Tarnished (16 page)

Silver repeated the words for the boy, and he gave her such a grin that the shadows hid deep inside her shoulder for a few moments. “Someday I’ll save everyone,” he declared, and Silver smiled back.

Dare brought the beta—Pierce. Cemented by the pain, the name came more easily to her now. She took to handing Pierce food as well. He bristled under the attention. She could see from his movements that he was superficially healed, but he had not the Lady’s light about him of a healthy Were. He needed food and rest yet.

“Someone needs to make sure there’s no blood left,” he whined at Dare, who pushed him back down again.

“That’s being taken care of.” Dare threaded his fingers into Silver’s hair, and she touched his wrist. No rest for either of them, though she could feel how much he ached for it. He’d sustained no injury in this battle, but he had not his full light, either, a ghostly trace of shadows in his back. “Stay with Silver for now.”

Pierce turned his sullen look on her as Dare disappeared off on another task. Silver held his eyes, and she could see the memory return of what they’d shared below, when she’d helped him re-break his fingers. He let his head hang, finally resting, leaving things to her and Dare. Trusting.

For all that such trust worried her a little, something in Silver curled up, warm and content.

*   *   *

Andrew cursed John under his breath as he helped everyone clean up. They’d pulled up the carpet pad to throw out and scrubbed the bare concrete beneath just in case. Later they could pull up the rest of the carpet in the room, to present to installers as someone’s weekend do-it-yourself project run out of steam. He’d have to call some installers—
John
would have to call some installers. Andrew had to remember that however much of an idiot Seattle was being, this was still his pack. Once the man pulled his muzzle out of his ass, Andrew would hand over the arrangements. For now, it was nice to have something to concentrate on when his thoughts turned to how easily Silver could be dead instead. The pack seemed calmer for having a direction for their efforts too.

He checked back in on Pierce and Tom. They sat on the living room floor with Silver, who had an industrial-sized jerky package beside her. Those of the pack not cleaning up downstairs were starting a meal—late for lunch now, early for dinner, but the injured couldn’t wait that long.

Tom had shifted and lay curled up with his head in Silver’s lap, taking puppylike pleasure in the feminine attention he’d earned. Pierce ate with a single-minded intensity, marking time until he’d be released to do something useful.

Andrew let himself down to the floor behind Silver. Tom gave up his place without complaint so Silver could scoot back into Andrew’s arms. Andrew leaned over to grab the jerky. She snorted, but took pieces when he handed them to her. Where the hell was Seattle? He wanted to slip off somewhere private where he could hold Silver tight forever and breathe her scent and remember she was alive. Reaction made him feel shaky.

But there was the front door and John’s voice, low and trying to soothe, Susan’s scent of gunpowder and fear and tears. Andrew pushed himself up to go meet them, tearing himself away from Silver’s touch.

Susan’s expression was blank and dead, tears stopped for the moment, though her face was crusty with salt. John had his arm around her waist, guiding her inside. In the hall she stopped and blinked, then flinched away from John. “Edmond,” she said, looking past him. “I have to take care of Edmond.”

“He’s upstairs,” Andrew said gently. “The pack’s been switching off so someone’s always in the nursery with the children. He’s been well taken care of.” Susan stared at him, so he repeated himself. This time, she seemed to get it. She jogged for the stairs. Andrew wanted to call after her and tell her to make sure she never let Edmond go, whatever happened now. But things were different for Susan than they had been for him. No one was going to try to take away her son.

John started to follow her up the stairs, but Andrew blocked him. “We need to talk.”

John tried to push him aside. “Not now. I have to—”

Andrew gathered up a handful of John’s shirt. “We’re going to talk. In front of your pack, or outside where they can’t hear. It’s your choice.”

Through sheer stubbornness, Andrew got John out the back door. They crossed the pack house’s spacious backyard nearly to the fence line, where trees loomed high all around them. Andrew felt better already, just breathing in the scent of needles and sap rather than gunpowder.

Andrew didn’t want to have this talk, but clearly someone needed to remind John of what being an alpha meant. John was probably wrung out from healing the bullet wound, but as an alpha he didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. His pack needed a strong alpha presence to provide a foundation for their calm. Why couldn’t John see that? Why had it fallen to Andrew to make John understand?

