As Lie the Dead

about to experience the worst agony of my life and would have to see Wyatt break as I lay dying.

A moment in time I both treasured and regretted.

“Evy, I’m sorry.”

I blinked. “For what?”

“For whatever I said that made you look so sad.”

“Wyatt, don’t.” I sat next to him, letting the squishy mattress sink under my weight. I was weary of the constant battle between my emotions and my memories. Between the things I wanted and the things lodged firmly in my subconscious that kept me from them. I was sick to death of fighting with myself.

“I shouldn’t have joked about that night,” he said.

“I think you’ve earned the right to be honest with me.”

He turned his hand palm up. I threaded my fingers around his and held tight. “And I think you have, too,” he said.

“This isn’t me being honest?”

Shifting to face me more directly, he reached for my other hand and I let him take it. “Evy, I think if you were being truly honest right now, you’d be beating me into a bloody pulp. Or screaming obscenities out of sheer frustration. Maybe both.”

I searched his face for hints of teasing. A glimmer of self-deprecation that belied the honesty I sensed in his words. I found none. Why the hell did I think I could run around and prevent a citywide Dreg meltdown when I couldn’t even sort out my own feelings? Or my relationship with my … what? I couldn’t even put a label on what Wyatt was to me. More than a boyfriend, less than a lover. A best friend I’d die for in a second, and someone I’d rather punch in the face than be gut-wrenchingly honest with. The confusing dichotomy had me tied in knots.

Four years of professional give-and-take between Hunter and Handler had been complicated by one moment of weakness on my old self’s part—the culmination of immediate grief impacted by two months of behavioral changes and undefined tension between us. Add to it the physical attraction to Wyatt from a woman who’d been so lonely and depressed that she’d given up and killed herself rather than deal with life. Season it all with the fact that every wound I’d ever inflicted on a Dreg—deserving or not—had been paid back in spades by a goblin Queen and her horny henchman. Then roll it all up in my own bruised, orphaned psyche, and I was a psychiatrist’s wet dream.

“I don’t blame you” was poised on the tip of my tongue. But if I was being honest, I did blame him. Not for anything that had led up to my death but for everything that had happened since. For waking up alone and frozen on a morgue table, for dragging Alex Forrester into my life and getting him killed, for the battle at Olsmill that left six Hunters dead. And especially for the goddamned quiver I felt in my belly when he smiled at me; the way just holding his hand calmed me down, and the constant, warm memory of his kisses. All things I wanted to feel over and over again.

I’d been running around in a constant state of agitation ever since my resurrection, solving one problem after another. The closest Wyatt and I had come to figuring us out was four days ago in First Break. Surrounded by the peace and serenity of the Fair Ones and sure of our protection from everything hunting us, we’d finally been honest with each other. Or as honest as we’d been able when I was still only borrowing Chalice and I was convinced one or both of us would be dead in a day.

But now? We’d both survived that battle, only to be thrust headlong into a new fight—one that had been boiling beneath the surface for longer than we’d anticipated, with no downtime to think about us. Waiting for Phin’s phone call, we had time. And now that I had it, I wanted to do anything except think about us. Or me. All I wanted to think about was the next mission.

It was a hell of a lot easier to handle.

“I don’t want to beat you up, Wyatt,” I said, forcing a smile. “You’re less useful when you’re bleeding and unconscious.”

His eyes narrowed. “Will you be serious, please?”

“I am being serious!” I launched off the bed and stalked to the other side of the room, rounding to face him when I reached the door. “Getting pissed at you doesn’t help. Hell, getting pissed at me doesn’t even help, and quite frankly? The only fucking person I want to be pissed at right now is this Call asshole, because he’s the one creating all our problems.”

“Call isn’t the one affecting us, Evy.”

“Oh no? Without the Park Place tangent he led me on, I probably would have found the information I needed in time to save Rufus from the Assembly, and maybe even have had time for a daylong nap that didn’t come as a result of two broken legs and chemical inhalation.”

“Are you being intentionally dense?”

“Excuse me?” I took three steps toward him, hands balled by my sides, fuming. He stood up, shoulders back, fists loose, anticipating an assault and making no move to protect himself from it. “What the fuck—?”

“I’m talking about us,” he snapped.

No, no, no. We are not talking about us.

He continued. “You and me, Evy, not you and me and anyone else. I love you. I’ve made no bones about that, because it is what it is. I also know you have feelings for me, and I know why those feelings scare you.”

Heat flared in my cheeks. “Oh, really? You know exactly why my feelings for you scare me?”

“I was there at the end.” His voice quieted, was almost reverent.

“It’s more than what Kelsa did to me, Wyatt. I think if it were only that, I could compartmentalize it as just more Dreg-on-human violence and move on. As sick and disgusting as it was, and as … brutal, it was just one more way for the goblin bitch to tear me down and prove she was in charge. It was part of her job to keep me and kill me.”

Wyatt had paled a bit during my monologue. He’d twisted his mouth into a curious grimace, as though unsure what to make of my admission. Hell, I was a little unsure what to make of it. I would forever carry the memory of how I’d died, chained to a mattress, taken piece by piece. But that experience had been altered the morning I’d fully inhabited Chalice’s body. Our body.

My body. A body that had experienced things I hadn’t and recalled those sensations. Sometimes vividly, as I’d felt upon first reentering the apartment; other times, it was just a shadow of feeling. My own memories—of my childhood, of working for the Triads, my friendships with Jesse and Ash, every Dreg I’d ever killed—were becoming gray. Less distinct. They lacked sensation—the touch my old body, long gone and disposed of, had imprinted on itself. Just as Chalice’s life was imprinted on me.

I was glad to lose the pain of my death. I was also terrified of the loss and what it meant.

“If not that, then what is it?” he asked softly. His fingertips twitched, not quite trembling. “When you froze up in First Break, I thought I understood why. Now you’re saying … what, Evy?”

“No, I’m pretty sure in First Break, it was because of the goblins.” More than pretty sure. At the time, the memories were fresh and crystal clear, restored by the magic of a vampire memory ritual. I’d relived the brutality in Technicolor detail less than twelve hours prior to our attempt at sex. I’d only been borrowing Chalice at the time.

He blanched, struggling to understand my cryptic-speak. “Then what? Tell me.”

Something in his pleading tone made me snap. I don’t know what did it, only that I briefly saw red. Fury heated my skin and soured my stomach, barely tempered by the icy grip of fear. My fingernails dug into my palms.

“You really want to know why you scare me, Wyatt?” I asked, voice strange to my own ears. Cold. “You really want to hear why I regret sleeping with you two weeks ago, when I knew I shouldn’t have, and why the idea of admitting my new feelings for you drives me to irrational fear? Tell me you want to know.”

He didn’t reply, and I wanted him to. Hesitation meant he wasn’t sure. “Yes” meant exposing personal bullshit. “No” was easier. If he said no, I’d clam up, swallow the truth, and move on with the other shit we had to deal with. As the silence drew out, the tension became a tangible thing, wrapping cold, icy fingers around my heart and squeezing tight.

He doesn’t want to know. He likes the fantasy warrior woman who kills bad things and doesn’t have a past deeper than four years. The woman who needs him to save her from the terrible memories of torture and death—he wants her. The one he fell in love with, not the amalgamation of two people that you’ve become. He doesn’t—