Biting Cold - By Chloe Neill Page 0,68
we?”
“That’s not important,” he said. “The more important question is why we’re here.”
“Because you’re a vindictive son of a bitch?”
Tate laughed and walked into the room. He wore dark pants and a T-shirt. His wings had disappeared, but his T-shirt was mottled with blood. I guessed Jonah had gotten in a few shots.
He chuckled and moved closer. It was disturbing to watch him move. So handsome…and so deadly. I looked him over, scanning his face and body for any detail that would help me differentiate between the two of them. But I saw nothing.
“I prefer messenger of justice, thank you.”
I guessed the librarian had been right. “Prefer it all you want. Playing judge, jury, and executioner doesn’t make you just. It makes you arrogant.”
“I’m not the arrogant one, Sentinel of Cadogan House.”
“You’re a fallen angel, aren’t you? A Dark One? That’s arrogance by definition. You thought you knew better than everyone else.”
“I know right from wrong.”
“Is this right? Punishing me because I tried to help save four police officers? Putting me in this room, where I’ll burn to ashes in a couple of hours?”
“Those men were corrupt,” he said. “Their souls were corrupt.”
“Those men have families. They have wives and children.”
“They hurt others. They deserved punishing,” he insisted.
“That’s not your call to make.”
He stilled, and it was almost scarier than arguing with him, like I was staring back at a furious man suddenly frozen in marble.
“Those who say we cannot tell right from wrong have no courage. They have no will to make the decisions that must be made. Justice should be meted out by those who have the willpower to act, the stomach for punishment. No one forced those men to their actions. They chose their own paths. They should bear the burden of the consequences.”
“They would have. That’s why they’d been imprisoned.”
“And they were released. The human justice system has no backbone.”
“You don’t get to make that decision. Isn’t that what got you in trouble millennia ago?”
My hands began to shake with exhaustion, my body rebelling against the fact that I was awake. I squeezed them into fists and forced myself to concentrate.
“You are weak creatures with no stomach for justice.”
“What you call justice, we call war. Destruction. Havoc.” I swallowed down a scream of pain. Ethan was probably frantic, but Jonah would have seen me disappear. They’d have to work to find me, but they would. God willing, they would.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked.
“To make an example of you.”
“For what?”
“You stopped me from completing my work, just as the scarlet witch tried to do. You asked for this, remember?”
Paige must have been the scarlet witch. “You burned her house down because she tried to stop you?”
“Justice does not veer for cowards.”
“And killing people doesn’t make you brave. It just makes you a killer.”
“I can see that you’re regretting your decision to stand in for the corrupt cops. You’ll have a little while yet to regret that decision, won’t you?”
He pointed at the line of sunlight, which had shifted a few more degrees. Soon my bit of shadow would shrink to nothing, and I would be completely exposed to sunlight.
“I’ll admit,” he said, surveying the room, “this is my first time using this particular mechanism. A single slice with a sword wouldn’t quite have the same effect on you, would it? You’d too easily survive that.”
For the first time, I actually regretted having fast healing powers. But I wasn’t going to let Tate get the emotional upper hand.
“You’ve already lost once today,” I said. “We stopped you. They’ll find me, and you’ll lose again.”
But with each second that passed, it seemed more and more unlikely that they’d find me in time. The press conference had taken place in the early evening. An entire night had come and gone, and the sun had risen again. No one had found me yet. And now the sun was up, and neither Jonah nor Ethan could look for me.
Soon I’d be out of time.
Tate pulled something from his pocket, then held it up. It was shiny and reflected the light, and I looked away again, blinking back the glare.
“You still have my Cadogan medal,” I said. “That’s not news.”
“It is, actually.” I heard the clink of the chain and assumed he’d tucked it away again. No point in waving it in my face if I wasn’t going to look.
“I find it interestingly symbolic. A girl, a graduate student, changed into a vampire one night against her will. Reborn into