“Keeping me safe means what?” I half-shouted over the rush of wind. “That I can’t protect myself? That I can’t protect you?”
It felt ridiculous to even ask. I was a large human, built strong. I could handle myself in a fight and had done so all my life.
It bothered the hell out of me that she would think I was fragile.
“You protect me,” she shouted back. “But I don’t need it.”
“How does me standing beside you make you less safe?” I asked.
She raised a hand and put on the brakes, slowing the truck. Dust flowed forward, rolling in through the windows and covering the truck in a silty orange film.
“Listen.” She cranked the gearshift intopark. We were in the middle of the road, of old Route 66, at a dead stop. No one was coming from either direction for as far as the eye could see.
“I should have talked to you about this,” she said. “Before. Before I agreed to talk to the hunter.”
“Youagreedto talk to that asshole?”
So that’s why she’d been looking out the diner window. That’s why she’d been so tense. “Heshotyou, Lula. Why the hell would you agree to meet him and talk to him?”
The other question, of course, was why hadn’t she told me she was going to do this? Why hadn’t she wanted to do this together?
“He shotatme.”
“Well, he didn’t miss Lorde. Or don’t you remember her having to go to the vet to get stitches?”
“I remember.” She closed her eyes, then pressed pale fingers against them.
Some bug was chittering out there like bacon in a pan, and a bird I couldn’t identify hacked through a short warble.
I watched her, trying to read her distress. Ever since the monsters had attacked us all those years ago, turning her half-vampire, and me spirit, I’d been beside her, invisible, unable to talk to her, to touch her, to keep her safe.
In all that time she’d been determined to find the monsters who had attacked us, determined to kill them. I’d clung to thehope I would someday be alive again and could help her see that goal through to the end.
She’d never given up. Never given up on me. Never given up on us. There was no single soul on this earth as strong as her.
But even the strongest sword can shatter in battle.
“He has a lead on the book,” she said, her eyes still closed. “I agreed to hear him out.”
Fear, then anger, squeezed my heart until I couldn’t feel the beats. She had met with Hatcher without meon purpose.
It would be easy to yell. But I didn’t.
Inhale. Exhale.
“When?” I asked, my voice too low. I cleared my throat and did everything I could to hold onto reason. “When did he contact you?”
“After we left Eunice’s place. That first hotel.”
Days ago. He’d contacted her days ago, and she hadn’t told me.
It felt like the world was spinning out from under my feet, and I could find neither sky nor earth.
“How many times have you met with him?”
She opened her eyes. The black of her pupils blew wide, then narrowed to dots in the honey gold of her gaze. “Once. Only once, Brogan. You just saw it. You just interrupted it.”
“What did he tell you? What did he say that was worth risking your life for?”
