Chapter 40
Lucas had followed them. He had tried to tell himself he just wanted to keep her safe, but really he had needed to know for certain whether Cyrus and Evie were a couple.
But now he was wishing he hadn’t come. He stood on the roof of the bookstore clutching his hand to his side, grimacing at the image seared now on his mind of Cyrus’s hands running all over Evie’s body.
He should have burst in when he saw Cyrus pick up the copy of Hustler and indicate Evie to lie down on the sofa. Or when he’d started stroking her hair. But then Evie had been the one to sit up and he’d seen the desire on her face – he knew that look – and she’d kissed Cyrus. It hadn’t been the other way around.
Lucas had seen enough at that point. Had torn his eyes away and stepped back, towards the edge of the roof. They hadn’t even sensed him. That’s how completely wrapped up in each other they were. Evie hadn’t even felt him – though he was feeling her right now, could feel her heart racing, an echo in his own chest. He was even picking up a faint trace of her scent – mint and lavender and something sweeter like vanilla, though it was masked by the acrid fumes of blood and by Cyrus’s stronger scent.
Lucas’s hands were curled into fists by his side. He had an overwhelming desire to burst in right now, drop through the skylight and smash Cyrus’s arrogant face into the wall. He took a deep breath. Hurting Cyrus, appealing as that was, wasn’t going to achieve anything. Evie needed protecting. This realm needed protecting. Even if protecting Evie was something Cyrus clearly felt he could do better if he first removed her clothes.
Anger leapt like quicksilver through his veins. He needed to get off this roof before he did something.
And there was only one place he could think of going.
‘Oh my god!’
Flic staggered back several steps, clutching at the wall to stay upright, a hand covering her mouth.
‘Lucas,’ she whispered through splayed fingers. It came out as a question.
He nodded, realising a little too late that he should have first changed his bloodstained clothing and tried to rinse more of the Original’s blood out of his hair.
Flic reached out a shaking hand, and with tentative fingers poked his arm through his sweater. When she was convinced he was solid she let out a wracking sob.
Lucas stepped inside the apartment and wrapped his arms around her, letting her cry. They stayed like that for a long while, Flic clutching onto him until she finally pulled back sharply. He saw she was no longer crying. Now she was glaring at him. And punching him in the arm.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she yelled. ‘I thought you were dead!’
‘Good to see you too,’ Lucas managed to say, rubbing at his arm.
Her hands flew to her mouth again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, clutching him by the other arm and steering him towards the living room. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe you’re real. What happened? How are you alive? You vanished. I saw it happen.’ Her words were a rush, tumbling out of her.
He dropped onto the sofa, glad all of a sudden to be sitting down – realising it was the first comfortable place he’d rested in a long time. Flic sat next to him, still clutching his hand. ‘What happened?’ she demanded. ‘You look like shit.’
He laughed bitterly. ‘Yeah, well two months in the Shadowlands will do that to a person.’
Flic shook her head at him, her eyes wide, not understanding.
Lucas took a deep breath. ‘Issa found me.’
Flic’s jaw went slack. ‘Issa?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. She had visions of me. She saw the way through hadn’t shut and came and found me.’
‘So it really is open then,’ Flic murmured, her gaze somewhere off in the middle distance. ‘I saw it, but I didn’t want to believe it was true.’ She stared at him in wonder again. ‘But oh god, I’m so glad it is now.’ She grinned at him, before punching him one more time on the arm.
‘Yeah,’ Lucas sighed. ‘It’s open. Issa saw it. Somehow, I don’t know how, she found me. I was practically dead by the time she got there. She fixed me up. Got me back here. The Shifter realm hadn’t been overrun when she came through it looking for me, so it was easier than it was on the way back.’
‘Overrun?’ Flic cut in. ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’
Lucas shifted awkwardly on the sofa. ‘The Shifter realm – it’s destroyed,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s no one left.’
Flic blinked at him, speechless. Lucas looked around. ‘Jamieson’s here, isn’t he? I can feel him.’
Flic nodded.
‘I need to tell him. Does he have family there?’
Flic nodded again. Her lips had turned white. ‘He’s sleeping,’ she said. ‘They dosed him up on painkillers at the hospital. He broke his arm,’ she trailed off.
In the morning then, Lucas decided. They’d tell him then.
‘What about the Elders?’ Flic asked. ‘Why didn’t they stop it from happening?’
‘The Elders are gone, Flic,’ he told her. ‘The Originals are leading some kind of rebellion. They want this realm and every realm for themselves.’
