It was late and the streets were nearly empty. This was a shitty time to be driving around in a stolen car, because there was no camouflage. Any cop you passed had plenty of time to think up reasons to fuck with you.
“It’ll be daylight in a few hours,” Daria said. “We should ditch the car and get ourselves checked in. I need a shower, and if I don’t get to sleep soon, I’m probably going to make a terrible mistake, like get bangs or buy a timeshare bungalow or something. After, I’ll crack Serrac’s files.”
I dropped off the stolen car around the corner from the lot where I’d taken it. As we walked away, I saw a lanky, college-age kid stumbling around in the center of the intersection, shouting into his phone about how it wasn’t his fault and he needed a ride.
When I opened the door to the hotel Biggs offered us, the only people in the lobby were the night concierge and a woman vacuuming the carpet. The maid shut off the machine immediately, then carried it into another room. Daria took care of collecting the keys and explaining that our luggage would arrive in the morning. I stood far away, moving toward the elevators and doing my best to keep my back—still covered with Yusuf’s blood—facing away from her.
Daria gave us our keys—three rooms all in a row, two floors up from our target—and we rode the elevator in silence.
I should have felt more tired. In fact, I was worn out and sore from sitting too long behind a steering wheel, and I still hadn’t rinsed my face after the effort of carrying Yusuf down all those stairs. I usually hated the feeling of sweat on my face, but it was hard to be upset about it next to all the blood.
There was a rogue sorcerer in this hotel—one who’d already tried to kill us once with a fucking predator.
It meant we were about to face new magic and a brand-new asshole who was going to be pissed off about the upcoming attempt on his life. My skin felt electric, and my mind, which was fuzzy and dull from lack of sleep, could not stop trying to picture his face.
And could not stop trying to picture what that face would look like when he was lying dead on the carpet.
There was an astonishing body count attached to my name. I hadn’t tried to nail down any specific number, mostly because I didn’t want to know but also because I didn’t want to remember.
In movies, you could tell a hired killer was a sensitive guy because he’d claim to remember everyone he’d ever murdered. It was supposed to make him seem less like a sociopath, or make him more likable or sympathetic or whatever. But I guessed I wasn’t either of those things, because the memory of Charles Hammer’s face had faded over the years. I don’t think I could have picked his photograph out of a book of mugshots. And Jon Burrows’s friend Peyton, well, I remember what it looked like when I cut him open and saw the inside of his skull, but his face and his last name had slipped away from me over the years.
And I never really got a good look at the victims of the sapphire dog that I killed in that church basement.
I’d killed so many people. Some because they’d used dangerous magic and would use it again. Some because they were the victims of a spell or predator, and that made dangerous. Soon, I’d help Annalise do it again.
Maybe this time it would finally feel like it wasn’t a big deal.
The elevator dinged and we went down the hall to our rooms. The first thing I did was strip down and grab a quick shower. Yusuf’s blood wasn’t just on my clothes. In some places, it had soaked through to my skin.
There was a gentle knock on my door. I threw on the hotel robe and checked the peephole. It was Daria, and she was holding surgical tape and gauze up to the peephole. I opened the door.
“Change my dressing before I go to sleep?”
I stepped back and let her inside. She had the same expression on her face as when she told me she was okay, just after she’d been shot, but she was looking at the floor, not at me. She sat on the edge of the bed, her injured shoulder near me, and I sat too. She still wouldn’t look directly at me. Then, when I fumbled with the cut in her sleeve to get to the bandage, she peeled off her shirt, showing her bra and bare skin.
After she draped her shirt on the chair, she let her hand come to rest on my knee.
A warm rush passed over me. I’d described her as gawky at some point, I knew I had, because she didn’t seem like my type at all, but the sight of her smooth tan skin and the smell of hotel soap made my pulse race. Funny how that works.
Her bandage probably didn’t need changing, and I was pretty sure she didn’t care about it, but I changed it anyway. It had been a long time since I’d had a woman in my bed, even just to sit on the edge. I’d been trapped inside the Show for years, and the months since haven’t exactly been filled with fun hanging-out time. Wooden men don’t get vacation days.
