CHAPTER 17
HELL WAS DRIVING A BLOOD-SOAKED VAN LISTENING to two children dying in the backseat, while Grendel whined as if something were killing him. Hell was watching Jezebel run out of the Keep’s gates, her face a pain-distorted mask, clench Joey’s mangled body, rock him like a child, and scream and scream and scream, as if it were Jezebel who was dying. Hell was seeing fear in Doolittle’s eyes when Curran carried Julie, wrapped in the sheets from my office cot, into the Keep, and then sitting in the waiting room.
Curran spoke into the phone, biting off words. “Is anybody going to tell me why our own fucking render attacked my mate?”
Barabas walked into the room. The skin of his face stretched too tight over his features, making him look sharper and fragile. He came over and crouched by me. “Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head. Curran hung up the phone.
Barabas’s eyes were watering. He looked feverish and unhinged. His quiet voice shook with barely contained anger. “Did she hurt before you killed her?”
“Yes,” Curran said. “I saw the body.”
“That’s good.” Barabas swallowed. His hands shook. Technical difficulties with controlling his rage. I could relate. “Jez will be glad to hear it.”
“Was Joey a relative?” I asked. My voice squeaked. I could’ve given a rusty metal gate a run for its money in the creaking department.
“He was the youngest of our generation,” Barabas said. “Jezebel used to babysit him. We all did, but she had done it the most.”
The door swung open and Jim blocked the light. Tall, dark, grim, and wrapped in a black cloak, he looked like death walking in. Jim reached into his cloak and pulled out a thin gold chain. The light of the feylanterns clutched at the gold and slid down to a small pendant. A lighthouse. A tiny diamond winked from the spot where the lighthouse lamp would have been.
“Boyfriend had it,” Jim said. “Leslie broke the chain. He was getting it fixed for her birthday.”
Leslie Wren was a Lighthouse Keeper.
It wasn’t the hundred-mile walk through rough terrain that had hurt Julie. It wasn’t a freak accident or a render gone loup. No, it was my case. Had she not been in that office, she wouldn’t have been attacked. Had I ordered the trackers to bring her back to the Keep . . .
“Leslie’s father was an engineer in Columbia,” Jim said. “Made good money. About fifteen years ago the man lost his shit, quit his job, and moved the family north of Atlanta, to the countryside. He’d inherited the house from his parents. Leslie had an older brother, but he stayed in Columbia. The locals say they never saw the family much. They remember Leslie—a quiet kid in threadbare clothes. She went to school, but the parents wouldn’t leave the property.”
“How did they survive?” I asked.
Jim put the pendant on the table. “Lived off the land. There are deer in the woods, raccoons, small game. They must’ve hunted a lot. Three shapeshifters need a lot of food.”
Curran glanced at me. “Explains why Leslie made a good render. She probably spent more time in her fur than in her skin growing up. It’s not good for children. Messes with your head.”
Jim shrugged off his cloak. “She came straight to the Pack the moment she turned eighteen. She’s been with us for nine years. She was squared away. No warning signs, no problems, nothing. In hindsight, I should’ve asked myself why there were no problems. Most renders miss a step once in a while. She never did. She was the go-to render when we had an issue.”
I leaned back. “Why would you look for trouble, when there is none?”
“She was with us for a third of her life. We treated her well.” Curran leaned on the table. “I want to know why.”
Jim squared his shoulders. “Teresa, one of my people, tracked down Leslie Wren’s brother. She came back this morning. We’d just missed her. She says that Leslie’s father, Colin Wren, had a serious case of paranoia. The mother, Liz, was a go-with-the-flow kind of woman. The brother says she was passive, didn’t like confrontations. They weren’t the most stable couple.”
A paranoid shapeshifter with a passive mate who’d do pretty much anything he wanted to avoid a fight. That was a recipe for disaster.
Jim kept going. “When Leslie was twelve and her brother was seventeen, their mother had an affair with Michael Waterson.”
“Local cat alpha of Columbia,” Curran said for my benefit. “Not a bad guy. Capable.”
“The affair didn’t last long,” Jim said. “When Colin found out, he snapped. From the way the brother tells it, he took Leslie with him out of Columbia and went to his parents’ house. He gave Liz a choice: if she didn’t come with him, she’d never see Leslie again.”
“Used his daughter as collateral,” Curran said.
Jim nodded. “The brother says she was afraid he’d do something to Leslie, so she went with him.
Waterson never followed her. He says she told him not to look for her and that she was going to save her marriage. They holed up in the house. Liz wasn’t allowed to leave the property. The brother was in high school at the time; he stayed behind to finish the year out. He came to visit them on his break. The dad tried to kill him. Said he was competition.”
Living in that house must’ve been pure hell. It didn’t make me regret killing Leslie. “She must’ve blamed Lyc-V for driving her father crazy.”
Jim nodded. “Yeah.”
“Bullshit,” Barabas spat. “Dozens of shapeshifters deal with affairs. Marriages break. People die. We carry on. We don’t abuse our mates and children.”
“When did the Keepers recruit her?” Curran asked.
“We don’t know,” Jim said. “Had to be early on.”
Something awful had happened to Leslie Wren in that house. Something that convinced her that the shapeshifters were evil, that the very magic that made their existence possible had to be destroyed. She believed it so deeply that she joined the people who hated her kind, signing her own death warrant. She had a life with the Pack, respect, friendships, a future. But whatever happened had scarred her so deeply, she threw it all away when the Keepers called.
How? How do you go from taking Julie on a hunting trip to trying to murder her? I had killed dozens, but I could never bring myself to take a life of a child. It was beyond me.
The door down the hall opened. Sander, one of Doolittle’s junior medics, a tall, thin man who looked like he would snap in half any second, came out and approached us. “The boy is awake.”