He holds his hands up in defense, the dirt between his fingers making me sick to look at, "Well, once you know what tech they use for tracking, it's not hard to tap into it."
"So even after everything, after all the warnings to leave her the fuck alone, you've been stalking her." Rage bubbles up in my chest, and I have to fight every instinct to reach across and strangle this fucking psycho.
"Yes— I, no— well, yeah." He scratches his face again, his madness becoming more apparent every second. "But for good reason. Look. The Sanctum wanted to make Bel and Cas and Fritz pay for their bullshit, but someone up at the tippy top told them to leave it alone. Said to focus all their efforts on findingyou. But one of the avenues they're using to do that is your friends. They have eyes on Bel, Mike, Charlie, all three of them, just waiting for you to show up."
"And you've done what with this information?" Realization dawns. "You caused the crash today."
He nods.
"And our phones going out."
Another frantic nod.
"And the booking issues so we had to go to a different hotel last minute."
"I—I know it doesn't make up for what I've done.But I just—"heblinks a few times, knocking his head with the palm of his hand, "I needed to dosomething, don't you get it? I need to fix it. I've done so many things, Isla. So many wrongs I don't even know where to start with making them right. Someone like me isn't deserving of forgiveness, I know that." His voice cracks as he speaks. "But I have to try. For everyone else's sake.
As misguided and absolutely insane as it is, his actions have probably kept all of us safer than we would have been without him.
"And how haven't they found you?"
He laughs, "Look at me. I don't even look like myself. I can feel the fucking filth underneath my fingernails. I'm so horribly gross that people look away in disgust. No one would suspect it's me. It's easy to blend into a place with 20 million other people."
"And what's your plan now?" I ask as the tequila is placed in front of me.
He downs his dark liquor all in one go, thanking the waitress and asking for another before she's even had time to walk away. "The plan is to send you back to wherever the fuck you've been hiding, and just hold out for the next... I don't know, 10 years or so."
"Ten years?" I push, "What happens then?"
His eyes glance around the room, darting out the window into the dark night before meeting mine again, "Well, it's more like eight and a half-ish. But their weapons will stop working."
It can't be that easy. "Do they not have any more blood to use or what?" Surely, if they have blood farms, they've got a stash of blood they can use.
He starts breathing hard, panic overtaking his face, "No, they have more blood than they know what to do with. More women to keep bleeding, too. What they don't-"
I interrupt him with a hand on his forearm, "Do you know where they keep them?" If I can find out where they are, I can let Eamon know, and he can break them all out.
He shakes his head, "If I did, I would have told you to tell your boyfriend when we spoke on the phone."
I'm choosing to ignore the boyfriend comment. "Then how can you be so sure they won't be able to fix their weapons?"
He laughs manically, "Because I stole the cookbook."
"The cookbook?"
"The Sanctus Sculitis Benedici," he confirms. "Their most sacred text. The one with all their history, enchantments, edicts."
Panic claws up my chest because if he really took that... he's definitely fucking dead when they catch him. "What kind of idiots only have one copy of something like that?"
"It's sacred to them. Kept behind a team of security 24/7 and only brought out once a year for worship, once a decade for actual use."
"Then how the fuck did you get your hands on it?" I ask.
His eyes go vacant as he stares into whatever memories haunt him. "The blood on my hands goes much further than you could possibly imagine, Isla. I've lost count of the lives I've taken. In the aftermath of the explosion you caused, things were... they were messy. With the scrambling to hideit all, truths about what happened that day fell through the cracks.
"While trying to gain access to their computers, I saw a little blip in their usually well-regulated vault holding the book. I didn't make it out unscathed, but the men watching it didnt make it out at all."
"Why?"
