Then his haziness cleared up, revealing his faultlessly combed hair and sophisticated-yet-understated business suit. A knot inside me eased. For more reasons than needing his help, I hadn’t wanted Don to vanish as soon as he saw us. I was still angry at him and not sure where his actions had left our relationship, but it appears that hadn’t stopped me from missing him.
“What do you want, Cat?” he asked in guarded tone.
Don didn’t even look at Bones; a good thing since his stare was cold enough to flash-freeze steam. I took my fingers off the planchette in favor of drumming them against the Ouija board.
“Madigan burned his hard drives beyond usability and killed himself when we infiltrated his secret facility,” I summarized briskly. “Bones brought him back as a ghoul, but something went wrong. His mind’s vegetable soup, and we were hoping you could pull some meat out of it.”
Tyler’s mouth dropped upon hearing this. Maybe he’d thought I wanted him to raise my uncle just so I could bitch at him again. Don’s expression didn’t change though his outline wavered for a moment.
“Why?” he asked at last. “You shut down his operation like you wanted to, and now he’s your prisoner. What else is left?”
“Stopping whoever’s been backing him,” I said, deliberately not mentioning Katie. I didn’t want Marie finding out about her, and she was one of the only people in the world who could successfully interrogate a ghost. “Someone shelled out countless millions to keep Madigan’s operation running, not to mention the money that person spent to keep you from finding out about it.”
I was poking his pride with that last comment. When he was alive, Don’s clearance had been above Top Secret, yet he’d been unaware that Madigan was continuing his experiments with the full blessing of Uncle Sam. Meanwhile, Madigan had known all about Don’s operation and had even been put in charge of it after his death. That had to rankle.
“If we don’t stop him, that same person will find someone else to replace Madigan,” I continued. “We can’t let that happen.”
“What if the backer is too high-ranking to take on?” Don asked.
Bones’s voice held the same resonance as low, ominous thunder.
“For this, no one’s too high-ranking.”
Don stiffened, glancing once at Bones before his gaze flicked back to me.
“This has never been his country, but it is yours, Cat. You’d really assassinate whoever’s behind this, no matter who it is?”
Even dead, Don’s allegiance to his nation was undiminished; an admirable quality. If only he’d shown the same loyalty to his family.
“You ran a secret operation that protected American citizens from dangers they didn’t know existed,” I replied, holding his steel-colored gaze. “Whoever’s behind Madigan knowingly funded the kidnapping, torture, and death of thousands of Americans, all for the purpose of illegal genetic manipulation. That’s reprehensible enough, but what’s worse is the war it could trigger if word leaked to the wrong undead ears.”
Then I got up and walked over to him, almost daring him to leave as I spoke the next part.
“You still love your country, Don? Prove it.”
He smiled then. Sad, jaded, and so weary that guilt struck me once more. Humans, vampires, and ghouls could find brief respite in sleep, but could ghosts? Or was their existence one endless day that stretched pitilessly into eternity?
Even if it wasn’t, as I stared at Don, sympathy began to outweigh my anger. He’d lied to me, manipulated me, and allowed a ruthless bureaucrat to use my DNA for secret experimentations, yet there was more to him than that. Don had protected the soldiers who worked for him, not experimented on and killed them like Madigan had. Once Brams was invented, Don turned down untold millions in pharmaceutical patents because he refused to release the drug to the public. When Madigan broached his forcible-breeding idea, Don fired him and kept him from me. Years later, when I revealed that I was in love with a vampire, Don allowed Bones to join the team. Then he lied to his superiors about my length-of-service agreement so I could quit when my life took a different direction, not to mention all the times he used his influence when vampire conflicts put me on the wrong end of the law.
His good deeds might not outweigh his bad, but Don’s greatest offenses occurred while he was still under the misconception that all vampires were evil. Through my teens and early twenties, I’d done some awful things under that misconception as well. In the years since, I’d tried to make up for that, and so, in his own way, had Don.
Even if he hadn’t, he didn’t deserve this fate. One day I’d be gone, yet he’d still be chained between a world he could never cross into and one he could never return to. Inadvertent or not, that was because of me—a punishment that far exceeded his crimes.
Above all else, Don was family. Flawed almost to the point of brokenness, yet family. I might not be able to forgive him today, but eventually, I would. Family was too precious to throw away if there was even a chance for reconciliation.