was the only way Hazard could describe the flush in his cheeks, the glow in his eyes, the intensity of his expression. Nothing had really changed about Mitchell. He had the same watery blue gaze, the same fiery hair. But now he looked fully awake and alert, as though every other time Hazard had seen him, he had been half asleep. The gun, pointed at Hazard’s chest now, was a massive semi-automatic. This close, Mitchell wouldn’t have to worry about aiming; if he hit Hazard anywhere, a bullet that big would take care of the rest.
“Are you gay?” Hazard said.
“It’s the twenty-first century, Emery. Get with the times. I’m me. That’s all I have to be.”
“So this wasn’t a hate crime. You’re not on a mission to get rid of queers and homos?”
Mitchell laughed and shook his head.
“Why Rory and Phil?”
“Because I hit on you once at the Pretty Pretty, and you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. You treated me like a kid. You wouldn’t look at me. You wouldn’t talk to me. I was nice to you, I flirted with you. And you stared straight through me. Then I saw you with John-Henry. I was curious. I started to watch more. And after I had hired you to investigate that murder, I followed you. Just sometimes. One night, I followed you to the sheriff’s house. I heard you talking to Rory outside, telling him . . . telling him what it felt like to be in love.” Mitchell shrugged. “What did you say? It’s like being tied to someone. Something like that. Do you still feel that way?”
Hazard touched the cut on his cheek; it stung, and he dropped his fingers. “I came here for John, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“The Orpheus thing, it was just a gag? You just wanted to jerk our strings, and the bees were creepy as fuck. Is that it?”
Something small and furry scurried at the edge of Hazard’s vision; Mitchell followed the rat, or whatever it was, with his eyes. A moment later, the rat vanished through a hole in the wall, and something clanged.
“Old pipes,” Hazard said when Mitchell looked at him. “It’s going to cost you a fucking fortune to fix up your little nightmare den.”
“No,” Mitchell said slowly. “The Orpheus thing wasn’t a gag. It was to prove a point. And I think I’ve proved it; as you said, you came here for John-Henry. But you only get to do it once, Emery. You only get to walk into death once for someone you love and come out alive.”
Behind Mitchell, something moved again in the darkness. Hazard struggled to keep his gaze on Mitchell, struggled not to look.
“I should have known,” Hazard said, “when you disappeared. I should have known it was you. No home security system is perfect, but we’d managed to rig up something pretty fucking good. At first, I was convinced it was one of our friends, someone you trusted enough to let inside. Then I was sure the Keeper was . . . was brilliant. Smarter than anyone I could imagine, with resources beyond anything I had encountered. Those were the only two options that seemed possible. That was the whole point of making me set up the security at your apartment, right? To get in my head, screw with my thinking? The Keeper had been ahead of me this whole time: hiding his trail with the bees, planting the recording equipment in my office, luring you to that fake meeting a few months ago, leaving that bee on my desk. And then, not only did he manage to abduct you from behind several layers of security, but he even managed to erase the security camera footage from an encrypted server. He could be everywhere at once: he got Nico and Dulac on the same morning. I’d never encountered anyone like this. Finding Dulac at Rasmussen’s house only postponed the questions.” Hazard smiled grimly, feeling the blood still running hot past the corner of his mouth. “How, how, how. I should have known none of it was real. Just tricks. Sleight of hand. Misdirection.”
Mitchell nodded. “But good, right?”
“Very good.”
“Why did Rasmussen help you?”
“She worked for a while at one of the reform schools I spent some time at. I had a few incriminating pictures. Serves her right; she kept telling me she was trying to make me feel better. She kept saying it while she put her hand down my pants.”