Nick had come by his hunting skills the hard way—through long experience and costly mistakes. Tally was a natural at it. She was that good. Of course, Nick had trained her, so she’d reaped his experience, too. Humans often didn’t do what they
should
do, but what they felt like doing. I couldn’t say that about Tally. She had absorbed every inch of training Nick had ever given her, reiterated and improved on it, to become the hunter and indomitable woman she was.
No, I didn’t want to lie to her. My huge reluctance to lie was why it turned out the way it did.
I hauled Nick to his feet, making everyone in the waiting room who wasn’t almost asleep turn their heads to watch us, then marched him back outside and told him to go clean up. As in, clean
everything
. The car would have to be scrubbed to remove anything that wouldn’t support the story and put in a parking lot near the body to account for how Connors had got to where he was found. A story would have to be made up to account for why he was there in the first place.
Tally would have to send up alarm signals in the next few hours, as a wife and new mother naturally would over a missing husband and father. Just the fact that Connors wasn’t here right now would raise questions all by itself. I could avoid the moment when I had to look her in the eye and speak the words.
Riley Carson Connors was born at five twenty-three a.m. I wasn’t at Tally’s side. No one was. In that decade, the idea of coaches and partners and breathing buddies didn’t exist. Even husbands weren’t encouraged to linger at the bedside where they would get in way.
Around seven a.m., when the night shift swapped out, I went up to the desk to ask about Tally. The nurse went away, then came back and informed me the child had been delivered about ninety minutes ago, sit down and wait until mother felt up to visitors.
I wondered if anyone had used that same peremptory tone with Tally and smiled to myself. If they did, they would rue the day.
Apparently, the day shift staff did try it on Tally for within a few minutes, the nurse at the station was visited by another harried nurse, they held a whispered conference and the first beckoned me to the counter.
“She wants to see you.” Disapproval was rich in her voice. “These are not official visiting hours,” she added. “Try to avoid getting in the way of the meal carts and the cleaning staff.”
I was taken back to the ward to see Tally.
She was lying on the bed with her head turned toward the window, which was frosted on the corners. The sky outside was iron gray.
The baby was not with her. The room had three other beds, one of them starched and untouched, the other two with bedsheets thrown aside. The occupants weren’t there at the moment, leaving Tally alone in the room. Later—much later—I would be grateful for that.
As I entered the room I reached for the normal, natural questions. “Boy or girl?” I asked gently.
She looked at me. Her eyes were huge, rimmed with darkness from fatigue, but the expression in her eyes was not one of exhaustion. It was knowledge. “Where is Connors?”
If I had been smarter, kinder, stronger, I would have made up some story on the spot. He’d got drunk over the impending birth. He and Miguel had gone upstate to track down an incubus. The nurses wouldn’t let him in. He’d been arrested.
Something
. I’ve spent centuries lying to every human I meet simply because I exist. That bred more lies. My name, my occupation. The fact that my partner in life was a man who had lived for eight centuries. Demons were real. So were gargoyles, but humans were too self-absorbed to be able to handle that truth.
The lies stacked up, day after day. After week. After year.
I should have been able to concoct a story that Tally would buy. I was good at it.
I just couldn’t.
Even as I stood flat-footed in the middle of the aisle between the beds, her eyes filled with tears.
That got me moving. I hurried over to the side of the bed and picked up her hand, the one with the paper cuff around her wrist that would tell everyone who she was if she couldn’t manage it.
Even though she was crying she was looking at me steadily, expecting nothing but truth.
“I don’t know what’s happened, yet,” I said softly.
“But he’s dead, isn’t he?”
I just couldn’t say it. So I nodded.
Her hand gripped mine. Her strength was astonishing. “Lirgon,” she breathed. “I’ll hunt him to the far ends of the earth if that’s what it takes. I’ll destroy him and Valdeg and stomp on their carcasses. I’ll fucking
kill
them.”
I jerked in surprise. Tally rarely swore. She could verbally flay a person without cursing. That made her whispered, anguished promise all the more powerful.
