Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Fourteen

We were all on our feet then, waiting for the match to light the odorless carbon monoxide in the air.

And the worst part was how everyone looked to me and Toivo. Even Jason and Elliot looked to us, and they were the two people I relied on to make smart decisions.

I remembered what Jason had told me the night after the arrest warrants had come.

"Because I might not be able to take on all five alone, but a particular three of us together could be."

Jason ended the call. My lips tightened, but I forced out the words, "This isn't a decision I should make. I already made the one that landed me in the hospital."

Jason was the first to turn on me. "You did what you had to do."

"No," Carmi said, "there's no reasoning in the world that justifies something like that."

Elliot lifted his hand to stop any fights before they started. "Whether or not it was, this isn't the time for that. There's no room for this conversation right now."

Carmi stomped a step forward, short swords shaking in his hands. "How are the two conversations really any different?"

Yuuhi looked to me. His eyes surveyed me as if he was trying to remember me, as if I was suddenly someone other than the girl I had always been.

His lips came together. He touched my face. "What do you want to do?"

The words stopped me. I must have wasted half our remaining time simply remembering how to work my voice. "I want to do what gives us all the best chance."

"I do too." He tried on his smile. The corners of his mouth twitched with it. "I want to be beside you when you fight."

The breath left my lungs.

I had expected him to react the way Carmi and Toivo had, finding the distance to put between us, blaming me or blaming themselves, but stopping short of finding answers.

Or forgiveness.

Yuuhi could still surprise me. He was the man I was always sure I had figured out, and then he found ways to surprise me. I smiled for him, and then switched to Jason. "What you said Friday night, you're right."

Jason's eyebrows lifted. "Of course I was." He switched to Toivo. "Can you use that?"

Toivo's bandaged hand tightened at first around the scythe. "No. But I'm about to learn." He lifted his other wrist to his mouth and sank his teeth into the bandages, tearing his palm free so that I caught a glimpse of the Sanskrit torched into his palm. Ave watched, and she didn't miss the reddened flesh, either. One of her hands slid onto his back. His muscles eased up ever so slightly, but the tremble in his fingers didn't.

Jason tossed the phone to the floor. "Listen. They're going to divide and conquer. If you're about to die, throw down your weapons, because unless you're one of us four lucky vampires, you're not the target."

How true was that really?

Everyone was the target, because, as Cassius said, the goal was to break everyone.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. My head swung as a man formed, his chest broad and his shirt taken from the back of Abraham Lincoln. "I do apologize," in the lack of light, he was only a towering silhouette with long hair tied over his shoulder and dangling against his chest, "but your minute's well over."