Page 26

26. Ruthless

Rome

Kerry was gone when I woke up again. Gray light filtered through the curtains, telling me it was dawn. I stretched, felt the duct tape pull at skin and hair, and gritted my teeth when fire ran up my side. My head felt better, though, and the numbing exhaustion was gone.

I sat up with a groan, swung my feet over the side of the bed, picked up yesterday’s jeans from the floor, and pulled them on. Seeing a sketchbook laying on the table by the window, I picked it up and opened it.

My jaw dropped.

Well, who would have thought? Kerry has talent . Real talent.

The first page had been cut out and the next couple were covered in random bits and pieces - parts of faces, flowers, a leaf, a glob of spit. I stared at a little Hellcat hissing and spitting in a corner and wondered why, of all things, Kerry had drawn that .

When Gemma started taking over every page, I grinned. There she was again and again - smiling, frowning, crying, laughing, blushing - until about halfway through the book when a pair of drawings stopped me cold.

In the first one, she lay crumpled on a sidewalk with a nearby street lamp providing a pool of light around her. Darkness seeped from her shoulder and spread in a puddle beneath her, staining the white circle. Agony lit her eyes and her lips twisted with pain.

On the page directly opposite, she knelt next to a prone figure on a wooden floor. The body was vaguely drawn with few details, but I could tell it was supposed to be Kerry. She held his hand in one of hers and touched his cheek with the other. Her face radiated sympathy, compassion in every tear that streamed from her eyes. The background was hazy, like it would be in a dream, distorted by the glow surrounding Gemma like a halo.

A nightmare and a glimpse of heaven? I studied the twin scenes. At least I know why he calls her angel now. That’s how he sees her in his mind.

“The one on the left is the night she found me,” Kerry’s voice came from over my shoulder.

I jumped. I hadn’t even heard the door opening. He must have gone for a run; his shirt was soaked with sweat and his hair plastered to his head. He stood very still, and his eyes burned.

I didn’t move a muscle. He was definitely in a bad head space, and I didn’t want to trigger an explosion. That would only get people hurt and delay our search for the others.

“I apologize. This is private and I shouldn’t have looked.”

“I almost killed her that night. On the other page is the night the wardens exorcized the demon. I thought I’d died and was stuck in Limbo and dreaming of her. But she really did come to heal me. Me . The demon-tainted guy who’d tried to kill her not a week before.” His voice cracked. “Do you think she hates me now?”

Once more, I wished Chance was here, so I could hand this over to him. All I knew to do was keep everyone as calm as possible.

“No. No way.” I took a chance and moved enough to lay the sketchbook back on the table. “You said it yourself. You almost killed her and she healed you. That’s not hate. Far from it.”

“She doesn’t trust me.” He turned his head. “And now, I let her be taken by an enemy.”

“You didn’t let anything happen. That was as much my fault as yours. I knew the trap was coming, but I sent them ahead anyway. Anyway, she’ll know you’re coming for her, won’t she?”

“Oh, yeah. Even if she doubts everything else about me, she won’t doubt that.”

“Listen, she does trust you.” I frowned. “She made a dumb mistake. And probably not even for the reasons you think. I’ll bet my blades she was more worried about how you would live with yourself than the fact that you’d killed an innocent human.”

“Yeah, that sounds like her way of thinking.” He bowed his head and clenched his hands into white-knuckled fists. “Promise me something.”

Uh-oh. I’m not going to like this .

“When we get there, if she’s—” Faint blue embers swirled out of his mouth with every breath. “If the worst has happened, forget me and grab as many as you can, then go. As far and as fast as you can.”

“I won’t leave you behind.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not … safe … at the best of times, but if she’s d—” His chest heaved. “If we get there and find only corpses—”

“Don’t! We will find them. We will save them. Positive thinking, karma, God, luck, destiny, fate, whatever you believe in, we need it on our side right now.”

I took a deep breath. Barking at him wasn’t going to help.

“Don’t think you’re going to get there and lose it, okay? That’s giving yourself permission. Tell yourself you’re going to keep it together no matter what we find. Then it’ll be easier to hold yourself to a higher standard and resist the temptation.”

