Iron (The Warding Book 1) (26 page)

The truth was no amount of wanting, no secret longing, would ever make me anything but what I was: a little girl trying to roll with the big dogs. I couldn’t be one of them, no matter how hard I tried. I was stranded worlds apart from them, and no amount of knife-throwing and cardio workouts were ever going to level that playing field. Being badass came with strings attached and I hadn’t stopped to think of what those strings were attached to or how hard they would tug when tested.

Life reminded me of that fact the first time Gannon agreed to take me on a hunt.

I ducked my head down to my knees and hugged my elbows to my ears, trying to block out the moaning. It grated along my nerves; that horrible, endless groan. It was the warble of something in pain. The last gasp of a dying animal. My attempts to block it out didn’t help.

The sound was coming from me.

Something inside of me was dying.

I was pretty sure it was my innocence.

What had I been thinking, insisting that I play a part in dealing out fae justice? What had I expected to happen, when I took another being’s fate into my own hands? Who the hell did I think I was? I couldn’t even hold my every day, mundane little life together. Work had become a joke; I was out more than I was in. I had no lifelines left there. One more screw up and I would find myself out on my ass. I should have been taking the initiative to look for another job—or maybe another living arrangement, for when everything finally went south—but I hadn’t. I wouldn’t.

Jenni hadn’t called or texted me in over a week. I could hardly blame her. I was living a life apart from everything she knew now. Our conversations had become more silence than words, hers stony while she waited to hear whatever poorly concocted lie I had for my increasingly unexplainable behavior, mine thick with guilt. I think we had a date set up to have lunch, but I couldn’t remember when. I hoped I had written it down somewhere but doubted I had. Soon, I would be making another round of ill-received apologies.

I was pretty sure my family hated me far worse than Jenni at the moment. I had missed my grandmother’s 91
st
birthday, forgetting not only the fancy dinner my mother had planned, but the day in question all together. Of course Grandma had said it was no big deal when I called to make my tearful apology two days later, but I wasn’t buying it. As her oldest granddaughter, I had the responsibility of remembering something as important as that. I could hardly tell her I had gotten caught up in another wild goose chase, scouring some crappy little off Broadway theater in the city because a sylph had told us that her djinn buddy had promised that he had heard, on good authority, that the Lynx had purchased tickets to the show that night. Big ol’ waste of time that had been.

Perhaps mom and dad would have forgiven me that transgression (even if I would never forgive myself), had I not missed Christmas too. I had no excuse for that one, save for the wear and tear on my body had finally caught up to me. That disaster was all me. Having the day off from work, training,
and
Lynx-hunting had been a rare gift. Maybe the day had started with the impromptu baking of semi-edible gingerbread cookies and present wrapping, but the temptation of a nap had wrecked all those good intentions. I had slept the sleep of the dead, straight on through morning, oblivious to alarm and phone both.

Jenni had remembered to stop by and see my parents, of course. She had come by on Christmas evening like clockwork, ever since we were teenagers. My mother’s abrupt message on my voicemail had tartly informed me that she had left my Christmas present with them too, having expected me to be there. Once, I had found my bestie’s love of my parents endearing. Now it was just another thorn in my side, reminding me of what a shitty daughter I had become. It was par for the course I guess. I wasn’t just a shitty friend and an even shittier daughter; I was a horrible person.

I had taken a life. I had felt that life spill out over my own two hands and watched the light fade from a living creature’s eyes. Yes, those eyes had been luminous green and more reptilian than human—but that hardly mattered.

My life was falling apart and I had no clue how to keep the pieces together. Everything felt wrong;
was
wrong. Every time I tried to shore up another weak spot, a leak sprung clear across the way and left me scrambling. With everything falling down around me, I had clung to the stupid hope that I was making strides toward becoming a new me, a
better
me. I told myself that when the fae went home I would somehow be better off for having met them. I let myself believe that I was learning something valuable; something that would shape my future. I wanted so damn bad to find my place in the world that I had jumped on in, thinking “Yes,
this
must be it!”

And what had that gotten me?

Nothing.

Worse than nothing, really. Instead of finding some sense of self, some confidence or whatever the fuck I had thought learning to knock off nasty fae would have given me, all I had learned was that my tough-as-nails attitude came with a price. Facing down a Naga in a dark back alley had revealed something even uglier than its snake-face living in my soul. It wasn’t the fear I had felt, grappling with scaly hands that wanted to lock around my throat. It wasn’t the panic that had done me in, in that moment when it bore down on me and I was sure as fuck that I had forgotten all Gannon had taught me. It wasn’t even some enlightening, angelic revelation that told me I was destined to be the god-damned protector of the human race.

It was the exact opposite. It was a cold and terrible fury that had taken me over when I stood above that thing, its eyes gone blank and its limbs still. It was the horror, the regret, that I had expected—
wanted
—to feel… only to never have it come.

I had stood there, searching myself for some sign of revulsion, while Gannon congratulated me on a job well done. It had been a clean kill, in his estimation. Could have fooled me, with the grime and blood splattered all over me, making my skin crawl and my hair stiff. His pride in me hadn’t made the situation any better. In fact, the smug glow I had felt at his praise only made it that much worse.

I had killed a man. Someone’s son, perhaps someone’s brother or father. He wasn’t human and he had killed innocent people—my people—but a life was a life, nonetheless. And I had ended it, without a second thought. I had watched Gannon load the corpse into the trunk for disposal, with the sickening realization that I was calm; controlled. I wasn’t in shock. I felt no regret. I was at peace with what I had done, though every shred of my humanity was screaming that I should be anything but.

Too late I understood Gannon’s warning. I had thought he was warning me that I couldn’t handle the internal struggle that would come with taking a life, but now I knew he had been saying the exact opposite. I couldn’t reconcile my lack of regret with the morals I had been taught to uphold all my life.

