That surprised me—and everyone else, too, by the look of it. Jack seemed to have embraced his trickster heritage with gusto, and I’d never seen him be serious about anything. Of course, Jamaal, with his nonexistent sense of humor, was Jack’s favorite target. The jokes sometimes had some pretty sharp teeth, but he wouldn’t have teased Jamaal so much if he didn’t like him.
“He’s had enough chances,” Blake countered with a snarl. “He’s proven he can’t control himself—or won’t—and there’s no place for him here.”
“Surely he’s learned his lesson,” Maggie put in softly, and I was glad I wasn’t the only bleeding heart in the room.
“Too late!” Blake snapped.
The tribunal was about to devolve into a free-for-all, but Anderson nipped that in the bud.
“Show of hands. How many of you think we should give Jamaal another chance?”
Maggie, Jack, and I all raised our hands. I got a couple of startled looks—and a sneer from Blake—but I was sure giving Jamaal another chance was the right thing to do. I didn’t think he would fall over himself in gratitude because I supported him, nor did I think he would suddenly be convinced I didn’t work for Konstantin. Maybe I’d end up regretting the decision later, but I couldn’t vote to throw him to the wolves. Steph might have been hurt because of him, but that certainly wasn’t what he’d meant to happen. And there was no guarantee Steph wouldn’t have been hurt if I’d made the rendezvous in time.
Blake, Logan, and Leo didn’t raise their hands, despite the sad look in Leo’s eyes. That left us deadlocked, though in truth I wasn’t sure how much our opinions really counted. Anderson had made it very clear: his house, his rules.
Anderson thought about it for a long moment, then nodded. “Since Nikki, as the injured party, is willing to give you another chance, I’ll let you choose your punishment. You can either pack your bags and leave. Or you can submit to an execution once a day for the next three days.”
There were gasps and winces all around the semicircle of Liberi, and I saw the flicker of fear in Jamaal’s eyes. Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate in his answer.
“I’ll submit to whatever I have to if you’ll let me stay.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what it all meant. Obviously, the Liberi couldn’t die, so this wasn’t a real execution we were talking about. (Not to mention that a real execution is a one-time deal.) But something about it sure gave the rest of the Liberi the shivers.
Anderson nodded regally. “Logan will perform the executions,” he continued. “I’ll leave it to him to decide the methods.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll convene at sunset at the clearing. Attendance is mandatory.” He shot a look at me, as if knowing how little I’d want to watch whatever was going to happen. “Jamaal, you will remain downstairs until the sentence has been fully carried out. No passing through the door, or you’re out. Clear?”
Jamaal held his chin high. “Clear.”
Anderson stood from his chair, still running arctic cold. “Everyone out,” he said as he turned his back on all of us and headed toward his desk to pull it out of the corner it had been shoved into. I think more than one of us considered offering to help him put the room back to rights, but we all thought better of it.
I gave Maggie a significant look as we left the room, and she got the message, following me up to my own suite.
“I don’t want to go into this thing tonight uninformed,” I told her as soon as I’d closed the sitting room door. “Jamaal can’t die, so what’s with the execution thing? And why did everyone look so sick about it?”
Maggie shuddered as she dropped onto the sofa, wrapping her arms about herself like she was cold. “It’s not true that we can’t die,” she said. “We just don’t stay dead.”
I joined her on the sofa, feeling a similar chill. “Huh?”
“If we’re dealt a serious enough wound, we die. Our bodies will heal the damage eventually, and we’ll revive, so it’s not permanent. But it is dead.
“I’ve never had a fatal wound myself, but from what I’ve heard, it’s horrible. It has nothing to do with the pain of the wound or of the healing—though that can be considerable in itself, depending on the cause of death—but dying itself is a massively unpleasant experience. Even as an immortal, you want to avoid dying at all costs.”
I salted this information away for later. I probably wasn’t cruel enough to kill Alexis over and over again if I ever got my hands on him. But at least for now, it made a comforting, if gruesome, fantasy.
TWENTY-ONE
I checked on Steph every couple of hours until the Valium had worn off and she was awake and alert. I had to admit, Blake seemed to be taking good care of her. Her face and throat were still darkly bruised, but judicious applications of ice had reduced the swelling. There was also a bottle of Advil on the bedside table, beside a cheerful flower arrangement exactly like the kind you might send someone in the hospital.
He’d given her an oversized T-shirt to wear, along with a pair of drawstring running shorts that would probably fall off if she tried to walk around in them. She was propped up in his bed, surrounded by mounds of pillows as she sipped from a mug of hot chocolate, when I came in.
Blake, still in guardian angel mode, was sitting on the side of the bed, his hand stroking idly up and down the covers over her legs as he kept her silent company. They both looked up when I knocked on the bedroom door, but Blake spared me only a brief glance before he turned his attention back to his patient.
Steph cupped her hands around her mug as if they were cold, then looked me up and down, her head cocked to the side. There was no way she could miss how my injuries had disappeared overnight. She didn’t look completely shocked, so I suspected Blake had told her all the secrets I’d been unwilling to share. Just one more thing to feel guilty about, though truthfully, if I could have gone back in time I’d probably have made the same decision.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, though it felt like a dumb question.
