Wrong Side of Dead

Chapter Seven

Wyatt holds me captive with his eyes and his voice, and it’s as though we’re having this conversation alone. “The system that we put in place has been rotting at its core for years, Evy. Call and Snow were just symptoms of a larger problem—one that I couldn’t see until recently. It took losing everything I’d once lived for to see just how broken things are.”

“The Triads?”

“Mostly. Whatever purpose Amalie ultimately had in mind for us, she chose well when she picked the first Hunters. I was so blinded by grief and rage against the bounty hunters who killed my family that I’d have listened to anyone who pointed me in a direction and said to kill. Most of us had the same grudge against a Halfie or a goblin. We did everything she told us to do.”

An image of Rufus flashes in my mind and with it the secret I’m keeping for him. He didn’t ask me to keep it, sure, but how can I tell Wyatt that one of his oldest, dearest friends helped slaughter his family ten years ago and put him on this path?

“We never questioned an order from the Fey Council or the brass, not once in ten years,” Wyatt continues. “Even the orders that didn’t make sense, that we found difficult to live with.”

I know him. I can see in his eyes and the slight downturn of his mouth that he’s thinking about Rain, the Kitsune he shot in cold blood for the simple crime of loving a human.

“Thinking back on some of them, they made sense as political moves. They drove a big damned wedge between humans and potential ally races.”

“Sunset Terrace,” I say, choking on the words.

Next to Wyatt, Phineas nods and doesn’t bother hiding a flash of grief. Several days before I died the first time, I’d hidden in the Sunset Terrace Apartments with my friend Danika, in order to escape the Hunters who wanted me dead. She helped me escape before the Triads descended and, upon orders from the brass, burned the complex to the ground with all inhabitants trapped within its walls. More than three hundred members of the Coni and Stri Clans—all birds of prey of one variety or another—died that night. The order never made sense, even as a scare tactic to keep the Clans in line, and it was directly responsible for the retaliatory attack on humans at Parker’s Palace.

The brass had to know there’d be a response of some sort, Assembly sanctioned or not, and Parker’s Palace was it.

“You don’t think the Fey Council simply condoned the attack on Sunset Terrace,” I say. “You think they ordered it through the brass?”

“Yes.”

“And I gave them a convenient excuse?”

“Yes.”

“But why—oh fuck.” It comes crashing down like a tidal wave, and everything seems fuzzy and far away for a moment. Weeks ago I accused the brass of purposely murdering the Coni and Stri because they were one of the oldest, most powerful of the Clans. The Coni are bi-shifters, able to maintain human form while still bearing wings strong enough to allow them to fly—like angels, creatures of legend. I tried to expose the brass, to make them accountable for Sunset Terrace, so the Assembly wouldn’t demand Rufus’s life in return. After circumstances secured a stay of execution on Rufus, I’d let the whole thing go.

Goddammit!

“Stone was right,” Kismet says. She sounds like she’d rather chew glass than admit it. Kismet knew what I was after back then, and she nearly killed me for it.

“She was,” Phineas says. “But had she known then, she still couldn’t have gotten to them. They never would have allowed it.”

“How could they have stopped it?”

I have a funny feeling I know what he’s going to say.

“Because the three men you called the brass were no longer human. They were full-time avatars for three of Amalie’s sprites. You were always being given her orders, protected by her whims. She’s been manipulating you. All of you.”

The room tips a little and I drop my head into my hands, elbows braced on my knees. It’s too much, too fast. Everything is falling apart, spinning out of control. And yet it all makes a perfect kind of sense, even down to this morning’s group suicide. The Fey Council has been silent for weeks. They didn’t help look for me when Thackery had me. They hid behind pacifism and refused to get involved when an elf tried to bring a demon into our world. Their invisible fingerprints cover everything. All signs point to the Council.

Wyatt and I had stood in Amalie’s presence in First Break, the underground home of the Fair Ones, and I had felt at peace there. Protected. Did she actually lie to our faces that day, or were her words chosen so carefully that it was all truth hiding behind falsehoods? I don’t know. It seems so long ago. Another lifetime.

Baylor shifts forward in his seat, angling toward Wyatt. “You’re absolutely convinced of this? That the Fey Council has been fucking with us all along?”

“Yes,” Wyatt replies without hesitation. “Amalie has been playing everyone like her own private chess set, but there was one thing she didn’t count on and it screwed up her carefully laid plans.”

“And what’s that?”

“Evy.”

I jerk upright. “Huh?”

“You,” Wyatt says. “You have consistently defied her expectations, so she’s had to improvise. And for a creature who’s been planning this for decades, improvisation doesn’t come easily. It’s probably why she’s withdrawn completely and ceased contact.”

“Why? Because she’s frustrated that I haven’t laid down and died yet?”

“Pretty much. I think that night in First Break she fully expected us to stay there until your clock ran out, so we wouldn’t interfere with Tovin’s plan.”

Okay, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Amalie told us how to stop Tovin from bringing the demon across the Break. “What are you talking about?”

