Wrong Side of Dead

Chapter Twenty

BEFORE

Friday, July 11

Watchtower

“What do you mean he got away?”

This is the fourth time someone’s asked me that question since we returned to the Watchtower, and this time it’s Isleen’s turn. She towers over me like a skyscraper, all white hair and tall, thin frame. I don’t even bother straining my neck to look up from my spot on the floor outside the infirmary, where I parked myself half an hour ago to wait for news on Milo.

So far everyone’s gotten the bulk of the story from Marcus, but they inevitably come to me when they find out Felix is now infected. Astrid came first, then Phineas, then Baylor. They want to know how. They also want to know why he got off the bus alive and is at large in the city. The former question I can answer; the latter question I can’t. Not really.

“He surprised me and he got away.” It’s my canned response, and it’s really the only one I have.

My healing palms itch like hell. I rub their bandaged surfaces over my jeans-clad knees, at once furious and desolate. One more name to add to the list of people I’ve failed.

The noise level in the corridor is pretty high. Humans, Therians, and vampires alike are trolling the hall, gossiping about the bus accident, the human Hunter who was turned, and hoping for more details than I’m laying out. I want to find a quiet corner somewhere and hide for a while, but I won’t leave until I know Milo will be okay. It seems the very least I owe him now, and my heart aches for what he’s lost.

Isleen seems to accept my explanation more readily than anyone else. “Then I am sorry for your loss, Evangeline.”

“Thanks.”

The conversation quiets just enough to catch my attention. Bystanders part, creating a kind of path for two sprinting figures. Gina Kismet doesn’t pause to look at me. She slams through the door and disappears inside the infirmary. As the door swings shut, her companion stops. I don’t have to look up to know it’s Wyatt.

He crouches in front of me and covers my hands with his, squeezing tight. I hazard a glance at his face; his expression nearly undoes my composure. Sympathy and regret are all I see. Not a trace of blame or anger. I’d almost rather he be mad at me for fucking up. He doesn’t say anything. Just holds my hands.

My throat tightens. God help me, I will not cry in front of all these people.

“Come with me,” he whispers.

I let him pull me to my feet. Let him hold my hand as he leads me away from the crowd. I stare at the back of his neck and struggle to retain my tenuous grip on the last threads of my restraint. He stops at a door, enters a code, and a lock springs free. Inside.

He shuts the door, and I blink at the glare of light. The weapons locker. I was given a tour of it last week—a chance to geek out over the vast array of guns, knives, swords, and explosive devices assembled by our combined forces. It’s arranged not unlike a store, separated by types of weapons, stacked on shelves and some displayed openly. The biting scents of gun oil and leather tickle my nose.

“Are we going out?” I ask, confused.

“Not for a while,” he replies, circling to stand in front of me. He reaches out, then freezes. “You looked like you needed some privacy.”

Amusement quirks my mouth. “So you thought immediately of the weapons locker?”

“Well, you and weapons are fairly synonymous in my mind.”

If anyone but Wyatt said that to my face, I might be offended, but I can hear the affection in his words. “Thank you.”

He reaches for me again, and I tilt my head to show him it’s okay. His palm cups my cheek, thumb brushing the corner of my lips. Heat blooms in my chest. I’ve missed his touch, missed this intimacy I’ve had only with Wyatt. We’ve seen each other only in passing these last ten days. Given each other the space we both needed.

I miss him.

“Don’t blame yourself for what happened to Felix,” he says, shattering the magical quiet.

I snort rather rudely and step back, out of arm’s reach. “Yeah, right.”

“It isn’t like what happened to Alex.”

My hand rises, reaching for the cross necklace. Too late, I remember I’m not wearing it. Haven’t very often since coming to the Watchtower. The silver is poisonous to Therians, and wearing it around them is rude, even if it’s a personal keepsake. It’s wrapped in a scrap of silk and tucked safely inside my trunk.

“It’s exactly like what happened to Alex,” I say. Those warm feelings disappear, trampled by equal parts guilt and anger.

Wyatt shakes his head, jaw set, determined. “No. Felix was a Hunter.”

“Was, Wyatt. Was. He hasn’t been on patrol since he was hurt. He hasn’t been training. You saw what that hound did to him.” My chest hurts at the memory of those few hours in the cabin, as he lay suffering on an old mattress while Thackery’s hounds kept us trapped inside.

“He survived, Evy.”

“To become what? He couldn’t walk from the car to the waiting room without sweating through his shirt. He was in pain all the fucking time. He was no more capable of fighting that Halfie than Alex would have been, but he did it anyway because it’s what he was fucking trained to do!”

