The well of truth, p.8
The Well of Truth, page 8
I closed the distance between us, keeping my hands firmly at my sides. “She’s here because I brought her here. If you have a problem with it, you can leave, or you can keep your mouth shut. Those are your only two options.”
“She’s going to be a corpse before this is over,” Flo hissed. “Turn her or lose her. Those are your only two options.”
My hand flew through the air, slapping her across the face so hard that she had to take a step back to steady herself. “I told you before that no one is going to be turning anyone. If you lay one finger on her, I swear that I will kill you myself.”
“I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.” Flo wiped a spot of blood off her lip. “Humans are landmines. You just have to look at Sullivan to see the damage they can cause. The last thing you need is to find that level of humanity in yourself again, Kaden. You’ve already found as much as you can handle now. If you fall in love with this girl, it will be the end of you. I guarantee it.”
“Get her out of my sight,” I growled to Stu. “Now.”
He stepped meekly up to Flo and touched her elbow. She yanked it out of his reach and flew down the Spanish Steps. Stu’s jaw was hanging open in shock. “I … uh …” he stammered.
“Just go,” I told him, losing some of my edge. He rubbed his cheek with his hand and started slowly in the same path Flo had just taken. “Stu, don’t take all night,” I called, causing him to pick up the pace.
Sullivan stepped up beside me. “Are you all right?” he asked once Stu had vanished.
I shrugged and leaned over the railing. “I don’t know.”
Sullivan released a long, heavy sigh and joined me, leaning his back against the stone beside my shoulder. “Flo is just confused herself, so she’s lashing out.”
“That’s no excuse. It’s none of her business, and she never should have brought you into it.”
“I told you what happened with Lucy,” Sullivan started. “I loved her more than I had ever loved anything before. I don’t think I will find it again. I will never stop blaming myself for her death.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said.
He shrugged. “I hope you never have to feel this way.”
I glanced at him sideways. “I have a hard time deciding what side you’re on sometimes.”
“What side?” He gave me a halfhearted smile. “There are no sides. I understand what Flo is saying, but I also understand what you’re feeling. If you want to know what I think you should do, I can’t answer that. It’s your choice. But …” he paused and pretended to wipe a bit of dirt from the back of his hand. “If I could have Lucy here again, I think I would do it.”
“You would turn her?” I asked in genuine surprise. “You would choose this life for her?”
His eyebrows lifted. “Are you really that shocked? I would do anything to have her with me again.”
“Anything?”
“You know … ” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking up to the sky. “If she hadn’t died the way she did, she still wouldn’t be here now. I try to tell myself that every day. Humans age, Kaden. They age quickly, and then it’s over for them. There is only one way that I could have saved myself this pain, no matter the circumstances. And, that’s exactly what you don’t want to do.”
I pushed myself up off the railing, hooking my hands under the ledge to stretch my arms. “I refuse to do it. This life would ruin her.”
“This life is what you make of it,” he said quietly. “Sometimes it’s the people around you that make all the difference.”
“And being able to live with yourself? What about that?” I asked. “Haven’t I already done enough?”
“We all have,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be happy in the future. You have one shot at this. It’s your choice. Make sure you make the right one.”
“I am,” I insisted.
Chapter 8
“I can’t believe you hit a girl,” Alex shouted under his breath.
Just when he was starting not to hate me …
“Listen,” I explained. “Once you become a member of the undead, you stop distinguishing between men and women. She’s a vampire and therefore no longer counts. I would never hit a human female.”
“But …”
“Alex,” Reece sighed, “if you had the chance to smack her, you would have done it too. Stop viewing the world from a human standpoint before you get yourself in trouble.” He grabbed a slice of pizza from the refrigerator and bit off a chunk of saucy crust. “This is so good.”
“Did you have fun?” Sullivan asked from the couch.
“Definitely,” Reece answered around a mouth full of food. “This city is so amazing. I went to the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Sistine Chapel, Trevi Fountain, and a couple museums. It’s a shame we’ll get booted out after we’re done. You guys should get the chance to look around.”
It definitely bothered me that Reece had gone out sightseeing, but I didn’t say anything. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all of us to be where we were. He had nothing to do in the apartment all day except be on the lookout for anything trying to kill us, but it sounded worse when I thought of it that way. I felt relatively safe for the moment. Abel had made himself known but hadn’t threatened us. And Alex had stayed behind.
“Phone,” Stu called from his bedroom. “I think it’s Kaden’s.”
I felt the pocket of my jeans. I must have left it in the bedroom on the charger. I opened the door quietly so I wouldn’t wake Lyn. She was curled up in the middle of the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin and both pillows positioned to form a V around her head.
The phone was buzzing violently across the nightstand. I ripped it off the charger and opened it. It was Sid. I answered quickly, whispering into the microphone.
“How’s everything going?” Sid asked calmly. “I haven’t heard from you since you left.”
“Reece and Alex are fine,” I assured him. “Abel’s here, but we still have no idea what’s going on.”
