Unhallowed (Rath and Rune #1) - Jordan L. Hawk Page 0,59

thought he was human.”

Bonnie gave a dismissive wave. “What does it matter? What I want to know is, what have you been up to, Sebastian? Trouble came looking for you here and put my children in danger. I won’t have that.”

“I didn’t think they would come for me here.” Stupid, in retrospect. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell you everything I can. It’s…it has something to do with the library’s bookbinders. With Mother.”

Bonnie’s eyes widened. “I see.” She took a deep breath. “Where is Mr. Rune?”

“I don’t know.”

I’m sorry, he’d said. And left. Run.

“Probably he didn’t want to explain things to the police,” Pete said sagely. “And I’m sure the police are grateful for it.”

“I don’t think that was it at all.” Sebastian put his glasses back on. “I think he was afraid. Of us.”

Compassion replaced concern on Bonnie’s face. “I forgot he’s an outsider. Where would he have gone? Find him, Sebastian, and see if you can convince him to come back with you. I’d feel a great deal safer with him in the house. No offense, my love,” she added to Pete.

“I was taken by surprise,” Pete protested. “Don’t you worry, Bonnie-Bell. I’ll be up all night, keeping watch with a stout club. Anyone so much as sets foot on the property, they’ll have me to deal with.”

Their words floated past Sebastian. Ves had been so hard to read, alternating between stand-offish and…well, he had definitely been returning Sebastian’s kiss on the balcony last night before he pulled away.

“It…it’s not you. I just—I can’t.”

He’d been raised by cultists. Swore by the trees and gods, plural.

“I never knew my progenitor.”

Whatever had formed the paternal half of his heritage, it might be earthly, but it was definitely not human.

He must have spent every moment since running away from home in hiding. Concealing half of himself. Sebastian’s heart ached at the thought; he could barely imagine such isolation. How would it be to live like that, with no one knowing your true self?

And yet, Ves had exposed himself to save them. To save Sebastian for the third time, considering he’d intervened with the same two ruffians twice before, the first not so very far away…

Ah.

Sebastian started for the door. “I think I know where Vesper might be.” The memory of the horror on Ves’s face struck him forcefully. “Bonnie, if you’d be so kind to clean the bricks before I return with him, I’d appreciate it.”

Ves sat concealed in one of the old trees outside his boarding house, waiting for the last light to go out.

He couldn’t risk capture. No hue and cry had yet gone up after him, but that was surely just a matter of time. He had to gather his few possessions, and he didn’t dare be seen. His coat still lay in the Raths’ front yard, and the back of his shirt and vest were shredded where his tentacles had burst forth. If he encountered anyone else in the boarding house, they’d wonder what had happened to him. Ask questions he couldn’t afford to answer.

Assuming they didn’t just notice the dark knobs along either side of his spine, the inescapable evidence of his retracted tentacles.

Even now, he didn’t know what he’d have done differently. The same men from their other two encounters had found where Sebastian lived—maybe had known all along, if it was indeed Mortimer Waite behind it. They’d been armed, and hurting Sebastian, and threatening innocents, and what choice had Ves had, save to act as fast and brutally as he could?

He’d killed a man. And maybe the fellow had brought it on himself, threatening children, but he was still dead at Ves’s hand. Or, rather, tentacles.

The gorge rose in Ves’s throat, and he shut his eyes until the feeling passed. He’d been trained since childhood to commit wholesale slaughter, but he’d never killed a man before. His victims had all been straw dummies, or rough shapes of wood, to simulate ripping off legs and arms and heads. He’d knocked weapons out of his grandfather’s hand, hefted Noct into the air, flung small boulders at targets across fields, but he never hurt anyone while doing it.

But tonight, that destructive power had been unleashed, even if only for a single minute, maybe two. Just that brief time was long enough to leave blood on the Rath hearth.

He wished he’d never come here. Except if he hadn’t, there would probably still be blood on the floor at the Rath residence, only it would have belonged to the Rath family