I back away through the patches of darkness, putting the humans’ ugly, panic-blotched faces out of my sight. “Don’t worry about it.”
My “team” follows me around the corner and down a quieter street. Peri waits until I come to a halt in the patch of shadows by our van before piping up again. “You can’t tell someone not to worry. Feelings don’t work that way. We need to know what everyone’s thinking about this problem if we’re going to have the best chance of solving it.”
She sounds so cheerfully determined that whatever nerves I have in this shadowy state set on edge. I spin toward her, as much as I can face her while we’re ephemeral. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not really a problem?”
Her frown carries through her voice. “What are you talking about? Viscera is running around destroying parts of the city. She said she wants to crush the whole place. How can that not be a problem?”
Of course the cream puff would never see things my way. Her tender heart aches for every being, mortal or otherwise, in the whole world.
Even me, even after I’ve been cruel to her.
That thought stokes the sparks of my irritation. “Look at what she’s actually wrecking. Cars. Buildings. Lamp posts. Mailboxes. It’s all human-made crap. She isn’t tearing up trees or smashing squirrels.”
“There’s a lot more human stuff in the city than anything else,” Mirage points out, which I’ll grudgingly admit is a pretty logical comment from the fox shifter. “Even if she’s smashing at random, she’s more likely to hit buildings and cars than trees.”
“But she’s here. She doesn’t want to leave the city and go somewhere with fewer people. She wants to ruin what they have.”
If Peri were standing in front of me, I think she’d stick her hands on her hips right now, but her expression would be pained rather than defiant. “How is that not a problem? The people who own those buildings and use those cars and everything else still need them in one piece. There must be hundreds of thousands of humans living here who are terrified.”
“You only care about that because you can feel them being terrified. Do you think they give a shit aboutyou?”
“They don’t know me,” Peri says. “I’m sure a lot of them?—”
I break in before she can make an absurd claim. “They wouldn’t care. Most of them would like to see beings like us as battered and broken as that store window, if they knew we were here. You remember that they call us monsters, right? Even though hardly any shadowkind actually hurt them? Some of them go all out with delusions of power like that asshole sorcerer who kept you in a cage, but almost every human would stamp us out if they knew how.”
Peri’s voice quiets with a pulse of sadness through our connection. “I don’t think that’s true. Humans haven’t had a chance to really understand us, and we haven’t given them one because it’d be too complicated. That doesn’t make thembad.”
Something in me snaps. “It does! Even Rollick thinks so. They don’t want to understand us—they want to hate us and cut us down and destroyus. So maybe it’s time they got a little payback. Maybe this Viscera being is giving the humans exactlywhat they deserve. Why shouldn’t they have to watch the things they care about get turned into rubble?”
Raze speaks with a hint of a growl. “None of the people here did anything?—”
“You don’t know that,” I retort before he can finish. “You have no idea how awful most of these people probably are to the parts of this world that are actually good—to all the other life that they don’t think is worthy.”
Peri’s distress pulses on, too intense for me to ignore it. “Most of them don’t think that way. Just because they like living in the cities?—”
“And how do they treat the other life in these cities? How many of them carve up the trees, take potshots at pigeons, and chain up their dogs like slaves?”
“Lots of them don’t do anything awful. They’re just adjusting the world so it does what they need it to. Shadowkind do the same thing.”
A dark laugh tumbles out of me, propelled by an ache that’s searing through me like it hasn’t in years. “Not like humans do. Not going around ruining life for their own satisfaction. If this new shadowkind has decided to ruin their crap right back at them, then I say good for her.”
A deeper pang of pain hits me from Peri, along with a brief shudder. “You don’t really mean that.” She pauses for a second and then takes a firmer tone. “Something else is bothering you. If there were humans who hurt you, you have to know that doesn’t mean?—”
I whirl around, denial screaming through every particle of my ephemeral body. “I don’t have to know anything.Youdon’t know anything. Some things are awful, and that’s the way they’ll always be. Thinking happy thoughts isn’t going to help.”
As the last words spill out, I shoot off through the shadows as fast as my essence can carry me. Away from Peri and herboundless optimism and compassion. Away from goofy Mirage and glowering Raze.
What do any of them know? They want to close their eyes and pretend human beings aren’t a stain on this world…
I haven’t gone all that far before the first prickling discomfort through the bond draws me to a halt.
If I race off much farther, Peri will collapse. And our connection will rip into me too.
With a gnash of my teeth, I whip around in the shadows. But my fury is already fading, leaving only a dull simmer of anguish in its wake.
Not all of that agony is mine. Even at this distance, Peri’s dismay wafts into me, full of guilt and regret that even I know it isn’t fair for her to feel.
Shedoesn’tknow what I’ve been through or why I can’t see good in human beings. I’ve never given her the chance to know.
