EIGHTEEN
After Jamaal left, I felt drained and melancholy. I dragged myself into the shower and stood under the hot spray for way longer than was environmentally correct, washing away the lingering traces of blood, sweat, dirt, and tears that clung to me. I didn’t have any plans to go out, having checked out the window and seen the pristine blanket of snow that covered everything in sight. It was still coming down, and only in the direst emergency would I consider trying to drive through it. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to blow-dry my hair and put on makeup, but I did it anyway. Maybe just because it made me feel more normal, though my concealer wasn’t up to the challenge of hiding the dark circles under my eyes.
I probably should have left my room in search of Anderson as soon as I was dressed. No doubt Jamaal and Leo had told him what they’d found in the police report and he would expect me to fill in any missing details for him. But I wasn’t up to facing him after what I’d been through. Maybe he’d had enough time to absorb the blow, especially after I’d left him that screen shot the other day, but I didn’t think it was likely. He had loved Emma so much, and though I suspected she had always been self-absorbed and bitchy, the years she’d spent as Konstantin’s prisoner had made Anderson forget her true nature. She had become a paragon in his memory, and I didn’t want to see his pain at having that paragon irrevocably destroyed.
I guess that meant my plan was to hole up in my room for the rest of the evening so I could avoid any chance of running into Anderson. Or anyone else, for that matter. My stomach grumbled its disapproval of my plan, reminding me I hadn’t eaten all day and my body had burned up tons of energy bringing itself back from the dead. I contemplated a run to the kitchen, but decided I’d dip into the box of granola bars I kept in the filing cabinet in my sitting room instead. Buying myself a filing cabinet had been silly, since most of my paper files had been destroyed by the sprinkler system in my old office, and I rarely kept much in the way of paper files anymore. But it made for a handy pantry, and I grabbed a chocolate bar for dessert while I was at it. It wasn’t exactly the healthiest meal I’d ever eaten, but it was damn convenient.
Crunching on my granola bar, I opened up my laptop and went in search of something, anything, to keep my mind occupied so I wouldn’t keep thinking about what had almost happened to me this afternoon. It was worth a try anyway.
I was just finishing my chocolate bar and trying to resist the urge to go foraging in my filing cabinet again when there was a knock on my door. I had the cowardly urge not to answer. I didn’t want to talk to anyone right now, wanted to lose myself in something completely mindless—not that I’d had a whole lot of success with that so far.
“Come in,” I finally said with weary acceptance.
The door opened, and Anderson stepped inside. No doubt he would have let himself in whether I’d invited him or not. I closed my laptop and laid it on the coffee table, then stood up, scattering a bunch of granola crumbs all over the place. I brushed at my clothes to dislodge any remaining crumbs, giving the task way more attention than it deserved. It looked like I was going to have to talk about all the things I didn’t want to talk about after all, and if I could put it off for a few seconds, I was all for it.
Finally, I was as crumb-free as I was going to be, and I raised my head to look at Anderson. I expected to see pain, anger, and even sorrow, but what I saw on his face was none of the above. Instead, I saw a frozen, almost lifeless calm. I’d seen him run both hot and cold with anger, but I’d never seen anything quite like this before, and there was something so forbidding about it I had to fight the urge to take a step back.
“I came to offer my apologies,” he said, and his voice was off-the-charts weird, too. Completely flat and noninflected. Inhuman, almost, though not exactly godlike, either.
“Umm . . .” I couldn’t think of what to say. The man who stood in front of me wasn’t Anderson, at least not the Anderson I knew.
“I was blind to Emma’s faults, and you almost paid an unspeakable price for it.”
He was saying the right words, but without any emotion behind them it was hard to tell if he actually meant them or not.
“A-are you all right?” Stupid question, of course, because he was obviously anything but all right. I realized his face was so immobile he wasn’t even blinking, like his body was some kind of automaton. Was the Anderson I knew even in there?
His head moved slightly in a sad imitation of a head shake. “No. I am far from ‘all right.’ I am dangerous in my current condition.” There was still no emotion in his voice, like he was reading off cue cards. “I cannot afford to feel anything just yet. I will try to act more like myself when we meet with Cyrus tomorrow.”
I shivered, more freaked out than I wanted to admit by the talking husk Anderson had left behind. “We’re meeting with Cyrus?”
“One of his Olympians has broken the treaty. We will meet to discuss the consequences.”
Not a conversation I particularly wanted to participate in. “Do you really need me—”
“You are the injured party. You are coming.”
Not much chance he was going to be flexible about that. “You’re not going to kill her, are you?” I didn’t know what this faux-Anderson was capable of. Maybe in his current state he wouldn’t mind letting the world know just who and what he was.
“No.”
He turned to leave, and I should have just let him go. But of course I had to open my big mouth again.
“So what exactly are you hoping to accomplish at this meeting?”
