“I don’t really want Rosalind to die,” Tammi said. “Do I get a vote in this?”
“No,” Aurora said, spearing mandarin slices with toothpicks.
Two friends. At least one of them had to be Miranda, but she didn’t need to ask about that now. And the other—she could only hope the other was not an incubus too. Oh gods, what if the demon I interrogated was Caine’s friend?
All at once, a wave of guilt slammed into her. She’d been trying to keep the memories at bay, but she couldn’t hold them back anymore. I’ve done terrible things. She slid her hands over her face, and her chest heaved with a sob. Such a simple set-up for an interrogation. A chair, cinderblocks, cloth, and water. She suppressed the urge to be sick. It could have been Caine.
Caine clenched his jaw. “There’s no need to cry. You’re supposed to be a warrior, and I’ll make sure you don’t die.”
Josiah had looked her straight in the eye and told her she needed to hurt the incubus. He’d sworn the demons were planning a massacre to rival the Boston Slaughter, and that the only way to stop it was to break the monster’s will. Josiah had said it was her duty to force the incubus to confess everything he knew until the Brotherhood could stop the carnage. It was the life of one monster sacrificed for the lives of thousands of innocent people. Simple math.
But half the stuff Josiah had told her was a lie. She wanted to smash his smug face in.
She lifted her eyes. “That’s not why I’m upset. You don’t understand. I’m not a good person.”
Confusion flitted across his features. “What are you talking about?”
She was half tempted to confess everything. “I thought demons and mages were all evil. I never would have agreed to the things I did if I’d known the truth. Maybe some demons deserve to die, but it’s not like we took the time to find out.” Every second they stood here was another moment wasted. “Why are we wasting time? We need to get in there now before anyone else gets hurt.”
Tammi raised her hands in the air. “You’ve officially lost your mind.”
Aurora handed Rosalind a plate of mandarin slices and raisins, each speared with a toothpick. “You can’t just go in there now. You sound like a nutter. Have a sodding snack and a nap, or you’ll be no good to anyone.”
Caine caught her eye. “The whole building is rigged with iron dust. That means I can’t use my magic until we disable the sensors. There are scanners to block our exit, and machines rigged with stakes.”
He was right. With all the defense systems at the entrances and the ID scanners, no supernatural creature could gain access to the building.
At Aurora’s insistence, Rosalind forced herself to eat a raisin. “And how do we disable all that?”
“We have a plan,” Aurora said. “I learned about the building’s design during my escape, and I’m guessing you can fill us in on what we don’t know.”
Caine shrugged. “Basically, I want to blow up half their building and disable their dust.”
“Why do you need magic for that?” Tammi gripped her plate of speared fruit. “Why not just use explosives?”
“Too messy,” Aurora said. “We might kill the people we’re trying to free. We want to save all the captives we can.”
Rosalind swallowed a mandarin. “How do we make sure no one from the Brotherhood gets killed?”
Caine furrowed his brow as though this question was absurd. “We don’t.”
Rosalind closed her eyes. “I don’t want to kill people. That’s the whole point.”
Caine eyed her. “Am I wrong in thinking that just yesterday, you were trying to kill a vampire?”
“Yes, but not everyone in the Chambers deserves to die.” She shot an uncertain glance at Aurora. “I know you were tortured, and you have every right to want to hurt the people who did that to you, but most of the novices don’t know about that. Most of them just thought we were stopping demons from massacring humans.”
The vamp glared at her. “Caine can hypnotize the novices to leave the building. Then the two of you need to blow up the front entrance, the great hall, and the offices. All of this means you need to take off your stupid ring and start learning Angelic, like you should have started yesterday.”
Rosalind froze, the full implications rolling through her mind. On the side of the demons, she’d have to abandon the only thing keeping her remotely sane—though, given her whirling emotions, maybe it wasn’t doing its job so well anymore.
She closed her eyes, trying to lock her terror into her mind’s vault. Her atonement would depend on her ability to master her fear. No longer hungry, she set the plate on the table. “Let’s get started now.”
Chapter 23