Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(37)
“She did, that’s true, but that’s not why I killed her. I killed her for revenge. For what I thought she’d done to you. For what she did do to me. And while she did fight, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been unarmed. I would’ve killed her all the same.” Matter-of-fact. He made no apologies.
I understood, and I was glad he did as well. Cherish hadn’t been a person. She’d been a swirling void of sociopathic lies and murder. Whatever made a person or a paien what they were . . . their soul if souls existed in that way . . . she didn’t have. She killed, manipulated, and then psychically brainwashed anyone who got in her way with visions so terrible they were capable of driving you mad. Niko hadn’t killed her. He’d exterminated her. She’d had far less worth than one of those bathroom cockroaches and far less purpose on this earth.
Not to mention she was a serious bitch.
“Wish you’d let me come. Grabbed some popcorn and cheered from the sidelines. But whether you think that makes you a killer or not”—and it didn’t—“Jack couldn’t know about that. He just hit town. His victims now are obvious, right? He can see them spreading all that wicked far and wide. We haven’t had a job in weeks. You haven’t had to put anyone or anything down. There’s nothing I can think of that would have him all over you. You should be innocent in his beady, psychotic eyes.”
Niko passed me his fortune cookie—a tradition long-standing since the very first time we’d had Chinese food. “It makes no difference. In fact, if he continues to come after me, it would be convenient. Knowing his victims are on the shadier side of the law, moral and otherwise, doesn’t make him much easier to locate. There are still too many. There are over ten thousand prostitutes alone in the city. There’s certainly no way to shadow them all. And when you factor in thieves and rapists and murderers, whatever else Jack considers wicked, it’s impossible. There simply is no way to track him down coming from that angle. But him coming to us, that is useful.”
“Would be useful if we knew how to kill him or even touch the bastard. I can’t do to Jack what I did to the peymakilir, not unless we’re far, damn far away from him. The explosion would send those spikes of stone or crystal, whatever the f*ck, that covers him flying. That’s the kind of shrapnel you can’t avoid or live through.”
Suddenly the shadow of one righteously pissed off brother was looming over me. He hadn’t moved, the sun hadn’t shifted its rays through the front window—how he managed to loom, I didn’t know, but he did.
Unblinking eyes fixed on me and stayed. As far as Niko was concerned, the restaurant had disappeared. It was him and me and I was screwed. “Yes,” he said softly and the word was worse for that unsettling softness. On Niko it was the pause and stillness the split second before a copperhead struck and pumped your veins with venom. Nik was my brother and he loved me, but that meant he’d do anything to keep me alive. Sometimes with me that took tough love—and a lot of it. “The peymakilir. I was saving this for home, but now that you’ve brought it up. There is absolutely no excuse for what you did to that creature, Cal, and you know it. I know you think you need to practice to face Grimm and you’re most likely right, but that was not practice. That was reality.”
The anger was gone as abruptly as it came. I expected that. Nik couldn’t stay angry with me and, believe me, there were times he should have. Would’ve been better for the world if he did. So I wasn’t surprised when it bled out of his face and eyes.
But what came in its wake was worse.
He reached across the table and looped his fingers around my wrist, holding my hand down against the table. The grip was immovable. “Do you feel that? The heaviness? It’s the same in battle. You feel the consequences of killing in the weight of your gun, the heft of a blade. When you can kill with a thought, you put yourself beyond that.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible but the weight on my wrist and hand increased. “And beyond that, Cal, is the step you take to not fighting Grimm but being him.”
Nik always said I never would become that. He wouldn’t let me. I waited to hear that certainty again.
I didn’t.
“When you were a child you would take some things on faith, even if you didn’t understand why I asked you to do them.” His set face softened, settling into lines of regret. I would’ve given a lot not to hear what he was saying, but he would’ve given anything at all not to have to say it. “You need to do the same now. What you’re doing is . . . wrong.” There was a brief hesitation but it was said firmly. With belief but not the kind of belief Niko had always had in me.
Wrong? Niko thought I was wrong?
“You’ve said if you became what you didn’t want to be that I should stop you. Cal, look at me.” I only realized as I heard it that I wasn’t. I was looking past him, around him, anywhere but at him. Niko was my one true mirror and I didn’t want to see myself there. Not now. “Cal.” Reluctantly I moved my gaze back to his. I’d joked to myself about my identity crisis and now it was time to pay the piper.
And he didn’t even know about the men by the Ninth Circle, the ones I’d thrown off the world before I’d kick-started my conscience into bringing them back.
His grip loosened and his thumb passed over the back of my hand; then his forefinger tapped it, the same as he’d done time and again when I’d been a child. “If your first instinct is to fight as an Auphe with gates and not as a human with guns and knives, you’ll become too quick. I won’t be able to stop you. But, Cal . . .