Page 10

Chapter 10

Frost

Four hours and twenty-seven minutes.

That was how long it took Caspian to tell the woman everything he remembered about his “accidents,” and it got worse and worse as we went. The attempted hit and run. The multiple muggings that were clearly less muggings and more assaults. The ancient statue at a temple that had just happened to come loose and fall right at the moment Caspian was standing underneath it, like something from a children’s cartoon that resulted in a comically flattened coyote.

Suddenly, my mind was combing through every moment I’d been in his presence, and every move he’d made took on a new, sinister shade.

In some ways, he drove like Kit always accused me of driving: like someone’s eighty-year-old grandmother. Regularly five miles an hour under the speed limit and stopping at every intersection to check if someone was coming even if the road was quiet and empty. I had thought of it as responsible, but now I realized it was an excess of caution.

At every loud sound, he’d spun and looked for danger. Every time someone exclaimed, every time something in the room changed, he jumped and looked around. He stood with his back to walls, eyes constantly scanning the area. Some of it had reminded me of Kit, and the way he was now, but some of it . . .

Post-traumatic stress disorder, my college psychology course told me. A nearly textbook-perfect example of it.

And of course he had post-traumatic stress disorder, how could he not? Someone had been trying to kill him since he was . . . well, we’d gotten back to his thirteenth birthday and being handed a glass of punch that had landed him in the hospital, and there was no end in sight.

The burgeoning pain in my head from overusing Vex’s power during the accident was not helping, starting with a tickle at my temples, ramping up as the hours passed to throbbing in time with my heartbeat. The world got brighter and louder and worse as it did, and I suspected that by sundown, I’d be either asleep or curled up in a ball wishing to die.

Officer Emery, the cop who’d come to take Caspian’s statement, looked like she wanted to leap out of her chair and hug him.

Also, she’d had to give up on her little paper notebook and start taking notes on her phone, because there was just too much to track. Too many attempts on his life, because there couldn’t be any doubt at all.

Someone was trying to kill Caspian. Had been trying to kill him for some time.

“So no one after that tried to put anything in your drinks?” she asked.

She wasn’t trying to poke holes in his story. No, it was much worse than that. Twice now, we’d caught him minimizing something that had happened, dismissing it as “normal.” So she was now double-checking everything, making sure that nothing was left unsaid.

He scrunched up his face and shrugged. “I don’t really know. I’ve been really careful since then not to accept a drink from anyone I didn’t know, unless it was right out of a bartender’s hands. I usually only order sealed things so I can be sure. Cans, bottles, that kind of thing.”

And that was the worst part.

Every single incident that went onto the list was accompanied by something Caspian had changed about himself. Some new fear he’d been stuck with. Some new danger he had learned to be on the lookout for. Something awful he now thought of as normal.

Officer Emery blinked, sitting back in her chair. She yawned and checked her watch, frowning. “I’m so sorry, it’s nearly dinner time. I should leave you to get something to eat. I know we’re not done with this, but I get the feeling we’re actually nowhere near done and couldn’t finish tonight if we tried.”

Caspian ducked his head, flushing pink. “Sorry.”

“ You’re sorry?” The sound of her voice on the exclamation was squirrel-like, almost squeaky, and she shook her head slowly. “ I’m sorry. We’re all sorry, I think. This is awful, and no one should have to go through this. Someone has been trying to kill you for years, and they haven’t been stopped.”

“That’s how it usually goes, though, isn’t it?” Kit asked. He sounded utterly exhausted. “The victim is the one who worries about other people, while the attempted murderer is mostly angry they didn’t succeed. I just spent a year with Dawnchaser, and this is precisely the pattern that happened constantly in that house.”

Officer Emery blinked at him in confusion. “Dawnchaser?”

“You know,” he said, casual as possible, his feet propped up on a side table, “the bastard who murdered Oberon Gloombringer? The man treated his own daughter like garbage, and she’s a fucking princess. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that he was a monster.”

