TWENTY-THREE
I’d been unsure of a lot of things in recent days. However, there was no uncertainty in my mind now. If Anderson had done worse sometime in the course of his long life, I didn’t want to know about it. And while he said Konstantin’s trick hadn’t hurt as much as Konstantin had hoped, it was obvious that it had hurt plenty. Anderson wasn’t exploding in rage, but the pain and sadness that wafted from him made my eyes tear up in sympathy yet again.
Not trusting my voice, I cleared my throat before I spoke again.
“Strangely enough, Cyrus doesn’t feel the need to protect Konstantin anymore. He suggested you and I might want to hunt Konstantin down and bury him somewhere that no one will ever find him.”
Anderson nodded slowly. “He wants us to do the dirty work for him so he can deny having anything to do with his father’s disappearance.”
“That was my interpretation. So far he and Mark are the only Olympians who know what Konstantin tried to do, and I think Cyrus plans to keep it that way if he can. I don’t know if he’s trying not to piss off Konstantin’s supporters, or if he just doesn’t want to give anyone else ideas.
“Anyway, Cyrus told me Konstantin’s been moving around constantly, trying to make it hard for me to get a bead on him. But he was apparently staying at Alexis’s old place last night. I’m sure he knows by now that his assassination attempt failed, and he’s no doubt on the run, but we have a solid starting point, and the moon is still up.”
Anderson raised an eyebrow at me. There was still a haunted expression in his eyes, and his face hadn’t fully regained its usual color, but he seemed entirely calm and rational. “You mean to tell me you’re willing to hunt him now? His revenge has come to its head, and I doubt you and your family are in any danger from him anymore. He was never really after you in the first place.”
My shoulders slumped, and I suddenly felt almost unbearably tired. Until that moment, when Anderson challenged me with it, I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about what I was doing. The pain and anger that swelled in me when I learned what Konstantin had done were so overwhelming that I’d been acting on pure instinct, letting those swirling emotions guide me. I wanted Konstantin dead, and if I could help make him that way, then I was all for it.
But had anything really changed since I’d refused to hunt Konstantin because my conscience rebelled at the idea of killing for revenge? Sure, Konstantin had hurt more people, but as Anderson had said, his revenge was now complete. At least, it seemed logical to assume it was.
I like to think of myself as a nice person. I’ve long taken pride in being a bleeding heart, in being a voice of reason when others around me were acting on pure emotion. I’d considered myself above acting out of revenge. And yet even now, when Anderson pointed out the inconsistency of my decision, my conscience couldn’t quite rouse itself to try to talk me out of it. Konstantin had hurt too many people, in too many twisted ways. And unlike Emma, or even Justin Kerner, he was not clinically insane. There was no excuse for his actions, not even in my unusually open mind. He was just an evil man, and the world would be a better place without him.
“I still don’t believe in revenge killings,” I said slowly, thinking over my words carefully. “If there were a way to sentence him to life in prison, I’d be all for it.” Even as I said those words, I wasn’t sure they were true. Not anymore. In my arrogance, I’d thought there was no situation that could persuade me to believe in the death penalty, ever. Maybe I still didn’t. I’d have to wait until my emotions settled down before I would know for sure. But there were exceptions to every rule, and I couldn’t deny that in my mind, Konstantin was one of them. “But since we can’t imprison him except by burial, which I wouldn’t wish even on him, then I guess he has to die. If that makes me a hypocrite, then I guess I’m just going to have to live with it.”
Anderson gave me a gentle smile. “I don’t think you’re being a hypocrite, Nikki. We’re being spurred into action by revenge, but that’s not all there is to it. Even if he doesn’t personally come after us anymore, he will still be an evil person, and countless others will suffer and die at his hands if we don’t take him out. There are good, logical reasons to kill him above and beyond our desire to punish him for what he’s done.”
Everything Anderson said was true. By killing Konstantin, we’d be saving innocent lives, there was no question about it. But I had the sense that I was taking my first step onto a slippery slope, and that there was a long, long fall ahead of me if I wasn’t very careful.
“I can wrestle with my conscience later,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We have about an hour and twenty minutes before the moon sets. It’ll take us thirty to get to Alexis’s place, and that won’t leave us a whole lot of time to pick up the trail and figure out where Konstantin has gone.” Assuming I could get my power to work on command, which was far from a sure thing.
“Then there’s not a moment to waste,” Anderson said.
