2 Witch and Famous (13 page)

“That’s what you think? After everything I have done? After how close we have gotten? You can believe this?”

“Do you think I
like
feeling like this?” I demanded.

Niall shook his head. “I did not kill this woman.”

“You can’t even say her name.”

“I didn’t kill Jessica Hammersmith.”

“It’s too late to try lying. You killed her. What I want to hear now is why.”

“You’re wrong,” he said flatly.

I took a step back from him. “You think I can’t feel an enchanter around a murder scene? You think that you get to deny it when your traces are all over this? Am I meant to believe that you would never kill?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve told me yourself that you’ve killed people in the past. I
saw
you kill Evert. So, what is to stop you from killing them now?”

Niall stood very still, his hands balled into fists with the tension. “The warlock was self-defense. As for the others… that was a long time ago. The circumstances were different.”

“Fine. How about if we discuss
the circumstances?” I ventured. “You didn’t tell me that you spent your life tricking people out of their money. What was it? You’d find some rich woman, get her to bankroll you, and then slowly drain her? I’ve looked in the box, Niall.”

“What box?”

“The trinket box in your office.”

“You had no
right
.” That made his anger flash all the way to his eyes. Not the thought of being caught. Not the thought that someone had died. Just that I had touched his stupid box.

“You left me with no choice,” I said. “You wouldn’t tell me anything, so I had to look for myself.”

“You had no right to look in that box,” Niall insisted again. “The things in there…they are too personal.”

 “What was I supposed to do?” I demanded. “A woman is dead. Do you even care?”

“Of course I care. She’s a human being. A life lost.”

“For someone who claims to care, you don’t seem all that upset.” I could hear how much I’d raised my voice by that point, but it didn’t matter. The strangest part was the way people just kept walking past us in our little bubble of isolation. It was as if no one could see us or hear us. We could probably have had a full-scale battle and no one would have noticed except for the two of us. Maybe we were going to, given the way things were heading.

“What am I meant to do?” I asked, and I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my voice.

“You’re supposed to trust me,” Niall said.

“Trust you? How on Earth could I trust you when you won’t tell me anything?” I stood there, my hands on my hips. “I’ve spent the past few weeks practically living with you, and yet I still feel like I hardly know anything about you outside of the bedroom at night. When I wake up, you’re gone. I wake up alone and every time I feel like you stole something from me.”

“I have never taken anything from you,” Niall insisted. “You know that our kind cannot take energy from one another. We can only give.”

“I’m not
talking
about energy,” I snapped back. “I’m talking about trust. I’m talking about love. I give you that, and you’re never there.”

Somehow, this had become about more than the murder. How? Maybe because I knew this would be the only opportunity to have this argument.

“I know every inch of your body,” I said, “and I still don’t know you. I don’t even know why you’re gone every morning.”

“Don’t you?” Niall demanded. “Or is it just that you don’t
let
yourself know?”

I stepped back until my back was against the cannon again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I go out to feed. I have ever since we met. I have told you, it is what we are. Yet, you have been so determined to ignore it that you haven’t even asked.”

“There have been plenty of things I
have
asked,” I countered. “I don’t remember getting answers to those either. I don’t know where you were born, what you’ve spent your life doing, Anything.”

“Because none of that matters,” Niall insisted. “That was then. This is now. We matter, but the past does not. I live in the present, with you. The things in that box…they are reminders of the past for me. Not for anyone else. Not even for you. Why can’t you see that? Things in there…I never wanted you to see those things.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t.” I took a breath. “Tell me, Niall, what about the witches and warlocks who are missing? Do you know how hard it has been to keep the coven from coming after you for that?”

“So, you have been talking to the coven about me.”

I reached out to touch the cannon. Somehow, there was something stable about the feel of something so solid under my fingers. “Anyone
else
would have simply killed you by now.”

“And is that what you intend to do?” Niall asked. He didn’t raise his voice. He just stood there, staring at me, waiting for an answer. “
Could
you?”

“Tell me about the box,” I insisted, ignoring the question. Mostly because even now, when it was clear what he’d done, I didn’t have an answer.

“No.” Niall shook his head. “The past is the past. My past is done with. It isn’t coming back. I will
not
go back there. Not even for you.”

“You aren’t exactly making this simple.” I stepped around almost to the other side of the cannon. I didn’t want to give him an easy escape route.

“I
am
making this simple,” Niall pointed out. “Not easy, perhaps, but simple. You believe me or you don’t. You love me or you don’t.”

“You aren’t going to give an inch, are you?” I demanded. “After everything I’ve given up for you. The coven. My life. My friends.”