“I’m sorry,” I made myself say. I had liked Carson a lot better than Nick ever had—no one would ever have been a suitable match for Tally in Nick’s estimation, but I had learned to trust Connors, eventually. Even to like him a little. I was as prejudiced as Nick but I saw the way Connors was always there for her.
Now he wasn’t.
“He was going to give up hunting,” she said weakly. “He
had
given it up. Just one last trip with Miguel…
God
…!” She turned her head away from me.
I could hear beyond the room. The nurses would be astonished to know I could hear their speculations about whether either of them could get me to give them my phone number and what I might be like in bed. I could hear the matron at the other end of the ward, giving orders about a new mother fighting depression and the drug therapy the doctor had ordered.
Life was moving on. It always did.
“Nick is arranging things,” I told Tally. “The authorities will come and find you in a few days. Until then, all you know is that Connors is missing.”
She let my hand go and sniffed heavily. “What’s the story?” she asked, her voice tight with control.
“I don’t know yet. It depends on what Nick and Miguel and the others can sort out. But he’ll be found in the woods. It’s the only way to explain his…condition.”
I saw her jaw ripple as she absorbed that. Her eyes closed for a moment. Then she turned to look at me directly. “Will you help me?”
“Find Lirgon and Valdeg?”
She nodded.
“Yes. Whatever it takes,” I promised her.
“Good.”
I had no idea I’d come to regret that promise.
Eventually, Connors’ body was found and an enquiry determined that he had been killed by misadventure—that an unknown natural predator had taken his life. They didn’t name the predator. They couldn’t, of course, because the forensic medical examiner would not have been able to match up the wounds with the patterns of known predators.
The enquiry and the determination of cause of death meant that the year had evolved into February before his body was released and he could be buried. The funeral was held in late February.
Tally and Carson had a neighbor, Mrs. Washinsky, who was relentlessly human and narrow-minded. She came to the funeral, possibly thinking that the new widow next door needed the moral support because they had been such an odd couple, such a
strange
couple, that there would be too few mourners. I watched her expression change to one of puzzled astonishment when more and more people quietly filed to the graveside.
They came from everywhere and all of them were in the business, or involved peripherally, or were the human partners of hunters. Donna and Oscar flew in from California. Oscar looked as though he was losing weight. Lots of it. Donna didn’t speak to anyone, including Oscar. Her jaw held tight the entire day. She was learning to live with the fact that it was the map she had found that had led Connors straight to Lirgon’s lair, where the last two gargoyles had been waiting for them.
Miguel had slipped into New York that morning. He had been forced to disappear and stay off the radar, as he was a person of interest in the investigation into Connors’ death and his lack of documentation would be discovered if he let himself be officially processed in any way. He took the risk to return for the funeral.
Joy and Connie were moving to San Francisco. The old Continental they had inherited from Jimmy was packed to the window sills and they were leaving straight after the funeral.
There were others. Many others. I knew almost all of them and knew that many of them had never met Connors but they were there because it was one of their own. I think Connors would have been surprised by the people who attended. Surprised and quietly pleased. He had always considered himself to be an interloper in the business of hunting, someone who had forced his way in because of bad luck and circumstances, unlike Tally, who had been born to it. The people at his funeral said otherwise.
Tally stood stiff and straight next to the casket, her gaze straight ahead. Afterward, at the tiny house where they had lived, she spent all her time speaking to hunters, questioning them about activity in their area. She took phone numbers and contact information.
I kept an eye on her and on Riley, who slept in the basket at Tally’s feet or on her arm, when she wasn’t writing things down. Tally had adapted to being a mother seamlessly, incorporating feedings and diaper changes into her life, which had narrowed down to a single, fierce focus. Riley never left her side, except when Tally picked up the katana.
Since Riley’s birth, the only time Tally had wielded the katana was for training. She and Nick became obsessive about refining their techniques, gaining the sliver of an advantage from split second timing and honing their speed.