I’m screaming, and I hate it. I’m not angry at Wyatt. I’m furious at myself for failing another person. You’d think with all my recent experience at it, I’d be immune. Far from it—every new failure compounds the hurt, increases my shame. Makes me wonder why the hell Fate keeps seeing fit to let me live while better people die.

“If you’d been Felix,” Wyatt asks, “would you have done anything different?”

The question works as well as a slap across the face. Goddamn him for knowing me so well. I shake my head no and turn away, examining a tray of immaculately shined blades without really seeing them. My eyes burn. The tray blurs.

Hands slide over my shoulders and gently squeeze. “When I heard you were involved in the crash and that one of ours had been infected, I panicked.” His voice is strained, the fear impossible to mistake. “I know you’ve been training with Phin, but you’re also still recovering, and for a few minutes …”

I blink, and a hot tear slides down my cheek. “You thought you’d lost me again. Once and for all.”

“Yeah.” The single word is broken, full of regret and sorrow.

“Guess it’s a good thing we broke up, huh?”

“No, Evy.” He tugs until I turn around, and I’m crushed beneath the emotion in his eyes. And confused. “No, I was furious with myself. I thought I’d wasted the last two weeks we could have had together, and I knew I’d always regret that.”

My head is too light, and I grab his forearms to stay firmly upright. He grips my elbows, holding tight. “What are you saying, Wyatt?”

“That no matter how much I’ve changed, one thing hasn’t and it’s that I still love you.”

I thought hearing those words would make me giddy with joy. Make me say them back, reassure Wyatt that I still love him. And I do. But all I feel is sad. Sad for him. Sad for Milo. Sad for the two huge secrets I’m still keeping from Wyatt and can’t bring myself to tell. Not just the secret of his past that I’m keeping for Rufus, but the secret of my time with Walter Thackery. The thing I asked him to do.

The fact that I embraced my inner Chalice and I gave up.

“I still love you, too, Wyatt, but that was never the problem,” I hear myself saying. “It’s everything else.”

He doesn’t patronize either of us by asking what else. He simply nods, thoughtful. “The odds are against us ever being happy, I know. So that means we don’t even try?”

“Relationships are hard, and they require trust, right? Both people have to trust each other.”

“You don’t trust me.” It isn’t posed as a question, and I want to shake him for it.

“No, you can’t trust me.”

He frowns, releases my arms, and steps backward several paces. The distance might as well be a mile. “What do you mean?”

I feel as though I’m standing on a cliff and the stones beneath my feet are crumbling. “That there are still some things I can’t tell you, and they’re not little things, and I know that by keeping them from you I’m being dishonest. And you deserve better than that, Wyatt.”

“I don’t give a fuck anymore what I deserve, Evy. I want you.”

“Are you sure?”

His face is a perfect illustration of what the fuck do you mean, am I sure?

“You don’t know me anymore, not even these last two months. The girl you fell in love with died. The goblins made sure she died in the worst possible way. I’m not her. I haven’t been her for a long time.”

“I know who you are.” His voice is firm, his expression stormy.

“I don’t even know who I am. How can you?”

“Because the parts that matter are still there, Evy. Your loyalty, your pride, your drive and willingness to fight for what you think is right. Your ability to out-cuss anyone I know.”

He isn’t getting this. “I let him go,” I say.

Wyatt’s eyebrow furrow. “Let who go?”

Shit. It isn’t what I intended when I opened my mouth, but there it is. In for a penny … “I let Felix go.”

“When?”

When? Seriously? “Today, Wyatt. I let him go today, in the fucking bus.”

Wyatt freezes completely, so still for so long that I’m sure he’s been replaced by a photograph. Then he shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

“I saw his eyes. I saw the color change. I knew he’d been infected and I knew what I needed to do.” My stomach is in knots over the split-second decision that I’m not even sure I consciously made. “Marcus was already outside. It was just me, Milo, and that asshole who got Milo shot. I didn’t … shit.”

Why is this so hard? I’ve owned up to my mistakes before, admitted them out loud to Wyatt. What about this hurts so much? That I don’t think of it as a mistake?

“What did he do, Evy?” Wyatt asks.

“He knocked me down, and he had the advantage. I was so shocked I couldn’t react. It was like looking at Jesse all over again.” Months ago I’d watched my former partner get bitten and turn into a Halfie in front of my eyes. Watched him murder our other partner, Ash, then look at her with a sick fascination born of passion and confusion. Disgust and bloodlust. And then I shot him in the heart.

