As Lie The Dead (32 page)

“I don’t blame you” was poised on the tip of my tongue. But if I was being honest, I did blame him. Not for anything that had led up to my death but for everything that had happened since. For waking up alone and frozen on a morgue table, for dragging Alex Forrester into my life and getting him killed, for the battle at Olsmill that left six Hunters dead. And especially for the goddamned quiver I felt in my belly when he smiled at me; the way just holding his hand calmed me down, and the constant, warm memory of his kisses. All things I wanted to feel over and over again.

I’d been running around in a constant state of agitation ever since my resurrection, solving one problem after another. The closest Wyatt and I had come to figuring
us
out was four days ago in First Break. Surrounded by the peace and serenity of the Fair Ones and sure of our protection from everything hunting us, we’d finally been honest with each other. Or as honest as we’d been able when I was still only borrowing Chalice and I was convinced one or both of us would be dead in a day.

But now? We’d both survived that battle, only to be thrust headlong into a new fight—one that had been boiling beneath the surface for longer than we’d
anticipated, with no downtime to think about us. Waiting for Phin’s phone call, we had time. And now that I had it, I wanted to do anything except think about us. Or me. All I wanted to think about was the next mission.

It was a hell of a lot easier to handle.

“I don’t want to beat you up, Wyatt,” I said, forcing a smile. “You’re less useful when you’re bleeding and unconscious.”

His eyes narrowed. “Will you be serious, please?”

“I am being serious!” I launched off the bed and stalked to the other side of the room, rounding to face him when I reached the door. “Getting pissed at you doesn’t help. Hell, getting pissed at me doesn’t even help, and quite frankly? The only fucking person I want to be pissed at right now is this Call asshole, because he’s the one creating all our problems.”

“Call isn’t the one affecting us, Evy.”

“Oh no? Without the Park Place tangent he led me on, I probably would have found the information I needed in time to save Rufus from the Assembly, and maybe even have had time for a daylong nap that didn’t come as a result of two broken legs and chemical inhalation.”

“Are you being intentionally dense?”

“Excuse me?” I took three steps toward him, hands balled by my sides, fuming. He stood up, shoulders back, fists loose, anticipating an assault and making no move to protect himself from it. “What the fuck—?”

“I’m talking about us,” he snapped.

No, no, no. We are not talking about us
.

He continued. “You and me, Evy, not you and me and anyone else. I love you. I’ve made no bones about that, because it is what it is. I also know you have feelings for me, and I know why those feelings scare you.”

Heat flared in my cheeks. “Oh, really? You know exactly why my feelings for you scare me?”

“I was there at the end.” His voice quieted, was almost reverent.

“It’s more than what Kelsa did to me, Wyatt. I think if it were only that, I could compartmentalize it as just more Dreg-on-human violence and move on. As sick and disgusting as it was, and as … brutal, it was just one more way for the goblin bitch to tear me down and prove she was in charge. It was part of her job to keep me and kill me.”

Wyatt had paled a bit during my monologue. He’d twisted his mouth into a curious grimace, as though unsure what to make of my admission. Hell, I was a little unsure what to make of it. I would forever carry the memory of how I’d died, chained to a mattress, taken piece by piece. But that experience had been altered the morning I’d fully inhabited Chalice’s body. Our body.

My
body. A body that had experienced things I hadn’t and recalled those sensations. Sometimes vividly, as I’d felt upon first reentering the apartment; other times, it was just a shadow of feeling. My own memories—of my childhood, of working for the Triads, my friendships with Jesse and Ash, every Dreg I’d ever killed—were becoming gray. Less distinct. They lacked sensation—the touch my old body, long gone
and disposed of, had imprinted on itself. Just as Chalice’s life was imprinted on me.

I was glad to lose the pain of my death. I was also terrified of the loss and what it meant.

“If not that, then what is it?” he asked softly. His fingertips twitched, not quite trembling. “When you froze up in First Break, I thought I understood why. Now you’re saying … what, Evy?”

“No, I’m pretty sure in First Break, it was because of the goblins.” More than pretty sure. At the time, the memories were fresh and crystal clear, restored by the magic of a vampire memory ritual. I’d relived the brutality in Technicolor detail less than twelve hours prior to our attempt at sex. I’d only been borrowing Chalice at the time.

