beast.”
“For justice,” Anderson corrected sharply. “He can’t be tried in a court of law. There is no way to make him accountable for his crimes. Unless we do it ourselves. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m not a freaking hit man!”
Anderson’s gaze was hot enough to burn, and the muscles in his jaw and throat stood out in stark relief. “I’m not asking you to kill him. I’m asking you to find him.”
Usually, Anderson looks mild mannered and relaxed. The kind of man you’d pass in the street without a second glance. Certainly not someone you’d be afraid of. But that’s just his human disguise, and sometimes when he’s with me, he lets the disguise slip. Like right now, when pinpricks of white light appeared in the center of his pupils.
I won’t say I wasn’t intimidated. I’d seen what Anderson could do, and though I liked to think of him as something of a friend, I knew he didn’t have some of the boundaries human beings do. I was pretty sure he would hurt me if he got mad enough. But I was not a murderer, and I wasn’t going to let him turn me into one.
I put my coffee cup down, as if freeing my hands to defend myself would really help. My mouth had gone dry with nerves, and I couldn’t bear to meet his eyes and see that glow. It was hard to feel like I was drawing a firm line in the sand while not meeting his eyes, but I hoped he’d hear the conviction in my words.
“You sound just like Konstantin,” I told him. “Remember? He asked me to hunt ‘fugitives’ for the Olympians and basically told me I shouldn’t feel bad about doing it because I wouldn’t be the one actually killing the people I found.” In truth, there’d been no asking involved. The Olympians were on a mission to destroy all mortal Descendants—the only people capable of killing Liberi, at least as far as they knew—and they thought having a descendant of Artemis on their payroll would make their mission a lot easier. I was pretty sure that under the supposedly kinder, gentler leadership of Cyrus, they still had the same goal in mind, and still would love to recruit me by hook or by crook.
“If I hunt someone down knowing that person is going to be killed, then I’m a murderer, whether I do the deed myself or not,” I argued. “I’m not a murderer.”
“You were willing to hunt Kerner down, and you were hoping I would kill him!”
Since the alternative had been to bury him alive for all eternity, yes, I had indeed hoped Anderson would kill him. But as a mercy, not as a punishment. I was pretty sure he was being willfully obtuse, but I restated my point anyway.
“I hunted Kerner because it was the only way to stop him from killing innocents. Not because I hated his guts and wanted revenge.”
“And you think Konstantin won’t kill innocents if he’s allowed to live?”
I understood why Anderson wanted me to do this. Really I did. I could even acknowledge that he had a point. Konstantin had raped, tortured, and killed countless innocents in the centuries he’d been alive, and there was no reason to believe he would mend his ways now. Anderson would probably want to kill him even if Konstantin hadn’t kidnapped Emma, Anderson’s now-estranged wife, and chained her at the bottom of a pond to drown and revive for almost ten years. But we’d both be doing it as revenge for what Konstantin had done to our loved ones, not for any great and noble cause, and that would make me a murderer in my own eyes.
“Whatever I do, I’m going to have to live with it for the rest of my life,” I said, and with an impressive effort of will managed to meet Anderson’s gaze once more. The glow in his eyes had widened, the anger on his face inhuman in its intensity, but I didn’t let myself look away. “Unless you’re planning to kill me for saying no to you, I’m likely to have a very, very long life. And a revenge killing is something I don’t want to have on my conscience.”
“You don’t think Steph deserves vengeance?” There was both contempt and surprise in his voice, along with the anger. Yes, there was a good reason I’d been avoiding this conversation.
“She wouldn’t want me to do this,” I answered. “She didn’t even want