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.’