He paused, trying to hide his disappointment. “When do you think you’ll be getting back?”
Back? That was the furthest thing from my mind.
“Sorry, I don’t think it will be for a while. Why? Is there something I should be worried about?”
There was another long pause. “Ennis is doing all right with everything,” he began.
“But?” There was yet another long silence. “Sid?”
“Do you remember Merv?” he asked nervously.
“Merv?” I repeated. “Of course. He was my blood supplier before Francesca killed him to get to me. Why?”
“Well,” he said, carrying the vowel longer than necessary. “He’s not exactly dead.”
“What?” I shouted, waking Lyn up. “I tried calling him. He never answered and never called me back. He’s dead.”
“Kaden, I’m telling you that …”
“What does ‘not exactly dead’ mean?” I interrupted. “Is he in critical condition at the hospital?”
“Kaden?” Lyn was rubbing her left eye.
“You’re either dead or you’re not,” I continued.
“He’s alive,” Sid said carefully. “He’s just not human.”
“Excuse me?” I screamed into the receiver. I jumped off the edge of the bed and started pacing back and forth so hard the ceiling was probably shaking in the apartment below. “Define ‘not human.’”
“Kaden?” Lyn slipped out of the bed and flicked on the lights. “What’s going on?”
I winced against the brightness, shielding my eyes. “Nothing,” I snapped at her. “Sid, tell me what’s going on.”
“Merv showed up this morning. He said he was being kept in a shed, but when the people that were keeping him there stopped coming back, he found a way out. He’s lost a lot of weight, but looks fine otherwise. His spirits are up now that he’s had something to eat.”
“Something, or someone?” I hissed angrily.
“Something,” he replied in a quiet, calm voice that just added further to my bad temper.
“Get back to the un-human part,” I growled.
Sid took a deep breath. “He’s been bitten.”
I held the phone away from my ear and squeezed until it almost cracked into a hundred pieces. Merv, the man who had been so obsessed with the vampire world, was a werewolf. He was part of it now, but from a different perspective. And again, it was my fault.
Stu’s head popped inside the room. “Everything all right?”
“I’ve got to go,” I told Sid and hung up the phone. I sat down on the edge of the bed and waved my hand at Stu. “We’ll leave in a little while. Give me a few minutes.” Stu shot Lyn a nervous look and backed his head out of the door, shutting it behind him.
I didn’t know how I had ended up failing Merv so miserably. I had promised to keep him safe in exchange for supplying my bagged blood. It wasn’t that I liked the guy, I didn’t. At all. But he had been my responsibility. Not only had I left him for dead without confirming it, but he was a werewolf now. After his fascination with vampires, I could only imagine how he felt about being our polar opposite. Maybe finding out that werewolves existed would get the same reaction as the vamps, though.
“I need to send you home to Vermont,” I said to Lyn. “It’s not safe for you here, and I don’t know who I can trust in New York anymore. No one should bother you there.”
“What?” She walked around the bed and sat down next to me. “We already decided that I could stay.”
“Things change,” I whispered.
“No, I’m not going,” she said defiantly, her fingers digging into the comforter.
I moved quickly, pinning her to the bed with her hands above her head. I looked down at her, my face a few inches from hers. “Don’t you see how defenseless you are against us?” My breath came out in a hoarse whisper. “I could rip your throat out, and you would never see it coming.”
Her heart was beating quickly in her chest like a bird trapped in a cage. Her eyes searched my face, and she squirmed beneath me. “I’m not afraid,” she insisted.
“You’re not?” I whispered in her ear. “Then why do you reek of fear?”
She paused. “You won’t hurt me. I’m not scared with you around.”
With me around, she had all the more reason to be frightened. I was the reason all the dangerous things surrounded her, and I wouldn’t always be around to save her. One day, I wouldn’t be there.
“I hate that you’re so confident in me,” I told her, lifting my head to look her in the eye. “It will make the day I can’t protect you that much harder.”
She fixed her eyes on me and didn’t say a word. There were a million of them floating around in her head—I could see them under the surface. She was thinking very hard about more than one thing, but chose not to speak any of them out loud.
Her cheeks flushed a light pink, and her rosy lips parted as if she was about to change her mind and speak. The pull to kiss her buzzed in my head, but I wasn’t going to give in. Not this time. I sat up onto my knees with her still beneath me and sighed. “Alex should take you out to see Rome before you leave.”
“Can’t you take me?” she whispered.
“Lyn.” I choked on my words as a single tear fell from her eye and ran down onto the comforter. I wiped the trail from her face and reminded myself that I was doing this for her. The day would come when she realized that and would thank me for it.
“Kaden,” Sullivan called from the other side of the front door, “we should get going.”
“Coming,” I answered. I looked back to Lyn and took a deep breath. “I’ll be back later.”
I rushed from the room and out of the apartment. It was going to be another wet night, although the rain was just a light sprinkle for the time being. I stood there, letting it fall on my face to snap me out of my red-colored haze, and pushed my dark hair away from my face. I felt Sullivan come up beside me, rather than seeing him.
