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I grimace. “Sorry. I have a lot on my mind right now.”
“I noticed. It’s okay.” He finishes his tea and then stands up. “Well, long drive ahead of me. Gotta get home.”
“You sure you aren’t staying?”
“Why would I?”
“Because you’re a werewolf. Are you, though? It was the full moon last night. Wasn’t it? Did Von Alston miscalculate by a day?”
“No. I’m a werewolf. But it’s fine. I’m pretty zen about the whole thing.”
“Really?”
He shrugs. “We all have monsters inside. Mine’s just more literal. You understand.”
I do. More and more lately. If a werewolf is two different things—human and monster—but he’s figured out how to live with both, maybe he can teach me how to be the two different things I am. The healer who wants to fix everything, and the Slayer who increasingly wants to break them.
I lean forward. “How do you stop it taking over?” I’ve never heard of a werewolf being able to avoid transformation. According to our research, it’s not possible. But I’ve learned in the last few months that just because something is written in fancy calligraphy in an old book doesn’t mean it’s true.
“Think of the darkness like a river. If you try to dam it, it might work for a while, but eventually the dam will burst and then it’s all fangs and claws and chasing your ex-girlfriend’s girlfriend through a campus and getting caught and sent to government labs and being experimented on.”
“That … feels like a really specific example.”
“No, I think it’s universal. But back to the river of darkness. Don’t dam it. Channel it. Direct the darkness, let it flow through and past you. Feel it and then release it.”
“But how?”
“Have you tried meditation?”
I wrinkle my face up. “Mm. No. Slayer energy doesn’t really lend itself well to sitting still and letting your mind go blank. That’s when all the maybe we should go find something to kill thoughts sneak in.”
“Well, my other suggestion is moving to the Himalayas and finding yourself a beautiful wife. That one worked out really well for me. For a while, at least. But the darkness always finds you, and things get Slayer-army-and-giant-goddess-level complicated again.”
“So by darkness finding you, you mean Buffy?”
He laughs. “The Buffster messes things up, yeah, but she always shakes out the truth, too. And the truth was, we needed to help instead of isolating ourselves. I thought I had found peace, but really I was letting the darkness gather and pool. So here I am. Helping. Channeling that river. And here I go, back home, until I find another way to help. You can’t stop what’s inside you. If you fight it, it’ll win. Figure out how to live with it, how to direct it instead of letting it drag you in its current. And only you can do
that.”
“Moving to the Himalayas and finding a beautiful wife seems easier.”
“RSVP if you decide to visit.” With an enigmatic smile, Oz grabs the bag of snacks I threw together for him. I walk him out and watch as he drives away, back toward his life. I sit there for a long time afterward. Alone. In the dark.
I know the Slayer energy. I know the contours of that power, the feel of it. What I don’t know is the new jagged edges, the sharp bursts and spikes that feel foreign. The ones that I’ve had since Leo gave the power back to me. When I first became a Slayer, the power would wash over me in a fight and I’d become something—someone—else. But I always snapped back to myself.
Ever since I stopped Leo’s mother and thought I lost him, I can’t seem to find myself to snap back to.
If I want to understand, if I want to channel this darkness instead of being washed away in it, I need to talk to the one person who has held exactly what I have now. And it isn’t the other Slayers.
It’s the boy who stole what had been taken in order to give it back to me.
* * *
It takes me until the next afternoon to work up the guts to decide to talk to Leo. I’m so mad at him, and so relieved he’s not dead, and so mad he let me think he was dead, and so relieved I didn’t accidentally kill him, and a teensy bit afraid I might on-purpose kill him for the last few months of guilt and sadness he let me go through.
I’ve been trying to get ahold of Artemis all morning, but her number keeps going straight to a voicemail box that hasn’t been set up yet. I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t pick up soon. But I can’t delay seeing Leo any longer.
Unfortunately, I need to find him before I can talk to him. I don’t want to ask my mother. Not after she made such reasonable points about why I shouldn’t see Leo. So instead, I choose the person least likely to question or hassle me. Rhys is, unsurprisingly, in the library.
