“There are things we have to do that we don’t want to do,” I began.
“You think I don’t know that? I was eighteen, Lizzy, when Ruthie made me—” He stopped and shoved a shaking hand through his sweaty, tangled hair.
“Kill?” I prompted.
He blew air through his lips in a halfhearted Bronx cheer as he dropped his arm back to his side. “I was a killer long before that.”
I hated it when he called himself a killer. I didn’t think dusting Nephilim was killing. However, Jimmy had been on the streets a lot longer than I had, and he’d done things before coming to Ruthie’s that even I didn’t know about. Things I probably didn’t want to know about.
“You remember what she made me do,” he said, referring, I assumed, to his sleeping with Summer. “I knew it would hurt you,” he murmured, “but I did it anyway.”
“Why?”
“It had to be done.”
“There you go.” I threw up my hands. “So why can’t you forgive me?”
“I don’t know. Have you forgiven me?”
I thought of Summer’s beautiful face, her tiny, adorable body, her blond hair and blue eyes and her everlasting, unbreakable devotion to Jimmy Sanducci. “No.”
His lips curved just a little, and I saw again the boy who’d taken my heart and then broken it apart.
“I didn’t think so,” he said.
Jimmy was putting on his sinfully expensive Nikes, which he’d probably gotten for free after he took the most recent publicity photo of Venus Williams or Tiger Woods or whoever the top shoe hawker was this week, when he suddenly paused and asked, “What now?”
“We find the Dagda and get out from under.”
“And then?”
Jimmy was a little behind the times. Quickly I told him everything.
“Your mother,” he repeated, seemingly as stunned as I’d been. But what seemed to be true and what was true these days were often two completely different things.
“You didn’t know?” I watched him closely. Jimmy was an extremely good liar. He had to be. I could probably separate truth from fiction if I touched him. However, if I touched him one more time today, one or both of us would probably wind up bloody. Again.
“I thought she was dead.”
Hmm. Voice casual, gaze direct. He didn’t appear to be lying, but I couldn’t be sure.
“You thought she was dead, but you knew she was a phoenix? Or you just thought my mother, whoever she might be, was dead?”
“I choose door number two.” He finished tying his silver-tipped laces and stood.
My eyes narrowed. “Sanducci—”
He held up a hand. “I didn’t know, okay? I thought you were an orphan like me.”
“You weren’t an orphan.”
The past flickered in his eyes, and I was sorry I’d even brought it up.
“I wasn’t,” he agreed. “But I am now.”
“Not necessarily.” His eyes widened, and I held up my hand just as he had. “I’m just saying, parents seem to be coming out of the woodwork lately. Your dad. Sawyer’s mom. And now mine.”
“And they’re all such fantastic finds,” he muttered.
“Yeah, the reunions are a hoot. Although . . .” I paused, thinking. “I haven’t met my mother. Maybe—”
“Don’t go there,” Jimmy interrupted.
“Where?”
“Thinking that maybe she’s not evil, maybe you can have a relationship, maybe things will be different. They won’t be. She rose from the dead, Lizzy. That can’t be good.”
“It was once,” I muttered.
“And once is all we get. Anyone rising from the dead these days is gonna be a problem.”
He was right. Still—
“Sawyer’s other, and he’s not evil.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes!”
Jimmy just raised his eyebrows. My voice had been too loud, the word too emphatic, for him to believe me. Hell, I didn’t believe me.
“Think about it,” he said. “Guy up and disappears.”
“He does that.”
Sanducci stared at me until I squirmed. Everything I said was too loud or too quick and not very believable at all. Why couldn’t I lie like he did?
“Don’t you find it strange that Sawyer can raise the dead and suddenly the dead are being raised?” Jimmy asked.
“He can’t raise the dead, only ghosts.”
“So he says.”
I opened my mouth, shut it again, then said, “What?”
“Someone raised the Phoenix.”
“You think it was Sawyer?”
“Lizzy, I always think it’s Sawyer.”
CHAPTER 21
“I don’t believe Sawyer would do that,” I said. “Even if he could, which he can’t.”
“Let’s go see.”
“How?”
“Find her, find him.”
“We won’t,” I insisted.
“Wanna bet?” He held out his hand, then realized what he was doing and yanked it back.
The two of them had always been like junkyard dogs, circling each other, hackles raised, teeth bared, with me right in the middle. More often than not, whenever they shared the same air they tried to kill each other. It was exhausting.