Page 67 of Sidhe
Swifter than Nathan could have predicted, the arm keeping him back reached down to pull another gun that had been tucked into Solrin’s cargos. “Jim!” Nathan warned his brother as he prepared to tackle Solrin to the ground.
Jim motioned from Solrin to the far wall and the white-haired seal went flying that direction, his gun left clattering near Nathan on the floor. “The reason we kept the truth from you,” Jim said viciously, “was because we knew you were a fucking psycho!”
“Jim!” Nathan shouted again, this time in anger. Sure, Solrin had tried to shoot him twice now in the span of only a couple minutes, but still. It wasn’t like Jim to just blow up.
Of course Jim never used to take pride in what he was.
“Jim, come on.” Nathan walked toward his brother, holding up his hands and trying to be calmer so that Jim would follow suit. Sasha looked so spooked and pitiful on that dentist chair, unable to do anything, and Nathan really wished there was time to offer the incubus some soothing words too.
Jim lessened his hold on Solrin so that the fierce looking man, snarling now, was lowered back to the floor but still held in place against the wall. “I’m not letting him go just so he can try and pull another gun,” Jim grumbled. “You want to try and talk some sense into him, go ahead.”
Nathan took a few deep breaths before turning to address Solrin. “Now just focus on me for two seconds and listen.”
Solrin turned his gaze to Nathan and his eyes softened if only for that, that he was looking atNathan.
“Just hear me out. Notice how I’m not freaking over what Jim can do, or over what both of them are. I know what they are. I’ve always known. Yeah, Sasha’s an incubus, and Jim’s a changeling—like you. Neither of them is a bad guy. They haven’t tricked me or lied to me. I know it’s hard for you to believe, and if all those scars came from fae doing a number on you then…then I get it, I get why you hate them all, I do. But trust me,” he took another slow step forward, eyes locked onto the pale green clashing against the shimmering dead grey eye beside it, “not everything that seems evil is. Jim and Sasha aren’t monsters. They’re still the same nice guys you met. Well,” Nathan couldn’t help smirking a little to break the tension, “Jim’s just a little extra sensitive as you can see, it being his time of the month and all.”
There was a huff from Jim, but no smirk or smile, not even a twitch of Solrin’s lips came as a reply to Nathan’s words. Nathan was surprised, however, that the anger on Solrin’s face quickly became replaced with something more like grief. Then Nathan realized it wasn’t grief.
It was pity.
“Nathan,” Solrin said slow and direct, almost patronizing as he strained against Jim’s hold keeping him to the wall, “they have clouded your mind so well you do not even know what you are saying. I admit that Jim and I seem to share something in our…abilities, but I see their true faces, and that is more than simply seeing an incubus for what it really is, or the darkness spilling from Jim just as light spills from you. I never thought something like you could exist,” he said with that same strange reverence taking shape on his face, “something to counter all the evil I have seen in my life. You are the proof, Nathan, the proof that what I see in them is real because I see the very opposite in you.”
Deep down Nathan knew that there had to be something wrong with what Solrin could see, because if there was any light in his life it was from the men that fought beside him.
“Nathan, this is pointless, he’s not going to listen,” Jim said.
“Hang on.” Nathan turned back to Jim with a glare, angry when he found the same hatred on Jim’s face that he could see on Solrin. Jim was still keeping an arm outstretched to better pin Solrin to the wall, but his other hand was behind his back, holding readily to the gun he had tucked there. “What are you gonna do if he won’t listen to reason, Jim? Shoot him in cold blood?”
“It’s not cold blood if it’s self-defense,” Jim said at least a little more Jim-like, whiney and insistent. “If we just let him go, he’ll come after us and keep on coming. Tokill us.”
“Gladly,” Solrin confirmed with another attempt to jerk forward that made his shoulders bounce and pound back against the wall.
Jim gestured pointedly with the hand holding Solrin in place as if to say,see?
Nathan looked to Sasha, hoping to see some sympathy there, but there was only more pity. Pity for Nathan. Like hejust. Didn’t.Get it.
“Solrin, please,” Nathan really didn’t know how to solve this one, but he had to try, “you’re wrong, okay? I know you’re wrong, because one thing you can’t fake is love. You can’t fake it and an evil thing couldn’t feel it, and I know that Jim and Sasha love me. Jim’s my brother.Annoying, sure,” he tried not to look back at Jim as he said that even though he was sorely tempted, “but he loves me. And Sasha does too. I’ve never doubted that.”
“There was another creature in that house, wasn’t there?”
Nathan blinked at the sudden change in subject. “What?”
“I felt it from the beginning,” Solrin said. “Again, I dismissed it for you, Nathan, wanting to believe I had been mistaken when, after the nachzehrer was gone, the sense that there had been a second creature disappeared as well. It would make perfect sense why theincubusis so drained,” he said bitingly, his eyes focusing sharply on Sasha, “perfect sense…if the other creature was one of his own.”
Shit. “Yeah, about that,” Nathan tried to think of how to defend their ruse, “just, ummm…let me explain—”
“You fed it so it would be strong enough to escape us,” Solrin accused Sasha. “You let the real killer get away because it was like you. Truly an act oflovefor Nathan, I’m sure.”
“It’s not what you think,” Nathan jumped in. “I knew what Sasha was doing. We were working behind your back, okay, I admit it, because we wanted to save that other incubus. He was just a kid. He didn’t mean for all that to happen. The deaths wereaccidents. How else would the first one have created a nach? We just needed to find the kid and try to help him. It was too late when we did, too close to frenzy for him, so…so Sasha took one for the team,” he said, cringing at his choice of words.
“I may be a stranger to the kind of love you think you have with him,” Solrin said with a stern, steady voice, “but I have never heard it said in any loving relationship thatfuckingsomeone else is a worthy sacrifice.”
The clatter and clang of the dentist chair was more than enough for Nathan to realize that they were way past things slipping from bad to worse.
He whipped around to see Jim holding Sasha back by the arms, the dentist chair totally toppled. Sasha’s eyes were red again, his fangs bared despite the fatigue still so present in his body.
“You don’t know anything!” Sasha growled. “Do you think I wanted that!? To hurt Nathan like that!? I had to save that boy! I had to! You don’t know afuckingthing about me!”
