My nose wrinkled. “Do you need his permission?”
“I’m … not really sure. But this was important, so I came.”
I felt a lecture coming on. “Rick—” Ben squeezed my arm. A reminder that some tact might be in order. “I understand that Columban showed you something, or offered you something that you’ve been looking for, that you need. If it’ll make you happy—I can’t ask you to walk away from that.”
He said, “If I had never left Spain, if I had been made a vampire in Europe, where Saint Lazarus of the Shadows has been established for centuries, I might have joined them from the start. My life would have been very different. Not better or worse, just different. As it was, in Mexico, cut off fro
m the European vampires … how was I to know?”
“You don’t need a religious order to be a crusader—”
“My religion is what’s guided me all this time. It’s the thing that made me believe I could do good, be good, no matter what demons might take hold of me.”
“But do you need someone with rank and title telling you that?”
“Kitty, when I leave Denver, I’ll tell you. I promise.” He turned and walked away.
I watched him for a long time, until Ben squeezed my shoulder and brought me back to myself.
“He won’t do it,” Ben said. “Not really. We both know how much he likes Denver.”
When I spoke, my voice cracked with stifled tears. “He didn’t say if. He said when.”
Chapter 17
BEN AND I sat with Becky until after midnight while she shifted back. Her fur thinned, vanished; her limbs stretched, and contracted. The metamorphosis was painful to watch, in that it called up a throbbing in my own limbs, a memory of my own episodes of waking up, aching, piecing together how I had arrived at this new place. I thought sometimes that this was why we slept through our shifting back to human—feeling our bodies break and reform once during the Change was plenty. We couldn’t take any more than that.
She slept for another hour, appearing vulnerable, which I knew she wasn’t. But we watched over her, Becky’s head on my lap, my head on Ben’s, as I napped for a few minutes. Becky started awake in a heartbeat, pushing herself up, alert in an instant. The move sent all our hearts racing in communal panic.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I murmured, hands on her shoulders, hoping to transmit calm. “He’s gone, everything’s fine.”
Groaning, she covered her face with her hands. “I feel like crap.”
“You got a little beat up,” I said. Her wounds had healed; the cuts appeared as raised pink scars that would vanish by dawn.
“I suppose that went well, considering.”
“I kind of hoped he’d just walk away,” I said.
“No. He thought he was right. Where’d he go?”
“He ran. Shaun and the others are tracking him.”
She nodded and pursed her lips.
Ben looked across the clearing. “You two ready to get out of here?”
We were.
* * *
WE’D GOTTEN Becky—wrapped in Ben’s ubiquitous coat, since her clothes were a shredded mess—safely back to her apartment and had just arrived back at the condo when I got a call from Shaun. The sky was growing pale, the murky gray of predawn, when I couldn’t tell if the day was going to be overcast, sunny, bright, or dim. My mind felt equally muzzy, as if I couldn’t see my next step clearly. What day was it again?
We waited in the car for Shaun to explain. “We tracked down Darren. He’s asleep. His wolf bedded down in a park in Golden.” Then he wasn’t planning on leaving town. If he had been, he’d have just kept running, or stayed in the hills and circled back to his car. “Can you show me where he is?”
“Yeah. You sure that’s such a great idea?”
“He’s sticking around because he wants to talk.”