He blanched, struggling to understand my cryptic-speak. “Then what? Tell me.”

Something in his pleading tone made me snap. I don’t know what did it, only that I briefly saw red. Fury heated my skin and soured my stomach, barely tempered by the icy grip of fear. My fingernails dug into my palms.

“You really want to know why you scare me, Wyatt?” I asked, voice strange to my own ears. Cold. “You really want to hear why I regret sleeping with you two weeks ago, when I knew I shouldn’t have, and why the idea of admitting my new feelings for you drives me to irrational fear? Tell me you want to know.”

He didn’t reply, and I wanted him to. Hesitation meant he wasn’t sure. “Yes” meant exposing personal bullshit. “No” was easier. If he said no, I’d clam up,
swallow the truth, and move on with the other shit we had to deal with. As the silence drew out, the tension became a tangible thing, wrapping cold, icy fingers around my heart and squeezing tight.

He doesn’t want to know. He likes the fantasy warrior woman who kills bad things and doesn’t have a past deeper than four years. The woman who needs him to save her from the terrible memories of torture and death—he wants her. The one he fell in love with, not the amalgamation of two people that you’ve become. He doesn’t—

“I want to know,” he said.

My mouth fell open. A strange chill settled in my stomach. I’d challenged him and he’d called my bluff, and now I didn’t want to say it. Saying it meant he’d really asked, and that meant he wanted me. Not her.
Me
. Warts and wounds and multiple personalities and all. I retreated until my back hit the door, an immovable barrier. Unless I turned and ran.

Different emotions telegraphed across his face—surprise, concern, anger, frustration, hesitation, even grief. I’d seen them all; I knew his facial tics. I retained the advantage from our old life. He wasn’t so lucky.

“I could guess,” he said evenly, “from things you’ve said in the past, adding details from my own imagination. But I don’t want to guess anymore, Evy. I’ve never known anyone who could still surprise the hell out of me after four years, not the way you do. Who hurt you?”

“Who didn’t?”

His face crumpled. Not out of pity—good for his looks, since I’d have pummeled him if pity had even
pretended to come my way—but out of the acknowledgment of hidden fears. This wasn’t the conversation I’d expected, but there was no sense in holding back, either. He wanted the truth? He’d get it.

“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice a little too poisonous. “I wasn’t molested by my mom’s rotating boyfriends or raped by the guards at Juvie. My entire life before the Triads, I was just never treated like a person.”

“Abuse isn’t only sexual, Evy,” he said. Low voice, nostrils flaring. “No one deserves to be ignored.”

I snorted—if only being ignored had been the problem. “Oh no, they paid attention. Just the wrong kind, and mostly it was my own damned fault. To my mother’s boyfriends, I was a leech that needed occasional feeding and slapping around. To the people at the group foster home, I was another pathetic orphan with anger-management issues that was locked in the closet at least once a month for fighting with the other kids. When I was in Juvie, I spent more time in solitary or the infirmary than anywhere else.”

He scowled. I could almost see his blood boiling in his veins. “What about your mother?”

“She’s dead. What about her?”

“Did she love you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. She stopped saying it when I was four. After my stepfather left us, I think she stopped loving everything, including herself.”

“She filled the void with heroin?”

“You know she did.” Where the blue fuck was he going with this?

“Just like you filled the void with killing Dregs?”

The entire world seemed to go absolutely still. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it. It drowned out any other sound. Panic set in, colored with fear and anger. He had no right to get into my head like that. He wasn’t allowed to know me so well.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Just don’t!” My chest hurt. It was hard to breathe. Tears stung my eyes, sharp and hot. It was too much. I didn’t want to analyze why I was the way I was. I didn’t want to know why I had a hard time letting people in. I didn’t want to understand why killing Dregs made me feel good—gave me a sense of purpose I’d never felt as just another angry orphan.

Psychology was stupid.

Wyatt walked toward me, and I recoiled. Didn’t even think. The loneliness was there from our conversation; I just slipped into the electrical current of the Break and moved. The jump was brief, barely irritating, and I found myself standing on the other side of the bed, by the bathroom. Wyatt’s back was still to me, attention on the space where I’d been.

