"You think fairies are only female?" Summer reached for her cell phone. "I'll call him. He wouldn't mind."
"I would." I stayed her hand. She peered at me, confused. "Just because I can absorb powers doesn't mean I should."
"Then why have the talent?"
"It's the only way we can win."
I was going to need to be stronger than what I was to keep the Nephilim from overpowering the earth. Just being psychic wasn't good enough. It certainly hadn't been for Ruthie.
Nevertheless, I balked at blatantly screwing every breed I could find. And I'd been warned never to have sex with a Nephilim. I might absorb their evil as well as their strength. No one really knew how my empathy worked, and I wasn't willing to take the chance and wind up batting for the other side.
I'd made a vow to myself that I'd only absorb powers that were absolutely necessary. I'd kind of hoped I wouldn't need any more. Sure, that hope was far-fetched, but what hope wasn't?
The highway curved upward, and we began the ascent to the top of the ridge where I assumed there'd be a sign: this way to the creepy caverns.
"I imagine everyone in Barnaby's Gap is going to forget we ever rolled through?"
Summer nodded, still kneading her hands. "Along with anything spooky in the hills."
"What if someone was out of town for the day? On vacation? Just couldn't take Hicksville one more second?"
"If no one else remembers, they'll forget eventually, too. It's the nature of the human mind to rationalize."
"What happens in the places you don't go?" I wondered. "Jimmy doesn't have forget-me talents."
Because if he did, I'd have them, too.
"Like I said, people rationalize. Once the threat is gone, the memories fade, especially when those memories are so hard to believe in the first place. They'll start to think they had a nightmare, a fever."
"An entire town will rationalize away mass murder by monster?"
"Mass murder doesn't happen." I flinched, and she corrected herself. "Much."
I'd seen mass murder, been too late to prevent it, and was still haunted by the images nearly every time I closed my eyes.
"DKs are sent at the first hint of a problem," Summer continued, "if not earlier. The federation's goal is to stop the Nephilim before they cause death and destruction. Why else would all our seers be psychics?"
"Then what happened in Barnaby's Gap?"
"Jimmy's one of us."
"So we weren't warned that he's snacking on the little people? Sounds like a breakdown in communication to me."
"I saw him," Summer said quietly.
My eyes narrowed, and my mouth tightened. I didn't need reminding. "Why was that?" I asked. "You aren't a seer."
"And Jimmy's not a Nephilim."
"I'm not following."
"If the powers that be had sent a flash of Jimmy to any of the seers, a DK would have been dispatched and he'd be dead. Obviously they don't want him dead, hence the message to me."
"Conveniently minus the intel that he's gone off the deep end and started sucking on townspeople like a hungry six-month-old."
"That was left out for a reason. We're supposed to find him; we're supposed to help him. We are not supposed to kill him."
"The jury's still out on that," I said.
"Seems a little unfair since you're the judge, the jury, and—" She broke off, biting her lip.
"The executioner?" I finished. "Got that right."
"You want to punish him for something you don't know all the facts on."
"I know the facts, Summer. Jimmy shared blood with the strega; he became just like him. He started to kill people in that chrome tower in Manhattan. I know this because I was there. He kept me captive. He drank from me until I was too weak to fight back."
And the only reason I'd survived was because Jimmy hadn't known I had the power of empathy. He'd made me his sex slave in an attempt to take away first my will and then my life.
But the joke was on him, because in trying to hurt me, debase me, subjugate me, he'd actually made me stronger. When he'd taken my body, he'd given me his supernatural abilities. Those powers had allowed me to destroy the leader of the darkness.
"That wasn't him," she whispered.
"Walked like him, talked like him, looked like him." I didn't mention that it had fucked like him, too.
I'd been so confused. I'd believed that Jimmy was still inside the thing that wore his skin, that if I could get him to remember what we'd had, I might save him. I'd been a fool.
"When I said you didn't know all the facts I wasn't talking about Manhattan," Summer said.
"Then what—" My fingers clenched on the steering wheel. I did not want to have this conversation.
"Didn't you ever wonder why he'd be so stupid as to sleep with me when he knew damn well you'd see it the next time you touched him?"
"I figured he was a man." I let my gaze sweep from the tip of her stupid white hat to the toes of her just-scuffed-enough boots. "He couldn't keep it in his pants any more than the next guy if you paid him."
"You don't have a very high opinion of men."
"Should I?" Every man I'd ever trusted had betrayed me.