“Now you know how I feel.” Sacramento’s voice made Andrew jerk his head to look, but it was only Death lounging on the bench of a much-gnawed picnic table. Death laughed at him silently, jaws parted.

John followed Andrew’s gaze, then looked inquiringly at Andrew when he presumably found nothing there. “Jumping at shadows,” Andrew excused himself. “Now. If you will allow me to teach you your job, Seattle, you need to be where people can see you, looking in control, even if you don’t feel it.”

He waited for John to respond, but the man just shook his head. Perhaps he meant that he didn’t know how to even pretend control at the moment. Andrew sighed. Maybe the minutiae of cleaning would help focus John, as it had him. “Tomorrow, you can pull up the rest of the carpet in the basement, and call some installers. Get Tom to laze around in wolf. That’ll explain all the layers of hair and you can tell them it was ruined from the dog peeing on it.”

John nodded, but he still looked glazed. “I can’t— If only I’d fought him for the gun when he first arrived—”

Andrew hauled back and slapped him. “Seattle! If you don’t start taking care of your pack, you. Will. Lose. Them.” He knew he sounded angry, and he played that up to get the man moving. John growled and jerked out of reach, hands coming up in fists, but automatically, like his mind was still elsewhere.

Underneath the show of anger, Andrew felt wrung out. He hurt with the weight of the what-ifs for Silver, hurt with sympathy for the pack and their distress. He was the one who’d brought Sacramento here, but he couldn’t truly help them. That had to be their alpha. “They’re hurt, they’re scared. They need their alpha with them, helping each of them, not just his mate. Susan is stronger than I ever expected, stronger probably than you realize. She’ll survive.”

That, finally, brought John’s eyes to his face. He stared at Andrew for the space of a breath, then another, before he turned and headed back inside. Andrew could only hope it was to talk to his pack and not to follow Susan again. He stayed outside for about a minute before he couldn’t stand it and went back in to check that Seattle was doing his job.

16

Things were relatively simple for Susan for a few hours. She nursed Edmond, checked his diaper, put him down to sleep, and locked herself in John’s bedroom. As evening dragged into night, she gave in and took several allergy pills to knock herself out until Edmond needed feeding again. She didn’t remember any dreams, but then again it felt like she never got deep enough into sleep to have them. After she got up the first time she only dozed until morning was far enough advanced that she could check on Edmond again.

A plate of breakfast waited beside John’s door when she got back from the nursery, and Susan took it in with her. After some consideration, she called in sick to work again. Unfortunately, she soon found that, alone with her thoughts, they overwhelmed her.

She’d killed someone. She’d pulled the trigger, she’d seen the blood well up on Sacramento’s temple. She’d seen the body fall. How could she have killed another person? Not human, but still a person. But hadn’t she stopped him from killing Silver, maybe Dare? She’d grown up taught that capital punishment was wrong, but what about self-defense? Or defense of people she cared about, anyway. Could she have stopped him without killing him? Would a bluff with the gun have been enough? She had no idea.

It all circled back. She’d killed someone. She’d had to. Hadn’t she? But what would the Were think? John’s pack, or the others? She had the vague sense that Dare had defended her from Sacramento’s thugs. She presumed they would tell people about her. Susan supposed she should be worried that they’d show up to kill her, but she couldn’t get past the crisis of what she thought of herself.

She’d killed someone.

She was on the floor, curled with her back pressed against the end of the bed, when someone finally knocked. She didn’t choose to answer, so the knock came again. John’s voice followed. “Susan?”

“I know perfectly well you can break that lock. Do it if you’re going to, or go away.” Susan hadn’t meant it to come out that acid, but wasn’t it all John’s fault? It was his world that had forced her to kill, one of his kind that had been hurting them. If he’d fought Sacramento earlier, then Silver wouldn’t have come, and his pack would have been safe.

She just didn’t want to deal with any of it right now. John, or Were, or anyone until she could breathe again without the pressure of the thought that she’d killed someone.

John did go away, after a while. She could hear his voice as he talked to the others, a little more commanding now. When he knocked again, she shouted, “Go away!”

