“Don’t say it!” She twisted around, glaring up at him. “You know what word I’m sick of? ‘Monster.’”
“But I am a—”
“No, you’re not!” Her glare intensified. She had a shine in her dark eyes, the brilliance of a strong-willed woman who is really and truly pissed off. “You’re a man who was lied to and had your feelings manipulated and your trust taken advantage of by a thief who pretended to like you, and you were angry and hurt and you hit back. That doesn’t make you a monster. It makes you human.”
That makes you human.Those words reverberated inside his head. When she said it about him, it felt true.
It is true.The voice was inside his mind, from one of his monsters or maybe several of them at once.Youarehuman.
“I did something terrible.” Carter wasn’t sure whether he was talking to Fen or to his inner monsters or to himself. “I did something so bad, my own inner animal—the best part of myself—abandoned me!”
He did not.It was the voice of a monster or several monsters, more firm and less frantic than usual.
“He did not,” said Fen, almost at the same time. “You got in a fight and he sulked—just like you do, which makes sense because he was you—and he died before you could make up. It was an awful, tragic thing to happen, but it doesn’t prove anything about you.”
“It proves everything about me.”
“That you did something impulsive and mean that you regretted afterward? That you were kidnapped and harmed and traumatized by a bunch of sociopaths?” Her eyes burned like black flame. “They’rethe monsters, not you!”
There was something so comforting about her anger on his behalf. She’d been angry about what Fiona had done to him, too. It felt good to know that Fen would take his side; that his enemies were her enemies. He recalled them toasting the downfall of the manhunters, and he almost smiled.
“Did you ever see Fiona again, by the way?” Fen asked.
Carter nodded. “A couple times, actually. She’s on the west coast branch of Protection, Inc. team.”
“Awkward,” Fen remarked. “At least she’s not on your team. Did either of you apologize?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we both did.”
“Didn’t that make you feel better?”
He shook his head. “I know it’s supposed to. But I still did what I did, you know?”
“Look, Carter,” she said, snuggling in closer. “We’ve all done things we regret. I haven’t done anything as dramatic as turning someone into a snow leopard and dumping them on a mountaintop, but I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of. I was a mean girl in high school. In retrospect I was trying to build up my non-existent self-esteem by putting other people down, but my motives didn’t matter to the girls I bullied. I’ve been more ruthless than I’ve had to be. And I can still be mean. Once I made a paparazzi cry.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Carter couldn’t help joking.
She gave him a wry glance. “I’m not saying I feel all that guilty about that one. But my point is, we’re all flawed. We’ve all made selfish choices and lost our tempers and hurt people. That doesn’t make us monsters.”
He wanted to believe her. But even as she spoke, he could feel his wings trembling against the back of the sofa, and he knew his eyes were probably changing color. If he flexed his fingers, claws would emerge. And that was only the beginning. A whole host of hideous, malformed beasts lurked inside of him, and he was becoming one of them.
“There are monsters in me, though. Very literal ones. You’ve seen them.”
“Yes, I have,” she replied crisply. “So has your entire team. And not one of them thought you were a monster. They explicitly said otherwise.”
“What else would you call them?” Carter burst out. “A horrible collection of body parts all thrown together! Wings and claws and tails and paws and tentacles! You don’t know what it’s like.”
“And you don’t know what it’s like to suddenly start bleeding once a month,” Fen retorted. “You’re not the only person who’s had to deal with a body that changed in a way you didn’t like. How do you think Dali and Tirzah felt getting a new disability as an adult?”
“Disabilities are normal, though.”
“How about your teammates getting shift forms when they didn’t even know shifters existed? You don’t catch them calling themselves monsters!”
“I think some of them did, actually,” Carter admitted. “Pete, probably. Ransom, for sure.”
“Do you think they’re monsters?” Fen demanded.
“No, but—”
