Wicked Bite (Night Rebel #2)(67)

I gave a brisk nod. “Soon after Tenoch turned me into a vampire, there was . . . an incident involving my other abilities. What I did terrified him, but he loved me too much to kill me. So, he made me vow to always keep that part of myself locked away, then bequeathed Cain’s legacy of power to Mencheres.” I gave a humorless laugh. “Mencheres was my intended executioner, if I broke my vow and let the other half of me take over. Mencheres didn’t know it, but I always did.”

Rage blasted across Ian’s features before it vanished. In a carefully controlled tone, he said, “Tenoch told you that?”

A surge of defensiveness made me sit up. “You don’t understand. What you’ve seen of my powers is only a little slice of what I’m actually capable of. Tenoch didn’t make this decision lightly. He was thinking of the greater good—”

“The greater good.” Scorn dripped from Ian’s tone. “I’d have to think long and hard to find three words more widely twisted to excuse the infliction of needless pain and suffering than those.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Tenoch believed it when it came to me, though. I—I thought he’d stopped fearing me because we’d been through so much. Then he died, and Vlad began manifesting powers he couldn’t have on his own.” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled sob. “Tenoch must’ve thought Mencheres wouldn’t be enough to take me down. Mencheres had sunk into a depression after his first wife left him and began plotting against him. So, Tenoch dumped the last of his legacy powers into Vlad, then killed himself with a horde of ghouls two weeks later.”

Leaving me reeling with grief, guilt and a resounding sense of culpability, once I’d put it all together.

“No wonder you refer to your other abilities as a separate person.” Ian’s voice was very soft. “It’s how you compartmentalized the pain when it was too much to bear.”

Once, I would’ve argued. Now, I closed my eyes. “Perhaps.”

“Tenoch was still a bloody fool.”

My eyes snapped open in time to see my vision flash with black. Ian didn’t flinch from the rage he had to see as well as scent.

“He might have been well-intentioned, but like millions of parents who reject their children over things they don’t understand, Tenoch was wrong. You are exactly as you should be, and it’s Tenoch’s loss that he never realized that.”

Anguish tightened my muscles until it felt like I was being beaten from the inside. “You didn’t see what I did—”

“As a new vampire dealing with incredibly heightened senses and emotions that doubtless activated the abilities in your other nature?” Ian made a contemptuous noise. “I don’t have to see it to know a slip of supernatural control doesn’t make you a monster that needs to be exterminated. Yes, your power can be dangerous, but the same can be said for your vampire side. Or your human one, when that applied.”

“Tenoch would never have gone to such extremes unless he knew it was the only way!”

I’d repeated that to myself countless times over the centuries. Otherwise, the knowledge that Tenoch had still considered me a threat to be eliminated when he died would break me.

“Fear can make people do terrible things, even to the ones they love,” Ian replied in a softer tone. “You know that. You just can’t bring yourself to admit it when it comes to Tenoch. Makes you feel disloyal, and that’s just the beginning. When you realize it was Tenoch who was wrong, not you, you have to confront the fact that you stuffed half of yourself into a cage merely to appease the fears of a man who should have loved you unconditionally because that is a parent’s bloody job.”

“He did love me! He just knew the other half of me could never be trusted—”

“Bollocks,” Ian said crisply. “He never bothered to find out. He saw your father, shat himself in terror, then made up his mind that something that powerful had to be evil. That’s why he shat himself again when he saw those same powers in you, but whatever you did was no more innately evil than a new vampire losing control from blood cravings. Are all of them evil, too?”

“No, but . . .” Dammit, now he was confusing me!

“No is right. They’re simply untrained. You were, too, and instead of training you to control your power, Tenoch made you fear and suppress it.”

“Because I hurt people with it,” I snapped.

“Did they deserve it?” he countered. “I’ll wager they did, because when your other nature broke free after I died, you didn’t hurt innocents. Instead, you took out the demons who’d tried to kill us, and you forsook eons of vengeance against Dagon in order to pull me back from the grave. When that half of you grabbed the wheel again, you repeatedly protected me, propositioned me—my favorite part—and saved dozens of humans from drowning beneath a toppled house. Show me the evil in any of that.”

Well . . . I couldn’t, if I was looking at it objectively. But if Ian was right, Tenoch had punished me for simply existing, and the man who’d rescued me, protected me, and loved me when no one else had couldn’t have made such a colossal mistake. Could he?

No. Ian hadn’t seen what Tenoch had seen back when vampires from a rival clan had kidnapped me in an attempt to force Tenoch to side with them. What I’d done had made Tenoch fear me for the rest of his life. How could I discount that?