Page 9 of Dawn to Dusk
“Before that.” I didn’t intend to bark at her, but that feeling grew more unbearable by the second.
“My last case before switching sides was a pair of drakes in Sweden.”
You ask her one thing, and she answers something else. Always holding back. Would it kill her to give a straight answer?
“Did you kill Jalis?” I asked outright. It was the first time I asked, instead of hurling accusations at her. She froze in place. Tension turned her shoulders into bars of steel.
“Her name was on my kill list.”
This infuriating woman! “I know you were sending each other letters. Did you shove your blade through her heart?”
There was no wiggling out of that one. She turned to face me, and her mask melted long enough that I could see the anguish before she put it back up. “No.”
I captured her arm in a rough vise grip. Her face scrunched with pain, but she didn’t cry out or try to make a move, not even to flinch towards her deadly daggers. The same blades that her ancestors killed or critically injured a wyre to forge.
“I didn’t kill her, and I don’t know who did.” She finished.
“How did she end up on your sheet?”
“I found her like that and another Hunter caught up to me. They assumed I took her. I couldn’t risk anyone asking questions, so I claimed the kill.”
Esmerey offered Jalis asylum in those letters. Esmerey promised to take her to Goddess Yenir’s sanctuary. “You were going to hide her, like you hid Drakko.”
“I was supposed to get there sooner.” Raw pain stared at me from her flaming red eyes. A vulnerability that I never saw on the strong woman before. “I’m sorry.”
Then she covered her emotions back up behind that empty mask of secrecy and continued her trek through the woods. The word liar died in my throat, because I knew she wasn’t deceiving me. For the first time, I felt like she was actually being genuine.
She carried on as if she didn’t destroy what I thought I knew about what happened twelve years ago. What I thought I knew about her. Panic whirled around in me. Did I start a personal vendetta against someone who didn’t deserve it?
“Sunshine!” I yelled after shuffling behind her for who knows how long. She shushed me. I ran to catch up to her from where I dawdled behind. “Why didn’t you tell us that you were hiding beasts, not killing them?”
She sighed at me. She didn’t want to deal with my question. “I did kill beasts.”
“Stop.” I told her. The world whooshed around me too fast. Everything needed to slow down. “I want a clear-cut answer. When was the last time you killed someone?”
Ruby eyes stared at me a long moment before she decided to get it over with. “An orc in Vera Cruz a couple years ago.”
“That orc that lost it and demolished entire cities?”
“Yes.”
“That is completely different. Someone needed to put that orc down.” I was yelling again. This woman rattled me. “When was the last time you killed an innocent?”
Her lips squeezed into a flat line. She tried to keep walking, but I blocked her off.
“Esmerey?!”
She knew the safe houses and never reported them. Calida even made it sound like Esmerey was the mastermind behind it.
“My first year.” She whispered with a tight jaw.
No way. Her kill list was a mile long. She was single-handedly the most prolific hunter to ever exist.
“Forty-two years ago.” I looked up at the branches of the trees above us. I chuckled out a scoff. “Balthazar was right.”
That bastard.
“Balthazar knew?” Concern filled her eyes.
