I’d spent the last couple of days in a blur, turning over everything Dempsey told me, picking through the bits I thought were the drugs talking and the half-truths he’d always been known to spin. There hadn’t been time to examine everything. Or at least not until Jonas called me son and the dam I’d built to hold back my conflicted emotions surged forward, an unstoppable destructive force I would never be able to get back in.
“That’s how you saw me? As one of Tanic’s fucked-up creations?” Sarah wasn’t wrong. Pele knew she probably spoke more of a truth than I wanted to admit, but it still stung. “Is that why you told him he might want to leave the iron in me? You remember that conversation, Jonas? Because he did. And he was at least honest about thinking you might have been right. Or at least back then. Because he wasn’t sure what I would do to him if I weren’t in constant pain, having that metal bleed into me, rusting through my bones and leaking into my blood. Did he tell you that part of it? About how I threw up most of what I could get down into me? Because I was that iron-sick, I couldn’t even digest food. It’s how Tanic kept me beaten down, leashed in tight and broken. I was a kid, Jonas. The man I thought you were would never have let anyone suffer through that, least of all a kid.”
“You weren’t a kid. You were a monster.” Sarah shrugged off Jonas’s hand when it settled on her shoulder. “As dangerous as one of those things whose skins we bring in for cash. And yes, Dempsey told you the truth. Because that’s how we all saw you then. It didn’t matter that you were as stupid as a brain-damaged turtle or that your back looked like a rusted chandelier with bits and pieces sticking out of it. You weren’t… aren’t… human.”
“Kai!” Ryder shoved his way through the gathering at the edge of the lot. There was a bit of panic in his voice, a brilliant strident silver flash in the golden syrup of his Sidhe accent. He spoke my name with a familiarity I couldn’t take at the moment—another complication in my already tangled life. “Sparky, let me go.”
She’d grabbed hold of his arm, twisting it around to keep him back. They began arguing, but I couldn’t hear much beyond the rumble of thunder breaking over the Presidio. The promise of rain thickened in the air, an earthy note to the sluggish wind ambling over the hillside. Ryder could take care of himself, and at the moment, I didn’t want to add him into the mix. He was everything I’d run from, a clear symbol of the bloodlines and past I’d tried so hard to outrun, to hide from. I thought I’d been successful. After all, how many times had one of them cursed the elfin in front of me only to apologize and reassure me they didn’t mean me? I wasn’t one of those cat bastards, not one of the pointy-eared, fanged demons who’d poured over their fractured world, bringing with them horrific predators and unspeakable magics the humans had no way of fighting.
“I love you like you’re one of my own, Kai,” Jonas whispered, his face wet with tears. I couldn’t look at him. Not and hold on to my anger. “And yes, it took me a long time to… understand you. Najiri and I prayed over my troubles, trying to find some place in me where I could stand to look at you. I expected one day to find myself across the table from an elfin, but to have one thrust on me so soon was difficult, and I’m going to be honest with you and say I thought you’d be better off with your own. We all did.
“You’ve got to see this as how it was. Back then,” he continued, “you were a blacklisted job. One that would have set Dempsey up for a long time. He could have retired, set up a new life with Sarah and quit living on the edge. He threw that all away. For an elfin kid he pulled out of a shithole and didn’t know one thing about. Everything about you was… you bit and fought, even when he was trying to help you. You kicked the shit out of him. Some part of that asshole respected that, and yeah, he said he had a bad feeling about things. Because why would a retrieval contract be blacklisted? We did them all the time. Just not for elfin. And not so far away. He knew he was bringing danger down on his head, and he was asking us to shoulder that with him. I’d just gotten married. Wanted to have kids. I knew what the elfin could do, and I didn’t want that coming down on me because I’d gotten conned into protecting someone’s stolen pet.”
“That’s what Dempsey was asking of us. Because I bet you he didn’t tell you about the black dogs he had to kill along the way,” Sarah said. “How many pelts did he rack up, Jonas? Thirty? Forty? The Wild Hunts were looking for you, and if we want to be all honest and shit, I’m going to say what I’ve thought all along—that you’re the reason we have so many infestations.
“These packs are too far from their masters, gotten loose from their hold, and now they’re breeding up as far as they can before their magics fall apart.” Sarah’s mouth tightened into a dark twisted line. “And then there’s the Sidhe who contracted the job. Dempsey blew that exchange point, and they were looking for him, and it wasn’t because they owed him money. Someone up there was… probably still is… hunting for you. I know. I helped him bury three Sidhe who’d come for us one night. That was the end for me. I wasn’t going to be a part of hiding you. You weren’t worth the risk.”
“It’s different now, Kai. Things are… we all are… different.” Jonas stepped in close, edging in past Sarah, who snorted and eased away, throwing her hands up. “We know you. Know who you are. Just like I know after you sit and think about this, after giving yourself some time to deal with Dempsey’s passing, you’ll see the truth in all of this and know I’ve got your back. That I still hold you in my heart. We’re your family, kid. Through thick and thin, we’re tighter than blood in a lot of ways, and I count you as one of the best people I know. Just give it some time. Give yourself some time and I’m hoping you understand.”
“Any time I’ve got right now is going to be put into getting drunk.” Spotting my keys a few inches from Jonas’s right foot, I bent down and grabbed them up. “Funny thing is, all my life with you guys… well, what I remember… everyone’s always going on about how shitty of a person Dempsey is. Because as I see it, he was the only one of you with a heart and soul. He might have been a fucking bastard, but from pretty close to the beginning, he did right by me. And I’m sorry to say, it seems like he was the only one.”
Four
DESPITE THE guns and gear I had in its trunk, my Mustang bucked and swerved in the unrelenting pound of rain. San Diego’s streets weren’t made for a ’69 muscle car, especially not the tight turns near Balboa, and I was running out of gas, too drunk to change over the engine but not so trashed that I couldn’t find my way to the one place no one from Dempsey’s world could get ahold of me. The buzz I’d worked myself into back at my warehouse was gone, leaving behind the brain-numbing stillness I’d been filled with since the machines in Dempsey’s hospital room chirped their final beat, dropping down to a keening, screeching flatline.
I shouldn’t have been driving. Not in the rain. Not in a car the size of a rhino. And especially not with my cat, Newt, sitting in a plastic carrier strapped down to the passenger seat. But I had to leave the warehouse with its memories of Dempsey and the others living in every shadow pooled in the corners of my life. There was some kind of sick irony in Dempsey’s steadfast reluctance to come down to the shoreline where I lived while Jonas spent hours there, helping me rebuild the Mustang and complaining he couldn’t get an ounce of peace and quiet at his own house because his family was too loud and happy.