Page 61 of Vanish Into Light

“You didn’tdrag me.”

“No. I didn’t, did I?” He didn’t smile again, but his gaze was impossibly fond – in the moments before it hardened. “But I’m going to insist, now, that you stay here. Ready a room for me, for when I get back. I’ll need your brain.” He tapped at her temple, lightly with two fingers. “And your steady knife-hand. I’ll need you to keep the others back – keep them from being noble. They don’t understand that sometimes the right thing isn’t noble at all.” His look begged her to understand…

And she did. Though it left her aching, though she felt excluded, she could accept that he was right, in this instance: Beck never did anything without reason.

She sighed. “Fine.”

“That’s my girl.” He kissed her forehead. “It won’t be long. There’s rope in one of the kitchen cabinets, I think.” He winked as he drew back. “And a whetstone upstairs in our room, if you need one.”

“You don’t think I have my own whetstone?”

He grinned, as he backed away, wings unfurling. “You can never have too many.”

TWELVE

When Lance was eight, he had a friend named Scott he used to play dodgeball with. They weren’t best friends – not the kind that smeared their cut palms together, spit into handshakes, and promised to be brothers forever – he’d never had that sort of friend. Rose came the closest, but maybe that didn’t count because they’d slept together, and she would have laughed at all those ridiculous, little boy rituals besides. But he and Scott had played together, and eaten lunch together, and liked all the same comic books.

But, slowly, over time, he’d begun to notice things: like the way Scott enjoyed it a little too much when they found a bit of road kill. Like the way Scott had once stabbed a frog with a sharp stick, and laughed when it writhed and struggled. The friendship had collapsed before middle school, because Scott was cruel, and Lance wanted nothing to do with that.

The military, what he did for a living, wasn’t the same thing, he’d told himself, again and again. He was fighting beings who burned, and tortured, and killed, and hijacked humans. He took no pleasure in the task, but was efficient, and quick, and he only exerted the force that he needed to. It was never fun for him. He didn’t enjoy it – beyond having a sense of pride in his own carefully-honed skills. He did what he did to protect people; to make this awful world just a little bit safer.

This was his inner mantra.

So it sat heavy and uneasy in his stomach: watching Rose, now.

Three doors down from the library was a game room; the hunting trophies on the walls had long since moldered; they dripped cobwebs and tattered bits of fur, the mysterious underpinnings of taxidermy visible in ragged strips where dead flesh had peeled, and in the sockets where glass eyes had fallen out. A pool table stood in the center of the room, mahogany with once-burgundy felt on top – a fitting color, Lance supposed, with a lurch.

Rose had found rope somewhere – new rope, another Beck acquisition, obviously, and was creating manacles, one attached to each leg of the table. There was no question where the stolen guard would go, once Beck returned with him.

Shubert had been Lance’s first interrogation, and though he’d hated it, he’d contented himself with the knowledge that the man was a conduit, that he could heal from grievous injury; that he’d tried to kill them, besides. And, if he was honest, Lance had been too distracted by Beck’s proximity to pay close attention to what was being done to their captive.

He wasn’t ruling out distraction again, but it felt different, this time. Now, he’d crossed the line; he couldn’t pretend innocence or revulsion. If he watched Rose and Beck torture this man, it would be with the full knowledge that they’d been his lovers, and would be again.

It was the curl of excitement in the pit of his stomach that left him wanting to retch.

Rose secured the final knot, and stood, wiping her hands absently on the fronts of her tac pants. She turned to him – and pulled up short. She wore a hard, flat expression, the one she wore on ops: the efficient mask that was all focus, and zero sentiment. It tweaked, though, as she looked at him, an unhappy plucking at the corners of her mouth. “You don’t approve.” It wasn’t a question.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“War isn’t always black and white.”

“Did I say it was?”

Before she could respond, Gallo poked his head in the door and said, “He’s back.”

Lance heard a sound like an umbrella snapping shut – Beck’s wings, he saw, as Gallo stepped hastily back and Beck strode through the door, wings dripping rainwater, a body thrown unceremoniously over his shoulder. It was a man – an unconscious one – and Beck strode up to the table and thumped him down flat on his back with more force than necessary.

The lump in Lance’s belly gained layers, and momentum, as it jumped up into his throat.

The man was clearly security of some sort: large, heavily-muscled. He was dressed all in black, with tightly-laced combat boots and a flak vest strapped on over his fitted t-shirt. His head lolled to the side, and Lance spotted the two weeping puncture marks on his neck that marked where Beck had bit him.

A hot bolt of jealousy moved through him, tamped down as soon as it spiked – but not before he acknowledged, ashamedly, that he didn’t like the idea of Beck biting other people.Tastingother people.

“I had to try three before I found one who knew anything,” Beck said, as Rose and Gallo began securing the captive at wrists and ankles to the table. Beck made a face and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “This one’s a boor, but he waits hand and foot on Raphael. I caught some indistinct images: drop-offs, I think. And the keycodes for the doors. But I’ll need him to confirm everything.”

Lance said, “If you can tell all that from his blood, did you really need to bring him back here?”

Beck shot him a low-lidded, inscrutable look. “It never hurts to be sure, Lieutenant.”

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