There was nothing else I could do. This fury needed a physical outlet. I needed to hurt someone, and the only person I could hurt was me.
I ran east, toward the water, into the long fingers of mist curling off the lake. Leaf shadows fluttered in the twilight, a collage of dark wings rippling over pavement. I was pure heat. A meteor hurtling through space, burning a trail through the cooling city.
Running reduces the world to its simplest forms. Muscle stretching, contracting. Oxygen saturating blood. An inescapable oneness with your body, no matter how ill-fitting it feels when it’s still. Ellis hooked me on running when she said it helped with dysphoria—she stopped fixating so much on being stuck in a girl’s body and instead became a nameless, wild animal, a skeleton in motion, a living machine fueled by air and water and light. Even if your body wasn’t quite right, it could do amazing things. It could convert base elements into emotional release. Take you, for a moment, out of your own skin. If you ran fast enough, you could escape the very machinery of yourself.
But tonight I wasn’t running for catharsis. I was outrunning the avalanche of rage bearing down. That infinite heaviness that had almost crushed me once, when I was wronged. When I was hurt.
By him by him by him.
I flew under a bridge and kept going. No rest. The oxygen in my lungs combusted into a million particles of flame. I didn’t feel like myself anymore but some dragon, limbs heavy and graceless from long years of slumber, ready to crack my wings and take flight, roar fire, snap my jaws on the motherfucker who’d done this to me. Tear him in half.
Someone was sitting on the bench up ahead.
I staggered, slowed. Tamsin raised an eyebrow.
“Not in the fucking mood,” I gasped.
“I know. Laney texted me.”
“Great.”
“I’m not here at her behest. I’m here on my own. Please, rest a moment.”
I dropped to the bench, gulping air.
Tamsin watched awhile and said nothing. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run again until I couldn’t breathe so I couldn’t scream, because if I started, how could I stop?
Laney was not on my side. Didn’t have my back when I needed her most. Didn’t want to stop a monster, because his victim wasn’t a girl and that didn’t fit her feminist vigilante narrative.
She’d shown me time and again: In her world, only men hurt others. Only women deserved our help. Not once had she sent me to hurt a girl—not before Tamsin had I ever fought one.
Not once had she sent me to help a boy.
Now I saw why she chose me as her right hand. Because she knew my biases. Knew I’d be happy indulging my internalized misandry. Until it came time to help a man—to help me—and then it was “risky” and “jeopardizing” and “selfish.”
Fucking hypocrite.
Wind rumpled the river, pulling folds of black satin over the reflections of skyscrapers, stirring strands of twinkling gold filigree. I shivered, sweat-soaked. The hot throb in my heel was probably blood.
Finally Tamsin said, “You want to hurt someone.”
“Yes.”
“A man.”
“Yes.”
“But the Little Wolf said no.”
We regarded each other in a dusk tinted sepia with streetlight. “Did she tell you that?”
“I inferred.” Tamsin crossed her ankles. “Who is he?”
“Someone who’s lived too long.”
Light flared in those hazel eyes. She mulled over this bit of info. Then, “I have one, too.”
“What?”
“A vendetta.”
Electricity zigzagged down my arm, to my fingertips, to the warm aura of her body beside mine. The space between us pulsed.
“Perhaps we can help each other, Renard.”
“I don’t trust you, Tamsin.”
“So let me earn your trust.”
She stood and so did I. Wind combed her curls, pulled at my hood. Steely edge of cold in it, running down my neck like a blade. Tamsin bent one knee, stretching.
“Earn it how?” I said.
She touched her toes, her tight little heart-shaped ass facing the sky. Fuck.
“Like this.” Tamsin eyed me coolly. “I know where Adam is. If you want to know, catch me.”
Then she was off, a blur of leather and oiled hair.
Unthinkingly, I chased.
She ran down the riverbank, leaped up the stairs to street level. Dashed headlong into the nightlife rush, the musk of cologne and suede and cigarettes. Cut her silhouette against the searing beams of headlights. When she veered out into traffic on Lake Street I almost stopped.
But she knew his name. How?