She was afraid. She was very afraid.
Alaric had seen this before. People-grown men and women, other guards just like him-who’d come back from missions exactly the way Meena was right now, slinking around in abject terror, afraid of their own shadows because of the demonic horrors they’d seen in the field.
He didn’t want her going off with the prince.
But he couldn’t let her go on this way, either.
Even if it meant losing her.
He took a deep breath and said, “If I’ve learned anything in this life, Meena, it’s that there are a lot of scary things out there. Sometimes I just want to go into a windowless room until the sun comes back up, and the scary things have gone away. But the truth is…those scary things aren’t going to just go away on their own.”
Meena, as if she sensed where he was headed with this, started to pull her hand away, shaking her head. Her eyes had filled with tears.
But he wouldn’t release her fingers from his. Because she had to hear it.
No matter how much she didn’t want to. “Because it turns out I have a gift,” he went on. “And that gift is that I’m good at killing scary things. So I use my gift to help others who aren’t as strong as I am, in order to make the world a safer place for them. I can’t lock myself into a windowless room until the sun comes back up, Meena. No matter how much I might want to sometimes.”
She whipped her head toward him, starting to protest.
But he just held her hand and went on.
“Because my job is to face the scary things. And I think deep down, Meena, you know that’s your job, too. That maybe the reason people like you and me were put here on this earth was so that everyone else-people who don’t have our gifts-can sleep in their windowless rooms while we make the world a little bit safer for them.”
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he saw why.
She was crying.
Well…he hadn’t meant to make her cry.
Maybe he couldn’t do anything right. Maybe there was no Alaric Wulf magic. Maybe Holtzman was right, and he really did need that counseling.
After a little while she looked up and said, “I’ve been a fool.”
“I don’t think you’re a fool,” he said.
He wanted to say a lot of other things. But he wasn’t suffering from blood loss anymore. So he kept silent.
She yanked on her hand again. This time, he let go.
She took that hand and pressed it, along with her casted hand, to her eyes, which were red with unshed tears.
“You really are annoying sometimes,” she said.
Martin often told him the same thing. “I know,” he said, agreeing.
“Why do you do this to me?” she asked, drying her eyes with the edge of his bedsheet. He doubted she’d find it very absorbent. The thread count couldn’t have been very high at all.
He longed to put his arms around her, to hold her.
But he was afraid she’d slap him.
Or that Holtzman would walk in. Either would have been equally embarrassing.
And besides, he couldn’t lean forward far enough to get his arms around her because of his stupid leg, which was hanging in traction.
Then, her eyes dry, she stood up.
She’d be leaving now, he supposed, his depression complete. And he had no idea if he’d ever even see her again.
Except, to his surprise, instead of leaving, she laid her uninjured hand on his chest.
“I don’t suppose,” she said, “we’re even now, are we?”
He shook his head, not understanding what she meant.
His confusion increased when she bent down and kissed him gently on the cheek, the way she had in the rectory that night.
“Probably not,” she said when she straightened. “I think I still owe you. Plus, you saved Jack, too.”
Oh. She meant all the times he’d saved her life. But she didn’t owe him for that. That was his job.
“You need a shave,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Tomorrow do you want me to bring you some stuff to shave with?”
“Yes,” he said, his mood suddenly brightening.
She’d been the only one to offer. The only one.
This was why he loved her.
Plus, she’d said she was coming to visit again tomorrow.
No, it wasn’t the same as saying she was going to take the job.
And maybe it was only because she was going to be visiting her friend in the maternity ward, anyway, and so it was easy for her to swing by to see him, too.
But by tomorrow, he’d have another speech ready for her, about how she belonged with the Palatine.
And when she came the next day-and she would; he knew she would-he’d have another.
And eventually, he’d wear her down. That’s how the old Alaric Wulf magic worked.
And even if the Alaric Wulf magic didn’t exist-Martin often said it didn’t-one of these days, they were going to have to let him out of traction, and he was going to stumble into some more danger.
And then she wasn’t going to be able to resist warning him to stay out of it.
And that’s when he’d point out, with the kind of brilliant and in-arguable logic for which he was so widely known, that she might just as well get paid to do this for a living.
She would be powerless in the face of such superior intellectual reasoning.
“Okay,” Meena said. She smiled and reached out to run her finger over some of the razor stubble on his cheek. He was careful to keep very still while she did this, so she wouldn’t stop. This was another example of how the Alaric Wulf magic worked. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, that was when she turned around and left.
But his hospital room didn’t seem nearly as unbearable to Alaric after that as it had before she’d come to pay her visit.
In fact, suddenly it felt downright cheerful.
Alaric didn’t think this was the result of powerful neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, being released in his brain.
He decided it was because of the daisies.
Alaric probably would have felt completely differently if he’d had the slightest idea about where Meena Harper was going…that his speech about not sleeping in windowless rooms had convinced her, not that she had to join the Palatine Guard to help him battle the forces of evil, but that she had to go, as soon as she left the hospital, to the single place that most terrified her and to which he’d made her promise not to go at all.
Chapter Sixty-one
8:00 P.M., Friday, April 23
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Meena wasn’t sure what made her go back to her apartment.
Everyone told her not to. Alaric, who’d been there and seen the horrific destruction for himself. Abraham Holtzman, referring to his handbook about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it would only make hers worse. Sister Gertrude, who was practical and kind about these things.
Even Jon, who’d been there, too, to see if he could salvage any of his own things.
“It’s awful,” he’d said with a shudder. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
But Meena did want to know. Ever since that night…
She tried not to think about that night. She didn’t want to think about it because every time she started to, the tears came, and with them the conviction that Lucien was dead.
He had to be dead.
And then came the horrible hollow sensation in the middle of her chest…
And then, just as terrible, the fear that he wasn’t dead. What if he wasn’t dead, and still loved her, and wanted them to be together?
Which was worse?
The fact that she didn’t know was what made her decide she couldn’t think about it at all. Just not at all.
Not thinking about it was easier than anyone might have imagined. Every time she started to think about it, she just shoved all thoughts, all memories, anything and everything connected to Lucien Antonescu from her mind and thought firmly about something else.
She kept herself so busy at St. Clare’s that she didn’t really have time to think about Lucien. There were the dishes to do after every meal, the pots and pans and casserole dishes piled high in the in the rectory kitchen sink. Cleaning them was Meena’s penance for the burns everyone had sustained because of her. She scoured them until they gleamed, sometimes late into the night, just her, alone in the kitchen, with the sponge and her rubber gloves and the hot soapy water.