Page 43 of Nightshade

He was acting like I was some kind of kid, just waiting to be the victim of Altair’s evil schemes.

Like Altair was sitting around twirling a waxed mustache, plotting to tie me to some railroad tracks if I didn’t sign over the deed to my ranch.

Then Altair said the thing I thought would stick in my mind forever.

“So. Have. I.”

A second later, he marched through the kitchen as though he were on a mission. He barely stopped for a second to tell Mama and me good evening, then headed right up to my old bedroom, where I heard him thump down onto the bed.

So have I.

It wasn’t a claim that he knew what damage he was capable of. It was a statement that he’d been through horrible things. He’d had another vampire’s rage taken out on him, not the other way around. He wasn’t agreeing that he was a monster, he was crying out that he had been a victim, only he didn’t know how to say that.

He didn’t like to think of himself as a victim, because who did? Not even Viktor, even though he was the most victimized person I knew. Or at least, he had been before I met Altair.

I suspected that he and Altair were in precisely the same situation on that: neither would be able to comprehend themselves as a victim, so they just burrowed deep into their feelings and tried to protect that hard shell they’d built up as armor instead of dealing with what had happened.

Funnily enough, Mama was the one who spoke up. “The humans who know wolves exist think we’re out of control monsters,” she said quietly, when Viktor came in.

He froze. Not for a second, or searching for some response, but just . . . froze. Stood there in the doorway staring at her, like it was a shock she’d spoken at all, let alone pointed out a problem with his determination that Altair was a beast.

When he didn’t move, she turned to look at him. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t defend your family—that’s always the right thing to do. Just . . . don’t put Altair into a little box because you think all of ‘his kind’ go there. Let him either put himself there or choose not to. That’s up to him, not us, don’t you think?”

He pursed his lips, chastened, but not finished with his bias against Altair. “You’ve never met one of his kind before, Mama.”

She patted the table in front of his seat, nodding. “I have not. Tell me, how many have you met?”

Hesitantly, like she might change her mind and pull the chair away from him, Viktor came and sat down between us. “Just one,” he admitted after a while. “But it was enough.”

“And if you’d only ever met one wolf in your life, and that wolf was, oh, Grant? What would you think of wolves as a species?”

He didn’t have an answer for that, just a long sigh. Probably because he knew she was right. Heck, I hadn’t even thought about that. I’d just been accepting Altair as he presented himself, not thinking about how his behavior represented all vampire-kind.

That was easy for me, since I’d never met a vampire before. Unlike my brother, and also, unlike Altair.

And maybe Altair would be the first person to say that vampires had great potential to be monsters, given how he’d responded to Viktor behind the house. It sounded like Altair had equally bad experiences with vampires as Viktor had, after all. But Mama was right too. Why assume that just because a few vampires were bad, that meant they all were?

It wasn’t just bad logic; it was morally wrong to assign blame for things someone else had done. Every person deserved the right to be judged on their own merits or lack thereof.

We ate in mostly silence, Viktor clearly considering Mama’s words, while she acted like everything was fine. Viktor actually thinking gave me hope, though. Sure, maybe he was being an asshole, but that didn’t mean that he was always and only going to be an asshole to Altair. Maybe he would realize he was being unfair and change his mind. He was my brother, and his opinion mattered to me, even if right now I thought that opinion was shit.

All of dinner passed in silence, and then we helped Mama with the dishes, before all going our separate ways, to our rooms. Or, well, me going to Aleks’s old room.

It wasn’t awful, but it smelled wrong, and I sure wasn’t going to be able to sleep there.

That, though, got me thinking. I sat there in Aleks’s bed, staring at the ceiling, while the whole house went dark and quiet. While I listened to Mama dress for sleep, and then go to bed.

And then, finally, after eleven, Viktor started snoring softly.

So I slid out of bed, as quiet as possible, and into the hallway. I avoided the one creaky board in the middle, and kept to the wall. Annoying that such a new house had a creaky board, but I supposed wood was wood, regardless of age.

I got to my old room and remembered telling Altair that the door had a lock.

It still did. If he’d locked it, I didn’t really have any place to question that. More than that, I’d have to knock, which would wake Viktor, and that would ruin the whole point of sneaking over.

But when I wrapped my hand around the knob and turned, it went smoothly. No lock.

Altair was already sitting up in bed looking at the door when I got it open. His relief at seeing me was nice, but also sad, because clearly part of him had been expecting my brother with murder on his mind.