“Eh. I'm pretty sure Mia is grateful that she found a guard ruthless enough to try to eat me.” Stephen seemed pretty damn sanguine about it.
“Not going to happen,” Kilian said firmly. “Even aside from the fact that eating people is as evil as that demon you carry, there was too much power there. It was like trying to plug into a wall socket and discovering that I had mainlined nuclear power. I am not going to try that again.”
“Too bad. It was hot.” Stephen wiggled and slid his foot under Kilian's ass.
Kilian stared at Stephen blankly.
Stephen threw up his hands. “Come on. What do I have to do to get you to lighten up? You’re the good guy. You are so much a good guy that your goodness is sort of terrifying. You're all Mom and apple pie and American way of life, and yet you’re blaming yourself for needing to eat. You do see how incredibly pathologically unhealthy this is, yes?”
“I ate a person in the field,” Kilian snapped. “That sort of thing is unforgivable, just as unforgivable as attempting to eat the person whose life you are sworn to protect.” Old memories and shame skewered Kilian so that he felt as if he’d been blessed by a Catholic priest.
“I know evil,” Stephen said softly. “You're not even in the ballpark with evil.”
Kilian gave a dark laugh. “I am. They would not have recruited me for this position if I didn’t have enough darkness in me to match the creature in you.” Now that Kilian had said it out loud, he knew it to be true. He certainly didn’t have the kind of record that would get him into an elite unit of this level. Hell, he had been the sole survivor of two separate team massacres, and the Army was not fond of survival under those circumstances. Sure, his past relationship with Stephen would have been a bonus, but he’d known a little boy. Years later, the emotional connection between them was tenuous at best.
Stephen snorted. “Maybe your soul is a little shadowed, but you are still the big damn hero who always tries to save everyone. You’re still that lithe, sexy bodyguard sitting in the tall chair at the pool, ready to yell at me for... I don’t know, whatever you used to yell at me about.”
“Running on the deck, usually.”
After a short silence, Stephen asked, “Kilian?”
Kilian would have stormed off and found some coffee shop where he could hide or a base gym where he could work off some aggressions, but the spell that had seemed like nothing more than a trap for the demon had become a shackle on Kilian as well. “Let it drop.”
“No.”
Kilian’s eyes grew warm as red bled into then. He said, “Stephen, this is not up for debate.”
“You're right, it isn't. And if I were a nice person, I would give you a little privacy, but I'm not nice. I'm so not nice that I blackmailed a base of supernatural badasses into leaving me alone. What shot do you think you have in winning this little battle of wills we have going on? I’m going to nag you until you accept your lack of evilness.”
“I'm asking you as a friend to give me some space,” Kilian begged. Maybe tomorrow he could believe that, but tonight he carried more guilt than even a Judas vamp could handle. He felt as if he were sliding into some moral abyss and he didn’t know how to save himself. Eating an enemy in the field—that was a line he had no right to cross.
“Space to do what? To convince yourself to plaster some level of acceptance on top of this guilt you carry like a fucking security blanket? The demon gives me all kinds of upgrades, including the ability to see emotional states. You say you’re upset, but the emotion is too washed out. You have some reds of anger and yellow of sorrow and a shit ton of puce guilt, but it's all overlaid with this gray. It's all muted. I was willing to accept your emotionally stunted life when I only kinda liked you, but now I’m not willing to let you wallow in depression. If you won't talk to me, I’ll call Mia in here and tell her that we need whatever therapist they have on call. Trust me, they have a therapist somewhere in this hellhole.”
Shock stripped Kilian of other emotions. “You’re worried about me?”
Stephen snorted. “You’re the only person on this base I don’t consistently hate. My father with his drinking problems is only sometimes in that category.”
“Stephen,” Kilian said softly.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m pathetic.”
“No,” Kilian said firmly. “You aren’t. But you haven’t known me that long. It’s possible the gray you see is my vampiric nature.”
“I’ve known you for over twenty years,” Stephen said. “And maybe I haven’t seen you in a long time, but you’re still the same guy I had a wild crush on when I was ten and twelve, and even after you signed up for the fucking military and left home. You’re so fucking noble that you’re feeling guilty about the blood of a demon summoner. A demon summoner! You’re worth a thousand of them.”
It had been too long since anyone had shown him such fierce loyalty; Kilian had to swallow the emotions that threatened to spill out. Instead, he projected as much disdain as he could while ignoring his discomfort at Stephen’s aura-reading abilities. “Don’t threaten me with therapy. I’ve talked my way past a half dozen.” Kilian’s obfuscation skills and the Army’s reluctance to lose a supernatural asset had kept him on active duty even during his most psychologically-shaken periods.
“Yeah, but the threat of bringing in a therapist might get you to talk to me. I’m manipulative like that.” Stephen offered him a bright smile. Slowly, that smile faded. “The demon likes the darkness, but I don't. I'll tell you one real thing if you tell me one real thing of equal emotional value.”
Kilian shook his head. “You don't need to.” Kilian already knew that Stephen had cursed his father, so he didn’t need to know the details of Stephen’s guilt.
“My mother was the witch who did this,” Stephen blurted.
Kilian froze, his mouth open in an attempt to stop Stephen. The words caught him so off-guard that he had no response, and after a second Stephen looked away. He cleared his throat and continued.
“She was sick, and she found a spell that she thought would give her power to heal herself, but she was never much of a witch. She didn’t have the power to finish the ritual, so she decided to give herself a power upgrade by using a sacrifice.”
That was a common technique, but most of the sacrifice’s power would be lost to the earth. No one died with their attacker's well-being near the top of their priority list, and that tended to disperse the magic. “How many people did she have to kill to open a dimensional lock?” Kilian felt as if he were walking through a minefield.