After what Emma had tried to do to me, I should have been screaming for her blood. I should have been begging Anderson to kill her. But despite the horrors I’d seen in the last few months, becoming Liberi hadn’t stopped me from being a bleeding heart. I wanted Emma to pay for what she’d done—and tried to do—and I wanted her not to be able to hurt me again, but I didn’t want her to pay with her life. If she were tried in a court of law, she might well get a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Confinement in a mental institution might be the most appropriate sentence, but I was under no illusion that it was an option.
For the first time since he’d set foot in my sitting room, something stirred behind Anderson’s eyes. I couldn’t have said what it was—the expression was gone almost before I had a chance to notice the change—but it made my heart skip a beat in primal terror. I dropped my gaze to the floor, an instinctive gesture of submission, and held my breath. I didn’t like this lifeless talking shell of his, but even that one tiny glimpse of what lay beneath had told me in no uncertain terms that the shell was the lesser of two evils. If and when Anderson unleashed everything he was suppressing, I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
I felt his eyes boring through me for what felt like forever. I kept my own gaze pinned to the floor, and my lungs started to burn with the pressure of holding my breath.
I didn’t give in to the need to breathe until Anderson had left the room and closed the door behind him.
I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep on Saturday night, despite my exhaustion. When I lay down to try to relax, I kept obsessing about what had almost happened to me. Just thinking about it flooded my system with adrenaline. And to make matters worse, when I closed my eyes I was immediately transported into the memory of the darkness of death.
I knew from previous experience—and from talking with Jamaal about his own experiences—that my fear of the darkness would fade over time. Every night, it would be just a little bit easier. But that didn’t help me much on this first night. I wished Jamaal would come up to my room and sing me asleep as he had the first time I’d died, but it wasn’t going to happen.
Eventually, exhaustion won out over terror, though it did so not when I was lying comfortably in my bed, but when I was on the couch in the sitting room playing solitaire on my laptop. I remember waking up briefly hours later, when there was a roll of thunder so violent it made the whole house shake. My laptop slid off my lap and onto the floor, but I wasn’t awake enough to bother picking it up.
I’d fallen asleep sitting up, and during that brief period of wakefulness, I stretched myself out on the couch, clutching a throw pillow under my head. I had the brief, hazy thought that it was unusual to have violent thunder in the midst of a snowstorm, but the phenomenon wasn’t interesting enough to keep me awake. I drifted back into sleep and didn’t wake up until the sun had risen.
I was stiff from spending the night on the couch, and I didn’t exactly feel well rested. I checked my laptop and found, to my relief, that it had survived the fall. I’d have followed my morning ritual of making coffee in my room while perusing the news, except my stomach was growling at me that my granola-and-candy meal last night had been woefully inadequate.
Though the mansion felt more and more like my home every day, I didn’t feel at home enough to go downstairs in my bathrobe, so I showered and dressed before heading down to the kitchen. I’d slept in enough that for once I wasn’t the first person up and about, which meant there was already a pot of coffee brewed. I poured myself a cup, then frowned when I noticed someone had left dirty dishes in the sink. There were drawbacks to living in a house with so many other people in it. I put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, then made myself some scrambled eggs and toast. And cleaned up my own damn mess when I was finished.
I sat down at the kitchen table with my food and coffee, taking a moment to admire the view through the windows. It looked like it had snowed about four inches all told, and the back lawn was a pristine white carpet that glittered in the light of the sun. A dark blot was moving across the snow, and the glare was bright enough I had to squint to make out Jamaal’s form as he tromped toward the house. At a guess, I’d say he was coming from the clearing.
I’d have thought after our make-out session yesterday he’d have waited until I was out of the house before summoning Sita again, but apparently not. Maybe he thought the fact that he’d ultimately rebuffed my advances was enough to calm Sita’s jealousy. Or maybe I’d ruffled his composure so much he felt he needed to vent the death magic immediately, whether he wanted to or not.
I had wolfed down half my eggs and all of my toast by the time Jamaal made it back to the house and into the kitchen. The first bite had proved to me that I was starving, and I’d started shoveling it in as fast as I could chew and swallow. Jamaal nodded at me in greeting before turning his back on me to pour himself a cup of coffee.
Even in that one brief glance, I’d been able to see his turmoil, so when he turned as if to leave with his coffee, I paused between bites to ask, “Did Sita give you a hard time this morning?”
He reluctantly turned back toward me. “No.”
If he thought he was going to put me off with one-syllable responses, he had another think coming. There was a haunted, troubled look in his eyes that worried me.
“Then what’s wrong?” I asked.
He took a couple of steps closer to me, though he leaned against the end of the kitchen counter instead of coming all the way into the breakfast nook. “I went to the clearing to practice this morning.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.” My remaining eggs were getting cold, and my stomach was far from satisfied with what I’d eaten already, so I went ahead and shoved another forkful into my mouth while Jamaal paused to give me a dirty look. “Sorry,” I said with my mouth full. Dying had not had a good influence on my table manners. “What happened?”
