“You got her killed. The same way you were going to get us all killed, so I made a deal to save myself. I guess you’re surprised you aren’t the only one capable of selling out.” Fatima sneers.
“Iknewit was you all along,” Juno hisses. “Traitorous little bitch.”
“What? What’s she talking about?” I ask Fatima.
“You fucking blindfolded me and sent me into a room of knives. You sliced my Achilles and told me to run. You?—”
“Fatima?” I cut through Juno’s tirade.
She shrugs and rolls her eyes. “I laced her food with Gregor’s blood.”
Juno growls. “You made me a puppet, you fucking cunt. I’m going to rip your lying tongue out!”
David clears his throat. “That’s the end of the conversation. You two need to leave. I’ll drag you out of here if I have to.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Fatima simpers and tosses her bloodied hair over her shoulder.
“This isn’t over,” Juno fumes.
“It won’t be over till you’re dead,” Fatima shoots back.
“Out!” David bellows.
Juno leaves, her steps unhurried, but she casts one more deadly look back at Fatima before she disappears.
“You, too.” David gestures to Fatima. “You’re done here.”
She sidles up to him and runs her fingers along the edge of his wing. “I was hoping you’d show me your room.”
His jaw tightens. “Out.”
She grins. “Next time, then.”
“Fatima, wait, about what I said. Can you?—”
“I’ll think about it” is all she says before she, too, is gone.
I swipe my hair behind my ears, only then realizing my hands are shaking. “Sheesh.”
“They’re going to kill each other.” David sighs. “Just not on my watch.”
When did Fatima start lacing Juno’s food with Gregor’s blood? Could it have been all the way back in Austin? I don’t know. Then again, what does it matter now? All the horrible decisions have already been made, the damage done. A small part of me is still looking for ways to absolve Juno, but I have to let that go. Juno’s decisions may or may not have been influenced, but she still made them.
I spend the next 15 minutes picking up the papers and books, righting the library as best I can. When I find the list I made for Fatima, I sink to my knees and just sit for a while. Thinking. Planning. Until my legs ache and my feet have pins and needles. But no answer comes to me, no way for me to work on a vaccine or—just as importantly—replicate the vampire poison.
By the time I’m finished cleaning, I don’t much feel like translating more ancient Romanian, so I return to my room and go over my notes. I end up staring at my list for Fatima. The most basic things I need to create a poison and a cure. Who am I fucking kidding? I’m just one person. One person with a death sentence over her head and no chance at saving anyone.
Hope was something I always had plenty of when I was in Austin. Hell, even when I was in DC. Now, though, it’s a dry riverbed. There’s nothing left. And soon enough, there’ll be no one left to save.
5
“Where is he?” I sit on the stairs at the base of the Green Flame landing while David paces back and forth.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s almost dawn.” I’d fallen asleep in my room only to wake in a cold sweat with the memory of a knife in my belly. The Saints. I can still see the look in the leader’s eyes, the unfeeling way he smiled as he gutted me. In DC they’d come for my life and almost taken it. If not for Valen, I’d be dead. Same with Gorsky. Same with the shooting at the inauguration. With Whitbine. I rub my eyes. In that brief bit of sleep, I gained a slight ray of clarity about Valen. Everything he’s done, he’s done to keep me safe. Even so, it’s not as if I can erase the horrors of it, the cost. After all, the Specter exists, too. He’s taken countless lives, might be out taking more right this second. How many? There’s no balancing the scales for what he’s done, for what any of us has done.
“I thought he’d be here by now,” David says for the dozenth time. “He told me he would.”