He met my eyes for a long moment, and I could tell that was a new concept for him. To hold himself accountable to a standard he’d set rather than trying to meet everyone else’s.

Maybe it will give him food for thought. Or at least distract him a bit.

“I promise to try,” he said at last, “if you promise you’ll do what I asked if I can’t.’

“All right, all right!”

“If there was something I could do right now!” He plowed his hands through his wet hair. “I have too much time to think. I’m useless!”

I understood that feeling all too well. I didn’t want to tell the story, but I could share enough that it might help him.

“Last year, one of my team members started dating a guy who stank of taint. Turned out he was working with a black magician. A necromancer. Long story short, they ‘accidentally’ turned her into a zombie and sicced her on us.”

Kerry grimaced. He already knew what came next, but I said it anyway.

“I had to destroy her.”

“That’s rough. What was her name?”

“Zoe Becerra.” I rubbed a hand across my face. “The point is, it’s hard for warriors to accept that we can’t fix everything. It’s drilled into us that we can, or we develop that way of thinking ourselves because we’re so powerful and almost always leaders on missions. In the end, though, we can only do the best we can do. And right now, the best we can do is look for a lead.”

“Yeah. Still hard to do.” He hung his head and was quiet for a moment, then looked at me. “About Zoe being turned into a zombie. You said ‘accidentally’ in a way that makes it sound like you think it wasn’t.”

“I don’t.” I had never thought it was an accident. “Something more was going on there, but the wardens are a tight-lipped bunch during an investigation. It was a closed trial, so we weren’t privy to all the information. I know the boyfriend’s in The Box on a life sentence and that’s about all we were told.”

“I would have killed him outright, and you’re enough like me that you would have done the same. Does that make us wicked?”

“No, it makes us ruthless.”

“I don’t know that word.”

He flushed a little, and I wondered if he was embarrassed to admit it.

“Without mercy.” I shrugged to show it was no big deal.

“Oh. Gemma told me that mercy was a virtue. I’ve been thinking about that for a while, but I still don’t get it. Ruthless, though, that I understand just fine.”

Again I was struck by the dichotomy of Kerry’s mind. On one side, he was a child seeing the world for the first time and striving to gulp in as much knowledge as he could as fast as he could. On the other, he was a feral killer - and the only person in the world he loved was in his enemies’ hands.

Yep. About what I figured. Bad head space.

“What was Zoe’s power?” he asked.

“Bibliothecary, and she had a side talent for transmuting.” I could see he didn’t recognize the term and elaborated so he didn’t have to sink his pride again to ask. “Changing things on an elemental level. A simple transmute turns rocks into mud. A harder one would make steel transparent. The most difficult would be transmuting something alive. Like turning a bird into—”

“I know what it is now,” he interrupted. “Where I’m from, we call it a tailor. What about the black magician? The necromancer.”

“Clem volunteered to hunt him down after the Council rendered a death verdict.” I shrugged. “I think the old man gets bored. Or he wants to feel like he’s doing something. Like us right now.”

Kerry frowned, but said nothing.

“Want to get showered while I’ll wake everyone up?” I tried to stretch and winced as my ribs started to throb. “You and I could get the shopping out of the way, at least.”

“Do you feel like getting outta bed?” He toed off his sneakers and kicked them into a corner.

“Not really, but I need to walk to keep my lungs clear. You’ll have to do any heavy lifting. Maybe driving, too.”

“Sure.” He nodded and headed toward the bathroom, stripping out of his sweat-soaked clothes as he walked. Then he stopped at the sink.

“Rome?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for telling me about Zoe. It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“Yeah, it was.” I hung my head, feeling the shame of that failure wash over me yet again. “I was her team leader. I should have been able to save her.”

“Woulda, shoulda, coulda. That’s what you told me, remember?” he retorted. “And my warden says you gotta keep moving forward. Even if it’s a baby step at a time, you have to keep trying. Evil wins when we give up.”

“Then take your own advice.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Forgive Gemma when she asks you to and move past it. Don’t run away because you think you’re not good enough.”

“How did you— Never mind.” He made a face at me. “Must suck being a know-it-all.”

“It does.” I grinned and dodged his wadded-up shirt.