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Then I really would be the killer my mother had told me I was. And I didn’t want to live up to her expectations.
“There is a big gap between six and ten, Anderson. So you better uncloud your memory really quick. How many people has Deerling held here?”
“They weren’t—”
“If you tell me again how werewolves aren’t people, I might decide I’m bored of this conversation, understand?” It pained me to make these threats, because all I was doing was proving Deerling right. What was I, right now, if not a monster? I was scaring myself.
But if I was nothing more than an animal, I was responding as any animal would. When it came to fight or flight, I was choosing to fight. And by God I would use every weapon in my arsenal to walk away from this alive.
I took a step closer, and he flinched. Sharp stones bit into my feet, and I realized for the first time I was barefoot.
I wanted to ask where my shoes were, but we’d take this one question at a time. “Six or ten?”
“Ten.” He opened one eye a crack to see if I was coming closer. The tension in his body let up slightly when he saw I’d stopped moving.
“What did he do with them?” My toes curled in the stained dirt on the floor. I knew perfectly well what had happened to the people who had been here before me. But I needed to hear confirmation from someone else.
“He k-killed them.”
“He killed them?”
All color drained from Anderson’s cheeks. We both glanced at the big knife on the floor. It might as well have been covered in blood. He couldn’t have looked more guilty if he were wearing a big scarlet M for Murderer on his chest.
Maybe I should put one there.
I blinked the thought away, shaking my head as if I could chase it off by sheer force of will. Instead of advancing, I took two big steps back. I briefly considered picking up the knife but thought better of it.
I didn’t trust myself.
“We killed them,” he admitted. “I killed them. Some of them.” His legs gave out, refusing to hold him upright. After sliding to the floor, he wrapped his arms around his legs and tried to take up as little space as possible. Like maybe if he could compress himself into a ball, I wouldn’t notice he was there.
“How long has he been taking them?”
Silence. Anderson wouldn’t meet my gaze.
There was no way I was going to like the answer to this.
I’d assumed Deerling had been planning to lash out at the werewolf population since we’d been forced into the open. He’d certainly needed time to plan his attack on us and to find members of our pack who would be easy to grab, like Hank.
But what if this wasn’t a new idea?
What if our public exposure was just a convenient excuse for him to bring his hatred out to a wider audience?
“How long?”
“Ten years.”
I blanched. Deerling had been at this for a decade? My skin felt cold, and all the fire faded away. “He hasn’t even been here ten years.” It was like I was so unwilling to believe it, I was offering up reasons for it to be a lie.
“He started in Merrydale, then moved on to Greensburg.”
“So the ten you know about…that was just here?”
Anderson nodded.
“So there were more. In the other cities.” I didn’t phrase it like a question. It wasn’t a question.
If Deerling had been killing werewolves for a decade, this had nothing to do with the church being a hate group. Sure, they were a real entity and a massive problem for us. But this wasn’t about public opinion of werewolves. He’d known we existed long before we were out.