I cleared my throat, ignoring the throb that caused in my head. “What my brother is trying to say is that it isn’t uncommon for the victims of violence to try to find reason behind that violence, when the perpetrators often have no such concerns.”

She nodded, still staring at Kit. “Right. I . . .yes, that’s true. But I’m sure you have things you need to finish. You’re on your way back to Verisa?”

“We are,” Kit agreed. “And our sister has doubtless obtained a vehicle by now, and is on the way back to get us. Probably with dinner.”

“Tacos,” I added, holding up my phone. “She just texted. It took her a while and she ended up buying a car instead of renting, but she’s on her way now. We should talk to the doctor and see about when Caspian can leave.”

Kit snorted and grabbed a clipboard from the counter next to him. “I filled out the paperwork to check him out.” He lifted a brow at Caspian. “Assuming you’re up to it?”

“Huh? Oh, um, yeah. Yes, I’m fine, as long as the doctor is fine with me leaving.”

Kit snorted and shook his head, pushing up out of the chair and turning to the door. “Yeah, clearly the concussion isn’t affecting you at all. We’ll have Frost drive the rest of the way, if he doesn’t have a migraine in the morning. You can sit next to him and give him instructions.” He opened the door and held it for the police officer, mumbling, “Get both of you good and used to it, since you’re going to be doing it for the rest of your lives.”

The officer paused and blinked at him, then at Caspian and me again, but finally nodded to us as she preceded Kit out of the room. They were talking about jurisdictions and contacting police in Verisa to follow up on the repeated attempted murders.

The checkout process was simple enough, especially since Kit had already filled out the paperwork, and also, Caspian had a lot of experience with it. He didn’t try to argue with the nurse with the wheelchair, just smiled and let her help him into the thing. They gave him a whole speech about not spending too much time on screens and how he should treat his injuries, but it was apparent he’d heard it all before.

As we reached the door of the hospital, Kit grabbed me by the arm and held me back a moment. “You need to calm down.”

I whipped around to look at him, ready to snap something back about how I was calm, when I realized he was right. I was not calm. I’d been grinding my teeth so hard that my jaw ached even more than my head. I’d just assumed it was part of my slowly building headache, but it wasn’t.

I was angry.

No, angry wasn’t a good enough word.

I was livid.

I was absolutely incandescent with rage.

For a second, I wondered why Vex hadn’t pointed it out to me, but hells, he’d probably been feeding it. He was no doubt angry as well, and on the odd occasion both of us felt similarly, we sometimes did this. Rage spiral, I called it in my head.

Before I could tell Kit to fuck off and leave us be, though, he turned me toward him, planting his hands on my shoulders. “Yelling isn’t going to help anything. Caspian will worry you’re mad at him, and you won’t feel better. Believe me, I’ve been through this. Yelling, throwing things, cutting up a practice dummy, it’s all just a placebo for what you actually need. It won’t even help you in the short term, because you’re you. You want a real solution, not a short term way to vent your anger at the situation.”

He was right, of course. But what was the solution to someone spending years trying to murder a completely innocent man?

“We have to get to Verisa and stop her, obviously,” Kit said.

Kill her , Vex corrected, and that was unusually bloodthirsty for him.

Caspian, who’d been getting out of the wheelchair to climb into the so-predictable shimmery white SUV Ember had bought, turned to look at us. “Her? Her who?”

Kit looked at him, head cocked, blinking for a moment. “You’re not joking. Of course you’re not joking. You didn’t even see till this afternoon that someone was trying to kill you at all.” He stepped forward, hands falling from my shoulders, and reached out to squeeze one of Caspian’s arms. “I owe you an apology. I made presumptions about you that were entirely wrong. You’re not only not what I thought, you may be the only person in the fucking universe as innocent as my brother.”

Caspian’s face twisted in a disbelieving expression I didn’t find terribly flattering and he started to shake his head but stopped quickly with a wince of pain. “No one is as innocent as Frost. He’s like . . . what is it they say in Moonstriker lands? Pure as the driven snow?”

