Fractured (12 page)

“It won’t change my decision.”

I took a step toward him. He backtracked. “You’re blaming me for this,” I said.

“No. I’m the only one at fault. Ana warned me that I was making mistakes because of you, and I ignored her. But as I think back, I realize how right she was. Especially now.”

It felt like he’d landed a rock-solid kick to my gut. I nearly doubled over with pain. “What?” I blinked fast to hold back tears. “You said you were doing the right thing …”

“I thought I was almost ready to get out of the dark city,” he said roughly. “Then you arrived, and I was stupid enough to believe it was meant to happen, as if this was my reward after all those years of service. So I let go of everything I knew because I thought I didn’t need it anymore. I let my emotions rule me completely.” He laughed bitterly and raked his hand through his hair. “I actually thought I could be with you, that we could go into the Countryside. And when we were sent here, I was
still
telling myself we could be together, still holding on to all those wishes for a future.” He bowed his head, not letting me see his expression. “I have been such a fool.”

“N-no. We’re not a mistake.” It came out broken, little more than a squeak. “This is a good thing.
We’re
a good thing. We can figure this out together. We can fight for that future. We don’t have to—”

“Don’t,” he whispered, holding up his hand. “Please don’t.”

“You love me,” I breathed. “You can’t just … stop.”

“I can,” he said softly. “I have. What happened today was too much.”

“And you could let it go this easily. Just like that.” My vision spotted and sparked as the truth of my words hit me. He
had
let it go that easily. Why would I even question it? It wasn’t like this kind of thing hadn’t happened before. I’d simply forgotten how little I was worth. I leaned on the desk, needing something to hold me up. “Okay. I get it.”

“You obviously don’t,” he said, so quiet I barely caught it.

“What?”

He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “This isn’t about
you
,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice. “This is about me, and our mission. If I’m focused on you, I can’t do it. I’ll keep making mistakes. I can’t be what you need if all I want is—”

“I’ll do better,” I pleaded, unable to accept what was right in front of me because it was too painful. “I won’t go charging into places alone. I won’t—”

“Please respect my decision.” He crossed his arms over his chest. His knuckles were pale again as his fingers bit into the flesh of his arms. “Things between us will be professional from now on. As my Captain, you have my support and loyalty. I will follow your orders, whatever they are.” He clamped his lips shut and swallowed hard. “But that is all I am to you.”

A more untrue statement had
never
been spoken. I hugged myself, willing myself to stop being pathetic, forcing every ounce of pride to the surface, needing it to coat me like armor.

Like I was watching from outside my body, I heard myself say, “Of course I’ll respect your decision.”

He sagged a little as I spoke, but recovered quickly. “Thank you,” he murmured. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like some privacy.”

“Yeah, sure. It’s your room.” I spun around and fled as my armor melted away, leaving only a raw lump of misery and confusion where my heart used to be.

Blinded by tears, hurting and dizzy, desperate to escape to a place where I could scream and cry without being observed, I took the stairs too quickly. My knee gave out halfway down, and I flew forward, knowing this was going to be bad.

But I never hit. Warm arms caught me and set me on my feet. “That was nearly your second stair calamity of the day,” Raphael said, holding me steady as I regained my balance.

“How did you—never mind,” I said.

“Come into the living room, Lela. You need to rest.” He put his arm around me, and I didn’t fight him. I might have fallen without his support. My knee was killing me, my head was throbbing, and my heart was shattered. He guided me to the couch. I fell onto it, pulled a cushion over my chest, and hugged it tight, needing something to contain me, to keep me from falling apart.

He squatted in front of me, dressed in plain khaki pants and a button-down. Perfectly designed to be utterly forgettable … like me, apparently. “I won’t ask what hurts,” he said gently.

“It’s been a shitty day,” I said, praying he wasn’t going to make me talk about it.

His gaze slid up the steps before returning to me. “There is so much pain in this house.”