Together, we hurried out into the predawn darkness to hunt the deposed “king” of the Olympians.
I let Anderson drive, on the assumption that once we got close enough to Alexis’s mansion for me to start sensing Konstantin, I’d have to do my semiconscious tour-guide impersonation as I’d done with Steph on the night we’d gone hunting together. As soon as we were through the gates, I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, trying to let my mind drift in just the right way. The darkness, the early hour, and my exhaustion from a mostly sleepless night threatened to drag me down into sleep. The pressure of the ticking clock, along with the burning need to ensure that Konstantin could never hurt anyone again, kept sleep from winning, but it didn’t exactly help me zone out.
The roads were an icy mess, making the drive painfully slow. A couple of times, I felt the car skid, and my eyes opened in alarm. Anderson knew how to drive in the snow and ice, however, and he quickly righted the car.
“Relax, Nikki,” he said, reaching over to pat my knee briefly. “I’m not going to crash the car. Trust me.”
I gave him a sidelong glance and frowned. The knee-pat had been an almost instinctual, absent gesture, and if he’d realized it was uncommonly familiar, he showed no sign of it. I bit my lip and sank a little lower in my seat. The last thing I needed right now was to distract myself analyzing every nuance of Anderson’s behavior when I should be tracking a killer.
“It would be nice if just once I was trying to find someone without being under time pressure,” I grumbled. It would be so much easier to relax if it didn’t matter so goddamn much.
Of course, if it didn’t matter so much, then I wouldn’t be doing it.
Anderson didn’t reply. I let out a long, slow breath and let my eyes slide closed again. I hoped Konstantin hadn’t gotten very far away from Alexis’s house by the time we got there. We were going to have precious little moonlight left, and if I lost the “signal,” we’d be back to square one again by the time the moon next rose. Konstantin was no dummy, and after poking the bear, he was going to be running as fast as he could. With Cyrus mad at him, without the full support of the Olympians, he would have to get out of the D.C. area, and who knew where he would end up? If it were me, I’d get out of the country. And if he left the country, I suspected even my hunting skills might not be up to the challenge of finding him.
The urgency made my nerves buzz as if I’d drunk a gallon of coffee. I was tapping the fingers of one hand restlessly against my thigh. I stopped as soon as I noticed the movement, taking another deep breath and urging myself to calm. I searched for that floaty, abstracted feeling I got when I was a passenger on a boring drive.
The car hit a bump, and my eyes popped open again, searching out the dashboard clock before I could stop myself. It was 5:29, and we had less than thirty minutes left before the moon set. My heart sank. Even if Konstantin hadn’t found out his assassination attempt failed until Anderson and I had left the mansion—and I was pretty sure he would have known before then—he had a good forty-minute head start. There was no way we were going to catch up with him before the moon set. My powers aren’t nonexistent without the moon, but they’re spotty at the best of times. I didn’t for a moment believe I could find Konstantin during the day. And by nightfall, he’d be long gone, perhaps out of my reach.
The grimness on Anderson’s face told me he’d reached the same conclusion, but he wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
“Keep trying,” he urged me as he turned onto the street that would take us by the front gates of Alexis’s home. I would have thought one of the other Olympians would have appropriated it after Alexis’s “disappearance,” but perhaps Konstantin had wanted to keep it for himself.
I shook my head. “It’s too late.” I rubbed at my tired eyes, wishing there were some better way for me to control my power. Maybe it would help if I took up meditation. Maybe that would make it easier to relax in tense situations like this one.
“Don’t you dare give up on me now, Nikki,” Anderson warned in a low growl.
If he thought that was going to make it easier for me to relax into my powers, he was sorely mistaken. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue with him, so I closed my eyes. My fingers were tapping away again, trying to vent the nervous energy that still pulsed through my veins. My mind might have decided the search was fruitless, but my body hadn’t caught up, still buzzing on the adrenaline of the hunt.
I made only a halfhearted effort to relax myself, knowing there was no way we were going to have time to catch up to Konstantin. Mostly, I was just pretending to try so Anderson wouldn’t nag me. My mind was still going a thousand miles an hour, and my token effort to relax hadn’t had the slightest effect, when my eyes popped open for a third time, this time with no external prompting whatsoever.
A shiver of dread trailed down my spine as I looked out my window and saw we were passing directly in front of the gates to Alexis’s mansion. Once upon a time, I would have considered the fact that my eyes had opened at that very moment to be nothing more than a coincidence. Now, however, I felt sure it meant only one thing.
