“Let us bow our heads in prayer as we say goodbye to our brother, Michael Gray Dempsey, who, while he leaves this mortal coil, remains in the hearts of his family and friends.” The priest’s voice rang out, fighting to compete with the toll of the Presidio’s often-silent bells. “Thus we consign Michael’s soul to the hands of his God and the Heavens, where he shall rejoice in His eternal glory.”
It was almost impossible to hear anything over the bells, but I heard Jonas well enough when he leaned over to whisper into my ear, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, son. Dempsey—”
“Don’t you fucking call me son,” I growled back. “Not after all these years. Not after all those lies.”
JONAS CAUGHT up with me in the parking lot and grabbed my arm while I tried to get my key into the truck’s door lock. I might have been stronger than most humans, but no elfin musculature was going to be a match for Jonas’s pure brawn and mass. He flipped me around and had me up against the old Chevy’s side before I could protest, my keys flying from my fingers and landing someplace near my feet. I didn’t look for them. Not when Jonas stood nearly half a head again taller than me, his husky body blocking out most of the sun.
His dark eyes were filled with fury and confusion, and the small lizard part of my primal brain was happy to see it there because at least he knew how I felt. Especially now.
His deep complexion was made even darker silhouetted against the flashes of lightning still roiling through the clouds—an ebony statue looming over me with the same oppressive heat and humidity clinging to the air. There was no gentleness in his features, or what I could see of them. His breath was hot on my face, the words on his tongue thick with spit as he let them fly, splattering me with his anger.
“What the hell was that? You think you’re the only one that misses the man?” Jonas stepped into my space, trying to crowd me against the truck. “You think—”
“Dempsey told me I was a contract.” My words struck, cold jabs to Jonas’s fury. “And all of you told him to complete it. To drop me off at Elfhaine. Even when he told you it didn’t feel right to him. That his gut told him something was wrong. You. Sarah. Sparky, who found out afterward… who cut the damned iron out of my bones… and still said toss him to the fucking assholes on the white mountain. Because he’s not one of us. Not human.”
I’d held in everything, every damning secret Dempsey whispered to me in the rising tide of his death, the rattle in his throat clattering and clacking in time to the machines struggling to keep him alive for just one more moment. I’d listened, growing numb with each peeled-back layer of my past, exposing the callous man who’d taken me from Tanic’s lair in Ireland to flee across the American wildlands with every intention of throwing me to the wolves once he reached California.
Except he hadn’t, though every person in his life hammered at him to turn me over.
Including the man looming over me, a man I considered as much my uncle as Dempsey was my father.
There were people gathered behind Jonas, faces I knew in my soul, or at least I thought I had. If Dempsey’s death left me unanchored, the truth of how he’d fought his closest friends to keep me left me adrift and hurting. Ryder was lost in the small crowd, and I didn’t—couldn’t—seek him out. Finding an elfin face among the all-too-human sea would have undone me, unraveled what little grip I had on my forged humanity.
“Deny it. Tell me how Sarah didn’t leave him because he wouldn’t give me up and then tried to block my Stalker license until he pressed the Post to issue me one. Or how about you coming in that night, with me mostly there and you offering me chocolate with one hand while whispering to Dempsey that you’d take me on north if he couldn’t do it himself.” My shoulders began to ache, the scars dug into my skin itching and crawling beneath my shirt. The storm had nothing on me. I couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop plunging my verbal knives into Jonas. My voice cracked, but I ground out, “Even Najiri. So go on, tell me how Dempsey lied to me. Tell me I’m wrong and he just decided to spend the last hour of his life fucking with my world.”
There were tiny bits of gravel beneath my boots, rubbing against the lot’s asphalt pour when I shifted my weight. The world past Jonas’s shoulders blurred, an indistinct mass of people I was no longer sure about. I thought letting go of Dalia hurt, but it was nothing compared to the weighted blows of Dempsey’s final words before he slipped off to the nothingness, his nicotine-stained gnarled fingers going lax in my grip.
Nothing sang in the trees lining the lot except for a sharp breeze picking through the leaves with a tight, discordant whistle. Someone behind Jonas said my name, but he jerked his hand out, keeping them back. I couldn’t even tell who spoke, but no one drew closer, probably held back by the storm brewing in front of them, the one bubbling across the skies fading into the background.
I searched Jonas’s face for even the slightest denial of Dempsey’s damning words, but I saw nothing there but resignation. Even his ire slipped from his eyes, the fire slinking off under the regret ebbing in. His gleaming deep brown skin grew slack over his bones, and Jonas faded in on himself, his mouth diving down into a grimace.
“It wasn’t… you’ve got to understand, Kai,” Jonas began softly, his hands dropping to his sides. He still loomed. He was too large of a man to do otherwise, but he was smaller now, pushed back by what I’d said. “Things were different. For us, it was a long, hard time fighting… we lost so many of our own. And then Dempsey showed back up with—gods, I don’t even know how to explain it to you. How damned hard it was to deal with having what was one of your worst nightmares dropped into your lap and be told by one of your best friends—”
“It was like he’d brought home a black dog and told us all, ‘Look at the puppy I found. I’m going to keep it,’” Sarah cut in, edging in around Jonas. “That’s what it felt like. We were still standing knee-deep in death and blood, and there he was, asking us to keep quiet about having an elfin in our circles. He chose to keep you over marrying me. For what it’s worth, I spent years resenting you because you took away the life I thought I was going to have, only to find out you were a better man than he’d ever been. I still… it’s not easy to change, Kai. It’s hard to let that kind of hatreds go.”
It was hard to imagine the older short-haired stocky woman who ran the Post as a loving fiancée to the man who raised me, especially since his taste ran to floozies and mean-spirited bitches, but Sarah didn’t seem to be lying, and Jonas sure as hell didn’t contradict her. She’d left off wearing her typical uniform of cargo shorts and a loud Hawaiian button-up shirt for the funeral. The shapeless black dress she’d pulled over her square body did her no favors, but her steely, honest gaze was firm, fixing me in place with a sternness I’d never truly challenged before.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to now, but Jonas threw down first, and it didn’t look like I was going to be able to walk away from the years we’d piled up beneath us. I just hadn’t known about all of the shit being churned up, festering beneath my friendships, a bubbling poison growing more potent with every day of lies going by.