Looking at the slight sadness in his expression, I got an idea. “Can you … can you take that away? You take other kinds of pain away.” A tiny bubble of hope rose through the horrible, heavy despair inside of me. “You … you could just make it black, and when we wake up, we’ll be okay. Maybe you could do that. Because I—” My voice cracked as the reality of what had happened broke over me again. “I’m not sure I can—” I ducked my head so that he wouldn’t see the tears start to fall. “I’m really sorry. I can’t do this.”

He nudged my chin up with his fingers. “You can.”

“Find another Guard. Put Henry in charge.
Please
.”

He smiled, nearly blinding me. “This conversation is sounding remarkably similar to the one you had with Jim not thirty minutes ago, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to think about the fact that you’re listening to every freaking word I say,” I snapped.

The smile didn’t fade, so I directed my attention out the window until he let go of my chin. “You’re smart enough to recognize the parallel, Lela. Jim didn’t think he could handle this mission, and you told him he needed to take responsibility. Malachi is now confronted with his very worst fear—as a victim of the wholesale slaughter of his people, his family, all of them innocent, he is now himself responsible for the death of an innocent child. And yet he is determined to do his job.”

I leaned back, wanting to scream in Raphael’s face. Malachi was determined to do his job, all right. And I had interfered with that, and he had pushed me away without hesitation, totally calm as he crushed my heart. “Yeah, his dedication is admirable.” And it was, really. It just hurt more than I could bear.

“So is yours, Lela.” He pulled a phone out of his pocket that was identical to mine. “I figured you’d need this. And if you give me your keys, Henry and I can fetch your car when he returns.”

“Is that my cell?” I asked as I dug in my pocket for my keys. “You got it from the Mazikin nest?”

He shook his head. “But I knew you’d need a new one—”

It buzzed. Raphael handed it to me. My new phone had just gotten a text from Henry:

They set the nest on fire cops here people everywhere no idea who to follow

“
Goddammit!
” I shouted as the phone vibrated in my hand with another text from him.

Orders?

I texted back:
Come home.
Then I tossed the phone onto the coffee table. “Do you want to revisit the notion that I’m actually capable of being the Captain?” I snarled at Raphael. “Because everything I try seems to explode in my face.”

Raphael chuckled. “Then you should do better.”

Fuck you
almost made it out of my mouth, but I clenched my teeth around the words. And for some reason, it seemed to intensify Raphael’s amusement. He patted my knee but pulled his hand away at my sharp intake of breath.

“What we need is to be immortal,” I said, clutching at my knee and realizing it was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. “If you need us to fight the Mazikin, why can’t you make us invincible? Or fight them yourself?”

His smile disappeared. “The Mazikin are not under the authority of the Judge, and haven’t been for thousands of years. I cannot interfere with them directly. I am bound by the Judge’s oath in this matter.”

“Wait, what? The Judge promised the
Mazikin
that you wouldn’t—”

“Only what you need, Lela,” he said with a tone of quiet warning.

I bit my lip and tried to figure out what I might
need
to know. “They’ve escaped before, haven’t they? Ana told me.”

Raphael settled himself on the floor. “They have.”

“And the human Guards stopped them.”

“They did.”

“So we can do this, right? We can win?”

“I can’t tell the future, Lela. That’s not one of my skills.”

I watched his face, looking for clues. “They’re stronger now, aren’t they?”

He nodded.

I swallowed back the metallic taste of fear. “So I’m in charge of preventing an evil demon scourge from killing who knows how many innocent people, and if I don’t do it soon, they’ll split up and become unstoppable.”

He smiled again, but it had a distinctly ghostly quality. “I’m glad you understand.”

“I could do this better if you could numb me up, you know?” I said, my voice breaking. “You said you wouldn’t ask where I hurt, but I’ll tell you anyway. Everywhere. Not just my knee or my head. I don’t want these feelings. It’s too much.”

He didn’t even have the grace to look apologetic. “That’s a different kind of battle wound entirely. I can’t erase that kind of pain, Lela. It wouldn’t be good for you anyway.”

I lay back on the couch. “Then you’d better patch me up so that I can get out there again.” Not that I was eager to go. What I wanted was the moment of peace Raphael’s healing provided. Just for a little while, I needed the world to go the fuck away.

