“No,” he answered, with a quick jerk of his head. “I left voluntarily.”
“But why?” Please don’t say it was for me, I thought silently. Not when it was the only home he’d ever known. The place he loved above all others. “They’re the ones infected.”
“But I’m the one who got Marlo killed.”
“Unknowingly.”
“Well, you know Warren. Even if he didn’t say it…”
He blamed Hunter. Anger rose in me at that. Mr. Black and White. Mr. Right or Wrong. Mr. Light or Shadow, and nothing in between. “Yeah,” I finally said on a sigh. “I know Warren.”
Hunter began brushing Luna’s hair from his clothing, careful not to look at me as he spoke. “Have I ever told you why I don’t drink?” he said abruptly.
I quirked a brow. I’d seen him intoxicated twice in the past week. He looked up as my silence lengthened, read the thoughts on my face, and chuckled darkly. “Before all this, I mean. Why I haven’t allowed myself a drink in almost ten years?”
I shook my head. Nobody’d told me, and I couldn’t imagine what his not drinking had to do with anything now.
“You should know,” he mumbled, then swallowed hard as he ate up the distance between us. His hands were shoved in his pockets, like he didn’t know what to do with them, and he shifted from one foot to the other, a nervous gesture for Hunter Lorenzo. “It would all make a lot more sense if you knew.”
Something making sense. That would be new. I gestured to the bed, and when he sat-sinking a good few inches into the downy comforter-I took a seat on the white bench at the bed’s footboard. It was both firmer and closer to the door. Hunter, of course, knew what I was doing, and he let me, which went a long way to helping me relax further.
“Okay,” I said, wrapping my arms around one up-drawn knee. “So why don’t you drink?”
“Because whiskey nearly killed me a decade ago.”
I drew back, startled, and Hunter let out a humorless laugh, pulling his ankle up to cross his knee, looking large and dangerous and tough, even surrounded by eyelet and lace. “Well, it wasn’t just the whiskey,” he said, and told me the story.
He’d just come off a mission, rescuing a commuter airliner from the Shadows, who’d hijacked it and were flying it right over Nellis air base. It was going to be shot down in seconds, as close as he’d ever come to being killed, and he said he’d never felt the passing of time so acutely. I could imagine. Agents couldn’t be killed by mortal weapons, but if you happened to be blown to smithereens? I shuddered at the thought. Even if he’d lived, it’d take some doing to put those pieces back together again.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head, “chalk another one up for the agents of Light. But I was ready for a little vacation after that, which I took as soon as I got back.”
In the form of a shot glass and a bottle.
He sighed at the memory, and when he spoke, it almost sounded apologetic. “See, I’m not like Warren. I don’t believe in a greater cause, or in the troop as an institution. I believe in people. Individuals.” He looked at me, and I knew that’s why he had tested me so greatly in the beginning, why he’d remained on my side since I’d proven myself to him, and why he kissed me even after I revealed the darkness living in my core. He knew my Shadow side and he still believed in me. “There has to be a deeper involvement for me. I…feel more if it’s personal. I feel alive.” He snorted. “And if there was anything I needed to feel that night, it was alive.”
So when the raven-haired siren with the lush lips and the body that wouldn’t quit asked if she could join him, he welcomed the company, ordered another shot glass, and drove away the Reaper with some hard-core XXX flirting.
“In retrospect, I knew something was wrong,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, wincing. “I scented deceit on her, but didn’t want to admit it. I tasted guile in her kiss, a smoky heaviness that found harbor inside me. You possess the same flavor, though not as strong. I recognized it when we shared the aureole.”
I licked my lips self-consciously, and he hesitated, but I motioned for him to go on. If he really believed in individuals-in me-then I didn’t have to apologize for who and what I was. So, he continued, even though his instincts told him something was off, he’d ignored them and took the woman home. He shook his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know how I woke up when I did, but she was straddling me, naked but for a tomahawk bowing toward my heart. I killed her in the bed that still smelled like our lovemaking.”
I was about to say, So? when he cut me off with a shake of his head.
“I’d…been with her only minutes earlier. I know the alcohol was clouding my senses, but it also slowed every moment so that her death seemed to take years, not minutes. So even as her last breath rattled in her chest I was still seeing her in a lover’s light. If I let myself, I can see her even now.”
And he looked at me like he hoped I might understand that.
What I understood was that in telling me this he wasn’t only explaining why he didn’t drink, but that he knew how I could allow a Shadow to live. That even those of us who should know better sometimes mistook them for human.
“What was her name?” I asked softly.
“The Shadow woman who so ruthlessly seduced me?” he said, but the teasing note couldn’t mask his shame. I nodded. He shrugged self-consciously. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.” And he stood, turned his back on me, and headed out the room. Topic closed.
I was about to pursue it anyway when I noticed something else not quite right. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Hunter was back in the room in a shot. I’d probably injected more alarm in my words than necessary, but as I crossed to Olivia’s desk, I said it again. Louder.
“The computer’s missing.”
“What computer?” Hunter turned, eyes falling on the empty desk.
“Exactly,” I said, whirling on him. “You haven’t left the apartment in three days?”
“I’ve been here the whole time.”
So before that…not that it narrowed things down much. I’d been gone from the apartment for almost three weeks. Yet Luna wouldn’t have let a Shadow just waltz in here and walk out with Olivia’s computer. Not without putting up a fight, and there was no sign of struggle, nor-I confirmed-had there been when Hunter arrived to make himself at home. Still, this didn’t sit right. A random break-in at a guarded, high-rise condo…and nobody noticed someone leaving with a desktop computer they hadn’t walked in with?
“I’ll have to report it,” I said, mostly talking to myself. “Maybe they’ll let me see the building’s security tapes.”
“You think it’s a lead.” He stated it as a fact, and I turned back to face him.
“It’s something.” I didn’t add it was all I had to go on. He could probably see that for himself.
“Let me help,” he said, lifting his chin.
I didn’t have to say anything. He knew my thoughts. What about the second sign of the Zodiac? What about Marlo’s death, still lying between us like an unbreachable river? Even the most understanding guy in the world, and Hunter certainly wasn’t that, couldn’t erase all that.
“It wasn’t fair to let you take the blame for everything that happened.” His voice, steady now, had lost the thickness it’d possessed while relaying the past. “I kissed you too, but I was in shock back at the sanctuary, and before that I was just acting like a hormone-crazed teen. Chasing you into that maze. Pouting when you said no that night in my room. Kissing another girl just to make you jealous.” He shook his head, sighing with the movement. It was a look he usually reserved for Felix, and I would have smiled but for his next words. “Marlo died for no good reason, and I want to right that. I want to make it right.”