Ben the better.
Footsteps moved down the hall and stopped in front of the cell. “I assume since the door is hanging open and you two are in there that everything has been resolved?” Ben asked, bitterness tainting his words. “Are you okay, my lord?”
She snorted and Thomas squeezed her hip in warning. This “my lord” crap really had to stop. Uppity vamps and dark fae.
“Thanks to Juliana, I will be fine,” Thomas answered and his chest vibrated against her cheek.
“She’s good at that. How is she?” Jeremiah sounded concerned but not overly so. He apparently realized that Thomas would not be this calm if something were seriously wrong with her.
“Fine. Exhausted. I need to take her home.” If Thomas wanted to get her out of there, she wasn’t about to argue. She could be chewed out by Ben later.
“There’s a lot of blood out here,” Jeremiah pointed out.
“My fault,” Michael said. “I spilled a bag in my rush to get to Thomas.”
“Hmm.” She couldn’t tell if that was Ben or Jeremiah, but she was betting on the latter. Ben was probably too focused on her to worry about anything else.
“She’s not leaving with you until I’ve had a chance to talk to her.” Juliana knew he wanted to make sure they didn’t collaborate on their story.
“There are cameras in the hallway. Surely they showed you everything you needed to know.” She was glad the anger in Thomas’s voice wasn’t directed at her. She was also thankful her smile wasn’t visible.
“It was...destroyed. We caught nothing since shortly after Nathaniel left. And there are none in this cell or your bar.” Actually there were several cameras in the Den but she wasn’t about to enlighten him if Thomas wasn’t.
“Your lack of surveillance is your problem, not ours.”
She understood that Thomas was only trying to protect her and she appreciated the gesture, but she had a job to do. She rolled her head to the side so she could see her boss. “Ten minutes, Ben. You get ten minutes and then I’m going home.”
He studied her for a minute, his eyes flickering between her and Thomas. “Fifteen and you do your own reports.”
“Fine. Let’s get it over with.”
Juliana started to stand and Thomas stopped her. “Wait,” he said. “I need a moment with her before you interrogate her.”
“It’s not an interrogation, it’s a debriefing and the whole point of talking to her now is to get to her before you do,” Ben argued.
“I have to heal her and you are not going to watch.” Thomas’s voice was glacial. “You will go down the hallway, out of sight but within hearing distance if you must. I am not asking.”
Ben hesitated for a moment, his jaw tight, and then he nodded once and led everyone down the hall.
“You don’t need to do this, Thomas,” she told him as soon as they were gone. “You must still be weak.”
He laid a hand along the side of her face and looked into her eyes. “You were injured because of me. I will do what I can to make it right.”
She had a feeling he wasn’t just talking about recent events. It wasn’t his job to fix her, but she wasn’t sure how to convince him of that. Some of what she was thinking must have shown on her face.
He lowered his voice so only she could hear. “You are my responsibility,
A tear slid down her cheek and he wiped it away with his thumb. “We have much to discuss, but now is not the time.” He moved the hand from her face and bit into his wrist. He pressed the wound to her mouth and she held onto his arm while she drank from it. As soon as she felt the familiar tingle that told her it was working, she stopped.
“I need to go,” she told him after a moment. He nodded and didn’t stop her when she stood. She felt the heat of his eyes on her until she joined Ben out of sight of the cell.
He gestured for her to follow and led her out the door and around the corner. As she trailed after him through the halls, she thought about the revelation her father had made. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that she wasn’t limited in lives like a cat or terrified that any time she came close, her father might not reach her in time to save her. She was going to have to start being more concerned with her wellbeing. After years of thinking otherwise, it was a blow to discover she was only mortal. It was really going to hamper the way she did her job.
She followed Ben into a small room. He could call this a debriefing all he wanted, but he had taken her to one of the interrogation rooms. She took a seat with her back to the mirror and watched while he shut the door and took the seat across from her.
“What were you thinking?” His voice was low, but the fury in it was unmistakable.
“About what precisely?”
“Well, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? How about your decision to keep the information that Thomas Kendrick was in fact demon-ridden to yourself until after you went to his house? Or your subsequent decisions to pursue him with no backup? Pick one.”
No matter what answer she gave him, it wasn’t going to be good enough. He was angry. At her and at the Council that kept him from doing his job.
When she said nothing, he continued. “You deliberately disobeyed a direct order to terminate the vampire Thomas Kendrick. Not only did you disobey that order, you got the Council to aid you in your insubordination.”
“There was no reason to kill him. I saved him. Besides, if I had followed your orders, the demon would have just jumped to another host.” She hated having to explain herself to him. “It’s called using my brain instead of a cursed policy manual.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched as he clasped his hands together on the table. “And when you arrived at the Den and found him actively torturing someone, why didn’t you neutralize the threat?”
“Again, what was to keep the demon from jumping? Or worse, slaughtering everyone because I opened fire from the door?”
“The same way you kept it from jumping downstairs, I assume.”
She couldn’t tell him about the spell or her father. “We had the cell downstairs. We needed the demon contained to do what we did.”
“I will ask you again: when you saw the demon in control of Thomas Kendrick torturing others, why did you not follow protocol and destroy the host in an attempt to be rid of it?”
She was pretty sure she’d already answered that question. “You ever face a first-level demon, Ben? No, of course you haven’t. None of us had before this. I did the best I could with the knowledge I possessed. You know, like watching the cursed thing walk off in a corpse. What was to stop it from doing it again?”
“The fact that your sword is specifically enchanted against demons, perhaps?”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. They weren’t going to come to an agreement on this so there was no point arguing with him.
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you allowed your feelings for Kendrick to cloud your judgment. You allowed it to interfere with your job.”
“Bullshit.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to rein in her temper before speaking again. “The demon wasn’t rampaging or irrational. When it saw I was there, it stopped what it was doing and turned its attention to me.”
“Then why do we have a dead vampire?”