“Now, that I can do,” he murmured, and sank me under the weight of dreamless sleep.

ELEVEN

WHEN I WOKE UP
on Monday, for once, I found myself grateful that I had to go to school. It had been a long weekend of fruitless patrols, broken up only by the hours I spent alone in my room, crying into my pillow so that Diane wouldn’t hear. Jim had decided to remain a Guard, and so far was following orders. So was Malachi. Perfectly, as I would expect. Coldly, which hurt more than I could say. Firefighters had discovered two bodies in the basement of that Mazikin nest, burned beyond recognition. Police were investigating. They suspected the house had been a drug den. I knew better, but we’d combed the area and come up empty, so now we were back at square one.

I needed the distraction desperately. And maybe the chance to grab a nap.

Then I remembered I had two classes with Malachi. At least Henry had agreed to drop him off at school in the mornings, so I didn’t have to ride in a car with him. I wasn’t sure the fragile stitches holding me together would hold if he were that close to me.

The early morning sun bounced off lampposts and windows and windshields, blinding me as I pulled into the school lot well before school was set to start. I stood outside my car, which was one of the few in the parking lot, wishing my head would stop pounding, wishing I hadn’t promised to meet—

Tegan pulled her little black BMW into the space beside mine and got out, holding two coffees. She offered one to me. “I don’t know how you like it, so it’s black.”

I cradled it in my hands, savoring the warmth in the cold morning air. “Thanks.”

“Want to go in or sit in my car?”

I didn’t really want to be in an enclosed space with her, but when I saw the gray sedan pull into the lot, Henry at the wheel and Malachi sitting next to him, I practically dove into her passenger seat.

“Okay,” she said as she settled herself in the driver’s seat. “How was the rest of your weekend?”

I took a sip of the coffee and let it sear my throat. “Fine. But you didn’t ask me here to talk about my weekend.”

She blinked. “You always cut right through the bullshit, huh?”

“I’ve never had time for it.” And I had no interest in preserving her feelings.

“Well, if that’s the way it is … the purple in your shirt matches the circles under your eyes,” Tegan commented.

“I guess you won’t bullshit me, either. I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”

“Because of Nadia?”

“No.” Missing Nadia was like a chronic ache inside me, especially at moments like this, because Tegan was trying to be friendly, but she was no substitute for the friend I’d lost. That wasn’t what was keeping me up at night, though.

Tegan’s gray-blue eyes landed on me hard. “Lela, are you okay? I mean, I thought you were, but then … what happened on Saturday?”

I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t been too wrecked to come up with a decent cover story. “I … the smell in that kitchen started to make me feel sick, so I went outside to get some air. I, um, got jumped. By a guy. I didn’t have my wallet. So he … beat me up and left me there.”

Tegan’s eyes grew huge and shiny, filled with righteous anger. “You got mugged? You texted me to get Malachi for you and didn’t even
mention
that?” Her little fist banged against her steering wheel, causing the horn to let out a high-pitched yip. “Was it one of those homeless people? Could you pick them out of a lineup?”

I rubbed at my temples, my head feeling like it was going to split open. “Slow down, Tegan. I don’t … it’s okay. Can we drop it? I’m fine, and I shouldn’t have been wandering around alone anyway. Serves me right.”

She shifted in her seat and tapped her long fingernails on the bottom edge of the steering wheel. “You—you aren’t involved in anything illegal, right?”

I shook my head but couldn’t look at her.

“You’re not taking drugs or something, are you?” she whispered.

“What? Are you crazy? Did Nadia tell you
anything
about me?”

She shrank back in her seat. “All right, I’m sorry.” Her face was super pale. She looked like she was about to faint. “Nadia did tell me you thought drugs were stupid and everything, but I thought maybe, you know, when she died … never mind.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I … went to her grave yesterday.”

I sank back in my seat. I hadn’t been since the funeral, but that would sound heartless to anyone who didn’t know what I’d gone through to make sure Nadia was all right.

“I hated you,” Tegan blurted, and then looked straight-up startled at the sound of her own voice. She cleared her throat. “I still hate you, a little.”