“And then Felix smiled,” I continue. “Smiled like he’d just discovered the ultimate secret to joy and wanted to share. He looked at me, and even though I could see the madness, for one brief moment he was perfectly lucid. He was Felix. And do you know what he said to me?”

Wyatt shakes his head, eyes suspiciously bright.

“He said ‘it doesn’t hurt anymore, Evy.’ ” My voice breaks just as my heart broke earlier on the bus. “He wasn’t holding tight. I probably could have gotten my arms free, reached up, and snapped his neck. Kept him from an existence in half-Blood hell, but I didn’t.”

“You let him go.” His voice is so quiet. Not the quiet of calm or intimacy. No, this is furious-Wyatt’s quiet voice.

“Yeah.” More tears escape, tracking down my cheeks.

“You let a Halfie go.”

“I did. I let Felix go.”

“No, Evy.” Anger flushes his cheeks. His shoulders tremble faintly. “Felix was gone. You know that wasn’t him anymore. You let a Halfie go free, and not just any goddamned Halfie, but one with Hunter training and knowledge. One who knows where the Watchtower is and can use all of that against us.”

He’s livid. Angrier than I’ve seen him in a long time, and it’s my fault. Letting Felix go was wrong and stupid, and a decision made in only a few tense seconds. I can’t even defend myself, because there is no defense for my actions. I allowed emotion to control me, and I ignored my training.

Wyatt is not done spearing me with words. “Jesse was your partner for four years. He was infected right in front of you, and you still freed him. Alex was an innocent, and he was Chalice’s best friend. And you still put a bullet in the back of his head to free him. You’ve killed dozens and dozens of Halfies over the years, Evy. They don’t get a stay of execution, they get put down with extreme prejudice.”

“I know!” The two shouted words come out like vomit—unexpected and bitter. My throat hurts, my chest hurts, and I’m afraid I’ll turn inside out from all the emotion churning inside me. “I fucking know that, Wyatt!”

“Then why?” He’s finally shouting back, giving in to his temper. “Why Felix? You should fucking know better, Evy!”

I don’t want to keep fighting, but say it anyway. “Because he wasn’t in pain anymore. I know better than anyone what it’s like to spend hour after hour, day after day, in agony, just praying the pain will stop. But it doesn’t. It’s always there, even when you’re asleep. You can’t get away from it. The goblins tortured me, Thackery tortured me, and both times I’d have given anything for it to stop. Even if it was for just a few minutes. And all I had to look forward to was death.”

Wyatt’s eyebrows pull together as he puzzles something out. “You told me with Kelsa that you never stopped hoping for rescue.”

“I didn’t.” Fucking hell, I said too much. My cheeks are hot, my hands are cold, and I’m fairly positive I’m about to pass out. Or maybe spontaneously combust. “I didn’t give up with Kelsa.” I catch his stony gaze and try to hold it through a film of tears. “But I didn’t think I could survive that again and come back whole. I didn’t want to.”

He blinks hard, fighting his own tears. He knows. He won’t ask me to stop talking, but he knows what I’m about to say—the agony in his eyes tells me so.

“So,” I say, choking on the words, “I made Thackery promise to kill me when he was finished with me.”

All the anger he exuded before disappears, replaced by a kind of miserable grief mixed with disbelief. His eyebrows arch up, his mouth drops open. He’s so stricken it’s almost comical. But not really. Not at all.

By his own admission, my strength and tenacity are two of the things he loves most about me. Now I’ve just shown him how very weak I can be. How weak I am still. How completely unlike the old Evy Stone I’ve become, and just how far I’ve fallen.

A tear trickles down Wyatt’s cheek, and he brushes it away with an angry swipe. Then he rediscovers his lost anger and the mask is back on. Somehow putting his guard up around me, when we’ve shared so many painful parts of ourselves in the past, hurts more than anything else.

And I’m not even finished breaking his heart. “I knew what Felix was going through, living with that agony,” I say, even though the look on Wyatt’s face should shut me up. Might as well spill my guts before he decides he never wants to speak with me again. “Agony he was in because of me.”

Wyatt inhales sharply. “You didn’t attack him, Evy.”

“He was at the cabin because of me. The hounds were there because Thackery wanted me.” I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand, exhausted and nauseated and just ready for this to be finished. Somehow. “So when he said it didn’t hurt anymore, Wyatt, something in me broke.”

“And you let him go,” he says coldly.

I swallow back a rising tide of tears and square my shoulders; he can’t possibly think less of me than he already does. “No,” I say, the words sticking in my throat like barbed wire. “I told him to go.”

Five words. One final betrayal.