I look around for my friends, but I don’t see them. All around me, people move freely—but no one seems to notice the two of us.
Wonderful. The blessing and curse of being “invisible” to most humans. I don’t want to make a scene, but if someone’s going to get this guy to go away, or set him straight, I guess it has to be me.
“You didn’t get the full picture. I th-think you should go home. Ask for a new assignment,” I say in a voice that barely trembles.
“Well,schwesterl, you needn’t worry. Our kind do abide by the rules. Your little town will be safe, and I will move along, higher north. I will just make sure I cover the city on our night, take our annual payments, and return home. If you ever want to see where you could belong—if you were taken as a bride, of course—I will be happy to show you. I am Blase, but the way.” His eyes sear along my body again, and I feel like he sees beneath my hood, beneath my clothes. “You are pretty enough that one could almost overlook your deformity. After all, sons and daughters would not be born with your disfigurements—and you would soon take to the kill. You weren’t raised among our kind, were you?”
I shake my head, throat frozen, backing away slowly. I could run.
But then I wouldn’t know.
All my life, I’ve hungered to know things that were kept from me, and Blase is telling me so much at once, all because of a chance meeting—and I don’t believe in chance, not anymore. I believe that things happen for a reason. Laurel. Artie. My new family. My friendship with Lesha.
Lesha and her nephews and nieces. In New York City.
I have to keep him talking. “I was raised by humans. My mother’s husband. Do you... Do you know where these women who have the shamed children go?”
“Oh, yes. They go mad. They will be punished in many satisfying layers.” Blase gives a single, pleased nod. “First, they will carry the shame of their adulterousness, and the wrath of the man they have shamed, then, the shame of this half-human child, and when all of this hits them and buries their soul in guilt and rage—then they will go mad. The brain will shrivel, andthey will die—unless of course a krampus takes pity on a comely maiden and keeps her for himself.”
He paints a horrible picture, a picture that makes me want to vomit. All I say is, “I see.”
“You should come with me to the city this time, Miss—”
“Imogene.” I don’t give him my last name, or Artie’s.
“Ah, Imogene. Pretty name for a pretty thing. You haven’t been with your kind. You haven’t been allowed to be free—have you?” He points at my head and clucks his tongue. “You will see. Revenge is waiting. You will kill the ones who harmed you, and then you will see how good it feels to deliver retribution.”
For a second—just asecond, there is something tempting in his words. A spark of pleasure when I think of hurting Barton.
But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt and kill people. I wouldn’t want my baby girl thinking of me the same way I’m forced to think about my mother—as someone who hurt her, who left her, who abandoned her. Choosing vengeance over Artie and Laurel?
I mouth the word “No.”
Blase sniffs the air around me and frowns. “You smell like... Like another of our kind, but muddled. Are you hiding anotherbeschämtenmannskind?”
“What? No!” I feel sweat trickle down the back of my neck.Laurel.
“Then you are trying to turn another of our kind against tradition! Do you know what bad children become? Bad adults! Like the man who hurt your mother, and hurt you, I daresay.”
“Or they meet loving people who help them, and they don’t become anything bad. They become website coders or nannies or English professors.”
“Spoken by one raised in ignorance. You and those like you will always find out in amost horribleway that they were meant to be with our kind. You rebellious ones just delay it.”
“Rebellious or not, I’m not hiding anyone you need to be concerned about,” I say coldly. “You should just... browse the Night Market like you were doing, and I’ll do a little research about our traditions.” I stall for time. I want to keep him here—for a very short amount of time. Just enough time to call Artie. Libby. Milo. The Night Watch needs to take him out of town, or back to where he came from.
Or end him. So he cannot kill a child.
My maternal instincts flare, and I know I flash a snarl.
Blase’s eyes light up. “Oooh, my pretty pink flame! You are magnificent even at the thought of violence. Tell me, were you envisioning the horrendous human who cut away your pride? What pretty curls of horns you would have had,” he purrs, taking my arm, daring to touch my hair.
I jerk back, and now I hear startled voices around me. “I was thinking that you—you don’t know me. Or what I was thinking.” I hold off on making threats. I want him to stay here. I want him to be caught.
I want to punish him for the lives he’s thinking of taking.
And that scares me. How bad I suddenly want it.
Wait, Imogene. No! That’s like punishing the “bad children.” Not offering them a chance to learn, to grow, to become better people.
