It took me another minute to answer. “You know about Mab. What I am now. The deal I made.”
“I also know that you did so intending to use that power to save your daughter’s life.”
“You don’t know about Susan,” I said. I met his eyes. “I killed her, Michael.”
I don’t know what I looked like—but tears suddenly stood out in his eyes. “Oh, Harry.” He looked down. “She turned, didn’t she? What happened?”
“That son of a bitch, Martin,” I said. “He . . . he set her up. Sold out the family that had Maggie. I think he did it to set me on a collision course with the Red King, maybe hoping to focus the White Council on the war effort a little harder. But he had inside knowledge of the Reds, too. He’d worked for them. Was some kind of double agent, or triple agent—I don’t know. I don’t think he was running a grand scheme to get to one specific moment . . . but he saw his chance. The Red King was getting set to kill Maggie as part of a ritual bloodline curse. The curse was meant to kill me and . . . other people, up my family tree.”
Michael raised his eyebrows.
“But the ritual was all loaded up and Martin saw a chance to wipe out the whole Red Court. All of them. He popped Susan in the face with the knowledge of his treachery and she just snapped . . .” I shuddered, remembering it. “I saw it coming. Saw what he was doing. Maybe I could have stopped it—I don’t know—but . . . I didn’t. And she killed him. Tore his throat out. And . . . she started to change and . . .”
“And you finished the ritual,” he said quietly. “You killed her. You killed them all.”
“The youngest vampire in the whole world,” I said. “Brand-new. And they all originated from a single point—the Red King, I guess. Their own curse got every one of them. The whole family.”
“Every Red Court vampire,” Michael said gently, “was a killer. Every one of them, at one point, chose to take someone’s life to slake their thirst. That’s what turned them. That choice.”
“I’m not shedding tears over the Red Court,” I said, contempt in my voice. “The fallout from taking them all out at once . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’d wish I could have done it differently. With more planning.”
“One doesn’t destroy an empire built on pain and terror neatly,” Michael said, “if history is to be any indicator.”
I smiled bleakly. “It was a little hectic at the time,” I said. “I just wanted to save Maggie.”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“After she started to turn . . . how did you subdue Susan?”
I sat for a time, trying to remember the moment less clearly.
“You didn’t,” he said gently, “did you?”
“She . . . she was turning. But she understood what was happening.”
“She sacrificed herself,” Michael said.
“She allowed me to sacrifice her,” I snarled, with sudden, boiling fury. “There’s a difference.”
“Yes,” Michael said quietly. “There’s a cost for you in that. A burden to be carried.”
“I kissed her,” I said. “And then I cut her throat.”
The silence after I said that was profound.
Michael got up and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Harry,” he said quietly, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you were faced with those awful choices.”
“I never meant . . .” I swallowed. “I never meant for all those things to happen. For Susan to get hurt. For Mab’s deal to stick. I never meant to keep it.”
Real pain touched his eyes. “Ah,” he said quietly. “I’d . . . wondered. About the after.”
“That was me,” I said. “I arranged it. I thought . . . if I was gone before Mab had a chance to change me, it would be all right.”
“You thought . . .” Michael took a slow breath and sat down again. “You thought that if you died, it would be all right?”
“Compared to me becoming Mab’s psychotic monster?” I asked. “Compared to letting the Reds kill my daughter and my grandfather? Yeah. I regarded that as a win.”
Michael put his face in his hands for a moment. He shook his head. Then he lifted his face and looked up at his ceiling, his expression a mixture of sadness and frustration and pain.
“And now I’ve got this thing inside me,” I said. “And it pushes me, Michael. It pushes and pushes and pushes me to . . . do things.”
He eyed me.
“And right now . . . Hell’s bells, right now, Mab has me working with Nicodemus Archleone. If I don’t, there’s this thing in my head that’s going to come popping out of it, kill me, and then go after Maggie.”
“What?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Nicodemus. He’s robbing a vault somewhere and Mab expects me to pay off a debt she owes him. He’s formed his own Evil League of Evil to get it done—and I’m a member. And to make it worse, I dragged Murphy into it with me, and I’m not even telling her everything. Because I can’t.”
Michael shook his head slowly.
“I look around me, man . . . I’m trying to do what I’ve always done, to protect people, to keep them safe from the monsters—only I’m pretty sure I’m one of them. I can’t figure out where I could have . . . what else I might have done . . .” I swallowed. “I’m lost. I know every step I took to get here, and I’m still lost.”
“Harry . . .”
“And my friends,” I said. “Even Thomas . . . I was stuck out on that island of the damned for a year. A year, Michael, and they only showed up a handful of times. Just Murphy and Thomas, maybe half a dozen times in more than a year. It’s just a goddamned boat ride away, forty minutes. People drive farther than that to go to the movies. They know what I’m turning into. They don’t want to watch it happening to me.”
“Harry,” Michael said in a low, soft voice. “You . . . you are . . .”
“A fool,” I said quietly. “A monster. Damned.”
“. . . so arrogant,” Michael breathed.
I blinked.
“I mean, I was accustomed to a certain degree of hubris from you, but . . . this is stunning. Even on your scale.”
“What?” I said.
“Arrogant,” he repeated, enunciating. “To a degree I can scarcely believe.”
I just stared at him for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you were expecting me to share words of wisdom with you, maybe say something to you about God and your soul and forgiveness and redemption. And all those things are good things that need to be said in the right time, but . . . honestly, Harry. I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t point out to you that you are behaving like an amazingly pigheaded idiot.”
“I am?” I asked, a little blankly.
He stared at me for a second, anger and pain on his face—and then they vanished, and he smiled, his eyes flickering as merrily as a Christmas Eve fire. I suddenly realized where Molly got her smile. Something very like laughter bubbled just under the surface of his words. “Yes, Harry. You idiot. You are.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He eyed our beers, which were empty. That tends to happen with Mac’s microbrews. He went to the fridge and opened another pair of bottles with the power of Thor, and put one of them in front of me. We clinked and drinked.
“Harry,” he said, after a meditative moment, “are you perfect?”
“No,” I said.
He nodded. “Omniscient?”
I snorted. “No.”
“Can you go into the past, change things that have already happened?”
“Theoretically?” I asked.