He shook his head. “Finish your breakfast. I’ll show you.”
The words sounded ominous, and the expression on his face made them even more so. I wanted to ask him to explain, but he was obviously not in a talking mood, and I didn’t want him to get annoyed with me and wander off. I finished my eggs in two big bites, then loaded my dishes into the dishwasher.
“Okay,” I said, closing the dishwasher, “time for show-and-tell.”
I snatched my parka from the coat closet. Jamaal waited for me impatiently, his edginess making me nervous. What the hell had he seen out in the clearing that had rattled him so much? And was I going to regret going to get a look for myself?
The snow was a little deeper than I’d thought, and I wished I’d run up to my room for boots as my feet sank into it. Of course, I doubt Jamaal would have waited for me. He was agitated enough that he lit a cigarette and puffed on it steadily as we made our way out to the clearing, following the narrow path his shoes had already left in the snow. The air bit into my cheeks, and snow trickled in around the edges of my shoes. I buried my hands in my pockets and shivered.
The first thing I noticed as we approached the clearing was that there were a bunch of trees down. I certainly hadn’t thought the storm was violent enough to take down trees, especially not as many as I saw. I glanced at Jamaal, wondering if this was what he wanted to show me, thinking that he could just as easily have told me a bunch of trees had fallen.
Jamaal looked grim and kept walking. I followed, and the closer we got to the clearing, the more fallen trees I saw, lying like discarded children’s toys among the ones left standing. We had to weave our way around the trees to get to the clearing. Most of the trees were pines, and they were all green and healthy looking.
When we stepped around the last set of branches that were obscuring our view, I finally got a good look at the clearing, and I gasped.
There wasn’t a flake of snow anywhere in the clearing, as if someone had come out here and gone to work with a snow blower, doing such a thorough job of it that all you could see was grass. That was weird as hell, but it wasn’t what took my breath away.
Mouth gaping open, I continued forward until my feet left the snow, blinking a couple of times as if that might make what I saw go away.
I said there were “a bunch” of trees down. Now that I was in the clearing proper, I could see that there were dozens down. Some had been torn up by the roots, and some had snapped in two. Not a single tree that had fronted the clearing was left upright. And the weirdest thing of all? They had all fallen away from the clearing. Almost like a bomb had gone off in the center.
Jamaal stood beside me, his arms crossed over his chest as he surveyed the sight. He must have smoked that cigarette in record time, but I had to admit, if I were a smoker, I’d have been diving for the cigs myself.
“What the hell happened here?” I whispered, my words steaming in the brisk air.
Jamaal swallowed hard. “There was a loud noise in the middle of the night. Woke me up and shook the bed under me.”
I remembered. “I thought it was thunder,” I murmured.
“I did, too, at the time.”
I was pretty sure I had at least a clue of what had happened. Or at least who had happened. Anderson had made himself into a walking, talking automaton in his effort to contain his fury over what Emma had done. He had promised me he would be more like himself when we met with Cyrus today, and the only way that was possible was if he let out some of that repressed fury. I had the distinct feeling we were looking at the results right now.
Jamaal didn’t know what I did about Anderson’s origins, but his mind was obviously traveling similar paths.
“No one knows who Anderson is descended from,” he said. “I don’t know why he’s so mysterious about it, but he is. I’ve never seen him do anything other than that trick with his hand. I have no idea what he’s capable of. What I do know is that none of the rest of us are capable of this.” He indicated the clearing with a sweep of his hand.
I didn’t know what Anderson was capable of, either, although I knew more than Jamaal. “If he has a power that lets him do this, I’m just as happy he keep it and any other powers he might have under wraps.”
Jamaal grunted something that might have been an agreement.
“You think we should ask him about this?” I asked.
Jamaal gave me a look of disbelief. “You go right ahead. Just tell me when you’re going to do it so I can arrange to be in the next county over.”
Okay, it had been a dumb question. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Anderson would not be open to discussion about whatever had happened out here. And even if he had vented some of his fury last night, he wasn’t exactly going to be in a good mood in the foreseeable future. Asking him questions he didn’t want to answer would be a poor survival tactic.
“I don’t want to be there when he confronts Cyrus,” I said. “Not that I have a choice.”
I wished he’d at least given himself a couple of days to absorb everything and calm down as much as he could before squaring off with someone who could start a war that could kill every one of Anderson’s Liberi if he wanted to.
“He’ll keep a lid on it,” Jamaal assured me, not very convincingly.
“Uh-huh.”
I sure as hell hoped he did, despite my skepticism. Because if Anderson let loose whatever it was he’d let loose in this clearing, I didn’t think anyone near him, even immortal Liberi, would survive.