Dark Descendant

NINETEEN

I drove back to the mansion in a daze. Steph lay curled in the backseat, her head once again on Blake’s lap as he soothed and petted her. Her tears had dried up long ago, but I knew there would be more to come. The wounds Alexis had inflicted on her psyche were far worse than the physical pain, and I wished like hell I were still a mortal so I could have the pleasure of killing him.

Blake called Anderson while we were en route, giving him an update. I couldn’t hear anything Anderson said over the phone, of course, but I swear I could sense his anger. I wasn’t sure who he was angry with, and I wasn’t sure I cared. I did my best to retreat into a numb sense of unreality, not ready to deal with the emotions that roiled within me.

When we got to the house, Blake once again insisted on carrying Steph, despite her protests that she could walk. Maybe it made him feel better to be gallant, though I couldn’t help noticing how she curled into him, her arm slung around his neck, her head resting just below his chin. Protests aside, it seemed she needed the comfort, too. Maybe he was doing it for her sake after all. I raced ahead to hold the front door for him, then followed him into the entryway and came to a dead stop.

Anderson was waiting there for us, and he wasn’t alone. Jamaal stood beside him, his eye thoroughly bandaged. I expected him to be in a towering rage after what I’d done to him. Instead, he took one look at Steph’s battered form as she cuddled against Blake’s chest, and lowered his head in what looked a hell of a lot like shame.

The rage I’d been fighting since the moment I’d seen what Alexis had done to my sister came boiling up through my chest. It was all I could do not to hurl myself at Jamaal and try to scratch his other eye out.

“Take her upstairs,” Anderson ordered Blake, who nodded and headed toward the grand staircase. “Not you,” Anderson continued when I made to follow Blake.

“But—” The look in Anderson’s eyes made me swallow my protest. I didn’t want to let Steph out of my sight, but a part of me knew my own emotional turmoil might do her more harm than good. The last thing she needed was to worry herself over my well-being after what she’d been through, and she was enough of a mother hen to do it. Curling my hands into fists, I stayed where I was and watched as Blake carried her upstairs.

Slowly, I turned back to Anderson and Jamaal. Jamaal still stood with his head bowed, his shoulders hunched like he was trying to make himself smaller. Maybe he sensed me looking at him, because he raised his head and met my gaze for a moment. The expression in his unbandaged eye was bleak. He opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head and returned his gaze to the floor.

“There are no words,” I thought I heard him say under his breath.

One thing I can say for Jamaal, he’s no actor. I doubted he could fake remorse if his life depended on it, and I knew what I was seeing was genuine. He had convinced himself every word out of my mouth was a lie, and therefore he had never believed holding me up would actually hurt anyone but me. Now that he was faced with the truth, his malice had drained away.

He might be genuinely sorry for what he’d done, but that didn’t do Steph any good, and therefore I didn’t give a damn.

“Tomorrow morning at nine,” Anderson said to Jamaal, his voice cold steel, “we will hold a tribunal in my study to determine your punishment.” Jamaal nodded his acceptance without looking up. “You’ll spend the night downstairs.” In one of the cells, I presumed. “Go. Now.”

Jamaal bowed from the waist and, still keeping his gaze fixed on the floor, backed out of the room and away. It was as submissive a gesture as I’d ever seen, and it made me wonder just what kind of punishment this tribunal might sentence him to. For all that I was nominally a part of Anderson’s merry band, I didn’t know all that much about them.

Anderson turned to me when Jamaal was gone, his expression somber. Had Jamaal told him about the ring? Was I going to be having a tribunal of my own? At the moment, I wasn’t sure I cared.

Anderson looked me up and down, inspecting the damage. The cuts and scrapes I’d suffered from rolling around on the asphalt were all well on their way to healing, but from the feel of it, several of the deeper bruises still had a ways to go. My head ached fiercely, but I suspected much of that was the aftermath of the stress rather than real physical injury.

Anderson shook his head. “I never would have guessed he’d do that,” he said. “I knew he still suspected you, and I knew he was unstable, but …” He let his voice trail off, and for the first time since I’d met him, a look of true uncertainty crossed his face.

I heaved out a sigh. “It’s not your fault,” I told him, and despite my anger at the Liberi in general, I realized I meant it. Maybe if I had told him about Jamaal’s nocturnal visit, he’d have been able to head off tonight’s disaster. Keeping quiet had seemed like the honorable thing to do, but I’d had even more evidence than Anderson that Jamaal was out of control. I should have done something about it, and Steph had suffered because I hadn’t.

“What are you going to do to him?” I asked, crossing my arms and shivering in a phantom chill. Despite his mild-mannered affect, I’d seen hints that Anderson had a ruthless side. No matter how angry I was at Jamaal, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that ruthless side unleashed.

“We’ll decide that tomorrow.” There was no give in his tone, and I knew the subject was closed.

“And his eye …” I swallowed hard, sickened once again at the memory of what I had done. “Will it heal?”

Anderson looked at me in surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling sorry for him!”

Logic said I shouldn’t. I never wanted to be so bloodthirsty that I reveled in another’s pain, no matter what that other had done, but that didn’t mean I should feel sorry for him. And yet still I couldn’t help being aware of the deep river of pain that ran beneath Jamaal’s hostility. He needed someone to blame for Emmitt’s death, and I was the obvious candidate. I knew too well what it was like to try to offload pain onto someone else. Just ask some of the unfortunate foster families who got stuck with me before the Glasses tamed me.

I glanced at the doorway through which Jamaal had disappeared. “What was he like before Emmitt died?” I asked instead of answering Anderson’s question.

Anderson sighed and ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. “Not like this,” he muttered, confirming what I’d already guessed. “He was always strung pretty tight, but Emmitt helped balance him. Emmitt had centuries of experience dealing with the effects of his death magic, and Jamaal’s only had a couple of decades. It isn’t an easy adjustment.”