“I want to get out of here,” I told him.
“We all do,” Flo hissed, joining us. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Stu was right behind her with a black Puma baseball hat on.
I bit my tongue. “Let’s go back to the apartment where we saw Abel the other night.”
“Why?” Stu asked.
“We’re skipping right to the source of the problem. I’m sick of being played with.”
There was still no blood in the apartment. Deep down I knew Max had nothing to do with that, but I was angry that the church lied to us. It wasn’t a setup to make us look like the villain because it was obvious they needed us, but there was something off. The sooner we left, the better.
It made sense that Abel was the proverbial head of the dragon. He told us himself that there was more than our secret that Phoenix was worried about. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I was going to find out sooner or later. Even if I had to torture it out of Abel, I would figure things out. Then I was going to finish it and never step foot in Rome again.
“That’s the roof we were on,” Sullivan said.
I looked up the building. It looked familiar, but to be honest, I wasn’t paying very close attention that night. I was lost and we were getting shot at. I was banking on Sullivan’s memory, and it was usually pretty accurate.
I hurried up to the roof the same way as before. The rain started to pick up and drop down in heavier sheets. It was déjà vu. I laid down on my stomach and looked over the edge. Nothing was happening. The lights were on, spilling out onto the patio from the windows, but no one was visible inside.
“Stu,” I whispered. “Keep an eye out in that direction. Let me know if anyone comes to the front door.”
Sullivan and I watched the back, while Flo joined Stu at the front. We settled in for a long night of waiting. I didn’t want to spook them. Not just yet. Information was power, and I wanted as much as I could before confronting them about anything.
“What do you think Abel meant when he said it wasn’t only our secret Phoenix was worried about?” I asked Sullivan as softly as I could.
He wiped the water from his face and shifted uncomfortably. “I think Phoenix has his own secret hidden here.”
“His own?”
“I could be wrong.” He shrugged. “The first thing Phoenix did when he took the crown from Tobias was to forbid any vampire or werewolf from Rome. There were a few things that didn’t add up at the time. Tobias, he said, was killed in Rome, and he wanted us to stay out as a sign of respect for him. But Tobias was last seen in what is now Amsterdam. Later, Phoenix was quoted saying that he wanted us to stay out of Rome to avoid the church.”
“Why didn’t I know any of this?” I asked.
Sullivan looked at me sharply from the corners of his gray eyes. “No one was stupid enough to speak any doubts out loud, especially not to you.”
He was right. I would have run right back to Phoenix and told him everything. Then they would have made a visit to the Marquis. No one wanted that, but I would have gladly sent them. I was ruthless, but more importantly, I was loyal. Neither of which I was proud of anymore.
“So, you think he’s hiding something here?” I continued.
“Kaden,” Stu called. “There’s a car.”
I crawled quickly and quietly over to the other side of the building and looked down. A white Alfa Romeo was parked across the street, and the lights switched off. The engine stopped purring, and a man stepped out in a brown suit, his stomach bulging out over his pants.
“Get out of here,” Flo said under her breath. “Is that who I think it is?”
“Depends,” Stu replied. “Do you think it’s Cardinal Lombardi?”
I looked more closely through the rain. They were right. It was the same cardinal from the meeting the night before, and he was running up to the front door of Abel’s apartment with a large cardboard box. He knocked, and someone immediately opened the door to let him in.
“What the …” Flo started.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I asked.
Sullivan shook his head. “Either we’re being fooled, or the church is.”
I pulled out my phone and called Max. It took him five rings to answer, and when he did, it was with a low, husky voice.
“Sorry to wake you,” I said without any conviction. “What’s the story with Cardinal Lombardi?”
“What?” he asked sleepily. “He’s a distant relative of mine—second cousin five times removed or something like that. I don’t really know him that well. Why?”
“Why isn’t he Iustitia?”
“He is,” Max said. “He’s just not a field man. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Did he try to become a field man?”
There was a pause while Max thought. “Yes. He has diabetes and a heart murmur, so they didn’t accept him. Kaden, what—”
I hung up on him.
“Anything shady?” Stu asked.
I scowled. “Maybe.”
I moved back to my original spot and watched the patio. Through the glass doors I could see Lombardi sitting at a kitchen table. Someone, we couldn’t see who, dumped the contents of the box out in front of him. Blood. Bags and bags of blood. Our blood.
Lombardi’s hands were moving through the air while he spoke. There was a loud bang, and he jumped up from his seat. Abel walked in front of the doors and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. It took two other vampires to pull him off the cardinal.
Then Abel stood back and smoothed himself out. He turned to the doors. If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn that he looked right at us, but he simply reached over and swung the curtain shut.
I let out a breath. I was just being paranoid. He hadn’t seen us. It wasn’t possible through the rain, or at least I hoped it wasn’t. If we could see him, he could probably see us too.
“Calling Phoenix sounds better by the second, doesn’t it?” Flo asked.
I glared. “Not even remotely.”
“Davis?” Sullivan said quietly.