“He is that,” Kit agreed, grinning. “But you spent the entire afternoon telling us about the forty or so times someone has tried to kill you, and you still don’t know who did it. You didn’t even make a guess.”

Caspian squinted at him, pained and confused, then corrected, “Twenty-three,” as though that actually made it better.

Ember, on the other hand, immediately understood. “Wow. You’re not kidding. They’re like a matched pair of innocents. It’s your aunt, sweetie pie. Your aunt has been trying to kill you. And we’re gonna stop her.”

His aunt. Of course, once Ember said it aloud, it was painfully obvious, even to me. Rachel Sunrunner had once been in contention for control of her family. Back then, she was overlooked in favor of her older brother, who had turned out to be little more than an addict, and he certainly wasn’t a good family lord.

Worse, if Dane died, Caspian would take control of the family.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Caspian denied. “Aunt Rachel isn’t my heir. If I died, my cousin Blair would get everything I owned.”

“Including your titles?” Kit asked, pointed, meeting Caspian’s eye.

Caspian, for a moment, remained clueless, but I could see what Kit was getting at. Rachel didn’t give a damn about stuff. She wanted to be the Sunrunner.

“I don’t . . . I don’t have any titles.”

“Not yet,” Kit agreed. “Which is why she’s spent the last decade trying to kill you. If you die first, and then your father, she’s the Sunrunner. If he dies first, then you, then your cousin Blair is the Sunrunner. Does Blair know about the succession?”

For a moment, Caspian just stared at him. “I don’t . . . I . . . she was a baby. She’s still a baby—not even a teenager yet. I was eleven when she was born. My mom had just died, and I was thinking about all that, so I talked to the family lawyer and named her my heir. Just to . . . to have one. To be connected to someone.”

He ducked his head as though it was something to be ashamed of, wanting to have a human connection. If he needed to be ashamed of that, I hated to imagine how I ought to feel, with my continuing struggles to even feel human some days. I was so different from everyone around me, it was . . .

Well, Caspian was the last person who should ever worry about that. What did it mean, that he, too, did worry about it?

Kit sighed. “Okay, so if your aunt fails to kill you before your dad dies, that means she’s going to be trying to kill Blair, too.”

Caspian stared at him, horror etched on every feature.

For a moment, Kit hesitated, looking concerned, and that was a surprise. Kit had always been painfully blunt, rarely caring whether his attitude shocked or hurt anyone around him. It had been one of the reasons I did well with him, because I always knew he was telling me the truth.

“You understand that there’s a decent chance your father is already dead, right? That she’s trying to clean you up as a loose end before she lets his death become public?”

Caspian leaned against the passenger side of the SUV, staring off into space and breathing too hard.

I went to his side, shaking my head and reaching out to put a hand in the middle of his chest. “Slow down. You’re breathing too fast, you’ll hyperventilate.”

Oddly enough, he just . . . sort of fell into me.

He tried, and struggled, to breathe along with me for a while, as Kit and Ember got the new car repacked to Kit’s liking.

Well, that wasn’t really what they were doing. I knew Kit. He was distracting Ember so that we didn’t have an audience for Caspian’s moment of vulnerability.

It was one of the many things Kit was so very good at that no one gave him credit for. He knew how to hurt and humiliate people, yes, but the opposite side of that was that he also knew how to avoid those things. He knew what that last horror was, the one that would break a person.

When we’d been children he’d gloried in breaking my bullies that way. In adulthood, I suspected he’d used it to good end against Huxley Dawnchaser, controlling him somewhat during his disastrous attempt to take over the Summerlands. And now, he was using it to help Caspian in a time of emotional turmoil.

All I could do was stand there and hold Caspian’s heaving body as he calmed. When he could finally breathe properly again, the first thing he said, looking up at me, his purple eyes wet, was, “If she kills Blair, that’s my fault.”