The word hypocritical crawled up Kilian’s belly and begged to be allowed into the world. “You know as well as I do that Dad's life was saved by the med-witches at the hospital.”
“He wouldn’t have needed their help had not another witch cursed him. And now I have to wonder if it was Susan Nguyen. She was here. In town. Suffer not a witch to live among you.”
Most Christians were sane, loving people who would’ve thanked Kilian for his service and not cared about his supernatural status, but that had never been the Kildare family. They’d always had a corner on guilt and judgement. And superstition. His mother had once bemoaned giving Kilian his name. It was a family name, but she’d thought he’d absorbed his love of war from the name’s meaning. He’d pointed out that the Gaelic originated with the word church. So it should have been just as likely he’d turn out a priest if that had been true. Sometimes logic and the Kildare family did not mix well.
Kilian took a deep breath. “Evil exists, some of us have to fight it. What's the old saying? All it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.”
“Are you suggesting that your alternatives were to do nothing against evil or to become an abomination?” Her eyes shone with tears. “How did I fail as a mother? You were such a sensitive little boy. You loved children, and I still remember the day a stray dog fell into the pond after it iced over. You came home with your clothes stiff from ice, blue and shaking, carrying that dog. That little boy didn’t feel the need to pick up a gun to make the world better.”
“And I am that same man now,” Kilian said. “Before I was tasked to work with Stephen, my previous case was a witch using a lamia spell. Thirteen children died in agony as the witch slowly strangled their souls. Their parents were forced to watch helplessly. How many more children would be dead right now if I hadn’t fought that witch? I am the one who goes into the dark so other people can live without fear.”
“You went after the Lamia Witch serial killer?” The awe in his mother’s voice broke Kilian’s heart a little. He shouldn’t have needed to kill an infamous villain to earn her respect, or her acceptance. He ached with emotions that rotted and swelled like a carcass in the sun, but this was a mission, and he had never allowed pain to stop him from completing the mission. So he had to convince his mother to either help or at the very least, keep her mouth shut about their visit. As long as the Army couldn’t confirm their location, they would have to invest resources in searching multiple locations. Mia would want to do that quietly, which meant slowly.
“She killed every member of my team except me,” Kilian said. That wasn’t the exact truth, but Kilian no longer trusted his mother with his darkest secrets. She knew how to hurt him. He did, however, let some of the soul-deep pain he carried show through his facade. “For the second time, I was the only survivor, but if I hadn’t chosen to become a vampire, I wouldn't have been there. Maybe the witch would've slipped out of the warehouse. Maybe she would've killed the next team the way she killed the team that came before mine. You talk about how God guides us to a path, but maybe this is the path he guided me to.” If Kilian kept saying God’s name, he was going to need blood to stop the shaking in his legs.
“That's blasphemy.” His mother’s words were a strained whisper. “The Lord does not guide you to power that is not supposed to be yours.”
“If it wasn’t supposed to be mine, then I would have died in the turning. Plenty of people don't survive.”
His mother opened her mouth, closed it, and then seemed to gather her wits. “Which is another reason you shouldn’t have taken the chance. Accepting the offer from that monster was dangerously close to suicide. You chose that, chose him, over coming home to your family. We would have taken care of you for the rest of your life.” Her voice cracked with emotion, and his old friend guilt seeped in through the cracks of Kilian’s defenses.
“I’m a Ranger. A soldier. I didn’t want to be taken care of, and I’ve saved a lot of people because of that decision.”
“Oh, Kilian.” His mother's voice broke, and Kilian realized there was a chasm between them that he would never be able to cross. He could never respect his mother's hypocritical condemnation of all things magical even while she accepted the benefits of living in a magical world, and she would never accept his decision to become something more than human. They stared at each other from opposite sides of a philosophical conflict that neither of them could bridge.
It was as if she mourned a Kilian Kildare who had never existed—a man who believed in all her hypocritical claptrap and worshipped her as the wise matron who knew all. Kilian had never been that child.
Stephen said, “Kilian, we need to get moving before we get caught.”
“‘Caught’?” Kilian winced as his mother jumped on that word. “Kilian? What's going on?” All the grief was gone, and now he was facing the sharp-eyed mother who had always known when any of her eight children lied. It had been a power so absolute that Kilian and his siblings had always wondered if Catherine Kildare didn’t have a little fey blood in the family tree. And now that she knew something other than vampirism was wrong in Kilian’s world, she wasn’t going to let it drop.
Chapter Thirteen
Kilian was trying tomentally construct an answer when Stephen jumped in. “The Army has decided to wallow in their own stupidity, so Kilian and I are trying to undermine their incompetence.”
“I... What?” She turned her full attention to Stephen.
