“Sure.” She moved over, drew them, and plunged the room into gloom. She didn’t bother with a lamp. Just then the dark was a comfort.
“What will they do to him? Don’t lie, don’t soften it. If they have him, what will they do to him?”
You know, Cian thought. You know already. “She’ll have him tortured. For the entertainment value and for the practical purpose of getting information.”
“He won’t tell her—”
“Of course he will.” Impatience whipped into Cian’s voice. It was infuriating that he was attached enough to Larkin to worry about the boy.
“She can do things to a man no human being can withstand—and keep him just this side of alive while she’s at it. He’ll tell her anything. So would you, so would any of us. And does it matter?”
“Maybe not.” She came over, gave in to her weak legs and sat on the table in front of his chair. He was giving her the truth, naked and without sentiment. It was what she needed. “She’ll change him, won’t she? That’s the big coup, siring one of us.”
“That would be two of us.”
“Right. Right.” She dropped her head in her hands because it felt sick. As sick as her gut, as sick as her belly. “Cian. If…we’ll have to…”
“Yes, we will.”
“I don’t think I can stand it. I don’t think I could go on with this. If he’s just dead, I can, because otherwise it would be like we wasted his life. But if she sends him back here changed, and we have to…” She lifted her head now, rubbed her hands over her damp cheeks. “How did you get through it? After King? Glenna told me you and King were tight, and you had to end him. How did you get through it?”
“I got piss-faced for a couple of days.”
“Did it help?”
“Not particularly. I grieved and I drank, then I let the anger in. It’s because of what was done to King, more than any other reason, that I’ll see this through to the end.” He angled his head, studying her. “You’ve fallen for him.”
“What? It’s not—I care about him, of course. All of us. We’re a unit.”
“Humans are so strange, their reactions to what they feel. The expressions of emotions. For you it seems to be embarrassment. Why is that? You’re both young, healthy, and caught in a situation filled with passion and jeopardy. Why shouldn’t you form an attachment?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Not for you, apparently.” He glanced over as Hoyt strode back in, and Blair sprang to her feet.
“There’s a van on the lane there. The wheels are all ripped. There are some weapons in it.”
Blair didn’t bother with a jacket, but went out, jogged down the lane. The driver’s door was open, she noted, with the key dangling from the ignition, as if someone had tried to start it, then abandoned it in a hurry.
There were a couple of swords and a cooler holding several packets of blood in the cargo area.
“Well, it’s theirs,” she said to Hoyt. “No question of that. And the chances of all four tires going flat come in at zero.” She hunkered down, stuck her finger in the wide hole in the rubber. “Larkin did this, somehow.”
“They must have abandoned it, taken to the woods, I’d think, to hide from the sun.”
“Yeah.” Her smile showed grim purpose. “At last I have something to do. I’ll go get armed.”
“I’ll go with you.”
She went into the forest with crossbow and stake, seeking out the shadows, moving like one. At the fork of a path, she and Hoyt separated, each moving deeper into light that was dappled and dim.
She found one cowering, curled on mossy ground in deep shade. A boy, she noted, no more than eighteen when he died. From his clothes—holey jeans and a faded sweatshirt, she imagined he’d probably been a student doing the backpacking thing.
“Sorry about this,” she told him.
He hissed at her, crawled over to hide behind the trunk of a tree.
“Oh come on, like I can’t still see you? Don’t make me come up there.”