“Konstantin is still in the house.”
Anderson’s hands jerked on the steering wheel, and for a moment I feared he was going to take us right into a ditch. He handled the car expertly, smoothly turning into the skid until he regained control and came to an idling stop in the middle of the road.
“He can’t be,” he protested. “He’s arrogant, but not stupid. He had to have arranged for his pet Descendant to contact him when Cyrus was dead, and he had to know what it meant when the Descendant didn’t do it.”
“Maybe he didn’t expect Cyrus to sic us on him so quickly,” I said doubtfully. Of course, it didn’t matter exactly what Konstantin had been expecting. Whether he thought we’d be after him in an hour or a day, he wouldn’t be hanging out at his last known location to make it easy for us. “Or maybe Cyrus forced the Descendant to call Konstantin and tell him he succeeded.”
“Yes, and he failed to mention that to you when you talked to him. And Konstantin has nothing better to do after assassinating his son than to lounge around in Alexis’s house.”
Okay, that theory didn’t make a whole lot of sense, either. But I really hated the third theory that came into my mind.
There was no parking on the street in this neighborhood, and a snowplow had piled dirty brown snow and ice along the curbs, but that didn’t stop Anderson from pulling off the road. The car shimmied and groaned a protest as he forced it over the mounded, icy snow. I clutched the grab bar with one hand and braced against the center console with the other. There was an ominous bang from the undercarriage, and Anderson’s side of the car lurched upward while mine lurched downward. I barely kept my head from smacking against the window.
Anderson brought the car to a stop—or maybe the car took the decision out of his hands—and put it in park. We were still at a precarious angle, and I wondered if the tires on his side were even touching anything. Of course, if being hung up on the side of the road was the worst thing that was going to happen, I’d be ecstatic.
“The only reason I can think of for Konstantin to still be here is if this is a trap,” I said, giving Anderson a meaningful look. Which would have been more effective—maybe—if he’d bothered to look at me. Instead, he was unbuckling his seat belt with one hand while opening the door with the other.
I grabbed his arm to get his attention. “Let’s think about this for a minute before we do something stupid!”
I had no idea what Konstantin was planning. He knew Anderson couldn’t be killed, not by him, and not by a Descendant. But he must think he had some way to hurt him, some way to prevent Anderson from killing him. There was no other reason I could imagine for him to still be in the house when he had to know we’d be coming after him.
Anderson gave me a steely glare. “Konstantin is here. That’s all I need to know.”
He turned toward the door again, and again I grabbed his arm. “We also know this has to be a trap. He could have thirty of his closest friends in there with him, just waiting for you to stroll in like a macho idiot.”
Anderson snorted. “He’d have to risk letting them find out what I am, and that’s something he would never do. He’s alone in there. And I suggest you let go of me. I’m in no mood for your interference.”
“Well, I’m in no mood to get killed because you won’t listen to reason.”
“Fine. Then stay here.” He easily jerked his arm out of my grip and leapt out of the car.
“Dammit!” I fumbled with my own seat belt, uttering a few choice cuss words under my breath. I couldn’t just let Anderson walk in there alone. Sure, I was more vulnerable than he was, but I was also a hell of a lot more rational, and right now, that seemed like an important factor. “Wait up!” I yelled, pushing my door open and jumping out. Which turned out not to be my brightest move ever. We had come to a stop at the edge of the ditch, the car’s undercarriage hung up on a big chunk of ice. The side of the ditch was covered with ice as well, and given my momentum and the severe angle, I ended up doing an inglorious nosedive into the ditch.
I twisted my ankle during the fall, as well as knocking the wind out of myself. Anderson, radiating impatience, reached down and hauled me to my feet before I was ready. I almost went down again.
“Your delay tactics are getting on my nerves,” he said, and if he wanted to think my pratfall was a deliberate attempt to slow him down, then I was happy to let him go right ahead thinking it.
“Just give me half a second to catch my breath. That hurt!”
From the looks of him, half a second was all I was going to get, and grudgingly at that.
“So what’s your plan, Rambo?” I asked as I gingerly put my weight on my injured ankle. “Go in the front door and hope he’s not expecting you?”
