“Can you please stop—?”
“—cutting you off?”
“You are the most frustrating woman I have ever met,” he told me, not unkindly.
“The feeling is mutual,” I assured him. “Except the woman part. I’m, ah, pretty sure you don’t qualify.”
“Pretty sure?”
“I’m not a booster seat for the male ego. Ask Ford.”
Mentioning Ford struck a chord with him, and his expression shuttered. “Finish questioning her.”
“Yeah, okay.”
He took the elevator down, and I walked back to my apartment, knocked on the door, and let myself in.
Ford kept his eyes averted, and it gave me the creeps. “What crawled up your butt and died?”
“He can no longer hold your gaze,” Bonnie said to the vicinity of my navel.
“We’ll sort this out later.” He brushed his fingers down my arm. “Work, don’t worry about me.”
Bonnie had moved to the futon while I was out yelling at Midas, so I joined her there and almost moaned as I sank into the new mattress. If my old one had been cloudlike, this one deserved its own angelic choir.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.” She stared at the slender fingers twined on her lap. “I ran away when I couldn’t take it any longer. I didn’t expect Midas to find me, to be found at all, but that doesn’t excuse what I did. I should have turned him down. I should have stayed at the shelter. Or maybe I shouldn’t have left the pack in the first place.”
“You had every right to leave a situation that made you unhappy or put you at risk.” I ran an absent hand over the velvety-soft fabric, forcing my thoughts away from brooding beta gwyllgi. “Where you went wrong was in assuming trouble wouldn’t follow you. You should have told Midas where you came from and why you left. He could have protected you, and his pack, better with that information.”
“I heard what you said to him in the hall.”
Gwyllgi hearing made keeping secrets hard, so I wasn’t surprised given our volume. “And?”
“Do you believe that?” Voice a bare whisper, she asked, “Would Siemen have done this to these people with or without me here?”
“Yes.” Of that I had no doubt. “He targeted the warg packs as well as the gwyllgi. There’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t have done the same whether you went to one of them for help or stayed in the shelter instead of going with Midas.”
“It’s my fault.” Her fingers went lax. “I am responsible.”
Blame was easy to cast but harder to cast off. She was doing a fine job of piling it on, so I didn’t add to her burden.
“Talk to me about your son.” I offered her a pillow to hold to give her hands something to do. “Why is he hunting you? Why is he killing to get to you?”
That poor lavender pillow would have begged for mercy had it a voice. As it was, I worried she might squeeze the stuffing right out of it. It did the job, though. Gave her something to hold on to when her world must feel like it was crumbling all over again.
“I was given to a warg pack a century ago, and they used me to…” She wet her lips. “I have many children.” She squished the pillow tighter. “None of them came out right.”
Dread whispered up my spine, and I didn’t want to know but had to ask, “What do you mean?”
“Lore on both sides of the veil between Earth and Faerie claims gwyllgi who interbred with wargs became creatures of this world. Their children were born with half the magic of their parents, but they were born free of Faerie rule, and that was what mattered.”
“That’s the version I was told too.”
“Lore is a story passed from one generation to the next, embellished as it flows in one ear and out another’s mouth.”
“You think there was more to it?”
“All my children were born feral, more warg than gwyllgi. Their forms were warg in appearance, but they were twisted, horrible things that made the earth weep to behold them. Their madness prevents them from holding their shifted form. It wasn’t uncommon for them to take down deer and other large prey in one form but eat their kill in another.”
That fit with how Reece interpreted the data. “Are there more like your son still out there?”
“No,” she whispered. “I killed them. All but the last.” She wet her lips. “I would have done the same to him if his father had given me half a chance, and Siemen knows it. That’s why I fled the pack. Their punishment couldn’t be worse than what my son was devising for me.”
“He wanted to kill you before you could kill him.”
Head down, she nodded. “Yes.”
“We’ll need a name, description, and any other information you can give us.”
“I will help in any way I can.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” I got to my feet. “Give me your word you won’t leave this room.”
“I will not leave this room,” she repeated, elaborating more. “I will not attempt another escape.”
Fae couldn’t lie, but they could twist and bend the truth until they got what they wanted out of the deal. The question was, what did she want? Protection? Shelter? Or something else?
“Ford?” I ushered him into the hall and shut her in. “Can you draft someone to keep an eye on her?”
“Yeah.” He took out his phone and sent a text. “Ares will be up in a minute.”
“Are you sure leaving her with a man is wise?”
“Ares is a woman.”
“Well alrighty then.” I led him to the elevator to wait on our relief and pitched my voice low. “How much of what she just said do you believe?”
“I can believe a warg pack thought bringing gwyllgi blood into their line was a good idea, but she didn’t say exactly how or why she ended up with them.” He mashed the button for the lobby again, but the car didn’t rise any faster. “There are packs who still drown babies who are born with deformities or with other imperfections. Psychological issues don’t always present themselves until the child is older. It’s not common anymore, but culling does happen when a pack member shows signs of madness.”
“The world is too small these days, thanks to technology, to risk exposure.”
“The world has always been too small to risk exposure.”
Me and my measly twenty-seven years couldn’t argue with him there.
“You think she was right to cull her children?”
Cull had a nicer ring to it than murder.
“We might look human at times, but we’re animals too. There will always be those among us who are more tame than wild, just as there will always be those who heed the whisper of instinct and do as it demands.”
“That was a long-winded way of saying you see where she’s coming from,” I pointed out.
“I wanted to avoid you looking at me the way you are now. A mentally ill human teen might turn a gun on their classmates at school, a mentally ill paranormal teen can slaughter entire towns before they’re caught. You can’t measure them with the same stick. Not if the true measure is protecting innocents—paranormal and normal.”