“I’ve been shot before,” he said with a sickening smirk. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” she shot back.
“Little girls who think they can do the work of men. Little girls should stay at home in their kitchens.”
“Oh boy,” Lucas said. “You’re super fucked now, bud.”
A groan from the floor sent a wave of relief crashing over me. Santiago was alive.
“What the fuck?” This came from Wilder, who must have heard all the commotion downstairs and come to see what was happening.
Had Deerling been down here the entire time as we looked around? I hadn’t smelled him not the recent kind of smell anyway, which made it all the more surprising that he’d been able to sneak up on us so quickly. But if he’d made his move during Santiago’s spell, I wouldn’t have been able to smell a damn thing. There must have been another entrance to the room, then, because he obviously hadn’t come down the stairs from the main level.
Cool, his creepy murder room had a back door.
Maybe that was how he was able to come and go from the church without being spotted on the tapes after he killed the guard. They’d locked it from upstairs, but he had other ways in and out.
I really hated this guy.
The odds being four against one didn’t faze him in the least. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness now—thanks, werewolf DNA—and I could easily tell he was still grinning ear to ear like a maniac. Secret was the only one of us who had come armed, but she was also the only non-werewolf still standing.
“Get Santiago out of here,” I said to Lucas. The last thing we needed was to put the newly restored werewolf in harm’s way. I wasn’t sure how Secret would respond if he died in front of her a second time, and I had a funny feeling that kind of guilt on my part might lead to a lot more hauntings in the future. Provided we could get Santiago out of this alive, I was hoping to never feel bad about someone dying near me again.
But I sure as hell wasn’t going to feel bad about killing the motherfucker standing in front of me.
Lucas didn’t argue. Instead he lifted Santiago as if the man weighed nothing, and jogged up the stairs two at a time until they were out of the basement. Okay, so being dead really hadn’t damaged his physique at all.
Noted.
That meant Deerling could probably still pack a punch too.
“What the fuck do you want?” I snarled at him.
“I want you dead.”
“Yeah, I get it, but why. I didn’t kill you. Why did you wake up after a year in the grave and think to yourself, gee, I should really kill Genie.”
He paused, his body that once looked ready to spring into action froze, and he seemed to consider my words, like up until that point he’d never thought about the question for himself.
“You need to die.”
“Genie, stop trading quips with the dead guy, let’s just kill him,” Secret said.
Her telling anyone not to trade quips in the heat of a fight was the peak of hilarity, but I decided not to point that out.
“I just want to know.”
Deerling blinked at me, then his lips curled back. I wouldn’t call the gesture a smile so much as it was a predator’s threat.
“If I’d never met you, I would have never died.”
I opened my mouth to retort, but instead I closed my lips again and blinked back a sudden sheen of tears that threatened to fall from my eyes. I wasn’t sad for Deerling. I was shaken by the truth of his words. All the wights following me wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t been in their lives. If I had just stayed in the bayou with La Sorciere they might still be alive.
“Yeah, well, if I’d never met her I would be dead,” Wilder answered. He took the gun from Secret before she registered what he was doing and fired three rounds in rapid succession into Deerling’s head. “So fuck you.”
I stared, gobsmacked, at the pulpy mess that had once been Deerling’s head.
This was the second time I had looked inside his skull after someone else had blown a hole in it, and if I was being honest I hoped it was the last.