Flic buried her head in her hands. Lucas put his hand on her back but no words would come to comfort her. How could he reassure her that it was all going to be OK? He’d seen what had been done to the Shifter realm.
Flic suddenly looked up at him, her dark hair falling in curtains either side of her face, her eyes blazing. ‘We’re going to stop them, you know. They’re not getting this realm. No way.’
Lucas frowned at her. ‘Is that what you were doing there this afternoon? Trying to stop them?’
She sat back. ‘You were there?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was you!’ Flic exhaled sharply, shaking her head at him in disbelief. ‘It was you. I knew I sensed something. I thought I saw you but then you were gone.’ She shook her head at him. ‘You killed those two Originals.’
Lucas nodded. ‘What were you trying to do, Flic? What were you thinking, taking them on by yourself?’
‘It was a recce – we didn’t go in there to fight them.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Does Evie know you’re here, that you’re alive?
Lucas shook his head, feeling the ache in his side as though an animal were burrowing into him with claws and sharp rodent teeth.
Flic was on her feet. ‘You need to go – you need to see her. She’ll …’
He cut her off. ‘She’s busy.’
Flic shook her head. ‘She’s in the hospital. An Original almost killed her. She’s going to be OK though,’ she added quickly.
Lucas stared up at her. ‘I know. She’s more than OK.’
Flic frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
He pressed his lips together, trying not to let the image of Evie lying on top of Cyrus cloud his mind. ‘Let’s just say she’s not in the hospital any more. Cyrus is taking care of her.’
He could tell from Flic’s expression that she had finally understood.
‘Oh,’ was all she said.
‘Yeah.’
He got up from the sofa and crossed to the window. He didn’t want to see Flic’s pity. He wanted to … he didn’t know what he wanted actually. A part of him wanted to punch the living crap out of Cyrus. Another part of him, the bruised-ego part of him, wanted to confront Evie. And yet another part of him, a large part of him, wanted to find Evie and not talk, but instead take her in his arms, scoop her up and show her exactly what Cyrus couldn’t give her. But none of those ideas seemed like the right thing to do. He needed to get a hold of himself, cool down, and figure out his next move.
‘Lucas …’ Flic’s hand was on his shoulder.
He shrugged her off. ‘Don’t. I’m OK.’
He stared at his reflection in the darkened glass. He looked like a dark-souled ghost, the shadows slashing his face, his eyes a low glimmer, his jaw set. Flic, standing behind him, one uncertain hand hovering above his shoulder, looked like one of those girls from a horror movie – the one you yell silently at to run before the monster gets her.
Eventually she spoke. ‘She thinks you’re dead, Lucas. Don’t be angry with her.’
‘I’m not angry with her,’ he answered. And he wasn’t. Hurt, betrayed, confused. But not angry. She had moved on. Should he be angry? It had been over two months. He didn’t know if that was a long time or a short time – or just enough time to get over someone you thought was dead. Would he have done the same? No. He knew he wouldn’t. Evie was a part of him. Even lost to him she was still a part of him. She still owned his soul. The betrayal bit deep.
‘She’s still in love with you,’ Flic said softly.
He couldn’t help the bitter laugh that burst out. He wasn’t sure how to explain it to Flic without having to go there in his head and picture it all over again. You didn’t make out like that with a guy if you were in love with someone else. He spun around to face Flic. ‘Maybe once. Not any more.’
Flic was standing now with her hands on her hips. ‘There’s this thing called a rebound …’, she cut herself off before she could finish, cleared her throat and tried again, ‘relationship.’
‘Evie’s not like that,’ he answered.
Flic shrugged lightly, her eyebrows shooting up.
He brushed past her. ‘You should have seen them, Flic.’
‘You saw them?’
He sunk down onto the sofa and leant forward over his knees. ‘I needed to be sure,’ he swallowed, ‘that she felt the same way he obviously did.’
‘And?’
He looked up at Flic and held her gaze. ‘She does.’
End of conversation. Let’s move on.
But Flic wouldn’t drop it. ‘Don’t act like you don’t care,’ she said, still standing in front of him. ‘You were ready to die for her.’
He stared at the rug, feeling Flic’s words pierce him more deeply than any blade ever had. Flic was right. He would have died for Evie, without hesitation. And now everything he’d believed in for so long, everything he’d fought for, had been revealed as nothing more substantial than a trace of smoke, quickly dismissed, easily brushed away. ‘Well, I guess I was wrong after all. I guess you were right.’
Flic shook her head hard. ‘I wasn’t right.’