How could I ever face them again: my family, my best friend, even my co-workers? Seeing the mute horror in Seana’s eyes had been bad enough. How could I look another human being in the eye again, having seen what I had seen; knowing what I knew; having done what I had done? How could I pretend to be normal, when there was a part of me so dark I would never be able to reveal it to another soul? Was there any going on with the pretense of a normal life?

How could you kill a monster without becoming one?

I had become something so far removed from everything I once knew. I had seen the monster that lurked deep inside me and it had smiled. I pressed my face into my palms.

I was more lost than ever.

Chapter Eighteen

March

“Hello? Earth to Cat. Are you even listening to me?”

I jerked back to attention. That familiar flush of shame heated my cheeks. Shit. I had drifted off again. I kept losing myself somewhere between the feigned interest I had been so carefully cultivating and the bone deep exhaustion I had been fighting for days. Jenni was giving me that pursed-lip duck face of disapproval, meaning I had probably been bleary eyed for quite some time. At least we were sitting on her couch with some pizza and wine, rather than out in some public place where her impending wrath would leave me looking like a bad girlfriend to dozens of strangers.

Man, I sucked so hard at the double agent bullshit.

I heaved a deep sigh that was 100% real and put the half-empty wineglass that had been lolling in my hand back on the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to space out there.” I scrubbed at my face, remembering too late that I had tried to be normal and wear makeup for our get together. I hoped I hadn’t just given myself raccoon eyes. “I’m just so god-damn beat. It was a really long week.”

I caught the eye roll she didn’t quite try to hide. “Seems like you’re always beat these days.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t very well tell her my nights had become busier than my days. Aside from the futile Lynx hunts, I now had the Baddies After Dark routine to fulfill, which kept me roaming the streets with Gannon until the wee hours of the morning two or three nights a week.

I still wasn’t sure how my soul would reconcile the new roll I had taken on—and taken on so damn well, at that—but I had learned to push down those difficult emotions like a champ. It was that or spend the rest of my days locked in my apartment, hiding behind my sofa while eating rocky road straight form the tub with a wooden spoon.

Repression aside, I was burning the candle at both ends. It was getting rough to keep my head up by mid-day without a dozen cups of coffee. This night had been slated as a night to catch up, to reconnect with my humanity like in the old days—only that wasn’t working out so well. I would have preferred to spend my night off zonked out on my own couch, asleep before the ten o’clock news.

I hated myself for feeling that way, so I had made myself keep our dinner date, feeling like I should have wanted to spend time with Jenni more. Granted, the catching up had been pretty lame on my side. What could I tell her? Mind-numbingly boring stories about the office and watered down versions of my training routine wrapped in the guise of a gym membership that had sucked up my free time? That didn’t exactly fly.

Instead I had encouraged her to tell me about all the mundane antics I had been missing out on: her job woes, her exciting new skin care routine, anything. I wanted to care,
tried
to care. I just… Couldn’t. I couldn’t get myself into that mindset of girlie gossip about boys and shoes and pipe dreams we probably should have given up in our twenties. It all seemed so damn inconsequential now, when my every waking moment had become so saturated with death and danger. What did stories of Anthony’s impending homecoming mean to me now, when I saw monsters lurking around every corner? I spent my days worried that some terrible nightmare creature would catch her, or my sister, or the nice old lady who lived down the block from me, on a lone street corner and suck their brains out through their eye sockets. How could I relate to her musings on whether or not she should get a new couch?

I couldn’t even pretend to be normal anymore. I wanted to. I really,
really
did. I wanted to care, I wanted to connect—I wanted to feel like Caitlin again; the goofy, gawky fuck-up who got excited about sales at Saks and thought missing the newest episode of Game of Thrones was the end of the world. God, how I wanted to be her again.

Maybe that was why I had dragged myself off my couch for this sad little shindig. It was a last ditch effort at proving to myself that the old, normal part of me was still in there somewhere. Not because I wanted to see Jenni. Not even because I wanted to fix our failing friendship, but because I needed her to find that part of me I knew I was losing touch with.

Wow, did that ever make me the worst kind of bitch. If I was too far gone to even maintain a series of nods and mumbles of encouragement as she told me about all the stuff I had been missing in her life, what hope was there for…

“Cat, seriously. What the hell?”

I blinked, realizing that I had done it again. I rubbed my face with my hands, makeup be damned. Why was I finding it so hard to keep it together? “I’m sorry! I really just… I can’t help it. My mind just keeps wandering off and thinking about…stuff.”

“Care to elaborate?” She lounged on the opposite corner of the couch, her position casual though her expression read anything but. I could see the tension in the way she held herself. A twitch of the thumb told me she was fighting down anger, resisting the urge to make a fist. I couldn’t help but read every nuance of her body language, calculating; planning.

My stomach felt tight, the pizza within doing a flip flop. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to be normal old Cat. I wasn’t. Not anymore. The realization made me nauseous. I looked away, focusing on the fuzzy blue afghan thrown over the back of the sofa. I picked at a loose thread, noticing for the first time how ragged my nails were. They weren’t painted and my cuticles looked like hell. When was the last time I had gotten a manicure?

“Are you just going to ignore me?” she asked, words sharpening.

“I’m not ignoring you. I just don’t know what to say.”

Her laugh wasn’t the least bit friendly. “You say that a lot these days. You know, this is the first time we’ve hung out in, what, two months? Three? We used to spend, like, every single weekend together until you started disappearing all the time. I don’t know why you suddenly pushed me away but I tried to be cool with it. I tried to give you your space until you worked through whatever the hell has been going on with you. Tonight was your idea but the whole time you’ve been acting like this is some big sacrifice for you, to be hanging out with me. So what gives?”