“There was no other choice—”
“There were a hundred other choices!”I said, shaking him.“You could have had Kimmie replicate all that glass on the floor and send a fucking wall of it flying down that narrow ass corridor.Kill enough of the bad guys, and they block the way for the rest, at least long enough for you to get away!You could have had Jen animate all those corpses you just created and start a mage-on-mage battle to even get into the room!You could have grabbed the first mage through the door and used the potions on his belt to turn the corridor they were squeezing down into a killing zone!You had choices!”
“I… didn’t think of those,” he admitted.
“Which is why we don’t go on missions we haven’t been goddamned trained for!”I felt really unwell suddenly, and finally let him go, flopping back against the sofa like the weak-ass bitch I currently was.
“Hey,” Noah said, leaning forward.“You okay?”
“She don’t look okay,” Lee said, his voice a little high.“I’m getting Cyrus—”
“No!”I snarled.“You put… one paw… outside that door—”
“You’re sick—”
“Of course, I’m sick!Sick and tired… of your bullshit,” I said, and started looking around for my beer.I finally found it and—yeah.Oh, yeah.That was better.
I drained the whole thing and then just sat there, glaring at them and panting.They didn’t seem to enjoy it, but I did.At least I had their goddamned attention.
“But as stupid as sacrificing yourself to buy your friends time to escape was, you did itwithout hesitation,” I finally said.“So a thousand points for style and negative ten thousand for even the concept of a brain.”
“Who told you?”he asked again.
I hesitated, wondering how to explain something I was only beginning to understand myself.“Somebody who sees something in you.”
“But… I don’t even like the newcomers!Why would you want me interviewing them?”
“Ditto,” Noah said, taking my empty bottle.“Can you get her some water?”he asked Lee.
“I don’t want any goddamned water,” I said irritably.“And it’sbecauseyou don’t like them.”
“What?”
I ran a hand through the rat’s nest on my head and sighed.“Look, I’m not worried about those who fought for us—they may have problems, even a lot of them, but like you, they put their lives on the line when it mattered.That says something.But we’ve been getting hundreds of others recently—”
“Geriatric others,” Lee muttered.
“—from all sorts of clans.And they didn’t fight for us.”
“As if they could!”Noah said.
“Would you two shut up?”
They shut up.
“You know as well as I do how some of the other clans view us,” I said.“How much they want this whole thing to fail, even some of those supposedly on our side.They won’t say it out loud—they want to stay in Sebastian’s good books—but they think it.And maybe they’ve acted on it.”
“Come again?”That was Lee.
“I could be paranoid, God knows I have enough reason these days.But it occurred to me to wonder, with all the people joining us lately, what if some were planted?Like to deliberately undermine us?”
“Sabotage?”Noah said, sitting up.
“Maybe, maybe not.They could all be exactly what they appear to be, but I don’t know that, do I?They didn’t fight.They didn’tbleed.They didn’t do anything for Fireborn except show up, and we don’t know shit about them—”
“Finally!Someone’s talking sense!”Lee burst out.
“All we know for sure is that we have enemies, but we don’t even know who they all are.And lately, there’s so much going on, and Cyrus and I can’t be everywhere, especially not with me like this…”
