“You didn’t?” My voice was more than tinged with incredulity.
He looped his thumbs behind his big brass belt buckle. “No. You were already having an effect on me. Normally, I would have torn the guy apart and not given it a second thought, but since you asked me to leave him alone, I couldn’t bring myself lay a hand on him.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He rocked back on his heels. He took in a long breath and then said quickly as he blew it back out: “But I may have ordered a couple of Caleb’s Akhs to do the job for me.”
“nice.” I threw my hands up. “Because that was so much better?”
“What was I supposed to do, Grace? He was harassing you. He looked at you like you were another notch on his belt. I saw the fear in your eyes after he came up to you. I couldn’t let him get away with it. I did it for you.”
“For me? Someone I know is dead, or undead, or whatever, and you say you did it for me. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“That was the old me.”
“You’re still the old you.”
“If I were, then I wouldn’t have tried to fix it. I tried to take care of the problem in the hospital, but those stupid monitors went off.”
“Hospital?” Something that had been nagging at me since yesterday resurfaced in my head. “Oh my—You were the cousin.” The nurse in Pete Bradshaw’s room had said that he’d had a cousin come visit him right before he crashed. I thought back to when I’d accidentally hugged Talbot in the hospital’s stairwell. The angle we were standing at … He hadn’t come from up the stairs, he’d come from the doorway of the ICU’s lobby. He’d been headed out of the ICU. Taking the stairs for a quick getaway, no doubt. “Pete was the thing you had to take care of?”
I took a step back. Then another two. “Did you go to the hospital to finish off Pete? Did you kill him?”
How had my life come to the point where, in less than forty-eight hours, counting my run-in with Jude, I’d have to ask two different people I knew if they’d killed someone?
I mean, seriously?
“No. I’d heard rumors around town that they’d found bite marks on Pete’s body, which made me suspect that his coma was actually an incubation period for an Akh infestation. I went to confirm my suspicions, but his oxygen levels crashed almost as soon as I entered the room and his oxygen monitor went crazy. I got out of there as fast as I could. That’s when I ran into you in the stairwell.”
“And if the monitors hadn’t gone crazy? What would you have done?”
“If I had been sure he’d been infected—which apparently he has been—I would have put a stake through his heart.”
“You’d have killed him?”
“Only so you wouldn’t have to.”
My mouth popped open, but Talbot went on before I could I respond.
“Pete isn’t Pete anymore. Think of it this way: he’s just a demon walking around wearing a Pete suit. He might look like Pete, he might sound like Pete, he’ll even have Pete’s memories, but it’s very important that you don’t forget that he isn’t Pete. Especially when he comes for you.”
“Comes for me?”
“The Akh inside of him will not only retain his memories, he’ll also take on parts of Pete’s personality. The bad parts. Only amplified. Pete had it out for you before he was infected and died—which means you’re probably one of the first people he’s going to come looking for after he’s gotten over the feeding-frenzy stage, and his memories start to come back.” Talbot let out a few more swear words. “There’s already been one killing—that nurse at the hospital. I should have suspected Pete as soon as I heard about it. I was so busy wallowing, I didn’t even think—”