Chapter 52
Cyrus watched her walk away with her head held high. For a moment back then he had thought she was going to kill Victor. And he wouldn’t have done a thing to stop her.
Victor had a list of crimes against his name which needed accounting for. And not in any court of law. And besides, he was still a danger. Despite all the warnings he’d given Victor, he knew Victor still couldn’t be trusted. It was a risk – a huge risk letting him come with them.
Cyrus turned to look at him now and found the man staring straight back at him, testing him, studying him. There was a darkness to Victor that frightened him. OK, maybe not frightened – that was too strong – because nothing frightened him other than perhaps losing Evie. Maybe a better word would be disturbed. Victor’s absolutism to the Hunter cause – his complete lack of empathy or guilt or anything remotely resembling a human emotion – was disturbing in the extreme. He was a textbook sociopath, Cyrus thought, as the two locked eyes. There were Mixens out there with more human traits than this man, and yet Victor couldn’t see the irony of his wanting to destroy all unhumans.
It took all Cyrus’s will not to march over to him, grab him by that ridiculous necktie he was wearing and shove him head first through the back door. The thing that stopped Evie – that little thing called a conscience – wasn’t something Cyrus was so bothered by. Victor was no better than a Thirster or a Mixen. Unless Victor attacked Evie first, came at her ready to kill her, then Evie would never do it. She would only ever kill in defence of herself or people she cared about. So maybe, Cyrus mused, he should do it for her. It was that amused look on Victor’s face that was needling him. The smug smile he’d tossed at Evie as he’d walked away. Yes, they probably did need Victor, but on the other hand now they had Shadowlands weapons …
Cyrus slid his sword from its sheath almost without thinking and took a step towards Victor. But suddenly Issa was in the way, standing there with her hands on her hips, arching her eyebrows at him.
Cyrus tried to dodge around her, but she blocked him easily. Damn Sybll. And now Victor had left the room and it was too late. But then he did a double take and drew back. Had she seen what he was about to do? Would he have killed Victor? He frowned at the slip of a Sybll in front of him.
‘I’d have won though, right?’ he asked her.
‘We need him,’ Issa answered tiredly, but he could tell by the very slight twitch at the corner of her mouth that, yes, he would have won.
Cyrus suppressed the victory fist pump, reminding himself it didn’t actually count if it was only in a Sybll vision that he’d killed Victor and not in real life.
Issa frowned at him. She had lilac-coloured shadows under her eyes and he remembered that Flic had mentioned that Issa had had some kind of past with Lucas. What was it with him and hot girls falling at his feet? She wore the same worn-down, hurt look that he saw in Evie and it rankled him.
‘Do you believe in the prophecy?’ he suddenly asked her.
Issa looked taken aback. ‘Yes,’ she stammered, ‘I believe in the prophecy. Of course. It’s marked.’
‘But if you say things can swivel on a dime, that suggests we have free will – that each and every moment is ours to choose. You just stopped me from killing Victor. You saw it happening. Yet at the same time you’re trying to tell me things are foretold.’
‘The Sybll believe that some things, not everything, but some things are fated, destined, meant to be. The marked prophecies are among those things that are fated. They will happen,’ she said with a sigh, ‘no matter how hard we fight against them.’
‘So you still think it’s Evie, then? That she’s the White Light? That it won’t end until she closes the way through?’
Issa sighed more loudly. ‘I don’t know anymore,’ she admitted, shrugging her slender shoulders. ‘We did. We all did. It made sense. She’s the last pureblood Hunter. Well, apart from you. And it wasn’t you.’ She tipped her head to one side. ‘So who knows? Everything with Evie tends to be a blur. Her future is never clear.’
‘Why?’ Cyrus asked.
‘Because she’s always making choices that change things.’ Her tone seemed to suggest that she had issues with those choices. ‘She chose. She fell in love with Lucas and chose not to kill him. And she chose just now not to kill Victor. She chose to leave Riverview and come back here. She’s choosing to stand here and fight as you all are when she could have just buried her head in the sand. Most people follow the path of least resistance, do what’s expected of them – follow the crowd. That’s why it’s easy to see their futures. But not Evie. She never chooses the easy path. She constantly veers from it, and that makes it hard to see the destination she’s headed in.’
Cyrus laughed under his breath. ‘She does what she thinks is right. That’s why. Not what she thinks will be best for her but what she thinks will be best for other people.’
Issa didn’t say anything. She just continued staring at him with those freakishly big eyes of hers, which made it hard to guess exactly what she was thinking. Was she shooting him a disbelieving look or was that just her normal face?
He frowned at her, wondering. ‘So you can’t see her future then? At all?’
‘No,’ she answered firmly.
‘Or mine?’ he asked hopefully, aware that he probably looked pathetic and needy, and wondering whether he should just man up and ask her straight out whether she saw him getting together with Evie and whether any of her visions included a kid with his colour hair and Evie’s eyes. He shook his head, trying to shake some sense back into it. No way was any of that coming out of his mouth.
Issa arched a pale blonde eyebrow at him. She knew exactly what he was getting at and he squirmed beneath her stare.
‘You want me to tell you whether there’s a happy ever after?’ she asked drily, ‘whether she’ll get over Lucas and be yours one day?’
She laughed – a harsh braying sound that made a flush of anger scorch his cheeks.
‘I don’t know,’ she said over her shoulder as she walked away. ‘Ask me again later tonight.’