“Yeah, he...didn’t look so great.” Wondering if the senator had been looking for me, I kept my gaze glued to the windows for any sign of a possibly demented fallen angel. Not like I’d be able to see him coming until it was too late, but whatever.
“If someone is a ghost, that means they haven’t moved on, right? And spirits are those who’ve crossed over.” Dez had surmised correctly.
“Yep.” I squeezed my knees with my icy fingers. “Can’t say I’m surprised that Fisher hasn’t moved on.”
“Probably because he’s afraid of where he’s going to go.”
“No doubt.”
Silence fell between us as Dez drove, the twinkling city lights giving way to stretches of darkness as we crossed the Potomac. The silence didn’t last long. “You hanging in there?” he asked.
I nodded.
“How are you healing?”
“Good,” I said, my fingers tightening around my knees as I stamped down the burst of irritation. Dez wasn’t just being nice. He was nice, like Zayne. I shouldn’t be annoyed with his concern. “It looks worse than it feels.”
“That’s a relief, because I’ve got to be honest with you—it looks painful.”
“It wasn’t very...fun in the beginning.” It actually had been Hell. Not just the torn skin healing or the shattered bones knitting together, but waking up and remembering that Zayne was really gone had been the worse part. I would gladly live through a thousand hours of my body healing over and over again to not experience the cold, heartbreaking reality of his death.
And there was a chance I’d have to go through that again.
I sucked in a sharp breath, loosening the grip on my knees.
“I know...I know Zayne meant a lot to you,” Dez said after a moment, and I squeezed my eyes shut. The motion caused the tender, still healing skin to pull. “I know you meant a lot to him. He meant a lot to all of us.” He inhaled a shaky breath, and it took everything in me not to tell him right then what was going on, but I only wanted to explain everything once. “He was...”
Zayne was everything.
Dez cleared his throat. “He was the best of us. I don’t think he ever realized that, and I know for sure he didn’t understand that all of us would’ve rallied behind him if he took over after his father. We didn’t care about what happened in the past. He may have been missing a part of his soul, but he—he had more soul than most of us.”
I looked over at him, wishing Zayne was here to hear that, but Dez would get the chance to tell him. I just had to...stab him in the heart with the Sword of Michael.
God.
Pulling my gaze away, I let out a ragged breath. “It bothered Zayne for a while—the whole not taking on the role as the clan leader thing—but he’d come to terms with it. He...he realized that who he was becoming didn’t line up with a lot of what other Wardens believed. He was okay with it. Really.”
“He told you this?”
“Yes.”
“He was talking about the ‘kill all demons on sight’ stance most Wardens have?” he guessed. “Not all of us are that way. I’m not. Neither is Nicolai.”
I’d already figured that, considering they had worked with Roth and Cayman in the past.
“But I get it,” Dez went on. “Especially after what went down with Layla. There was no going back after that.”
No, there wasn’t. Not when Zayne’s father and almost the entire clan had been ready to kill her after she’d accidentally taken a part of his soul. They’d raised her and should’ve known there had been no malicious intent behind her actions, just stupidity on both her side and Zayne’s.
The jealousy over Zayne and Layla’s previous relationship was long gone. So was the weird mixture of bitterness that surrounded the knowledge that it was supposed to have been me who’d been raised alongside Zayne.
None of that mattered now, and it annoyed me that I had wasted time on it.
“By the way,” Dez said. “You’re bleeding.”
“What?” Lifting my hand, I touched my chin. My fingers came away smudged. So, it was my blood. I wiped my fingers on my jeans. “It’s nothing.”
“Uh-huh,” he murmured.
Luckily, he didn’t speak after that, but the trip to the Warden compound seemed to take forever. When he finally pulled up in front of the massive house, I nearly launched myself out of the SUV. Dez was right behind me. I started forward.
And promptly tripped over the first step, having not seen it.
Catching myself, I sighed and then carefully walked forward. Dez reached around me, opening the door, and we stepped inside. It took a couple of moments for my eyes to adjust to the bright light of the foyer as I followed Dez toward Nicolai’s office. On the way we passed a few Wardens either off for the night or heading in. The wide berth they gave us told me they probably had learned the truth about me.