Know Thine Enemy (23 page)

"
What? Human?" She laughed again. "That's Zack's thing. Humans are better because . . . what? We were here first? We don't commit evil? We don't kill each other every day? I don't think Jeffrey Dahmer ate people because he was a demon, do you?"

It was an argument Ryker had presented many times, in conversations with humans and demons alike. Those who justified their war on vampires by
declaring the innate rightness of humankind versus the innate wrongness of all other kinds. He wasn't accustomed to hearing his point being made with human lips.

"
Zack's wife was butchered by a vampire woman," Izzie said, her tone softer now. "A woman who became fixated on Zack because he reminded her of her lover, who was killed a century or so before. It left her all fucked in the head, you know? At least, that's what I think. She met Zack at a bar where he went to watch games with friends from work, and when he explained he was a married man with one kid and another on the way, she got it in her head that if she took out the obstacles they could be together. So she murdered Amber and the child, and Zack found out about vampires the hard way. But that's not something I can say a human woman has never done, because we all know differently, don't we? If that had happened to me, I'd be a different person. If what happened to me had happened to Zack, who knows?"

"
Been saying that since we first met. You don't have a reason. Not like the others."

"
Not like the others," Izzie agreed. "But that
doesn't
mean I don't have a reason. Zack was my reason, or as close as I came to one."

Ryker
's jaw clenched, hating the surge of jealousy that blistered his skin at the mention of what Izzie had shared with another. Fuck, he'd never felt such resentment over a woman's former lover before—never experienced the need to abandon everything to claim what he felt was his.

Why he felt so possessive was another matter
—one he hoped to figure sooner rather than later.

Izzie drew in a breath.
"They told you about Harrison, didn't they?"

"
Harrison?"

"
They told me about Prentiss, or Michael, or whatever. How he's your cousin and you fucked him over, so he fucked us over."

"
I didn't fuck anyone over," Ryker snapped, harder than he intended. He hated the way his mind immediately jumped to Caroline Prentiss's abandoned gravesite, and the way his belly knotted with guilt.

"
I'm not judging."

"
There's nothing to judge."

Izzie
's hands came up. "Should I just stop talking?"

Ryker
's hands tightened around the steering wheel, then he relaxed, feeling foolish. "No. No, of course not."

"
You seemed testy."

"
Lot on my mind."

"
Yeah, tell me about it."

He grinned at her and she smiled back. For a fleeting second, things almost felt normal, and in that second he decided to tell her. After all, she deserved to know why Michael had sold her to the highest bidder.
"Michael and I went to West Point together. We both graduated with honors right before the war, and being a bloody Yank, I lined up behind the North and Michael, being a Southern boy, went the other way."

"
So that's what this bad blood's about?"

Ryker laughed dryly.
"No. That was everyone's story, and I knew plenty of Johnnies who made amends, hard as it was." He sighed. "I was in the Army of the Tennessee, which took me close to my family in Natchez during the Siege of Vicksburg. When I contracted scarlet fever, I appealed to Grant, who was actually stationed in
Natchez—making things convenient—and I was allowed to stay with Michael's family while I got better."

"
Michael wasn't there?"

"
No. He was losing Gettysburg right about then. My aunt, his mother, was tending to the home front. Playing the gracious occupied hostess, 'cause Grant's men had swarmed the place. And Caroline." His chest tightened. "Michael's sister. She took care of me, Caroline did. And she got sick as a result, even as I got better."

Izzie frowned.
"Uh oh."

Ryker laughed again, though any hint of humor had abandoned him.
"Yeah. One night after the fever had gone, I was out in town. There was a place called Under-the-Hill. Still there, from what I've heard, but it's all sanitized and for families and the like, but in the day it was fucking scary. It was a strip of bars and brothels and men who would fuck you up on a dime. I got in a tussle and some jackass stuck his knife in my gut, and I would've been a dead man were I not found by the right sort of creature."

"
A vampire."

"
Right. Gave me a choice. I could die or I could be reborn. I chose Option B." He paused. "And I learned to always give an option before making a vampire—the hard way, of course. 'Cause while I got a new lease on life, Caroline lost hers. She was gonna die. And I knew this miracle cure."

"
You turned her."

"
Yeah. Didn't ask her how that'd make her feel. I figured since I found it, it was only fitting to pass it on."

He fell silent for a long moment. It had been a long while since he allowed himself to think of Caroline for more than a second, and he suddenly found himself craving the pilgrimage to her gravesite. He
'd done wrong by her, certainly, but it was an odd sort of wrong—the sort with gray areas and enough wiggle room to know he'd try to save her the same way over again if he could just go about it differently. Caroline had been a lost cause when he turned her, and he'd loved her enough to not let her die without a fight. She'd always been his favorite cousin.

"
She woke up with the blood lust," Ryker said. "I didn't get a chance to explain that to her before she turned. I was afraid any time wasted on words would have her dead before I could save her. And before I could get a word in, she . . . ."

He felt a hand on his arm. Izzie
's warmth lit him up from the inside out. He wanted to crawl inside her and never let go.

Instead, he found the strength to finish his story.
"She killed her mother in a fit of hunger, then lost her senses and walked into the sunlight. Guess you know what happened next."

"
Poof?"

