Sounded like she was advertising The Six Million Dollar Man.
“Why couldn’t he kill the Naye’i?” She frowned. “For that matter, why couldn’t you? Considering what you’ve told me about you and Jimmy, you’ve gotta be a dhampir, too, by now.”
“I am.” Megan knew me so well. “But dhampirs, as powerful as they are, aren’t quite powerful enough. They’re only part demon.”
“Ticky-tac,” she muttered. “You should have just nuked her.”
“Wouldn’t have worked. There’s usually one way to kill these things and one way only. For the Naye’i, I had to toss evil to the four winds.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Tore her into four pieces and sent them express air”—I flung my arms to the sky, releasing my fingers as if I were throwing something away—“to the farthest corners of the world.”
Silence settled between us. Finally Megan broke it. “I wish I could have seen that.”
“No, you don’t.”
I’d been a vampire at the time—mad with fury, lusting for the kill, bathed in the blood.
“If you didn’t sleep with a vampire then how did you become one?”
“Dhampirs can become vampires by sharing blood with other vampires.”
Jimmy’s daddy had made him a chip off the old block just a few months back.
“Ew.” Megan wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah.” I peered up at the blazingly blue sky, remembering when it had been dark, with a full moon shining down, as I became a monster for the sake of the world.
“Sanducci was okay with this?”
“Not really. He refused to cooperate. So I . . . seduced him.” He still hadn’t forgiven me. I wasn’t sure he ever would, could, or even should.
Jimmy had begged me not to become like him. He’d said it was damnation—for both of us. But that was a risk I’d been willing to take.
“Liz,” Megan said quietly, and I looked up. Her gaze was sympathetic. She’d always been able to hear what I was unable to say.
I’d been forced to choose between Jimmy’s “soul” and the lives of millions of people, which wasn’t really a choice at all. Jimmy had wound up broken inside. He could barely stand to look at me. I had to live with what I’d done, as well as the knowledge that if given a second chance, I’d do it all over again.
“You still love him,” she said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t bother to answer.
I hadn’t talked about Jimmy much, but Megan knew the truth. No matter what he did, no matter what I did, no matter how many others we might love, too, I’d feel the same way about Jimmy Sanducci until the day I died as I’d felt about him when I was seventeen. I couldn’t help myself.
Jimmy and I had shared similar childhoods, even before I’d come to Ruthie’s at twelve, straight from another foster home that didn’t want me. I’d also spent time on the streets, preferred it in fact to the parade of homes I’d been through. The streets might be rough, but they were honest.
Jimmy was the boss at Ruthie’s, and he didn’t much like having to move in with some of the other boys so I could have his bedroom. To welcome me, he’d left a grass snake between the sheets. I’d put the snake in a cage, named him James, then loosened a few of Sanducci’s teeth.
What followed was five years of living in the same house, pretending to loathe each other, while what we felt in truth was developing into something much different. Not long after the lust erupted, we fell in love. Jimmy would have done anything for me. It wasn’t until years later that I’d found out he had.
“Doesn’t matter.” I spread my hands. “Every time he sees me he remembers things he’d rather forget.”
“Which explains why you’re working with Luther instead of Sanducci these days.”
That actually wasn’t the reason. Jimmy and I had worked together after the Naye’i. What had separated us had been something else entirely.
“Someone’s gotta train the kid,” I said, and with Sawyer dead, that someone was me.
“Explain why you haven’t bloodsucked your way through Milwaukee and started on Chicago.”
Faith’s eyes had gotten heavy. She was nearly asleep in Megan’s lap.
“I have a control.” I tapped the dog collar. “Be-spelled. When this is in place, I’m me. The demon is contained.”
Megan nodded as if she heard tales of magical necklaces every day. “And the tattoo?”
I really wished my hair was longer. I was going to have to stop hacking at it with any sharp implement I could grab whenever it grew half an inch. At least let it spill past my shoulders and cover up the image of a phoenix inked onto the back of my neck.
“That’s a long story,” I said.
Megan checked her watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. Talk fast.”
“My mother—”
“Whoa! Thought she was dead.”
“She rose.” Then she’d gone around lifting others out of the grave, too. They’d been called revenants, and they’d all been eager to do her bidding.