Day 16

Everything was still the same. The couch with its usual pile of pillows and blankets. The kitchenette that was more of a work space than a cooking space scattered with pens and brushes and tins of paint with the occasional vodka bottle and coffee mug thrown in for good measure. What few books from his grandmother’s that hadn’t been sold. The mostly demolished cake from the night before still on the kitchen table.

          Jesus. It was hard to believe that was only the night before.

          Everything was still the same, but it looked different. He knew they were his things, his home, his life. But it felt like looking into a stranger’s world.

          His bones hummed until his skin felt like it would jump off just to get away from the feeling. He imagined he could claw it off with his fingers and stand there exposed muscle and nerve endings if he tried, but the effort seemed like more than he could manage at the moment.

          He was so. damn. tired. The kind of tired that went straight to the bottom of your soul and no amount of sleep could ever fix.

          There was blood on his shirt. His hands. He could feel it dried to his face and in his hair, but he wasn’t sure if it was his, or Troy’s, or both. A voice in his head insisted it was Remy’s, but Zev knew that couldn’t be true. That was far too long ago for Remy’s blood to still be on his hands.

          ‘You don’t look very cleaned up, Mr. Saint Cyr,’ Shain said.

          ‘Mhm.’ That had been why he’d come in here at all, hadn’t it? Wash off the blood and grit. Assault his raw skin and sore muscles with hot water. Change into something that didn’t look like it’d been dragged through a slaughterhouse and pretend for five seconds his life was still normal.

          ‘How’s Troy?’ he asked.

          ‘Sleeping. He grabbed some book from my shelf and curled up on the couch hugging it like a toy and he was out.’ Shain moved forward to stand beside him. ‘He’s almost cute when he’s asleep. Like a cat.’

          Zev closed his eyes and tried to ride out the vibration in his bones. ‘We can’t stay here, can we?’ It was a thought that had been rolling around in his mind since the conversation with Mr. Grey that morning.

          Shain shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s a place.’

          ‘What’s the point?’ Zev looked around the apartment again. He thought of his paintings in the studio-nee-bedroom. He liked his life. He liked being an artist. He liked being Prince of the Protégés. ‘This isn’t my life anymore.’ His chest sucked down the weight of that loss and welded it in his abdomen. He’d never been anywhere else. He’d never been anything else.

          ‘I thought the whole point was that things could go back to the way they were,’ Shain said. ‘That’s what you wanted.’

          ‘It was,’ Zev said. ‘But there’ll be others. They’ll come. Last night was just the first.’

          ‘What do you think Troy’s going to say?’

          ‘He knows.’ Like Zev, Troy wouldn’t have wanted to know. He would have told himself all along they could all just pick up their old lives where they left off. Like Zev, Troy would have known this path couldn’t be backtracked. ‘Is it hard?’

          Shain met his gaze for a moment before looking away. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you learn to… forget to miss what isn’t there.’

          ‘That works?’

          ‘Not really.’ Shain offered him a weak smile. ‘But it’s something.’

          ‘I know how a cathedral was built in 1175, and sixty-two ways to make the colour yellow. I know how to tie six different tie knots without looking at a mirror, and I can do a damn good rendition of a zombified werewolf, but I don’t know how to do anything else.’ He rubbed the palm of his hand with his thumb and watched the dried blood fall to the floor in flakes. ‘I don’t know how to be anywhere else.’

          ‘I guess… We figure out what we’re going to do about whoever else comes after us. You.’

          ‘Me,’ Zev confirmed. Mr. Grey had made that clear enough. Zev was the threat; the others were just collateral. The humming reached a pitch beyond feeling, but he still heard it. He understood what it was trying to tell him.

          ‘What do we do?’

          ‘We find them first.’