important for you to take this seriously,” Keaty went on, having given me more than enough time for personal introspection. “You know this won’t go overlooked.”
“There’s no evidence to link me to the crime, and like you said, the article doesn’t mention what happened to the body. Chances are good the authorities will cover it up to avoid the embarrassment of losing a corpse like that.” I made a mental note to call Tyler once I left. He was still working with Mercedes under the guise of being a police officer, but now I knew his real job.
Tyler had been recruited by the FBI to work for a special black-ops division that investigated paranormal entities in the US. Sort of like the X-Files only they were taken very seriously by their peers, and the stuff they worked on was real.
I was willing to bet Special Agent Nowakowski and his partner Agent Emilio LaRoy had international affiliations. They could probably call someone up at Interpol who would be able to sweep the whole mess under the rug. Sometimes it was nice to be a government asset.
“I’ll take care of it,” I assured him.
As to the matter of my secret identity becoming public knowledge? That was something I still didn’t know how to deal with.
Juan Carlos was going to have a heyday. No one had tried harder or pushed as much to find out what I was. He hated me. Hated me. Once he found out I had werewolf blood tainting my already questionable mortality, he would lose his mind. In Juan Carlos’s opinion, the only thing worse than a human was a werewolf. So what would be worse than a half-human vampire? A half-werewolf vampire, naturally.
Sig had kept me protected from Juan Carlos this long, but could he keep me safe now?
“You seem very sure of yourself.”
“I did what I had to do. I’ll make sure things don’t spin out of control.” Only a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to make such assurances. When I’d been a mere bounty hunter for the Council, I had feared their retribution at every turn. Now that I was on the Tribunal itself, I was damn near untouchable.
I was going to put my power to use for as long as I still had it.
“So, you killed Alexandre Peyton.” He crossed his legs at the knee and slipped his glasses back on.
I withdrew the leather cord tucked under my shirt and showed him the tooth I’d removed. Since I hadn’t been able to keep the first one I’d divested Peyton of, I wasn’t sure what would happen to this one if it were to see daylight. Luckily, keeping it on me meant I would probably never have to find out.
“Dead dead.”
“How does it feel?”
It was a fair question, but one I hadn’t really paused to consider for myself. Peyton’s death had opened up a whole Pandora’s box of problems I was now juggling. Unlike killing The Doctor, I hadn’t been able to meditate on how the death impacted me.
Killing The Doctor had been essential. I’d made a military general swear to me I’d be allowed to do it, and to their credit they’d followed through. If he hadn’t died by my hands, I never would have slept again. As it was I barely slept. Without seeing the life fade from him with my own eyes, though, I wouldn’t have been able to go on living.
Peyton was different. He was easier and harder all at once. Killing him didn’t cleanse my soul or give me freedom. It felt like the period at the end of a very long sentence, something that just finally was. It was as necessary as the death of The Doctor, perhaps more so in some ways. Yet when I thought about it now, I felt…
“Nothing. It feels like nothing.”
Maybe in a week, or whenever I was able to sit down and process everything, I might feel relieved, or triumphant. Maybe I’d feel sad. Or sick over how I’d done it. But for the time being, where there ought to be a sensation of finality, there was a void instead.
Keaty didn’t seem worried, though. Rather, the smile forming on his face told me he was the exact opposite of concerned. “At last.”
“At last?”
“You have been led through life by a leash of your emotions, Secret. You feel too much, and it makes you weak. I have spent years trying to train you to rid yourself of pointless thoughts and feelings and to simply be. And now, at last, I think you might be there.”
Ah, yes. To be Keaty’s perfect assassin. The mindless killing machine he had spent most of my teenage years teaching me to be. In an ideal world, I would be a cross between Sherlock Holmes and a Terminator. Deductive not reactive. And driven at all times by my directive.
I think Keaty’s main problem with me was that I wasn’t human, but I behaved too much like one. He didn’t know what to do with me, so he’d tried to beat the humanity out of me one lesson at a time.
There were days I think he succeeded more than he could ever know, but sometimes a shard of personhood peeked through.
Who the hell was I?
I had straddled the line between my vampire self and my werewolf self, and for the longest time neither side wanted me, which made it easy to stay the course and do a fair impression of humanness. Now I was being pulled in both directions at the same time, and something had to give.
And that something was my personhood.
I’d literally given up my humanity earlier in the year, hadn’t I? I’d had a chance to live as a human, and I’d traded it in to be a monster again.