“You were there, Evy, when Tovin summoned the Tainted. He was going to do it whether he had me to host the thing or not. He had those hounds in the room, and he had you at the end. If we’d stayed in First Break like Amalie wanted, Tovin would have summoned the Tainted anyway and no one would have been there to stop him.”

“Why, though? Why would Amalie have wanted the Tainted loose and uncontrollable?”

“Chaos,” Kismet says.

Wyatt nods. “The Tainted would have destroyed everything in its path. Tovin may have even gone further and loosed those caged hounds, as well as the hybrids locked in the lab. The goblins would have swarmed the streets, along with the Halfies. The city—” He stops, looks away, his temper simmering.

“Chaos,” I repeat.

“But she gave you that spell to turn the Tainted into a crystal,” Kismet said. “Why?”

“To keep playing the part of the benevolent ruler?”

“I have another theory on that,” Wyatt said. “I don’t think she intended that spell to work.”

I frown at him. “But it did.”

“Do you remember what Jaron said before she died?”

“Betrayal.” We’ve just never known what she meant.

“What happened directly before she showed up on our doorstep?”

He can’t possibly mean Alex’s funeral, so … “The earthquake. Thackery stole the crystal from the Nerei. The trolls were fighting, and some were attacking Boot Camp.”

“Exactly.”

“The Fey aren’t united,” Kismet says, catching on faster than I am. “Someone made sure the containment spell worked. You think Jaron was working against Amalie?”

“Yes,” Wyatt says. “That’s my theory.”

I struggle to maintain some semblance of composure when all I want to do is scream. In some ways, I always knew what might happen if we failed at Olsmill. While Tovin summoned the Tainted across First Break, the crystal containing the captured Tainted is currently contained and hidden far away from the Fey. A lead-lined box in the back of one of the trucks parked outside isn’t the best of places, but we’re keeping it close.

Hearing all this said out loud and knowing it’s what Amalie wanted spears my chest with a dull pain. I do not suffer betrayal well, and this … there isn’t even a word for what this is.

“But why?” Kismet asks. “What does the Fey Council gain by that sort of chaos and destruction?”

“Well, that should be obvious,” Astrid says. “The extinction of the human race.”

“Evy?”

Wyatt’s voice carries up the side of the hill long after I hear his approach through the underbrush. The sun is setting, casting the forest in shadows, and as hungry and exhausted as I am, I can’t bring myself to leave the comfort of these woods. It isn’t quiet—activity from the motel below prevents that. But it seems isolated. A private place to muddle through my thoughts.

“If you ask if I’m okay, I may have to punch you,” I say.

He laughs. I’ve missed that sound. I shift sideways on the fallen log that’s my chair. He stands a few feet away, leaning against a tree trunk, hands in the pockets of his cargo pants, a black smudge slowly melting into twilight. I want to run to him, throw my arms around his neck, and let him hold me.

Instead, I ask, “Any word from the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Bastian died a few minutes ago.”

I feel nothing at the news—just the same numbness around my heart that has been there since the meeting. “So what did they decide?”

“Gina and Adrian are talking to the other Handlers right now,” he replies. “It’ll take some time, but I think they’ll come around.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then they don’t. We can’t force anyone to accept the idea of working alongside the very creatures they’ve been taught to hate and hunt. No one changes their mind-set overnight, Evy. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” My tentative friendship with Danika planted the seeds of change that Phin’s influence forced into growing. Seeing individuals rather than an entire race, and judging each one separately. “So I guess this is what we were fighting over earlier?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“For the most part?”

He picks a path through the fallen branches and brush, each step careful and deliberate. He sits on the log without upsetting its balance, an arm’s reach of distance between us. Up close and without the lens of recent battle, I see the shadows under his eyes, the new wrinkles at the corners. The weight he’s lost and the way he’s aged. He’s not even thirty, and yet he looks close to fifty now.

“You know, part of me feels like I betrayed you,” he says, “by accepting that you’d died.”

“Wyatt, don’t.”

“No, Evy, please.” He’s speaking to me, but his attention is on the ground in front of us. “Part of me does think so. I never should have doubted you’d find a way back, and that part is so happy to have been wrong.”

“What’s the other part think?”

He draws his fingers through his hair, down his chin to scratch at his throat where his dark beard has shadowed the skin. He still won’t look at me. “The other part of me is angry and scared of getting his heart broken a third time.”

The words hit like a punch to the gut, all the more powerful because they’re honest. For Wyatt I’ve died twice, and both times I broke his heart. And I cannot guarantee it won’t happen again. Loss is part of our lives; we both know and accept this. But how do you lose the same person over and over, and still find the strength to return for more?

Do I even have the right to expect him to? I wouldn’t be here at all if Max hadn’t interfered. I told Thackery to kill me when he was finished with me, and he swore he would. Consistently defying expectations by not dying is fun when it confounds the bad guy, but not when it hurts the people I care about. Coming back ripped open a healing wound. Again.

“I get it,” I say.

“Do you? Because I’m not even sure I get it. Everything is so—”

“Different?”

He finally looks at me with utter devastation in his eyes. Glimmering with unshed tears, full of confusion and love and fear and so many things that both thrill and hurt me. “I still love you. That hasn’t changed.”

