NITA COULDN’T FALL BACK ASLEEP, and she didn’t want to wake Kovit, so she crept downstairs. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do in an empty pawnshop at night, but she knew she wasn’t going back to sleep yet. She didn’t want to have to lie down next to Kovit, hear his easy, peaceful breaths, untroubled by the things he’d done. She didn’t want to feel the heat of his body creeping over in the space between them on the bed.
Right now, she couldn’t be that close to him.
The light was still on when she went downstairs, and she opened the stairwell door and found Diana, cross-legged in one of the plush Victorian-style chairs, typing on her computer.
She looked up when Nita came in. “Oh, hey.”
“Hey.” Nita blinked at her. “It’s the middle of the night. What are you still doing here?”
Diana sighed. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail and taken out her mouthpiece, so Nita got a glimpse of her real teeth. They were small and sharp, and reminded her of cat’s teeth, but without the fangs. They didn’t look particularly dangerous, because they were so small, but they also didn’t look even the slightest bit human.
“I was working on decrypting the info from the phone you gave me.” Diana looked up, saw Nita staring at her mouth, and quickly shoved her fake teeth back in. There was a click as they hooked around her molars and the real teeth were gone, covered by a retainer.
Nita pretended she hadn’t noticed the teeth. “Any luck?”
She sighed. “No. Nothing.”
Diana rose and cracked her back. She put her computer down and looked outside. “I hadn’t realized how late it was. What time is it?”
Nita shrugged. “Around three, I think.”
Diana groaned and ran a hand through her hair. “Well, there goes my sleep schedule.”
Nita sat down on a dining chair across from her, careful not to knock over a hideous ceramic monkey in the process. “Did you have anything to wake up for tomorrow?”
“Not really. I’m doing some online courses in programming to get my diploma. Adair got me a new identity here, and I’m hoping I can have everything in place to go to college next year.”
Nita felt a spike of envy. She wanted to go to college next year. Even this year. Any year, really.
It was nice in a strange way, though, hearing her own goals echoed back at herself. It made her warm a little to Diana.
“You and Adair seem close,” Nita commented.
Diana looked away. “Who the hell knows with him. One minute he’s getting me a fake ID, the next he’s joking about murdering me in the basement.”
“But he listens to you.”
“Sometimes.” She sighed and looked away, changing the subject. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
Nita stretched. “I’m going to get rid of the person who sold me to the black market.”
Diana shifted uncomfortably. “And by ‘get rid of,’ I assume you mean murder.”
“Obviously.”
“You know, Nita, murder doesn’t solve every problem.”
“But it will solve this one.”
“Just like it solved your problems earlier today?” Diana’s voice was hard. “That just got the police on your tail too.”
True enough.
“This is different. Today was”—Nita swallowed, forcing herself to admit the words aloud, to acknowledge she was smart enough to know when she’d screwed up—“a mistake. I miscalculated.”
Diana’s eyebrows shot up.
“This is personal,” Nita continued, before Diana could respond. “I saved his life, and he repaid me by selling mine.” She crossed her arms. “He’s already sold my location to the black market twice. If I don’t get rid of him now, there’s no telling what he’ll do next.”
Diana wrapped her arms around herself. She was silent for a long time, and her large eyes were lost in thought.
Finally, she brushed a stray hair from her face, and still not looking at Nita, she whispered, “You know, after I ran away from my foster family, I decided to kill my family’s murderer.”
Nita nodded. This seemed like a logical thing to do. Nita would have done the same in Diana’s shoes.
Then she frowned. “Wasn’t he in jail?”
“No. He was a minor when he committed the crime, and the courts were so divided on the whole ghouls-are-evil-and-eat-people issue, that he ended up with a really short sentence.” Diana’s smile was bitter. “I’m sure it didn’t help that we were brown and he was white. He was out in a couple of years.”
Nita scowled, wondering if her father’s murderer had been human, he would have gotten a shorter sentence because her father was brown. The thought made her blood boil.
“That’s a shit system,” Nita finally said, the words pale and weak compared to her feelings.
“It is. I was unhappy with the ruling, to say the least.” Diana sighed, folding and refolding her hands in her lap. “So I went after him myself. I was fifteen, homeless, and determined to make him pay.”
Diana’s eyes went distant, and her lips turned down. “It wasn’t easy, tracking him down. It took a while. But I did it. He was living in Boston, working in a coffee shop, making lattes ten hours a day, and doing community college in the evening.”
