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Blade shook his head. Cleared his throat. Brushed under his eye with impatience and rubbed the blood away between his fingertips.
“I watched you go that night, sister mine. I watched… the van go. And I knew…” His voice cracked again and he put his hands up, covering his face. “I knew where they were taking you, and what was going to happen to you. And I let you go. Oh… fuck—I am—”
As he stuttered over his words, a bizarre inner calm came over Xhex. It was the strangest thing: All of her thoughts quieted, the chaos she had been struggling with like a snow globe settling after a shaking, her mind clearing from the confusion that had plagued her… for decades, it felt like.
Abruptly, her brother’s rambling came back to her ears.
“—I tried to get them out. I tried to save them because they were you. They were… you… but…” When Blade dropped his hands, blood was running down his face, the true tears of asymphathso rare that they were indeed squeezed from the marrow. “They were dead. They were always… dead…”
Xhex blinked a couple of times. “I don’t understand what you are telling me.”
The words that came out of him next were halting—and she wasn’t sure what she said in return. But as streaks of moonlight flickered over his red-washed face, the strobing created by the wind teasing the pine boughs, a picture emerged that took her breath from her.
Labs. Explosions. Rescues that were recoveries because it was too late.
Vengeance. Taken out on those who had hurt her, whether or not they were directly involved with what had been done to her.
As the truth of what her brother had been doing for the last two and a half decades hit her, she was vaguely aware of a wolf howling off in the distance.
And the call was answered by another.
And another.
Abruptly, a chorus of wolves she could not see began to sing to the night, and oddly, in the cresting and falling of the harmonies, she heard something that she not only understood, but felt like was directed to her.
Believe. Believe. Believe…
“I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I still don’t…”
After a shuddering breath, Blade seemed to pullhimself together. As if he knew he was not going to have a second chance at their conversation.
“I went to the labs.”
“What labs…” Although why did she have to ask that?
“The ones that you were in,” he repeated. “The underground facilities with the humans and the experimentation. I tried to find you. For years.”
“You went… looking for me?” she mumbled.
“For years. And after I heard you were out, that you had gotten yourself free, I went to Caldwell and located you in that club, Screamers. It took me a good year to track you down. But I had to see for myself that you were okay.”
“You went to that club?” She had to have him repeat everything because the recasting of reality that was required to take what he was saying as truth was so vast, so deep, that she had to be sure. “The club I was working in?”
“Indeed, I went with some regularity. I never intended for you to see me. I blended in, and you were not looking for me, so I passed among the crowds you were hired to control.” As the sounds of wolves rose in volume, he had to speak more loudly to project over the din of the howling. “By then, I had already taken out five of the underground labs looking for you, and it occurred to me that I must finish the job. Even if you hated me for all the right reasons, there were other people’s sisters out there.Other people’s… brothers. Sons. Daughters. I did not save you… but I couldahvengeyou and make amends to others, even if they never knew it or understood my motivations. Even if you never did.”
Xhex put her hands on her head as her heart pounded and she got dizzy. “You went after the labs… for me?”
“I wanted… to be forgiven. By you, by my own conscience. I should never have let them take you. I knew what our bloodline intended to do. I should have warned you so that even if you couldn’t have gotten out before the van came, you could have been prepared and escaped en route. I should have…”
Jesus, she wished like hell the wolves would shut up. This was the most important conversation she was ever going to have with one of her relatives, and the lupine community had decided it was time to tune up their sirens—except then she thought of the ghostly entity, the older female that Xhex had come to seek.
She had engineered this.
And though the entity was not visible, she was here, somewhere, in and among the pines. That was why the wolves were singing. She was of them somehow…
“Blade,” she interrupted her brother.
As he stopped talking, she stared into his face. They had similar coloring, the pair of them… andshe had thought that was all they had in common as half-breeds, both of them part of an experiment to mix the blood ofsymphathswith powerful vampires to see if there was an evolutionary advantage.