He shot me a glare that would have had me taking a hasty step away if my ankle weren’t complaining so loudly. Clearly, he wasn’t open to suggestion, nor was he prepared to address my objections. I’d never seen him quite like this before, and frankly, it scared me. I didn’t want to let him go in there alone, but I didn’t want to get killed—or worse, considering this was Konstantin we were going after—charging in like a stampeding bull.
“I don’t care if he’s expecting me,” Anderson said through gritted teeth. “There’s nothing he can do to me.”
Apparently that was as much discussion as he was willing to entertain. He turned away from me and started marching through the snow toward the house, leaving me to follow or not as I chose.
Wincing in pain at every step, I took off after him.
Our car had come to a stop well past the driveway, and Anderson and I were approaching the house through the woods. I could have reminded him that there were surveillance cameras in these woods and that it might be best to disable one before plowing heedlessly onward, but I didn’t think he would listen to me. I just hoped Konstantin hadn’t kept up the security detail that was monitoring the cameras the last time I’d trespassed here.
I had already determined beyond reasonable doubt that Anderson wasn’t going to listen to me, but I didn’t have it in me to just keep quiet as we knowingly walked into a trap without a plan.
“Konstantin obviously thinks there’s something he can do to you,” I said, panting a bit from the effort of walking through the snow, especially at the brisk pace Anderson had set. “Are you 100 percent sure he’s wrong?”
“Yes,” Anderson snapped.
“What if he’s planning to bury you? Or drown you, like he did Emma?”
“He might find me reluctant to hold still for it. Besides, I’m rather hard to restrain.” To punctuate his point, Anderson walked straight through the trunk of a tree.
I wished his reminder and demonstration made me feel better. The walking-through-walls thing was a common ability for death-god descendants. Konstantin had to know Anderson, as a death god, could do it, and he was waiting in that house for us anyway. To say I had a bad feeling about this was an understatement.
“But you can die, at least temporarily,” I said. “I’ve seen it happen.” He hadn’t stayed dead anywhere near as long as a Liberi with similar injuries would have, but still . . .
“Unless his plan is to stand by my side and kill me every ninety seconds or so, it doesn’t matter.” He came to an abrupt stop and whirled on me. A hint of white glow was leaking out of his eyes, giving me a glimpse of the terrifying, nonhuman creature that lay behind his facade. “Go back to the car. This is my battle, not yours.”
Oh, we were back to that again, were we?
“You’re being a pigheaded, mindless jackass,” I retorted. “Don’t you see that Konstantin has been pulling our strings from the very beginning?” I myself was only now beginning to see how thoroughly Konstantin had manipulated us all. “He didn’t trick you into killing Emma just to hurt you. He did it because he knew it would make you act exactly like you’re acting now.” And his attack on Cyrus was never supposed to succeed, was only meant to prompt Cyrus into giving up his location. “This is exactly the endgame he planned. We’re here because he wants us to be, and we’d be idiots to fall for it.”
Anderson moved so fast that all I saw was a blur. Then there was a hand at my throat and I was being propelled backward until I crashed into a tree trunk. I probably would have lost my footing in the snow and ice, but Anderson kindly held me up. Unfortunately, he was holding me up by the throat, but what’s a little choking between friends?
“I told you I would never hurt you in a fit of temper,” Anderson growled, the white light in his eyes now bright enough to make me squint. “Don’t make a liar out of me.”
I swallowed hard. Anderson can be one hell of a scary guy when he wants to be. But I also noticed that the hand around my throat wasn’t really digging in, and that my impact with the tree had been much more surprising than painful. He was in better control of himself than he wanted me to think, which was sort of scary in itself. If he was in control of himself and still wanted to storm the house, if it wasn’t just some hotheaded momentary madness, then there was no chance in hell I was talking him out of it, no matter how sound my reasoning.
Anderson took my silence for capitulation, and he let go of me. When I started following after him yet again, he gave me an exasperated look over his shoulder.
“I’ll shut up,” I promised him, holding my hands up in surrender. “But I’m coming with you.”
I didn’t know if I could possibly be any help. Konstantin had to be expecting both of us, after all, and that meant he had a plan to deal with both of us. But I wasn’t letting Anderson walk in there alone. I fished my gun out of my coat pocket, rechecking the cylinder to make sure it was loaded and ready to go. Not because I had any doubts, but because I wanted to look tough and ready for action, instead of scared out of my wits.
The show must have been at least marginally convincing. Anderson turned from me once again and started heading toward the house. I followed.