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Lassiter closed his eyes briefly.
“Look at me,” she demanded.
His lids slowly lifted.
“I need you to know something about me, something you should never forget.” She leaned in, so there was absolutely no mistaking her words. “I liked killing him. I breathed in the scent of his fear and suffering, the rank stench of his body odor as he vomited and lost control of his bladder and bowels. I relished both the sound of him begging me for mercy and the denial to him of that which he refused me. Further, his testicles were in his mouth when I put him on his flagpole. I was cruel and I do not regret it. I sleep well during the day, and there is naught on my conscience.”
“Rahvyn—”
“What is more, I believe that I owe him a debt of gratitude. Before him, there was no balance to me. I was of virtue, but I had no power because I was without aggression. And then… he captured me because of my gifts and sought to subdue me. He had heard about me rescuing crops and livestock, aiding with births, healing with my hands and presence, locating the missing. He feared losing his authority, that others would bow unto me. So he endeavored to destroy me by forcing my physical body to submit unto him in the basest manner. In the aftermath, as I was bound by chains and in pain, I realized I had a choice. Either I retained the virtue of my character, and submitted to my body’s ruin—or I sacrificed all of what I was, and ahvenged myself and my cousin. I. Have. No. Regrets. I am balanced now, the healer and the killer, the virtue’d and the cursed, and I will not hesitate to draw upon either side of me, as it suits or is required.”
In the silence that followed, she was aware of a deep-seated release, an uncoiling of the tension in her body. It was hard to imagine how she would have told Lassiter the details under any other circumstances, and she was glad it was done.
“When I tell you,” she intoned sternly, “that you do not need to worry about my safety, I mean it. I will not hesitate to defend myself and I have the power and strength not just to do that, but to make those who would seek to aggress upon me or those I protect rue the night they were born. I am not the Gift of Light, I am a scourge held in check by a conscience that is very easily dissuaded from its supremacy.”
* * *
There was a plane traveling overhead.
In the resonant quiet that followed Rahvyn’s stark revelations, Lassiter looked up to the night sky with an essential detachment and tracked the slow, lazy passage of a commercial aircraft from west to east. But the lack of evident speed was just about perspective, wasn’t it. From where he was standing on the ground, the 747, or whatever it was, seemed to be strolling. If the thing were going by him? At eye level? It would have been a blur that knocked him off his feet.
“And your apology about this evening is not required,” she concluded, “because I know what I did and what happened behind the club, and that is wholly sufficient for me. I do not need your version of events to align with reality. That is your issue, not mine.”
He re-leveled his head, and as he met her silver stare, he remembered when they had stood out here together that night of the flowers—all of which had died in the cold. She had been so diminutive, so fragile… or so it seemed. And it was that impression of her, as delicate and precious, that had fueled his anger at her autonomy tonight. He had imagined her in the dangerous alleys of Caldwell, surrounded by lessers and shadows and humans who were out to hurt her.
Fear over what could happen was what had made him snap.
Especially in light of what he knew had already been done to her.
“I am balance,” she reiterated, as if his silence made her feel that he was marshaling arguments. “Not innocence. And balance does not need protection to survive. It regulates itself, no matter what, and no matter who, seeks to upset the equilibrium.”
Lassiter closed his eyes—and yet he saw her on the backs of his lids, standing there in front of him, her platinum hair teased by the wind, her face composed, her voice unwavering. In her jeans and sweater, she seemed nothing like what she truly was.
No civilian, this female. But something else entirely.
Come on, though. Like he didn’t already know she was powerful after what she’d done to Nate. To George?
“I realize this changes your opinion of me,” she said. “It changed my opinion of myself.”