She raised one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “To tell you the truth, right now I’m kind of numb. I don’t suppose it’ll last, but I’ll take what I can get.”
The flatness of her voice made her sound as numb as she said she felt, and I wished to God I’d been able to save her. It took about a thousand wrong decisions on my part to put her in this situation, and I couldn’t stop myself from mentally recalling and regretting each one.
“How about you?” Steph asked. “You looked pretty rough last night.”
“I’m fine now,” I answered, which was true as long as we were talking only about my physical injuries. The emotional wounds left me in a state that was very far from fine.
Steph set her mug down on the bedside table, then lightly touched the back of Blake’s hand. “Could you give us a few minutes alone?”
I could tell by the look on his face that Blake was reluctant to leave her side, but he sighed and nodded. “I’ll be right outside if you need anything,” he said. “Just give me a holler.”
She managed a small smile. “I will.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead, like a father comforting a little girl, before he left the room, but I didn’t think his affection for her was exactly paternal. Was it just his guilt over having failed her last night that made him act so devoted, or had he really formed such a quick, strong attachment?
“Come and sit down, Nikki,” Steph beckoned.
I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was hovering near the door as if ready to make a quick escape. It was almost impossibly hard to face my sister and be forced to see what had been done to her because of me. But she needed every ounce of support she could get, so I manned up and took Blake’s place at the side of the bed. She reached out and took my hand, giving it a firm, comforting squeeze.
“I’ll survive,” she told me softly even as she squeezed my hand harder. “You know that, right?”
My throat ached so much I couldn’t answer, and if I wasn’t careful I
was going to start bawling. Steph shouldn’t need to comfort me after what she’d been through. I should be strong enough to hide my own pain and guilt, deal with it on my own rather than burdening her with it.
“I’m not as fragile as you think I am, Nikki,” she said when I still couldn’t force myself to speak. “It’s going to be rough for a while, but I swear to you, I’m going to get over it.”
I sucked in a breath, and it loosened my throat enough to let me speak. “I’m so sorry …”
Steph shook her head. “There was nothing you could have done. This Alexis creep was never going to just let me go. You know that, don’t you?”
Actually, I hadn’t thought about it, about what he would have done if I’d gotten there on time. I had a suspicion Steph was right. Alexis wasn’t what you’d call the honorable type, so expecting him to keep his word was wishful thinking. But having not made the rendezvous, I couldn’t be sure. I guess I didn’t look convinced, because Steph continued.
“Blake says Alexis wants you to track down a bunch of innocent people so he can slaughter them. Do you think for a moment that’s what I’d have wanted you to do?”
I scrubbed at my eyes, wiping away the hint of tears that had gathered in them, wishing I could wipe away the aching exhaustion as easily. Obviously, Blake had done a lot of talking. And been very convincing. “No, of course not.”
“I’d like to take you and Blake and knock both your heads together. The self-flagellation the two of you are doing is getting on my last nerve. Bad things happen to people, and unless you’ve got an infallible crystal ball, you aren’t always going to be able to stop them. Just deal with it and move on, because let me tell you, knowing you’re miserable about it doesn’t help me one iota.”
I flinched from the anger in her voice. The numbness appeared to be gone for now. “What do you want me to do? Smile and act like nothing’s wrong? I’m not a good enough actress to pull that off.”
“No,” she replied with exaggerated patience, “I want you to stop wasting your time and energy feeling guilty about it and start figuring out how you’re going to get the son of a bitch who did this to me!”
There was nothing I wanted to do more. The problem was, how do you “get” someone who’s immortal? Unlike the Olympians, Anderson didn’t have a bunch of indoctrinated Descendants sitting around waiting for the opportunity to kill a Liberi.
An idea struck me before I even managed to finish the thought. “The list,” I murmured, not meaning to say it aloud.
“Huh?”
“Konstantin gave me a list of Descendants he wanted me to find. Maybe if I could find one of them, we can use him to kill Alexis.” What a sweet irony it would be if the very list the Olympians gave me turned out to be the key to destroying Alexis! I’d enjoy rubbing his smug face in it, right before—
“Wait a minute,” Steph interrupted before my thoughts could gallop too far ahead. “Your plan is to hunt down some random civilian who probably has no idea that the Liberi even exist, then … what, exactly? Hope he’s a homicidal maniac who’ll be happy to kill Alexis at your command? Or were you thinking of kidnapping him and forcing him to kill Alexis? Or maybe doing to him what this Emmitt character did to you, somehow tricking him into killing Alexis?”
Damn. Steph had a few too many good questions for my taste. I frowned. “I only came up with this idea like five seconds ago. Give me some time to work out the kinks. Besides, how else are we supposed to make Alexis pay for what he did? There’s no other way to kill him.”
“Who says you have to kill him? Blake told me you’ve been searching for a woman the Olympians have had interred for ten years. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine?”
There was a sense of poetic justice to the idea, except—
“If we bury him, somebody could dig him up someday just like we plan to dig up Emma.” Assuming I could ever find her, which wasn’t looking too likely. “I never thought of myself as bloodthirsty before, but I want that man dead.”
