Mercer groaned under his breath. He lifted his head in time for Anthony to call from within the shed, “Why, hello again, punk.”
“God, not you,” Lydia said, but there was laughter in her voice.
Anthony gave a dramatic sigh. “Alas, the evil scientist has come for you again.”
“You look tired.”
“I feel tired.” Anthony’s voice faded back into the shed. “Perhaps we’re fated to save everyone but ourselves…”
Rahil tried to step after them, dread tightening his eyes, but Mercer grabbed his arm. “He’s the only reason she’salive. She’s safe with him.”
Rahil wasn’t sure he believed that, but Lydia wasn’t his to care for—and his track record of taking care of people he loved wasn’t great anyway. Their unholy gold was a different story, though. This had ramifications far beyond anyone in Rahil’s tiny bubble of affection. “It doesn’t matter how much you trust him with your own kid, I don’t trust what he’ll use that metal for inotherkids. He could do anything with it.”
“It’s a single chunk of gold, Rahil. One piece. And you have no proof he’ll do anything with it but that which he’s already promised to, which is tohelpvampires.” He was sounding frustrated now, low and dark in a way Rahil had never seen before—at least not since their first meeting when he’d literally invaded Mercer’s home.
It made Rahil feel drawn taut, his every muscle ready for a fight. “So, we let him walk away with it, with nothing but his word that he has good intentions? Do you know who he works with? What else he’s done when he’s not offering you his charity? What he’s using that altruism to make up for?”
Mercer flinched somewhere between the first question and the last, but his jaw remained as stiff as his stance. “And if he is all that you suspect—what then? He holds my daughter’slifein his hands. Either I can trust him to take this unholy gold and do good with it, or I can trust him to let my own kid die if I refuse.”
Now it was Rahil’s turn to flinch. He could understand that, understand it in a way that he doubted Mercer was intending, in the deep, dark parts of his heart where the wounds of Jonah and Matthew’s deaths still felt as fresh as the days he’d lost them, whether it was months or years ago. But this did not feel so simple as that. Mercerwasa good dad. Therehadto be other options. “Merc—”
“No,” Mercer cut him off, pressing past him, back toward the shed. “You agreed to help me create the gold for Dr. Hilker. This conversation is finished.”
Rahil could do nothing but stare after him. His heart pounded in his throat, his ears, his fingertips. He could go. He could take the unholy gold and run with it. But what if he was wrong? And worse yet, what if Mercer wasright? What if Lydia truly did suffer because Rahil made the wrong decision?
If this took her away from Mercer the way Rahil’s choices had already taken Leah…
He wavered—between one option and the other, between staying and leaving entirely, between life and death—and in the end, his heart took the first step for him.
Rahil sped after Mercer, arriving at the shed just in time to hear Lydia say, “Yo, Dad, why does the mold in your lockbox look kind of like Rahil’s fangs?”
And Rahil knew—he knew.
His blood chilled, a shudder like the start of a sun-poisoning running through him, followed by a crash of dread, a panic like the flight instead of the fight. He should have told Mercer earlier. Should have told him back when they’d tested the unholy gold on Natalie, when they’d sat beside the boardwalk, when they’d lain together in the darkness. When they weren’t already fighting. When this wasn’t doomed to crumble at the slightest shove.
Now there was one option, and it was, as ever, the one that hurt.
32
MERCER
It should not have hurt like this.
Rahil was just looking out for his community, just trying to protect those he cared about—but his people were vague and huge, and Mercer’s was his own goddamned daughter. The only person he had left in the world. The only person he’d had before Rahil had come barging into his life, at least.
That thought made him cringe, his mind replaying the harshness of his own words, reactive where he’d meant to be logical. This was exactly how he felt at the end of every argument with Lydia—like he’d said all the wrong things, despite walking into the conversation convinced that this time, finally, he’d explain his feelings calmly and have the serenity to listen in return. But instead he’d been scared and the fear had made him snappy, probably even cruel, though as he thought it, he couldn’t remember exactlywhathe’d said, just how it had felt: like he’d been trying to quickly throw up a protective wall and accidently lobbed bricks straight at Rahil in the process.
His mind was still reeling hard enough to ache behind his eyes, deep into the space between his temples, and he barely noticed Lydia hovering over his still-open lockbox when he first reentered the shed. He might have walked right past her if she didn’t call for him directly.
“Yo, Dad, why does the mold in your lockbox look kind of like Rahil’s fangs?” She snorted, rolling her eyes in the way he was always only seventy percent sure was teasing. “Like, I want to ship you, but that’ssocreepy.”
He braced himself, hoping to see the cast he’d taken of Rahil’s fangs and not the finished fang caps—he’d explained the basic concept of kink to her recently, but he was not prepared to get into these kinds of specifics, not now and hopefully not ever; that was what fanfiction was for. But the mold she casually held up to the light, squinting at it as she made a dramatic face, was neither of those. It was a silver metal, its weathered box discarded on the counter: long, lean fangs Mercer had spent years staring at, then even more years trying to forget. But even if he could forget their specifics, he knew he could never forget the day he’d crafted them, the blackened blood he’d cleaned off their edges after pulling them, so gently, from the cast of his wife’s corpse.
Mercer froze.
The floor seemed to cave out from under him, leaving his head floating in a haze of panic. That was—but it couldn’t have been. Rahil’s fangs looked similar, certainly, but Mercer would know if they were thesame—and Rahil wouldn’t have—he couldn’t be. This just—
Wasn’t.