He looked up at her, giving her a sardonic smile. That was the first time Flic had ever claimed not to be right about anything. She ignored his smile and dropped down onto her knees in front of him.
‘Listen to me, Lucas,’ she said. ‘Whatever you saw, whatever you might think right now, I know for a fact how she feels about you.’
His smile twisted into a scowl.
Flic carried on, undaunted. ‘She was here the other night – she came to find me. She loves you. You should have seen her – she was a mess. She looked like she hadn’t eaten or slept in months. God, Lucas, none of us have. I thought you were dead too. I still can’t believe you’re here.’
He frowned at her. Why was Flic doing this?
‘I’ll admit I wasn’t her biggest fan when you first showed up here,’ she carried on. ‘But, I don’t know, Lucas – there’s something about her – about the way you were when you were with her. Like you two were meant for each other. I see that now.’
Lucas stood up. Back when it was the two of them against half the realms, back when Evie needed him, before she’d made her first kill, back when they thought she was the White Light, he might have believed so, but now she had someone else fighting alongside her, someone who was doing a far better job of keeping her safe than he ever had.
‘You have to tell her,’ Flic urged. ‘You have to let her know you’re alive, at the very least. Let her decide.’
Lucas felt his shoulders tense beneath his shirt. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to tell her.’
Truthfully he didn’t think he could see her, be that close to her and have her tell him to his face that she was with Cyrus, hear the excuses fall from her lips.
He shook his head. ‘She can’t know, Flic. Not about me or about the way through being open. If she thinks it is, she might try to do something stupid, like last time.’
Flic’s mouth suddenly fell open, as she realised what he was saying. ‘What if that’s why it’s still open though, Lucas?’ she said in a rush. ‘What if it never shut because Evie should have been the one to shut it? Oh my god, I hadn’t even …’
‘No,’ he said loudly, cutting her off. ‘We’re not going through all that again. I’m done believing in prophecies. We deal with the Originals and then we’ll figure out what to do about closing the way through. But I refuse to believe in fate anymore.’
How had he ever believed that fate had brought them together for a reason or a purpose? ‘Evie’s been through enough.’
‘What are you going to do, then?’ Flic asked quietly.
He shrugged, keeping his back to her. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We need your help, Lucas.’
He frowned at the door just in front of him. He heard Flic. And he would help. But first he needed to deal with something.
‘Where are you going?’ Flic asked as he took a step towards the door.
He turned his head to look over his shoulder. ‘I saw Victor at the hospital. He and I need to have a few words.’
Flic’s eyes flew to the shadow blade hanging at his waist, then to his face. ‘Words?’
‘I’ll start there.’
‘Lucas,’ her hand was suddenly on his arm. ‘He’s working with them. That’s why he was at the hospital. The rogues – they banded up with him to destroy those things. There aren’t so many Hunters left these days. They didn’t have much choice.’
He studied her. ‘You mean Evie … she’s … they’re …’ He shook his head, not understanding, not able to finish the sentence.
‘No,’ Flic said quickly. ‘It’s not like that. The others wouldn’t let her kill him. She wanted to. You know, she’s the one who found him. Evie hunted him down. She was going to kill him … We’re still going to kill him. We’re going to get revenge. Believe me,’ she said, grimacing, ‘he’s dying.’
‘Flic,’ Lucas said softly, waiting until she looked him in the eye, ‘he’s mine.’
He crossed to the door but Flic beat him to it, pushing it shut and leaning heavily against it.
‘Lucas, don’t you think maybe they have a point? Listen, I hate Victor as much as you do but what if you go and fight him and you both end up wounded? What if neither of you is able to fight anymore? What will happen to the rest of us? To Evie?’ She paused. ‘There’s something bigger than revenge to deal with right now.’ He tried to turn away but she grabbed hold of his wrist and held him there. ‘We need you, Lucas. Victor I couldn’t care less about, but he did save Evie tonight.’
‘He did what?’
‘Victor saved her. That’s what Cyrus said. He killed the Original that was feeding on her. If we’re going to fight these things, we need all the help we can get. Even if that help’s a murdering son of a bitch who deserves to die.’
Lucas prised his hand out of Flic’s grip, the ice flowing once more through his veins, chilling him to the core.
‘If he saved her,’ he said, ‘it’s because he knows about the way through being open and thinks she’s the White Light. He kept her alive for a reason, Flic.’
He watched as Flic absorbed this last bit of truth and comprehension dawned.
‘You still think we need his help?’ he asked.