I’d just run from him.

God, can I sink any lower than this?

An angry sob tore from me and I fell to my knees, helpless against the shame choking me. Shame over what he knew, and all the things I couldn’t bear to tell him—about the scared thirteen-year-old who’d let an older boy touch her
down there
for the price of a plastic necklace; the confused twenty-one-year-old who
fucked strangers in dirty bar bathrooms to prove she was a woman and not just a killer.

Tears blurred my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut, gasping for air, desperate to keep it together.

Warm arms circled me from behind. I pulled away, but he held tight. Unafraid of my weakness. Not seeming to care that I wasn’t the strong, independent Hunter he’d trained. I turned and collapsed against his chest, unable to fight anymore, and let the tears come. Cheek against his shoulder, I sobbed until my head ached and I’d soaked his shirt through with tears and snot.

He didn’t speak until I was choking back soft hiccups instead of shaking gasps. “You scare me, too, you know,” he whispered, breath warm by my cheek. “You barrel into situations you don’t always understand, and you’re way too fond of questioning my orders.”

“Good thing …” I wheezed a bit, cleared my throat, and tried again. “Good thing I don’t take orders from you anymore.”

“I don’t want to give you orders. I want to be your partner, Evy, not your boss.”

“My partners have a bad habit of dying.”

“Well, I’ve already died once, so we can strike that off the list of objections.” He stroked my hair with one hand, gentle brushes, like I was fragile glass. “Why did you disappear like that?”

Tell the truth, dammit. He deserves that
. “I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Not you.” I pulled away far enough to see him. The look on his face broke my heart and my resolve to
shield any more of myself. Building that wall had been easy, placed brick by brick over twenty-two years of loneliness, ignorance, neglect, and pain. Keeping the wall up against something as simple as love … not so easy.

I was tired of it. Tired of battling my emotions. Tired of fearing the future. Why continue to fear what I couldn’t stop? I had too many other enemies out there, too many other things to fight, without fighting with myself all the time.

Wyatt hooked a finger beneath my chin, drawing my attention back to him. I tried to focus on the bridge of his nose, afraid if I looked into his eyes I’d fall in and never climb back out. He didn’t speak. I gave in, looked, and barely held on.

“Then what?” he asked.

“Of us.”

“Why?”

My stomach quaked. A tremor tore down my spine. I balled my hands in front of his shirt and closed my eyes, sure I would break into a thousand pieces if I didn’t hold on tight. Wyatt pulled me close, abandoning his quest for answers, and just held me. I pressed my face into his shoulder. Inhaled him. Felt his heart beat.

“I told you I’d never pressure you,” he said.

“It isn’t that. I want to be with you and let myself care for you, but it’s those things that scare me the most.”

He tensed a fraction, barely noticeable. “I don’t understand.”

“It feels like …” I struggled to put into words
what was so clear in my head. My mixed-up, tired, pain-addled head. “No, not feels like. It
is
. Giving in to this thing between us—to my physical attraction to you—means losing the old Evangeline Stone for good. It means the sensations I feel in this body are well and truly mine, and that what I was before? She’s gone. It means accepting I will never be her again, and that this is my life now. Period.”

I’d finally said it, and I felt strangely good. Relieved, even. There it was—my fear in full-color detail, and even if I’d been able to take back the confession, I wouldn’t. I knew in my brain that I couldn’t go back to what I’d been before my death, but I had not accepted it in my heart. Saying it drove that acceptance home. Made it impossible to ignore, for both of us.

Besides, it was better he know it all up front, so he could weigh the totality of my issues against his feelings for me. He’d more than earned it.

I drew back and searched his face. “Sorry you asked?”

“Never.” The vehemence in his voice made my heart soar. “Are you sorry you told me?”

“No.”

He smiled. I couldn’t decipher his expression. It seemed like … awe, but that wasn’t possible. “I can’t begin to imagine these last few days from your perspective, Evy. Your entire world changed when you came back, and I never considered that, or how inhabiting a new body would affect you. You’re allowed to be scared of this.”