Edmond crying outside the door startled her out of her thoughts next. She pushed to her feet immediately. She opened the door to find Dare there, the squalling baby in his arms. Susan reached for the baby and hooked her toe around the bottom of the door, ready to close it on Dare the moment she had Edmond.

He didn’t let Edmond go. “You don’t have to say anything, I just hope you’ll listen,” Andrew said, low. He relinquished Edmond once he was inside and shut the door before Susan could ask him to. She didn’t want to face John yet. She didn’t know if she’d scream at him for being a Were or fall sobbing into his arms. Dare was enough of a stranger she could keep better control.

Edmond quieted when she nursed him, sitting on the edge of the bed. She didn’t bother trying to cover up. Were didn’t care about nudity, and she didn’t have the energy to care on her own account.

“Well?” she said when Dare settled on the room’s chair, leaning forward with his wrists resting on his knees. “Get it over with.” Even considering what he might say made the emotions swirl in closer. Susan’s heart pounded as her eyes teared up. Was he here to say the Were wanted her executed? Did he pity her?

“How much did Silver tell you about what happened to my wife?” After a moment, Dare exhaled on an amused note, probably at the surprise on Susan’s face. She hadn’t expected him to say that.

“That she was killed. And your in-laws kept your daughter.” She had to climb out from under the morass of her own situation, but Susan did remember her politeness after a moment of looking down at her own son. “I’m sorry.”

“Mm.” Dare rubbed a thumb over his opposite palm for a few moments, maybe choosing his words. “A rival pack killed her, and then I killed them. Seven of them, the majority of the pack’s fighters, including the beta. After the first couple, the rest probably surrendered, but I didn’t pay any attention. I killed them all and tore out their throats.” He paused, repeating the measured movements with his hands. “Were believe that when we die, Death takes our voices back to the Lady. To tear out the throat is to deny what you’d call the soul that rest. Symbolically, of course. I don’t believe in Her literally.”

Andrew—having been trusted with what he’d told her, she couldn’t think of him as Dare anymore—paused again as if for some reaction. Susan had no clue what to say. It must have been much worse for him, but that was Andrew. He was better at all of this stuff than she was.

“So I fled home. Boston took me in. Kept me from killing myself.” Andrew’s rubbing thumb stilled and then he let his hands fall, tone giving the admission no more weight than the sentence before it. “Gave me some advice. My daughter was three years old at the time. Benjamin told me that I was probably thinking I had done something so wrong, so evil, that I needed to remove myself and the possibility of further evil from the world.”

He paused and Susan wondered what he expected her to say. She didn’t want to end it, she realized, confronted with that thought. She wanted to run and run until she’d outrun all of this and didn’t have to think about it anymore. Run until she wasn’t someone who’d killed anymore.

“And he told me that there was no evil I’d prevent by removing myself that could ever outweigh the evil I’d do by depriving my daughter of a father. The kind of father I would be, if only I always remembered to live as the father I’d want her to have. Live like that, and it’s hard to do evil at all.”

“I don’t want to kill myself.” Susan exhaled on a note of breathy hysterical humor and Andrew smiled in reciprocal punchiness. But there was more to it than that. She wasn’t sure how Andrew did it, made the words ring with something that had nothing to do with the actual physical sound of them. Maybe he hadn’t reacted in the same way, but Andrew had
been
where she sat now. He’d picked himself up. He was proof it could be done. He’d done it for his daughter. She had a son. A son, and a lover, and friends in this pack. “But thank you.”

Andrew pushed himself to his feet after a last pat to her knee and opened the door. Silver peeked inside and the two of them exchanged a look, communicating Susan wasn’t sure what. “Are you next?” she asked Silver.

Silver shook her head. “My dark hours had different sources than yours and Dare’s.” She looked at the floor. “Death offers ‘This too shall pass.’ Which is the sort of thing only he can get away with saying, because it’s completely true but also such bullshit.”

Susan looked down at Edmond. Full, he squirmed around to try to stand up on her thighs. She did have a son. And she was luckier than Andrew had been, since no one was trying to take him away from her. All in a rush, Susan wanted to get it over with. Maybe John would be angry at her for doing it, maybe he’d be disgusted or pitying, but she wanted to know. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. She stood and held Edmond out. “Would you guys put him down for me? I’m going to go find John.”