The gargoyles were nowhere to be found. In the seven weeks since Connors’ death, everyone had been hunting for traces of them. The lack of news was the reason Tally spent her time after the funeral cross-examining hunters from all over the country.
So I watched the pair of them, but didn’t intervene. I had another problem to deal with, first.
Everyone who doesn’t know Nicholas Sherwood as well as I do makes the mistake of thinking he’s a cold, controlled son of a bitch. His enemies are even less complimentary because they’ve been subjected to his ruthless and relentless will.
But I’ve known him a very long time and for most of those centuries, I’ve been in the privileged position of having his complete trust. There are only two other people he has ever let in—both female, both human and both at the funeral, one of them only seven weeks old.
Which was why I found him out in the snow-filled backyard, looking up at the stars in the frigid sky, out where no one wanted to be. From the little saltbox behind us, the murmur of humans throbbed in the air. Light spilled out onto the snow behind him, showing his tracks. Ahead, the moonlight was making the untouched snow glow with ghostly light.
The air was cold even to me. I would have stopped breathing to avoid getting it into my lungs, but I needed air to speak. So I ignored it. Instead, I stood next to him and looked up at the stars, too.
“No one is to blame,” I pointed out. “Especially not you.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“You didn’t force him to the mine. You didn’t kill him. Lirgon did that.”
“It’s the map,” Nick said tightly. I knew that tone of voice. There was anger there, deep inside, but he was holding it down. “The very convenient, suddenly there map. Why didn’t Jimmy tell us about it before he died? You know what he’s like. He couldn’t have sat on that and said nothing to save his life. He would have wanted to tell
everyone
. Crow about it and jump about, describing how he was going to shred gargoyles into ribbons. But instead he quietly checked out the mine by himself? Stirred up the gargoyles and led them back to his trailer?” Nick glanced at me. “How many things are wrong with that story?”
Many of them. I shifted in the snow. At least I wasn’t melting it into an icy puddle around my shoes the way a human would. “It’s done now,” I said, trying to keep the sharpness out of my voice. “Lirgon and Valdeg are gone. You have to concentrate on tomorrow, now.”
“Not if there’s a traitor among us.” Now his anger was audible.
“If there is, it doesn’t matter. You really think any of us would voluntarily work with the gargoyles to betray the rest of us? Someone was coerced into planting the map and now that Jimmy and Connors are dead, they’ve got their own guilt to deal with.” Not for the first time, I thought of Oscar, with his sudden weight loss and ghastly appearance. “Oscar and Donna are already gone. They’re in California chasing demons. Miguel is in Florida somewhere. Joy and Connie will be gone by tomorrow. There’s no one left, Nick. Just you and me, Tally and Riley.” I squeezed his shoulder through the heavy overcoat. “Let it go,” I urged him.
“I should have been there. I should have been the one to tell her.”
Ah
. That was what was eating him up. “You were busy.” In fact, he hadn’t got back to the house until nightfall the next day because he’d walked forty miles from where he’d left the car, not willing to risk hitching a ride when he was covered in Connors’ blood.
“I was stupid!” he cried and turned to face me. His eyes showed his ravaged state of mind. “I’m supposed to be good at this and I walked us all into a trap and let the man Tally loves get killed!”
“She doesn’t blame you,” I assured him.
“She should!”
I gripped the back of his neck and felt the tension there. “Guilt is useless, Nick. You know better than that.”
He shrugged off my hand. “I’m not guilty. I’m angry!”
“I know. But you’re angry at yourself and that’s going to impair your judgment.” I said it as calmly as I could. It didn’t surprise me that underneath the motionless façade he’d been showing the world for the last few weeks, he was beating himself up about perceived errors, about the harm he’d delivered upon those he loved. “Is that why you haven’t come near me?” I added gently.
“
You’ve
held it together!” His tone was fury-filled. “You had the guts to tell her. I’m not…I’m not….”
“Worthy?” I suggested.
He blew out his breath. “Christ, Damian. We’re both seen these hard times before. Over and over. Why can’t I just let it go?”