“Just like I thought, this is all about the girl. You probably think you’re some knight in shining armor come to save her.” Dad’s smile was sharp enough to cut diamonds. “You know how she sees you? A big, dumb idiot she can put on a leash. Her own pet pit bull. Your innocent little schoolgirl, she’s wearing the Founder’s symbol now. She’s working for the vampires. I sure as hell hope she’s like a porn star in the sack for you to be betraying your own like this.”
This time, I didn’t need a knock on the head to see red. I felt my chin going down, my lungs filling, but I held on to my temper. Somehow.
He was trying to make me charge him.
“I love her, Dad,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Love, yeah, right. You don’t know the meaning of the word, Shane. She’s working for the leeches. She’s helping them regain control of Morganville. She has to go, and you know it.”
“Over my dead body.”
In the corner, Jerome laughed that scratchy, raspy laugh that made me want to tear out his voice box once and for all. “Could be arranged,” he croaked.
“Shut up,” my dad snapped without taking his eyes off me. “Shane, listen to me. I’ve found the answer.”
“Wait—let me guess—forty-two?” No use. Dad wasn’t anywhere near cool enough to be a Douglas Adams fan. “I don’t care what you’ve found, Dad, and I’m not listening to you anymore. I’m going home. You want to have your pet dead guy stop me?”
His eyes fixed on my wrist, where I was wearing a bracelet. Not one of those things that would have identified me as vamp property—a hospital bracelet, white plastic with a big red cross on it.
“You wounded?” Not, of course, was I sick. I was just another foot soldier, to Dad. You were either wounded or malingering.
“Whatever. I’m better,” I said.
It seemed, for just a second, that he softened. Maybe nobody but me would have noticed. Maybe I imagined it, too. “Where were you hurt, boy?”
I shrugged and pointed to my abs, slightly off to one side. The scar still ached and felt hot. “Knife.”
He frowned. “How long ago?”
“Long enough.” The bracelet would be coming off in the next week. My grace period was nearly over.
He looked into my eyes, and for a second, just a second, I let myself believe he was genuinely concerned.
Sucker.
He always had been able to catch me off guard, no matter how carefully I watched him, and I didn’t even see the punch coming until it was too late. It was hard, delivered with surgical precision, and it doubled me over and sent me stumbling back to flop onto the couch again. Breathe, I told my muscles. My solar plexus told me to stuff it, and my insides throbbed, screaming in pain and terror. I heard myself making hard, gasping noises, and hated myself for it. Next time. Next time I hit the bastard first.
I knew better, though.
Dad grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. He pointed my face in Jerome’s direction. “I’m sorry, boy, but I need you to listen right now. You see him? I brought him back, right out of the grave. I can bring them all back, as many as I need. They’ll fight for me, Shane, and they won’t quit. It’s time. We can take this town back, and we can finally end this nightmare.”
My frozen muscles finally unclenched, and I pulled in a whooping, hoarse gasp of air. Dad let go of my hair and stepped away.
He’d always known when to back off, too.
“Your definition of . . . the end of the nightmare . . . is a little different . . . from mine,” I wheezed. “Mine doesn’t include zombies.” I swallowed and tried to slow my heart rate. “How’d you do it, Dad? How the hell is he standing here?”
He brushed that aside. Of course. “I’m trying to explain to you that it’s time to quit talking about the war, and time to start fighting it. We can win. We can destroy all of them.” He paused, and the glow in his eyes was the next best thing to the look of a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. “I need you, son. We can do it together.”
That part, he really meant. It was sick and twisted, but he did need me.
And I needed to use that. “First, tell me how you do it,” I said. “I need to know what I’m signing up for.”
“Later.” Dad clapped me on the shoulder. “When you’re convinced this is necessary, maybe. For now, all you need to know is that it’s possible. I’ve done it. Jerome’s proof.”
“No, Dad. Tell me how. Either I’m in it or I’m not. No more secrets.”
Nothing I was saying was going to register to him as a lie, because I wasn’t lying. I was saying what he wanted to hear. First rule of growing up with an abusive father: you cope; you bargain; you learn how to avoid getting hit.
And my father wasn’t bright enough to know I’d figured it out.
Still, some instinct warned him; he looked at me with narrowed eyes, a frown wrinkling his forehead. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you need to show me you can be trusted first.”
“Fine. Tell me what you need.” That translated into Tell me who you need me to beat up. As long as I was willing to do that, he’d believe me.
I was hoping it would be Jerome.
“Of everybody who died in the last couple of years, who was the strongest?”
I blinked, not sure it was a trick question. “Jerome?”