“And the world would probably be a better place without him.” Her voice softened. “But Nikki, you aren’t a killer. I want Alexis to pay for what he did, but not at the price of putting a black mark on your soul.”
I’d always suspected Steph was so damn nice because she’d had such an easy life. It’s easy to be magnanimous toward others when everything is going your way, or at least that’s what I’d thought. But here she was, being nice, worrying about the state of my soul after having been through a trauma worse than any I’d experienced. Maybe her niceness had nothing to do with her charmed life after all. Maybe it was just her.
“You can’t possibly believe you’re the only woman he’s hurt,” I said instead of voicing any of my true thoughts. “There’s not a question in my mind that he deserves to die.” And killing him would make me feel so much better. Thought the woman who felt guilty about taking Jamaal’s eye out. Maybe Steph had a point, but damned if I was going to admit it.
“So you’re going to turn vigilante? Use your superpowers to hunt down the baddies one by one?”
She meant for me to respond to the vigilante comment—I guess it was supposed to shame me into seeing things her way—but I didn’t want to argue with her, not now of all times. So I deflected the question.
“You’re presuming I even have superpowers. I do seem to have acquired really good aim, but the hunting/tracking thing has been a total bust.” Unless I counted finding the ring as part of my ”superpowers,” but that hadn’t exactly turned out so well.
Despite her misery, there was a spark of interest in Steph’s eyes. I suppose learning about the secret world that existed just beneath the surface of the ordinary one was a good way to distract herself from her present situation.
“How is the power supposed to work?” she asked.
“Beats me,” I answered with a shrug. “I didn’t get an instruction manual.”
She gave me an exasperated look. “No kidding? What have you tried?”
I resisted the urge to give her another flippant answer. I couldn’t do near as much as I wanted to help her, but I could at least talk to her and keep her mind occupied. “To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what to try,” I admitted. “I’ve approached the search just like I would if I were using my ordinary everyday skills and hoped I’d figure something out. So far, it hasn’t worked. It’s not like I’ve suddenly developed a hound’s sense of smell or can tell which way someone went by a blade of broken grass.”
Her brow furrowed in thought. “But you’ve always been good at finding things, even when you weren’t Liberi. How did you do it?”
I waved her point off. “Yeah, I was good at it, but there was nothing supernatural about it. Like you said, I wasn’t Liberi.”
“But it seems unlikely it’s a coincidence that you’re descended from a goddess of the hunt and you’ve always been good at … well, hunting.”
“I suppose,” I said doubtfully.
“Remember that time back in high school when I lost my wallet?”
I frowned at the unexpected question. “Um, yeah. I guess.” When we were kids, Steph had always been pretty bad about losing things, though it was a habit she’d outgrown. In fact, she’d lost enough stuff that I wasn’t immediately sure which incident she was talking about.
“I was walking back from school and stopped at a coffee shop because a couple of my friends were in there.”
I nodded, the memory sparking in my mind. “You got home and realized you didn’t have your wallet. We retraced your steps back to the shop, assuming you must have left it there when you paid for your coffee.”
“Right. Only it wasn’t there.”
We’d searched the place thoroughly, even asking the manager if we could look in the trash cans in case someone had found the wallet, taken all the good stuff, and thrown it away. We’d had no luck, and Steph had been in tears because she’d just gotten her first credit card. She was afraid her mom wouldn’t let her replace it if she los
t it so fast.
Steph was sure someone had stolen the wallet and it would never be seen again. That seemed like a pretty logical conclusion, but I suggested that maybe she’d dropped it somewhere between the coffee shop and home.
We started walking back home, scanning the pavement and the gutters, although Steph wasn’t exactly holding out much hope. When we still didn’t find it, Steph gave up and went to her room, miserably waiting for her mom to get home and scold her for being so careless with her belongings.
On a hunch, I headed back out. I remember it was in the early spring, the kind of day where you need a coat in the morning but it’s too hot to wear by afternoon. Steph had a habit of absently stuffing things in pockets—it seemed like half the things she lost turned up eventually in a pocket somewhere—and I thought it was possible she’d stuffed the wallet in her coat pocket after paying for her coffee. Because it was too hot to wear the coat, she’d have been carrying it over her arm, and it was possible the wallet had dropped out.
We’d checked the sidewalk carefully when we’d retraced her steps, but what if a Good Samaritan had found the wallet? This was D.C., not the kind of place you could leave a wallet lying around on the sidewalk for very long before someone helped themselves to it. That Good Samaritan would have either taken it with them in hopes of finding the owner—which might be hard, since the only identification in there was the credit card, and that gave nothing but a name—or handed it in to the closest shop.
It seemed like a long shot, but I didn’t think it would hurt to check. Figuring the wallet would have fallen out pretty close to the coffee shop, I went into the tiny little shoe store a couple of doors down and asked if anyone had turned in a wallet—and wouldn’t you know it, they had.
“How did you find that wallet?” Steph asked me.
“You know the story as well as I do.”
“Not really. I wasn’t inside your head, you know. Why did you decide to go into a shoe store that you knew I hadn’t been in myself to look for the wallet I’d supposedly lost at the coffee shop?”