“It’s okay, Wyatt.” It isn’t okay, not one bit, but I say it anyway. I say it like I mean it because I have to. He needs this. He deserves this.

“Is it?”

“Of course.” I scoot closer and rest one hand on his knee. “I still love you, too, and even though I’ve said it only a few times, I do mean it. And you’re right. Everything is different now and we can’t pretend it isn’t. We can’t go back. We can’t fix it. We can only be who we are now.”

He turns his hand so we’re palm to palm, fingers curling tight. “And who are we?”

“I don’t know.” My throat’s tight, clogging with tears. “But I think we both need time to figure that out for ourselves before we can think about us again.” The hand around mine squeezes tighter. “A part of me died in that trailer, Wyatt, in Thackery’s lab, and I’m not entirely sure who’s still left. I’ve been free less than two days, and now everything I thought was true isn’t. I don’t know where I go from here.”

“I know the feeling.” His voice is low, raspy with emotion. “Before this morning, I was ready to turn my back on the Triads and everything I’d help build. On the people who used to count on me and call me a friend. We’d learned all of these things about the Fey, and then the Assembly and the Families came together, and I needed what they were offering me. I wanted a fresh start. Everything about the Triads reminded me of you.

“But then I heard about Boot Camp being attacked and … I can’t even explain how I felt. It was beyond personal. And then I got there and saw those kids fighting. They were so brave, and then Gina told me you were alive, and I didn’t believe her. Even when I saw you fighting that wolf, I didn’t believe it. But you were real. Everything I’d abandoned was real. The people I hurt were real, and they needed me more than ever.”

“Wyatt,” I say, drawing out his name, unsure if I even want to ask this. “If the attack hadn’t happened this morning, would Astrid and Isleen still have invited the Triads into this little task force?”

He flinches. “Not this soon, no. I’ve brought it up, but we had no way of exposing the brass and no guarantee that anyone, even Gina, would listen to me. But now—”

“Now we don’t really have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Evy, but I do think that joining us is the lesser of many evils. And we’ll be five times stronger than we ever were before. Not only in numbers, but in abilities and knowledge and political power. Instead of bullying the Families and Clans, we’ll be working with them. Cooperating instead of ordering around. And if Amalie really is trying to instigate some sort of surface civil war, we’ll have a much stronger position from which to fight back.”

“You’re right.”

“But?”

“No buts.” I poke him in the shoulder. “I can’t say you’re right without adding a but?”

“You can. You just rarely do.”

We smile, and it feels so normal. So much like us—here, alone in the woods, with the problems of the world seeming so far away, as if the last three weeks never happened. Only they did, and we’ll remember that as soon as we rejoin the others. So many things still need to be said before either of us can heal.

“I’m not sorry I went with Thackery.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind. I don’t think I can ever tell Wyatt that I asked Thackery to kill me, but I can tell him about this.

He flinches. “I know. It was the right decision.”

“The right decision for everyone else.”

“Well, it was a Bigger Picture kind of moment.”

“It always is, and that’s okay. This is the life we chose.” Dusky shadows lengthen on the ground as twilight wanes. “Do you ever think about how different things would have turned out if you’d gotten Tybalt instead of me four years ago?”

Wyatt arches both eyebrows, expression going thoughtful. “Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t have kissed him that night I came over to your place drunk off my ass.”

“You remember that?”

“Parts of it.”

“You never said anything.”

“I was embarrassed, Evy. I never should have gone over there, much less kissed you.”

“Well, now that I know more about the anniversary in question, I’m glad you did.” My thoughts jump back to Rufus and his part in the reason behind that particular anniversary. It isn’t my secret to tell, and yet I feel like I’m lying to Wyatt simply by keeping my mouth shut.

“You’ve been part of my life, blonde or brunette, for the last four years, Evy Stone,” he says. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it. And for a while you weren’t, and I hated it. I hated the guy I was, and I hated you for leaving me.” He seems to realize just how tightly he’s been squeezing my hand and relaxes his grip. “You said that a part of you died in that trailer, and you aren’t sure what’s left.”

I nod, positive I know what’s coming.

“Part of me died with you,” he says, voice tight. Near the breaking point. “Died when I accepted you were gone. And I don’t know who’s left, either.”

“Maybe, um.” I swallow against the lump in my throat. “Maybe we both need time to figure that out. Time to just … make sense of the world again.”

“Apart.” It isn’t a question.

I laugh, and it’s a hollow sound. “Well, we’re going to be working together, I think, so ‘apart’ is a relative term.”

“Right.”

“We’re not going anywhere, Wyatt, but no pressure, no expectations. For a while. I think we both need this.” I tell myself it’s for him as much as me, but I’m being selfish. Incredibly selfish with the two hardest secrets I’ve ever kept from him.

“For a while,” he says. His voice cracks.

He opens his arms and I fall against his chest, clinging to his warmth despite the heat of the evening. I rest my cheek against his heart and listen to it beat for a while, as his free hand strokes my back, his chin a comfortable weight on the top of my head.

We’re still sitting like that a while later when Kismet finds us and delivers good news: our three-way alliance among humans, Therians, and vampires is a go.