Niall looked indignant this time. “You didn’t give up
anything
. You still try to live your life as if you are some protected little witch. You will not even bend enough to feed, because the thought disgusts you. I have given you everything I am. Everything I am
now
. What I
was
should not matter. I cannot change the past. I have stayed in this city for you, even though the threat—”

“The threat from the coven wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t started playing games!”

“Games? What games?”

“With them. With me!” I was shouting now, really shouting. “I’ve gone to so much trouble protecting you. I even threatened the coven for you. I threatened Rebecca when this started. When she thought you were going after her people. But they were right. You’re nothing but a killer!”

“I did not kill Jessica Hammersmith,” Niall said, evenly. “And I have done nothing to those witches and warlocks of this city who have not come after me.”

Somehow, that attempt at reasonableness just made me angrier. “And you expect me to believe that’s true just because you say it is?”

“Yes. You say that you love me, but you haven’t trusted me once. Not about anything that matters.”

It wasn’t enough. Not anymore. I shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that. I mean, do you even deny that you’re here…hunting?”

Niall paused again, and again, it told me everything I needed to know. He made a hurt noise in his throat.

“Come on,” I insisted. “Say it. You were here hunting.”

“Of course I was hunting,” Niall shot back. He wasn’t anywhere near as controlled as usual. “And you manage to make even
that
sound dirty, as though it is something that our kind should not do. As if it is not a natural part of our existence.”

I’d expected all kinds of things from Niall when I confronted him. Anger, guilt, confession… everything except indignation. “We—”

  “We are
predators
!” Niall’s voice had risen to match my own inside our little bubble of silence. I hadn’t seen this side of him before. “We hunt. We take life force from humans. We can no more stop hunting than a human can choose to stop breathing. It is what we do. It is what we
are
.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t what I am.”

“No,” Niall snapped back, “because you would rather pretend to be something else. You deny you are a predator, yet you would bleed my staff dry with your pretending. You treat your hunger as if it is something to be afraid of.”

“It
is
something to be afraid of,” I said. I could still remember the night when Niall had first told me what I was. I had almost drained his assistant Marie, simply because the hunger had been too much. I had ended up knocking her down and running. “If I don’t control it, people will get hurt.”

“You are not controlling it,” Niall insisted. “Not truly.”

I shook my head. “No. I control it now. I don’t let the hunger control me.”

“By draining my staff, piece by piece? You leave them exhausted, and you give nothing back.”

I cringed. “I’m not hurting them.”

“You’re using them, and that
is
hurting them. My housekeeper, Kelly, is exhausted. My driver, David, falls asleep at the wheel. Even me. You would rather have me feed you scraps of emotion secondhand to keep your conscience clean than admit what you are.”

“It isn’t about that,” I insisted. How had this conversation gotten twisted around to me?

“Isn’t it? One taste from a human the right way, and you turned away in disgust.”

He meant the bartender I’d kissed, obviously. I thought we’d dealt with that. Except we hadn’t dealt with it, had we? We’d just brushed it aside.

“You don’t dictate how I feed,” I said.

“I can tell you one thing, Elle. I cannot feed you anymore. I will not. You are perfectly capable of feeding yourself now. Of course, that will mean going out and hunting for yourself, but maybe I have been too lenient in the way I have taught you.”

“Lenient?” I bristled while the crowd swirled around us on the battlements. “I’m not your student.”

“No? Go out and get your own sustenance, and then tell me that you know everything. You want to be an enchantress? I had to learn what I was in far harsher ways. I did not get the
choice
of feeding so delicately, and yet you want to attack me for being what I am.”

“A killer.”

“You were born to this, just like me.”

Just like that, I could feel something shatter between us. I had known that coming after him like this had its risks, yet even so, the reality of this moment, just feeling that dead weight as I knew that things couldn’t be right again between us, was too much.

“So,” I said, and now my voice was quiet, “where does this leave us?”

“That is up to you. It was always up to you.” Niall stepped back from me. “If you truly believe that I killed this woman, after all I have said…well, you must treat me as a murderer.” Niall spread his hands.

He still wanted me to believe that he hadn’t done it, yet how could I? There had been an enchanter in Jessica Hammersmith’s house. That wasn’t something someone could fake, not to me. She had hanged herself, and only an enchanter would have been able to make her feel the driven despair that led to it. Niall had openly admitted that he had been hunting. Then there were all the other people who were missing.

All of the pieces to the puzzle were there, but I still wanted to hear him say it, if only to put off the moment when I would have to work out what I was going to do. With the emotion of a castle full of tourists around me, I could draw emotion from them and convert it into enough energy to throw almost any spell I wanted. I could envelop Niall in flames or blast him with force. I could treat him exactly as a murderer. I could kill him in a dozen different ways, but any one of them would feel like I’d be killing a part of myself. Yet, what else could I do?