Despite the situation, I couldn’t help being curious. I’d seen firsthand what Maggie and Blake could do, and I was pretty sure I’d seen Jamaal walk through a closed door, but other than that, I had very little grasp of the powers of my fellow Liberi. “Death magic?”

Anderson nodded. “It’s a very … dark power, particularly in Jamaal. He can kill people without even touching them, and the power practically has a mind of its own. It wants to be used, and it’s always a struggle to keep it contained. Emmitt had some of the same power, and he’d learned to master it. He was teaching Jamaal his techniques, and Jamaal was stabilizing.” His jaw clenched. “Then the bastard decided to shuffle off this mortal coil with the job unfinished.”

I hadn’t known Emmitt very well, and most of what I’d known had been a fiction anyway. He’d seemed like a pretty nice guy, at least on the surface. But truly nice guys didn’t walk out on people who needed them.

“Too bad we can’t bring him back from the dead and give him a tribunal,” I said, and Anderson cracked a small smile.

“Indeed.” The smile faded before it had a chance to take hold. “You should get cleaned up and tend your wounds. We’ll have an early day tomorrow.”

“Look, I don’t know if Jamaal told you—”

“That you found Emma’s ring?”

Well, that answered that. “Um, yeah.”

Anderson met my eyes. “If you tell me you found that ring in the pot, then I’ll take you at your word. For now.”

I wasn’t sure if saying he believed me was legitimate when it was paired with “for now,” but at least he wasn’t threatening me with the Hand of Doom. “I found the ring in the pot,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I swear it.”

He stared at me a long while, but I didn’t look away. Finally, he nodded. “All right then. We’ll say no more.”

I knew a dismissal when I heard one. I didn’t much want to be alone with my thoughts, but I headed upstairs anyway. I took a shower and changed, avoiding taking too close a look at myself in the mirror, then went looking for Steph.

Not surprisingly, she was in Blake’s suite. He was in his sitting room, sipping from a tumbler of amber liquid and pacing. The door to his bedroom was ajar, but the lights inside were out.

He stopped pacing when he saw me, putting his finger to his lips in a shushing motion. “She’s sleeping,” he whispered.

I wanted to go to her, to look her over and assure myself that she was all right. But of course, she wasn’t all right, and if she’d temporarily escaped her misery in sleep, I wasn’t about to wake her.

“You should get some sleep, too,” Blake continued, still in that soft whisper. “You look like you’re about to keel over.”

I felt like it. Healing definitely seemed to take a lot out of my body, and I felt like I hadn’t slept in three days. “Take good care of her,” I urged, surprised to find I felt perfectly comfortable leaving Steph in his care. Just a few short hours earlier, I’d have said I didn’t trust Blake as far as I could throw him. He’d failed to protect Steph, but he’d done more for her than I had. Who knew how much worse it would have been if Blake hadn’t shown up at the scene when he did?

Hoping that I could find oblivion in sleep, at least for a little while, I headed back to my own room and collapsed on the bed fully clothed.

I’ve had more than my fair share of bad nights throughout my life, but that night was among the worst. As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I could barely even keep my eyes closed. Instead, I lay there on my back in the dark, cataloging the sins of my past and wondering how Steph had had the bad luck to get stuck with such a crappy adoptive sister. As I lay there wallowing in guilt, I realized that this wasn’t the first time someone had gotten hurt because of my misguided desire not to be a tattletale. Considering how horribly wrong things had gone the last time I’d made the fateful decision to keep my mouth shut, you’d think I’d have known better by now.

I was eight years old, and was already on my eighth foster family, the Garcias. They had a twelve-year-old son, Dave, who had been every bit as much of a problem child as I was, so they were sure they could “fix” me. The thing was, they hadn’t “fixed” Dave as much as they’d thought.

Mr. Garcia was a gun enthusiast, but a very responsible one. He kept his guns safely locked away, with the ammo in a different safe and both keys hidden. Dave was fascinated with those damn guns, and one summer day when Mr. Garcia was off at work, Dave figured out where the keys were hidden. He was very proud of himself and excited about being able to handle the guns with impunity. He showed off for me and even let me hold one myself.

Playing with guns had appealed to my wild nature, and of course I thought of Dave as older and wiser. To tell the truth, I never even considered telling on him.

About a month later, Dave had some of his friends from school over. I was out shopping with Mrs. Garcia. Mr. Garcia was supposed to be keeping an eye on the boys, but they were old enough not to need constant supervision. He was comfortable sitting down in the living room and watching a baseball game while the boys played video games in Dave’s room.

Dave was now making a habit of sneaking into the gun safe. Wanting to impress his friends, he’d stuck a gun into his dresser drawer. I’m pretty sure he thought it wasn’t loaded, or that he’d fired all the bullets the last time he’d snuck it out for some target practice in the woods. One of his friends found out the hard way that there was one bullet left. The gun went off in Dave’s hand, and he’d have his friend’s death on his conscience for the rest of his life.

Dave told all in the aftermath, and when the Garcias found out I’d known about the gun, they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. They couldn’t find it in their hearts to be mad at Dave, their flesh and blood. So instead, they heaped all the blame on me. It was blame I’d never accepted, and my bitterness and anger when they packed me off was monumental.

I should have learned my lesson. No, the death hadn’t been my fault, and yes, it had been wrong of the Garcias to blame me. Even so, there’d been a life lesson I could have learned if only I’d opened my eyes to it. I wasn’t to blame for the death, but I could have prevented it.

Now that it was too late, I’d finally figured it out: I should have told Anderson the truth about Jamaal’s threats. But even the best hindsight couldn’t change the past.