. She felt that more deeply than Karl ever could. If she'd asked him why, when they needed to kill, he did it for them, he'd use that as an excuse: because he didn't mind and she did. The truth, as they both knew, was that the taking of a life was the one experience she'd denied the demon. Death was the demon's purest joy. A high like no other. If she took that life, would she find a new high? If so, could she live with that?

Enjoying death didn't have Hope wandering palliative care wards or racing to accident scenes. Her addiction was fed by serendipity – she took sustenance where she found it and never sought it out.

And yet…

Here was where Hope's drive to find her limits ended. Here she looked down from the precipice and saw the rest of her life consumed by a blaze of temptation and self-loathing.

She crouched beside Irving, garrote wire stretched between her hands. She knew she had to do it. Whatever the cost. Kill or be killed.

She pressed the wire against his throat. His skin whitened along it. She imagined that furrow filling with blood. Would he wake up at the last second, his windpipe severed, life-blood pumping out, gasping for breath, seeing her sitting there, patiently waiting for him to die?

Her bile rose. She swallowed it, burning down to her gut, adding to the roiling pit.

She couldn't do it. She couldn't. Not like this. Why a garrote? Why not a gun or a syringe of poison?

Was that what she wanted? A clean, quiet way to murder someone?

No, if she had to kill, it should be like this, messy and raw and undeniable.

She pushed down on the wire. A single spot of blood welled, then seeped along the wire.

Make it quick. If it's quick he won't wake -

Yes! If he didn't wake up, there wouldn't be any chaos.

Hope picked up the gun, ready to give Irving a second shot of the tranquilizer. Make sure he was out cold and then -

Her gorge rose again, bringing a fresh surge of bile. Sweat stung her eye; she swiped it back with a trembling hand.

She couldn't, couldn't, couldn't. Had to. Had to. Had to.

A crash from the stairwell sent Hope jetting to her feet. A thump, then another, the rapid bump-bump-bump of a body tumbling down stairs. A shout answered by a roar.

Another crash. Another bump-bump-bump. A vision flash came. Karl had turned on his captors, sending them flying into the stairwell walls and tumbling down. Hope grabbed the gun and the wire, the thread zipping back into its case as she flew down the hall.

She could say she was going to his aid, but she knew she wasn't. She was running, running as fast as she could. Running from Irving Nast to Karl, from the problem to the solution. Every pound of her feet drove a dagger of shame into her heart. But she kept running.

Hope clamored over the body of one guard, then the second. The first was unconscious. The second? She didn't pause to check.

The air throbbed with residual chaos. Every pump pushed the shame of her cowardice deeper into memory, gone but not forgotten.

As she climbed to the roof, that chaos throb was like the faintest beat of a distant heart, that pulse coming stronger with every step, chaos reeling her in.

"Where is she?" Karl snarled.

"Put him down!" someone yelled.

"Oh, I intend to."

Hope threw open the door. Karl stood at the roof edge, one hand around Rhys's throat, holding him over the side. Two armed SWAT team members had their guns trained on Karl.

Rhys hung there, unmoving. He was fully conscious, just staying very, very still.

"Karl? I'm okay."

He turned. The Cabal team still shouted orders. But he ignored them. His gaze traveled up and down Hope, assessing, as if, should she be injured, he might not rethink his threat to drop Rhys.

The Cabal men – like good soldiers – gave her only the briefest glance, checking for weapons, then dismissing her. When they looked away she mouthed and pantomimed a message, telling Karl she'd come with Rhys, that he wasn't planning to harm her.

He turned away before she was certain he got the message.

"So your plan failed, did it?" he growled at Rhys. "Hope was smarter than you gave her credit for. Outwitted you and escaped. Don't expect me to give you another shot at her. That's not how I handle threats."

Rhys's eyes saucered, a choked "wait!" burbling up as Hope flew forward, shouting for Karl to stop. He spun… and threw Rhys at the nearest guard as he lunged at the other.

Rhys hit the first guard, bowling him down in a shower of gravel and dust. Karl knocked the second one flying. Hope ran for Rhys's gun, dropped near the door. She made sure it was loaded with darts, then shot both the Cabal men. It wasn't as easy as it sounded, but she managed… after missing once and lodging a second dart in Karl's pant cuff.

Afterward, as she held a torn scrap of Cabal SWAT uniform to Karl's newly re-split lip, she said, "Next time you plan a fake out, warn me."

"If I did, your reaction wouldn't be nearly as authentic."

Rhys returned from dragging the second guard behind the rooftop shed. "I'd appreciate a warning, too, though I'll settle for not being used as a missile."

Karl shrugged, committing to no such promise.

Karl and Rhys hauled up the men on the stairs – both unconscious and given a second shot to be sure they stayed that way. Then Hope told them about the woman and the guard on the third floor, and said, "Irving came down looking for the guard."

"And?" Rhys prompted.

"I tranquilized him."

"And?"

Karl's head whipping around. "What'd he ask you to do?"

Hope touched his arm. "I didn't. Rhys says Irving will come back after us, and he's right, but that's when I heard you, so I left him."

"Good. You two check for more guards. I'll look after Irving."

"I-I can. I should."

"No, you shouldn't. And you're not going to."

He strode off to take care of it for her… as always.