Diana swallowed. “I didn’t want to get caught, so I set everything up with the utmost care. I followed him every day to learn his schedule and figure out when he was alone. I eavesdropped when he ordered food at restaurants to see if he had allergies. I wanted to kill him without a trace.
“But the more I followed him, the more I got to know him. He did community service hours picking up garbage from the park, which I’m pretty sure was part of his parole. Sometimes he’d give directions to lost tourists when he saw them. He lived in a homeless shelter, but never got into fights.”
She sighed. “I’d been watching him for nearly a month when one of those UEA members—you know, the hate group?”
“I know them.”
The Unnatural Extermination Agenda. Fanatics who believed all unnaturals were evil and ought to be murdered. They were a huge group, often censored and arrested, but the more attention they got, the more they seemed to grow. There had been a Post article condemning them last month after they burned a family’s house down to drive them out of town, and Nita swore that instead of making the UEA more hated, it had made them more popular.
This was why Nita hated people. They condemned things publicly then went and supported them in private. She didn’t trust them. People said that there were more good people than bad, but Nita actually thought there were more bad people than good—because all the people quietly doing nothing ended up supporting the bad people anyway.
Like Nita supported her mother with her silence. And Kovit.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t think of this right now.
“Nita?”
“Sorry.” Nita cleared her throat, trying to purge her thoughts from her head. “You were stalking your family’s murderer. And the UEA came by?”
“Yeah. So, he was walking down the street, and a member of the UEA gave him one of their pamphlets. You know the ones telling people ‘unnaturals are a conspiracy of the devil’ or whatever?”
“Yep.” She saw them all over the streets in some cities. Hate pamphlets littered across the sidewalks like evil paving stones.
Diana swallowed. “He took it.”
Nita tilted her head to the side. “I mean, he did kill a family of ghouls. The UEA sounds up his alley.”
Diana shook her head. “But he looked at it a block away, just stared at it for a long while.” She paused for a fraction of a second. “Then he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash.”
Diana let down her ponytail, so her hair swirled around her face. “I didn’t know if he threw it out because it was part of his parole conditions or because it was a particularly crazy flyer. But my first thought wasn’t any of that, it was maybe he regrets it.” She blinked rapidly, like she was trying to dust tears from her eyes. “Maybe he regrets what he’s done.”
Diana looked away, over the shadowy outlines of the pawnshop, into some place in the past. “And that’s when I knew I couldn’t kill him.”
Nita shifted. “Why not?”
“Because I was making up excuses for him. I wanted him to realize he’d made a mistake. I wanted him to not be bad. And the minute I realized I was making excuses, I knew I could never kill him. I’d had a month, and I hadn’t done it. It just wasn’t in me. His death wouldn’t bring back my family. And I didn’t think he’d be killing anyone else—I’d seen enough to be reasonably sure of that.”
Nita stared, and her voice was slightly incredulous. “You just let him go? Forgave him? After he murdered your whole family?”
Diana flinched. “No. Never. I won’t ever forgive him. I just . . .” She trailed off, then sighed. “I just realized that hurting him wouldn’t bring them back. Nothing would. Murdering him was only going to make me feel awful, and maybe get me arrested. He’d already taken away my past. Killing him might take away my future. I wasn’t going to let him ruin the rest of my life too.”
Nita sighed, finally seeing what Diana was trying to tell her. “Look, Diana, I appreciate the story. But we come from very different pasts. Fabricio is still actively trying to kill me.”
“Because you keep trying to kill him?” Diana countered.
Nita opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Tell me, did he decide to kill you because you tried to kill him?”
Nita’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “But I do now.”
“You just . . . guessed?”
“Based on your character. I bet you’d tried to take vengeance and it hadn’t worked.” Diana’s voice was soft. “And now he’s after you because he thinks you’re after him.”
Diana might be right about that. Nita considered, and decided it didn’t matter. “I still want him dead. He deserves to die for what he’s done. Besides, if I don’t kill him, he’ll keep coming after me.”
“You said you saved him. Do you really want to kill him?”
“Yes.”
Diana pursed her mouth. “Murder isn’t the answer.”
“Some people in the world only understand violence. If I want to communicate with them, I need to speak their language.”
“That’s not—”
Nita sighed and rose. “Look. I get it. You want me to understand that murder is bad. That all of this mess is happening because I tried to kill someone and failed. But the thing is, murder will solve this. And it’s a little late to be preaching morals at me. I’d say around a few hundred dead bodies too late to tell me murder is wrong.”
And with that, Nita turned around and walked back upstairs, leaving Diana alone in the dark shop.