Page 10 of Brought to Light
Well, that helped us not at all. I didn’t reply. What was the point?
Linden seemed subdued, walking along beside but half a step behind me with his head down. His admission that we might not get out at all and his inability to read the symbols had apparently left him in a brooding funk, and I was too annoyed to bother trying to snap him out of it.
Anyway, he hadn’t been exactly helpful when he’d bothered to talk so far, so there was that.
We’d gone about another two miles, I estimated, when he spoke up abruptly. “Were you going to kill me?”
Telling him that putting that question in the past tense was a little optimistic felt like too much information. “Why do you ask?”
A pause. Nothing but the faint taps of our feet on stone, and a distant dripping. I’d started to get thirsty, and the dripping irritated me twice as much because of it. The blue light of the flashlight illuminated about ten feet in front of us, and otherwise there was nothing in the world, it felt like. Fuck, but I missed Google Maps.
“You came to the shop. And then you were right there again, like you were looking for me. You’re armed. Someone else who followed me and was armed was trying to kill me. I guess it feels like too much of a coincidence. But you liked the hot chocolate, so I wasn’t sure.”
Say what now? I glanced over my shoulder and found him chewing thoughtfully on his plump lower lip again, as if he didn’t know what that did to everyone around him. The fact that he wasn’t human actually made me feel better about my general mental health. He was unnaturally pretty, with the white-blond silky hair and the face and the lips and the every-graceful-thing else, and at least I knew my reaction to him wasn’t me. It was him.
On the other hand, he seemed to be as mentally weird as he was physically out of the ordinary, and here I was dependent on what little information relating to our survival I could scrape out of his brain. That depressed me even more than the endless tunnels.
“The hot chocolate.” I was almost afraid to make it a question. I might get an answer.
“My mother’s a cook,” he said. “I’ve inherited some of her magic. When I prepare something for someone to eat or drink, their reaction to it tells me how they feel about me. You liked the hot chocolate. I thought that meant you didn’t intend to hurt me. But now I’m not so sure.”
“I haven’t killed you, have I?” It came out a lot sharper than I’d wanted it to.That’s guilt, Callum, you asshole.You left off the word “yet.”I told the voice in the back of my mind to shut up. I wasn’t above shooting it too.
“You would have by the creek. You had the gun pointed at me. I wasn’t any danger to you, so the only other reason would be that you meant to shoot me with it just because.”
That stung. Justbecause? Hell no! “I’m not a psychopath or a serial killer or something,” I insisted, even though by most people’s definitions, I totally was. “I don’t kill for fun.” Almost ever. Shit. “I always have a good reason.”
“Humans lie so much,” Linden said softly. As if he wasn’t even speaking to me, just making an observation for himself alone.
“Then I guess I’m only human. I have my reasons,” I snapped, and walked a little faster. We still hadn’t passed anything different. Just more stone, more damp patches, more mildewy dust.
Linden took a couple of quick steps to catch up to me and peered into my face. “Reasons. But not good ones after all?”
That hit a little too close to home, and I hated being on the defensive. I knocked it back to him. “Like you haven’t been lying this whole time.”
He smiled, and even out of the corner of my eye it was devastating, like it’d been in the coffee shop. Like the sun coming out of the clouds. “I haven’t lied to you once.”
“Like fuck you haven’t,” I shot back. But then he didn’t answer, just hummed quietly, and I ran back through all of the things he’d said to me, looking for something I could throw in his face.
And I could think of a few things that implied something different, or skirted the boundaries of the truth, but if he’d been honest about all of the weird shit I was experiencing—and I sure as hell didn’t have any better explanations—then I really couldn’t think of anything.
“Okay. Maybe you haven’t lied,” I admitted with very poor grace. “But you’ve omitted a whole hell of a lot. I wasn’t asking more questions because there didn’t seem to be any point, but maybe if you’re in a more forthcoming mood you could tell me why you don’t think we’re getting out of here.”
“I’ll answer you if you answer me. Were you going to kill me? And what’s your name?”
A strange shiver went through me as he asked about my name, like the question had a lot more riding on it than something you’d give out casually to the guy who took your sandwich order. He’d been focused on the other hitman’s name. And now mine. Except that he’d told me his own readily enough…and he didn’t lie, but he didn’t tell the whole truth, either.
“Is Linden your real name?” A faint echo of something from my childhood flitted through my head, a fairy tale or something. “Your true name?”
Linden flinched, subtly but noticeably. Gotcha.
“I’m called Linden,” he said carefully.
“So no, in other words.” And why did that piss me off so bad, enough that I felt pressure in my chest? Names didn’t have any particular power behind them.
Unless they did, of course.
“Who calls you Linden?”
