With black hair shoved behind his ears, he wiped a blood smear from his knuckles onto his jeans and offered, “You know, I’ve never had a problem with hitting a girl.”
Promise was correct: I really had raised him right.
I pulled the ice pack away from my nose and felt the bridge—straight and unmarred. As he’d said, unbroken. “A girl might be one thing,” I said, the taste of salt still on my tongue. “You’d be hitting a woman who would then paddle your ass like the Whiffle-ball-bat wielding child that you are.”
“Ye of little faith.” There was a dark tone under the flippant words that had me shaking my head.
I cuffed his head lightly. I did have one person to depend on always. It was well worth remembering. I filled him in on what Promise had told me. Seamus’s agenda had more history behind it than we suspected. It made his brutal jealousy easier to understand.
“In all honesty, I’m not sure who’s to blame, Promise or me.” Everyone else—Robin, Cherish, and her companion—had gone to bed. Cal and I stood alone in the living room. The lights were low but I could still see my breath form in the cold air leaking around the plastic. “Sophia made sure you and I both have our issues.”
“Issues?” he echoed incredulously. “Jesus, Nik. People on Dr. Phil have issues. We have atomic-powered, demonic-flavored, fresh-from-the-pits-of-hell, full-blown fucking neuroses. Freud would’ve been in a corner sucking his thumb after one session with us. And don’t ever think our bitch of a mother did worse by me than you. She stole your childhood, she was the reason you had to stand between me and her again and again, she made you the one that had to tell the truth, because all she could do was lie. Thanks to her, we both have walls around us like steel. If she ever taught us anything, it was that the only one we can trust is each other.”
He looked at me and winced. “Black eyes. Sorry.” Pushing my hand with the ice pack back toward my nose, he continued, “We learned differently with Robin. He lies for fun. He doesn’t mean it. He’s so full of shit with us we wouldn’t believe him for a second.” Which was true, and a puck’s way of being honest. “But Promise . . .” Cal shrugged.
I waited for him to say “I told you so.” He was the one who had smelled Seamus’s scent transferred from her to me. I expected him to tell me to cut her loose immediately. But he didn’t. Not quite.
“She didn’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “Maybe she didn’t lie outright, but she didn’t tell you she has a kid, about Seamus, that they were a family. That’s a big deal. Huge. If she’s not telling you that, what else isn’t she telling you?”
“You think I should give her up, then?” That freed pain wasn’t going anywhere. It simmered and swelled like the ache of a broken bone. It wasn’t alone. There was anger there as well—anger and betrayal.
His lips turned downward at the corners. “What do I think? Let’s see. I have a woman who loved me but I couldn’t be with because—forget truth—she wouldn’t tell me any damn thing at all. And I’m sleeping with a wolf who if she wants an after-sex snack might decide that’s me, but I still like her anyway.”
I hadn’t known that . . . that there might be the potential for more than sex between Delilah and him. I should have. Delilah wasn’t afraid of Cal. That was rare among the supernatural community, and I knew how incredible that must’ve felt to him—to be accepted. How could he not want more of that?
“What do I think?” He mused as he bent to pick up his gun from the coffee table. “I think you deserve the best,” he murmured, studiously not looking at me as he turned away to absently eject the clip from his Glock and slam it home again. “But there’s no such thing as the best. There’s good enough, though. Sometimes. Can you trust her for good enough?” He started for the hall, pausing only to say, “She made you happy, Nik. A happy brother’s not such a bad thing. And, Nik? I don’t have a problem being suspicious enough for both of us.”
When he was gone, I thought of how Promise hoped her daughter cared for her. I never had to hope my family cared for me. I knew.
Family—it can be the making of you or the breaking of you. If it had been only me as a child with Sophia, with no one to protect, to stand with, to share that cold, empty life . . . Sophia could’ve been the breaking of me. Cal . . . Cal had been the making of me.
I settled in to watch for the Auphe, Seamus, and any more of Cherish’s problems. I turned the lights all the way down and did silent katas in the dark. You could lose yourself in the smooth movements, in the structure and the balance. If you let yourself. I didn’t. I moved and listened and watched. I shifted the inner tangle of emotions aside and pushed away the image of pale blond and earth-brown hair spread over a silver-gray pillowcase. I ignored the phantom sensation of skin against mine, intermingled breath, and a giving warmth under my hands.
Conflict and confusion could get you killed. Focus and a calm mind kept you alive.
I doubted Seamus felt conflicted or confused—he knew exactly what he wanted—but that next morning he was dead nonetheless.
The sun was barely coming up when Cal’s cell phone rang. It was lying on the couch where he’d discarded it after calling Samuel hours before. I wasn’t surprised it was Samuel again. Cal wasn’t the most social of creatures. Very few people had his number, especially since he’d convinced Robin to stop writing it on bathroom walls.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Niko?” Samuel said.
“Yes,” I repeated evenly. Despite his help with the cadejos, I was still on the fence regarding Samuel. I couldn’t imagine that would change anytime soon.
From his reserved tone, he picked up on that. “We have a cleanup at your friend Seamus’s place. You might want to take a look first, since he was your client.”
“He’s hardly our friend and no longer our client,” I said shortly. “If we do go there and he’s alive, I’ll kill him. And as I’m human, I can be as overt as I care to be. And right now I’m in the mood to be extremely overt.”
“Trust me, the alive thing, you don’t have to worry about that.”
He was right. An hour later we were looking at Seamus’s body and head, neither of which shared a relationship anymore. When that person was trying to kill you, you like to see that sort of thing with your own eyes. To be certain—and I was certain: Seamus wouldn’t be a problem for me anymore.
“Well, this has to be the best news you’ve had all week,” Robin observed, nudging the decapitated head with a foot covered in one highly expensive shoe. There was very little mess. Once the heart stops beating, which would’ve been nearly instantaneously, there’s nothing to pump the blood out. Despite what most literature said, vampires did have hearts that beat as human ones did, and they stopped just the same.
“He’s been drinking blood,” Cal reappeared from a quick recon of the loft.
Promise, who’d been looking at Seamus without a hint of emotion in her eyes, lifted her gaze. “Drinking? How do you know?”
“The dead girl in the bathtub was pretty much a dead giveaway,” he answered grimly. “Her neck’s torn out. I guess Seamus wasn’t taking those Flintstone vitamins you guys swear by. Bastard.” He delivered a perfunctory kick to Seamus’s body, which rocked under the blow.
Although she had said she would kill him herself, Promise now winced and said with dark melancholy, “Seamus, cara mo anam, how far you fell.”