“Mr. Francis?” Kyle said incredulously. I pulled the towel off my head to see him standing slack-jawed. “Mr. Francis hired a witch to make a zombie to kill me?” After a moment, he shook off his shock. “I thought for sure it would be Nyelund.”
“Covington said she’d pay for half if we told her who hired someone to kill you,” I told him. “It was Sullivan who shot me”—Kyle looked at the red mark on my shoulder that was all that was left of the wound—“but he won’t be a threat to anyone anymore.”
Nadia broke Sullivan—but she’d aimed that magic at me, too. I wasn’t supposed to think about Kyle anymore, I was supposed to leave off the investigation with the feeling that everything would be all right. And I wasn’t supposed to remember the magic she’d worked to ensure that result. She’d spent so long teaching everyone to underestimate her, she’d overestimated herself.
Kyle frowned at me. “Tell me.”
So I told him about Sean Nyelund while I got dressed. I paced restlessly and told him about Nadia while he sat on the bench at the foot of the bed and watched me.
“Justice was served, Warren,” he said when I finished. “I’m sorry it had to be you who served it.”
“I’m not,” I told him. I’d only done what I needed to protect my own. I’d do it again.
He smiled a little as if he knew something I didn’t. “If you say so.”
“She was right,” I said.
“Who was?”
“Nadia. She said the red dress might be useful in finding out who’d killed Toni McFetters.”
He reached up and caught my hand, pulling me down to sit beside him.
“You liked her,” he told me.
“She had a prom photo in her house.” On top of the curio cabinet. “Toni’s husband had taken Nadia to her high school prom. That red dress Toni was wearing? It was Nadia’s prom dress; so were the pearls and shoes, near as I could tell. He’d taken her to the prom and hardly remembered her.” She’d remembered him, though. I’d expected to have to search her house for Toni’s missing belongings or, if that hadn’t worked, wake Nadia up and question her. She’d made things easy for me.
“Elizaveta only objected that she’d exposed herself as a witch to the humans,” Kyle said. “If you hadn’t told her that, she would have left Nadia alone. You didn’t have to kill her.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking now. Tell me that’s not what is bothering you.”
It wasn’t. Not quite. I was thinking that she had attacked Kyle and part of me would have been happier if I’d eaten her. It had taken more will than I’d thought I had not to eat the old man next door, who was even more to blame than Nadia.
I stared at Kyle. I know that the wolf must have been showing through, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes.
“She was escalating,” he said. “She killed for money and learned to like it. She killed Toni because Toni and her husband jogged past her house every day and they were happy. She tried to kill me because we are happy.”
He thought I was a hero. He needed to know better.
“I killed two people last night,” I told him. “Premeditated murder.” I swallowed, but told him the other part of it, too. “I enjoyed it.”
He kissed me. When he was finished, he told me, “You’re a werewolf—a predator. A skilled killer, but not an indiscriminate one. So am I. If my prey is still writhing when I’m finished, it doesn’t make me any less a predator.”
I looked at him and he gave me a crooked grin. “Ready to get rid of that apartment yet?”
I laughed and leaned into him.
“Maybe,” I said. “Just maybe.”
REDEMPTION
I knew, as soon as I brought Ben onstage in Moon Called, what his history was. I had to know so that his actions remained logically consistent throughout the series—though I didn’t know if I would ever bring them to light.
I am not an outline writer. The one book that I did write with a real, honest-to-goodness outline was really difficult for me to finish—since I already knew the ending, I didn’t feel that drive that usually pumps me through the last half of the book. That doesn’t mean I don’t do any planning on the large scale, but it makes for some interesting events on the small. Toward the end of Iron Kissed, Mercy is hurt. Adam, torn by guilt and unwilling to hurt her more, leaves Mercy—but not unguarded. Now who, I thought, should he send to guard Mercy? Warren was too . . . predictable. I could have sent one of the women. But, on a whim, I threw in Ben. What followed took me totally by surprise in the best of all possible ways—Ben was the perfect person.
Ben is in the process of change. We mere mortals have only seventy or so years in which to get over the bad things that have happened to us—and the bad things we’ve done. I found an event that would be pivotal for Ben—and a chance to bring in some of the weird and absurd things my husband ran into in his years as a DBA (database administrator) for a huge government contractor.
I would, in the interest of fairness, like to point out that although the IT (information technology) field is, for whatever reason, heavily dominated by men, Ben’s company, thanks to government hiring incentives, has many competent women in both the DBA and programming departments. But this is told (mostly) from Ben’s viewpoint, and Ben has issues with women in general, so his viewpoint is a little skewed.
The events in “Redemption” take place between Frost Burned and Night Broken.
“Hello, you have reached the Prophet support line. This is Bob, how may I help you?” said a cheery voice with a distinctively Indian accent, and Ben snorted.
For some reason, the database company thought it would sound better to give their overseas customer-service reps American names. Ben didn’t call the general number anymore, bouncing himself up the ladder of help-desk services a few tiers by using the personal number of a competent IT rep (IT stands for “information technology”—techspeak for people who know which end of a computer is up), so he could converse with someone who could actually do something. “Bob” was pretty sharp.
“Hey, Rajeev,” Ben said. “It’s me over here in Washington State. I need to talk to you about this f . . .” He drew in a deep breath and counted to ten. “Ducky. This ducky new package your company sold ours.”
“Ben?” Rajeev asked a little uncertainly. “Is this Ben?”
Rajeev and he had known each other, by phone, for a long time.
“It’s me,” Ben confirmed.
“Ducky?”
Thanks to Ben, Rajeev knew more English swearwords than all of his buddies in India combined—which explained his tentative greeting.
“I have a bet,” Ben told him. “No swearing for a week. There’s a bottle of eighteen-year-old scotch in the balance.” Werewolves might not get drunk, but that didn’t affect the flavor, or even the initial hit of a good, old, smoky scotch. It wasn’t that he couldn’t buy his own bottle of scotch, but the bet was with his Alpha—it was the principle of the thing.
“Ah.” In the following silence, Ben heard Rajeev calculating Ben’s chances for a moment before he recalled that someone might be monitoring the call for efficiency. “Good luck with that. You called with a problem?”
Reminded of his troubles, Ben growled. “Yes. This program is a piece of . . . of junk. My boss says his boss thought it would be a s . . . spiffy idea to replace my program that does a . . . perfectly adequate job already with this . . . program. I expect the . . . nice gentleman in question is getting a f . . . fiddling kickback.”