Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(98)

To her relief, the drug didn’t know which answer to force from her. She could pick one true thing. ‘Peace,’ she said. ‘Between monsters and humans.’

‘Peace?’ Nick was still leaning back as though relaxed. But his mouth tightened. ‘I killed your family, Joan. Are you saying you could ever forgive me for it?’

‘No,’ Joan blurted, forced to answer.

Nick seemed to stop breathing for a second. ‘No,’ he said softly.

‘Just like you could never get over the fact that I’m a monster,’ Joan said.

Nick’s answer took longer to come this time. ‘No,’ he said. Something about the pause made Joan wish he’d been compelled to speak the truth too.

But he didn’t need to take a truth drug. He never lied—not directly. Joan’s breath hitched. So there it was, the harsh truth of it.

If Jamie’s story was true, then Joan and Nick had been together in another timeline. If the story was true, then the new timeline was still trying to repair itself by bringing them back together, over and over. But it was doomed to fail. What was broken between them couldn’t be fixed.

‘I’m not talking about peace between you and me,’ she said. It hurt to say it.

‘There’ll never be peace between monsters and humans,’ he said. ‘Not as long as monsters steal time. And you can’t help yourselves. You all crave it.’

Joan shook her head. She didn’t.

‘You crave time travel.’

The compulsion answered for her. ‘Yes,’ she blurted. She pressed her lips together. She’d barely admitted that even to herself. The method of travel was a kind of focused yearning, and the yearning was always there in the background. It had been there as long as she could remember, in her love of history. ‘I can control it.’ She was relieved to hear herself say it. If the compulsion allowed it, then surely it must be true.

‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’ Joan sat up and tried to inch closer to him. Her heart thudded when he pulled back his feet fast. ‘Stop. Stop asking me questions,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop myself from answering. And I have to tell you . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘You told me about your family. The man who killed them—’

‘Is dead.’

‘I know. You killed him.’

‘Every monster knows that,’ he said. ‘It’s in all your childhood stories.’

Joan had never thought about how Nick might see those stories: his own suffering as a fairy tale.

‘You broke his neck.’

Nick stilled. That wasn’t in the stories.

‘You were tied to a chair before they died,’ Joan said. ‘You were tortured.’

Nick sat up slowly from his slouch. The pretence of relaxation had ended. ‘You shouldn’t know that,’ he said, soft and dangerous.

‘It . . . it was recorded,’ Joan said.

Nick clearly hadn’t expected her to say that. ‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry, but I saw what he did,’ Joan said. ‘Your whole family was killed. I saw them. Nick, I’m so sorry he—’

‘Stop,’ Nick ground out. ‘Stop.’

But Joan couldn’t. ‘You have to know what they were actually recording.’ She wet her dry lips. ‘They were recording the process of making you into the hero.’

Nick’s eyes hardened. The only sound in the room was their breathing. Joan was very aware that the walls of the basement were five feet thick. The basement had once been a wine cellar. You could scream and scream down here, and no one would ever hear you.

She had to wet her lips again before she could speak. ‘The . . . the stories say that you were orphaned by monsters and destined to kill them. But you weren’t destined. You were crafted. You were made into this.’

‘Stop,’ Nick said, and Joan felt a surge of real fear at the look on his face. She was suddenly very aware that she was trapped in a room with the slayer from her childhood stories.

But the drug was still working. It forced her to keep speaking. ‘They didn’t just do it once,’ she said. ‘They killed your family over and over. They reset the timeline so they could torture you over and over.’

‘Stop,’ Nick said again. ‘Stop lying.’

‘I’m not lying. You know I can’t.’

‘Drink the rest of that bottle.’

Joan’s stomach was churning. There was a good chance that she’d throw up if she drank. But she unscrewed the lid and took a deep breath, then forced the rest down. It sloshed unpleasantly in her gut.

The drug took effect even faster than the first dose. And this time, the out-of-control feeling was worse. Joan had the urge to babble anything to Nick. To say truths that he hadn’t even asked for.

‘You—you were made by monsters.’ She was stumbling over the words now; they came out faster than she could speak them. ‘They killed your family as . . . as a kind of origin story. To motivate you to hate us. Then . . .’ She made a guess. ‘Then you were trained in how to identify us, how to kill us.’ She could see in his face that she was right. ‘Nick, you resisted them. You didn’t want to become this. They had to do it over and over until you broke.’

‘You can’t change the timeline over and over. It isn’t possible.’