The chill in Rahil’s blood deepened. Why would a vampire want to know that? An unwarranted thought passed through his head: that this vampire was here now to tell him she’d been the one to kill Matt. That she hadn’t meant to.
That this was all just a misunderstanding.
“Do you want something?” Rahil managed, the words grating against his throat.
The vampire before himflinched. She tucked her arms across her chest, like she was trying to put up a shield, and her gaze wouldn’t quite meet his. “Matthew always said you were one of the rare good ones—someone who kept to their ethics and the law regardless of the circumstances. That if all vampires were like you, maybe we could live in peace.”
Rahil felt the burn of the tears before the emotion hit, jagged and aching in the center of his chest. Such a backhanded compliment, a complete misunderstanding of what drove this alleged abandonment of ethics in some vampires, despite all the nuance and compassion Rahil and his wife had tried to instill in their son growing up. He didn’t have room for this, not after everything that he’d already delved into today. With a short intake of breath, he wiped back the tears and tried not to feel it all at once.
His son had loved him. Despite the depths of Matt’s corruption and cruelty, somewhere deep down, he had loved Rahil—had let that love convince him that therecouldbe goodness in vampires. And it still hadn’t been enough.
But then he’d reached out, and Rahil hadn’t reached back, andthathadn’t been enough. If Jonah had been there, or even Shefali, they would have known what to do to help Matt, but Rahil had sat in his decrepit house and let his son dig his own grave.
“I can go,” the vampire muttered, taking a step back, towards the sun. She shook so hard it looked like she might not make it.
“Do you need something?” Rahil asked, softer this time. He reached out a hand. “Of course you do, look at you. Come in. Please. Come in.”
Now she looked like the one about to cry. She moved slowly—hesitantly—and Rahil wondered how her life had been since she’d turned, for her to still be so skittish even around other vampires. She didn’t even seem to notice the desperate state of the house, her flighty gaze going immediately to the windows and doorways. She jerked at the sound of Avery cackling from upstairs. Her fangs slipped out a little, and he could see her fighting to push them back in.
“Come; I have something that will help.” Rahil didn’t give her a choice, ushering her past the stairway and away from the distant humans, until they reached the kitchen. “The freezing ruins a lot of their nutritional value,” he said, drawing the last two cubes of emergency blood out of the freezer, which looked a little wonky from the hours the power hadn’t been running the previous night, “but they should at least curb the edge until you can feed properly.”
She shoved them both in her mouth at once, cracking her teeth through the cubes like it was the first thing she’d eaten in days. By the state of her eyes and the blackness of the hunger already creeping into them, she probably hadn’t fed in even longer.
Rahil cleared his throat as she finished, leaning back against the counter. “Better?”
She still shook from sun-poisoning, but she seemed slightly more stable—less suspicious of him, if nothing else. “Yes. Thanks.”
“It’s no problem.” Rahil would just have to—somehow—get Tim’s coworker’s phlebotomist sister to draw Tim’s blood again to replenish the freezer, was all. Rahil gave a weak smile, trying not to exude as much awkwardness as he felt. “So, tell me how you knew Matt?”
“He mentored me, before…” She gave a slight lift of her upper jaw, letting the first tips of her fangs slip out before pulling back in.
So her turninghadbeen recent. “At his Vitalis-Barron job?”
“Yeah.” The vampire shifted uncomfortably. She looked out the window, her expression twisting. “You know it’s not like I believedeverythingthey were doing was fine. But if they were taking the bad sorts off the streets and progressing science at the same time…” She said it so defensively and readily that Rahil wondered if it was even him who she was arguing with or herself. She tucked her arms back around her waist. “Not all vampires are as decent as like, you, or whatever.”
“You’re right,” Rahil assured her.
It was clearly not the response she’d expected. Her mouth opened, then closed again.
“Most vampires act decent, but not all of them. They’re like any other group of people. In any population, there will always be assholes and abusers, people who make selfish and cruel choices.”
“Right,” she agreed hesitantly, like she knew the catch was coming, as the catch had clearly come for her already, with fangs and a bloodlust.
Rahil lifted a brow. “If you had shown up at Vitalis-Barron’s front porch instead of mine, do you think they would say you were one of the decent ones?”
Her expression cracked down the middle, and she sucked in a breath. From the way she wouldn’t meet his gaze, he knew her answer. He wouldn’t force it out of her, asking for something else instead. Something deeper.
“Why did you comehere, kiddo?”
She did look at him then, just in time for him to see the full force of her breaking, the welling in her eyes, still tainted black from her blood starvation, and the juts of her cheekbones sharp with regular human hunger. The trembling beneath her skin turned to a sob. She curled inward.
After all the harm she’d clearly done to his people, Rahil could have let her suffer the weight of this alone, but he found he didn’t want to. She had been someone to his son, and been influencedbyhim, and that made her Rahil’s responsibility. He reached out with care, gently rubbing her shoulder a few times. “I’m glad you came to me. I’m glad I can help you, even if it’s just a little.”
She kept crying, her plea seemingly for the universe more than it was for him. “We were making things better. We were the front line. We were bringingjusticewhere others couldn’t.”
He let her have her anger and her misery, gently adding after, “Are you sure that every vampire’s death you caused made the world better? Did you ever get it wrong?”
She held her trembling hands over her face. Her voice was so small. “I don’t know.”