So, it felt good to touch her while I peeled off the old tape and laid a new piece of gauze in place, but I was pretty sure I knew why she was here.
“You don’t have to do this. It won’t help. If Annalise decides that she has to end you, I won’t be able to do anything about it, no matter how much I’m on your side. And I’m on your side already.”
“I nearly died today.”
“I remember.”
“And…” Whatever she was going to say next, she let it trail off. Her hand slid off my knee as she stood and turned away.
Cynthia Hammer suddenly surfaced out of my memories, the sister of the man Annalise had been sent to kill on our first official mission together for the society. She and I had barely escaped death at one point, and afterward…
“I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?”
“Yep.” She stepped toward the chair but did not pick up her shirt. “I didn’t come here to turn you against your peer. I wouldn’t even try that, even if I thought it was possible.”
“I misread the moment.”
“Badly.”
“I didn’t used to do that,” I said, and the next words were like a message from my subconscious. “But I haven’t really been on my game since… the coma.”
She turned and looked at me directly for the first time. The corner of her mouth crooked into a smile. “You know I know it wasn’t really a coma, right?”
“You got me. What really happened was that I got swallowed by a predator.”
Her mouth fell open and she dropped her shirt on the carpet. “You’re shitting me.”
“I wish. It couldn’t digest me because of the spells Annalise put on me”—I shifted the lapel of my robe an inch or two to show some of the marks there—“but it wasn’t about to let me go. Seven years it had me.”
I sighed. “Since I got out, I’ve been missing important details. I haven’t been able to read people the way I used to. I let those lawyers lure me into a trap, and I let a fucking lobby security guard get the drop on me, and now you. I just…” I just spent years surrounded by dead people, and I couldn’t tell. “It was fucked-up. And I can see on your face that you’re about to ask me questions or whatever, but please don’t. I’m not ready for that.”
She put her hands on her hips and seemed to study me. One corner of her mouth was still turned up in a crooked grin. “What do you know? You’re human after all.”
That was the absolute last thing I expected to hear from her. “What?”
“Well, we hear all these stories, and I see bullets bounce off your chest like you’re one of those guys in those awful cape movies, right, because you’re running straight at men with guns—men who have the training to use them—like it’s nothing. Because the investigators talk about you, too. Some of them think you’ve been so successful because you’re secretly a rogue sorcerer, spying on your boss and the whole society. Some think you’re a predator that Annalise turned to our side.”
A loud, barking laugh burst out of me, one I couldn’t have held back if I’d wanted to. “Holy shit, that’s six kinds of nuts. The idea that Annalise would even try— Nah. That’s nonsense. Whoever is saying that shit is a bad investigator, because they’re passing bad information. If you ever see Annalise fight someone with a predator inside them—and I hope you don’t, because that shit will haunt you like it haunts me—you’ll understand.”
She watched me for a second or two, as if she understood I had more to say. I realized that I did. “When I first saw Annalise doing her thing, I was sure she wasn’t human. Or wasn’t human anymore. Her strength. The way she could destroy shit with her bare hands. She seemed both more and less than everyone else. I guess it never occurred to me that, as she and the rest of the society kept adding spells to me, people might start to think those same things about me. I still feel human on the inside.”
“What about Annalise?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. I said, “I was going to make a joke, but the boss has had it rough. All the shit she’s been through might have turned her into a huge pain in the ass, but I would feel like an asshole if I said she wasn’t really human anymore. She is.”
Daria nodded, scratched the bridge of her sizable nose, and let out a long breath. She seemed more like herself now instead of that odd, timid someone who wouldn’t even look me in the eye. “I bet I can tell you why you’ve been such a success at this work, and there’s no magic involved.”
I figured I already knew. Arne had laid it out for me before he… before I killed him. But what the hell. “You’re on. Explain me to me.”
“After. We have more important things to do. Get into that bed and take off that robe.” She hooked her thumbs into the waist of her pants and pushed them down. “It doesn’t hide anything, anyway.”