He nodded. It was a rather tame way to describe burning from the inside out, but he didn
't care to get into too much detail of what Caroline had suffered. "Michael heard what happened when he got home. He didn't know about me at first. I was supposed to be dead. But he found out, started drinking, and came after me one night." Ryker's jaw tightened. "I was in Natchez. Used to make it a regular trip. Visit Caroline's headstone, even though I knew there was nothing underneath, and Michael told me he figured what I was. Words were exchanged. He came at me and wound up unconscious. I didn't hear anything from or about him until that night in the alley."

"
He blamed you for Caroline."

"
And his mother."

"
Even though you were just trying to help?"

Ryker cast her a mordant grin.
"Funny thing about misunderstandings is you always guess what the other person was thinking without ever figuring it for yourself. He probably knows, or knew at some point, that I didn't mean for it to happen like it did. Doesn't mean he forgives me, or understands why I thought turning his sister into a thing of Hell would make things better."

The thought seemed incomplete but he didn
't know how to finish it, and it felt disingenuous to try. It had been a long while since he'd given much consideration to the path he'd taken, and while he maintained he wouldn't alter the choices he made, he could concede there had been a better way to go about them. Michael deserved an explanation and he'd never received one. Had Ryker manned up and told him what had happened and why, he and Izzie might not be here—on the road to nowhere, running as far as possible from the horror behind they'd left behind.

"
You're not a thing of Hell," Izzie said at last.

"
What?"

"
You're not. Hell doesn't work that way. Trust me, I know." She stretched and craned her neck, checked the road behind them, then settled back into her seat. "I had to learn this young, but it stuck. What you are isn't who you are. You're not those jackasses back there and you're not some of the evil bastards I've put in the ground, and I can't buy that Hitler being a Christian gets him into Heaven while Gandhi goes downstairs, you know? You did what you did because you had to. It was either let her die or give her a chance, and while you might have made mistakes along the way, you didn't do it to be a dick."

Ryker swallowed. For whatever reason, he hadn
't expected that. He hadn't expected a lot of things. Since leaving Michael in the cemetery over a century before, he'd kept his experiences to himself. He'd never been one to talk about where he came from or what made him the way he was, and he certainly had never spoken candidly about Caroline or what had happened to her. Perhaps he was more ashamed of his actions than he thought. Knowing what he'd done was right and feeling it were two different things, and while the former had always been easy for him, he couldn't say the same about the latter.

"
Thank you," he said awkwardly.

"
Just a fact. Don't need to thank me." Izzie crossed her arms. "Harrison was a priest before he knocked up my mother."

He
looked at her curiously.

She shrugged.
"Figure since we're doing this survivor's gut-spilling thing, I might as well share my war story, right?"

"
If you like." Ryker turned back to the road, his mind dragging him to the moment after Izzie blew the guard's brains out, when he'd tasted her lips for the first time.

Had that been part of the high as well? Would she ignore it? Had they left everything behind, including the moments of intimacy they
'd stolen while being forced to perform? He didn't know and it seemed foolish to ask. Yet for everything they'd been through, he knew he wasn't ready to call it even and walk away.

He didn
't know if walking away was even in the cards where Izzie was concerned.

"
He was a priest," she said again. "And he got my mother pregnant, and then refused to talk to her, so she went vocal about it and he had to resign his post. She did giving birth to me…Kathleen did. And since Harrison was such a
good Christian,
he took me in when she died." Izzie paused thoughtfully. "I won't go into all the shit that happened, 'cause that's one trip down memory lane I don't need. Suffice to say it involved scrubbing my skin bloody in holy water, being locked in a closet whenever he felt I had sinned, and generally being blamed for his disgrace. I was a girl, and all girls were whores sent from Satan to tempt the righteous, and since he'd fallen once, he blamed me for being what my mother was. And then when I was around ten, things started getting bad."

Ryker hadn
't noticed the steady build of rage until it bubbled at her last words, inciting an inappropriate burst of laughter off his lips. "
Started
getting bad?" he barked. "That fucker better have met a violent death."

"
You already know the ending."

"
Doesn't matter. What he did to you—"

"
I know."

He met her eyes in time to see her smile, and she burned him alive with her warmth. Izzie held his gaze until instinct directed his attention back to the road.

Then she continued, "He had a massive nervous breakdown, I guess. He started seeing demons everywhere, and I mean everywhere. On the street, in the news. He was convinced the president was one of Satan's operatives for a long time."

"
Might've been right at that," Ryker noted.

She laughed.
"I was too young to really care. All of this went on for a couple years, and he eventually started thinking I was a demon, too. Sent from the devil as a means of mocking him for not being one of Christ's perfect followers. Then he received a vision from God or something—I dunno, some bullshit delusion. God told him he needed to kill the demon in order to regain the Kingdom. Which meant—"

"
He needed to kill you."

"
Bingo."

"
He told you this?"

"
Yes. Point blank, like he was outing me or something. Telling me he knew what I was up to and I wasn't going to get away with it. Harrison was eighteen kinds of crazy by then, so I didn't really pay attention." Izzie paused and shivered. "Nothing happened for a while after that. I guess he was either waiting for me to be off my guard or trying to get up the courage. Then one night he snuck into my room with a dagger." She paused, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand flex.
"My
dagger," she said. "I might not be here if I had been asleep, but it was hard sleeping in Harrison's house. I heard him, I fought him, I killed him . . . and then I ran."