Nita stretched. “I’m going to get rid of the person who sold me to the black market.”
Diana shifted uncomfortably. “And by ‘get rid of,’ I assume you mean murder.”
“Obviously.”
“You know, Nita, murder doesn’t solve every problem.”
“But it will solve this one.”
“Just like it solved your problems earlier today?” Diana’s voice was hard. “That just got the police on your tail too.”
True enough.
“This is different. Today was”—Nita swallowed, forcing herself to admit the words aloud, to acknowledge she was smart enough to know when she’d screwed up—“a mistake. I miscalculated.”
Diana’s eyebrows shot up.
“This is personal,” Nita continued, before Diana could respond. “I saved his life, and he repaid me by selling mine.” She crossed her arms. “He’s already sold my location to the black market twice. If I don’t get rid of him now, there’s no telling what he’ll do next.”
Diana wrapped her arms around herself. She was silent for a long time, and her large eyes were lost in thought.
Finally, she brushed a stray hair from her face, and still not looking at Nita, she whispered, “You know, after I ran away from my foster family, I decided to kill my family’s murderer.”
Nita nodded. This seemed like a logical thing to do. Nita would have done the same in Diana’s shoes.
Then she frowned. “Wasn’t he in jail?”
“No. He was a minor when he committed the crime, and the courts were so divided on the whole ghouls-are-evil-and-eat-people issue, that he ended up with a really short sentence.” Diana’s smile was bitter. “I’m sure it didn’t help that we were brown and he was white. He was out in a couple of years.”
Nita scowled, wondering if her father’s murderer had been human, he would have gotten a shorter sentence because her father was brown. The thought made her blood boil.
“That’s a shit system,” Nita finally said, the words pale and weak compared to her feelings.
“It is. I was unhappy with the ruling, to say the least.” Diana sighed, folding and refolding her hands in her lap. “So I went after him myself. I was fifteen, homeless, and determined to make him pay.”
Diana’s eyes went distant, and her lips turned down. “It wasn’t easy, tracking him down. It took a while. But I did it. He was living in Boston, working in a coffee shop, making lattes ten hours a day, and doing community college in the evening.”
Diana swallowed. “I didn’t want to get caught, so I set everything up with the utmost care. I followed him every day to learn his schedule and figure out when he was alone. I eavesdropped when he ordered food at restaurants to see if he had allergies. I wanted to kill him without a trace.
“But the more I followed him, the more I got to know him. He did community service hours picking up garbage from the park, which I’m pretty sure was part of his parole. Sometimes he’d give directions to lost tourists when he saw them. He lived in a homeless shelter, but never got into fights.”
She sighed. “I’d been watching him for nearly a month when one of those UEA members—you know, the hate group?”
“I know them.”
The Unnatural Extermination Agenda. Fanatics who believed all unnaturals were evil and ought to be murdered. They were a huge group, often censored and arrested, but the more attention they got, the more they seemed to grow. There had been a Post article condemning them last month after they burned a family’s house down to drive them out of town, and Nita swore that instead of making the UEA more hated, it had made them more popular.
This was why Nita hated people. They condemned things publicly then went and supported them in private. She didn’t trust them. People said that there were more good people than bad, but Nita actually thought there were more bad people than good—because all the people quietly doing nothing ended up supporting the bad people anyway.
Like Nita supported her mother with her silence. And Kovit.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t think of this right now.
“Nita?”
“Sorry.” Nita cleared her throat, trying to purge her thoughts from her head. “You were stalking your family’s murderer. And the UEA came by?”
“Yeah. So, he was walking down the street, and a member of the UEA gave him one of their pamphlets. You know the ones telling people ‘unnaturals are a conspiracy of the devil’ or whatever?”
“Yep.” She saw them all over the streets in some cities. Hate pamphlets littered across the sidewalks like evil paving stones.
Diana swallowed. “He took it.”
Nita tilted her head to the side. “I mean, he did kill a family of ghouls. The UEA sounds up his alley.”
Diana shook her head. “But he looked at it a block away, just stared at it for a long while.” She paused for a fraction of a second. “Then he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash.”
Diana let down her ponytail, so her hair swirled around her face. “I didn’t know if he threw it out because it was part of his parole conditions or because it was a particularly crazy flyer. But my first thought wasn’t any of that, it was maybe he regrets it.” She blinked rapidly, like she was trying to dust tears from her eyes. “Maybe he regrets what he’s done.”
Diana looked away, over the shadowy outlines of the pawnshop, into some place in the past. “And that’s when I knew I couldn’t kill him.”
Nita shifted. “Why not?”
“Because I was making up excuses for him. I wanted him to realize he’d made a mistake. I wanted him to not be bad. And the minute I realized I was making excuses, I knew I could never kill him. I’d had a month, and I hadn’t done it. It just wasn’t in me. His death wouldn’t bring back my family. And I didn’t think he’d be killing anyone else—I’d seen enough to be reasonably sure of that.”
Nita stared, and her voice was slightly incredulous. “You just let him go? Forgave him? After he murdered your whole family?”
Diana flinched. “No. Never. I won’t ever forgive him. I just . . .” She trailed off, then sighed. “I just realized that hurting him wouldn’t bring them back. Nothing would. Murdering him was only going to make me feel awful, and maybe get me arrested. He’d already taken away my past. Killing him might take away my future. I wasn’t going to let him ruin the rest of my life too.”
Nita sighed, finally seeing what Diana was trying to tell her. “Look, Diana, I appreciate the story. But we come from very different pasts. Fabricio is still actively trying to kill me.”
“Because you keep trying to kill him?” Diana countered.
Nita opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Tell me, did he decide to kill you because you tried to kill him?”
Nita’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “But I do now.”
“You just . . . guessed?”
“Based on your character. I bet you’d tried to take vengeance and it hadn’t worked.” Diana’s voice was soft. “And now he’s after you because he thinks you’re after him.”