having Dimitri ripped away from me, I knew how it felt to lose that kind of love, and I swore to myself that I'd do something to help her. But now wasn't the time. She and I need to reconnect first.
"You couldn't help it, though," I pointed out. "She was too strong with her compulsion-especially when she got you to drink and killed your defenses."
"Yeah, but not everyone knows that or will understand it."
"They'll forget," I said. "They always do."
I understood her angst over her reputation, but I doubted there would be any truly permanent damage-aside from Christian. Adrian and I had analyzed Avery's manipulation and figured things out once we'd paired it with Simon's comment about Lissa having an unfortunate accident. Avery had wanted to make Lissa look unstable in the event Avery somehow didn't have the strength to resurrect her. If Lissa actually died, no one would investigate much. After weeks of crazy, drunken behavior, her losing control and accidentally falling out of a window would be tragic but not completely out of the realm of possibility.
"Spirit's a pain in the ass," Lissa declared. "Everyone wants to take advantage of you-non-users like Victor and users like Avery. I swear, I'd go back on my medication if I wasn't paranoid now about protecting myself from other Avery-type people. Why'd she want to kill me and not Adrian?
Why am I always the target?"
I couldn't help a smile in spite of the grim topic. "Because she wanted you for a minion and him for a boyfriend. She probably wanted a guy who could help escalate her rise in society and couldn't risk killing him in a bonding attempt. Or who knows? Maybe she would have eventually tried him, too. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if she felt threatened by you and wanted to make sure she had the only other known female spirit user under her control. Face it, Liss. We could spend hours trying to figure out how Avery Lazar thinks and get nowhere."
"True, true." She slid off the bed and sat next to me on the floor. "But you know what? I feel like we could talk about anything for hours. You've been here ten minutes, and it's like... well, it's like you never left."
"Yeah," I agreed. Before he was a Strigoi, being with Dimitri had always felt natural and right. Being with Lissa also felt natural and right-though it was a different kind of rightness. In my grief over Dimitri, I'd nearly forgotten what I had with her. They were two sides of me.
In that uncanny way she had of guessing thoughts, Lissa said, "I meant what I said earlier. I'm sorry for what I said-about acting like I have some right to dictate your life. I don't. If you decide to stay or guard me, you do that by your choice and your kindness. I want to make sure you live and choose your own life."
"There's nothing 'kind' about it. I've always wanted to protect you. I still do." I sighed. "I just... I just had things to take care of. I had to get myself together-and I'm sorry I didn't handle it with you very well." There was a lot of apologizing going on, but I realized that was how it was with people you cared about. You forgave each other and moved on.
Lissa hesitated before asking her next question, but I'd known it was coming. "So... what happened? Did you... did you find him...?"
At first, I didn't think I wanted to talk about it, but then I realized that I needed to. And the thing was, a few different things had gone wrong with Lissa and me before. One had been that she'd taken me for granted. The other had been that I wouldn't tell her the truth-and then I'd resent her for it later. If we were going to patch up this friendship and forgive each other, we had to make sure we didn't repeat the past.
"I did find him," I said at last.
And I launched into the story, telling her everything that had happened to me: my travels, the Belikovs, the Alchemists, Oksana and Mark, the unpromised, and of course, Dimitri. Just as Lissa had joked earlier, we talked for hours. I poured out my heart to her, and she listened without judgment. Her face was compassionate the whole time, and when I reached the end, I was sobbing, all the love and rage and anguish I'd been holding onto since that night