The dock’s wooden planks were stained a deep reddish-brown that hid any evidence of the inevitable decay. Reece walked past the covered boat slip with its small skiff, heading farther out into the lake.
Grayson raised an eyebrow. “Or you’re admitting you’re scared ofme.”
“Don’t you wish.” Reece reached the end of the dock and sat down on the edge, letting his legs dangle so his sneakers were maybe a foot above the waters of the lake. He raised his phone and then turned on his camera.
There was no change in expression, of course, but Reece could tell the moment his image came on-screen by the way Grayson’s hazel eyes flicked up, then down. He didn’t speak, just took Reece in for a long moment. Maybe Reece was the empath, but he suddenly felt unbalanced and laid bare, like he was the book and Grayson was the reader.
He probably wasn’t looking his best these days either.
“You okay?” Grayson finally said.
My skin is crawling and my blood is burning and all I want is to see people suffer but some wisp of conscience keeps holding me back and who knew pacifism could fight like hell? I was a mess before, and I’m still a mess now, and the only time I’ve ever been okay was those few days when I was with you.
“Never better,” Reece said, in an unbothered tone, because Grayson wouldn’t hear the lie twisting his words in the cold lake air.
“Uh-huh.” Grayson didn’t sound remotely convinced. “Someone piss you off?”
Reece huffed a dark kind of half laugh. “Yeah,” he said truthfully. “Yeah. Someone did.”
“The person who’s framing you?”
“No,” Reece said. “This person hurt—”you“—someone else.”
There was a pause. “Of course they did,” Grayson said, like that had held a deeper meaning for him. Then he straightened up. “Did something happen to Alex?”
“You mean besides having his parents murdered and his brother tortured because some sick fucks wanted to see what would happen to him?” Reece said with bite. “No. Why?”
“Because I talk to your sister more than you do now,” Grayson said, and that flat voice didn’t quite have an edge of its own, but it sure wasn’tsoft. “And far as I know, no one has hurt her lately exceptyou.”
“Why don’t we leave our siblings out of this?” Reece said warningly. “What are you even getting at?”
“You’re pissed at someone for hurting someone else,” Grayson pointed out. “With St. James ruled out, I was trying to figure out whose pain could make you willing to call me.”
Reece looked into his eyes, the warm shades of golds and browns in the familiar face. It took him back to that golden-hued picture of Grayson in Texas, the bright blue summer sky between the green leaves of an oak tree. Once upon a time, there had been smile lines next to Grayson’s eyes, because he used to be happy, until Traynor and Stone and the others had taken that from him.
But while Grayson wasn’t happy anymore, he also wasn’t hurt right now. He probably needed more sleep, but he was safe in Reece’s Smart car in Seattle, not a bunker in West Texas, and the sight of Grayson had settled the black lighting enough that Reece might be able to walk back into Jason Owens’s house without murdering Traynor on the spot.
“Be careful with that engine,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter Seventeen
In this issue: Strength in Sensitivity; Countering (Uncaring) Culture; Soft Hearts in a Hard World.
Hearts Beat, Vol. 9 (Seattle: 1992).
—Digitized scan of an empath-run zine from Rainier University’s archival collection
Grayson stared at his suddenly dark phone. “Be careful with that engine,” he repeated. “The hell am I supposed to do with that? You didn’t even tell me why you called.”
Reece didn’t seem to be calling back to explain himself either. “You always got to be a problem for me,” Grayson said to the phone, and tossed it on the passenger seat.
He was gonna have to admit he’d missed another nuance to the corrupted empaths, though. Reece was being framed but was pissed over someone else’s pain. St. James had suspected the corrupted empaths still cared for others more than themselves, and he’d have to tell her she might be right.
It wasn’t something he’d considered before. He’d always assumed Alex’s biggest moment of violence had been straightforward revenge for his own capture. Could St. James’sspeculations be right, that Alex had decimated that West Texas bunker because they’d hurt Grayson himself?
It was a theory, nothing more. But if there was a chance it was true, Lord help Seattle if anything happened to St. James. Cora Falcon had taken down more than dozen people after her fiancé was killed. Alex had done his own share of murders in that bunker and after the loss of their parents.
Grayson glanced over at the phone, sitting innocently on the passenger seat.
