But then he didn’t.
As he watched, fresh messages arrived from his cousin, then his nephew. Opinions on dessert, agreements to be there. Auntie Fatima complained that her television was having problems—no Bollywood if she hosted—and Adam told her to give it a good kick. Nora asked if anyone had invited Rahil.
His head felt light, but once he started moving again, it wasn’t as hard as he’d thought. His finger slipped over the send button automatically.
Rahil
I’ll have to find a ride, but I’ll be there <3
He had to close the text thread immediately, pressing his phone to his chest and shutting his eyes. It was done. And maybe, maybe it would mean nothing. Maybe he was still the only 52hz whale in the sea. But his song had come from somewhere—from people he’d once loved, who still loved him, even after he’d pulled so far away that he’d been able to lock that love up in his heart’s dungeon and toss the key into the abyss.
He might hurt them, the little voice in the back of his mind whispered. He’d pulled away for a reason.
But if he’d truly done so many things that had turned out to be wrong, what were the chances that pulling away from his family wasn’t just another mistake?
At least this way, he’d have a front-row seat to whatever happened, for better or worse.
With his hands free of his phone, it was clear just how much he was shaking now, even the shade of the thick pine growth not enough to block out the cloudless summer sun. He had to get moving, one way or the other. Pick a wrong choice and stick with it.
He tried to settle the fluttering anxiety in his stomach, tamp down on the aching between his ribs, and look at the situation logically. He wanted to hope that Mercer had just needed space, but it seemed that Rahil’s involvement in Leah’s death was too much after all—fuck, that thought hurt. Even as a distant thing, numbed and rationalized, it made him want to tear into his own chest and rip through the muscle that bled within. He tried to steady himself with something factual: that regardless of his future with Mercer, they had come together for a job. Before Mercer invited him on a date, Rahil had already been preparing for this outcome.
Their quest for unholy gold may have been over, for better or for worse, but the mysterious protective device Rahil had agreed to finish for Lydia was still not quite functional—it turned on, certainly, but every way he’d tried to initiate a defensive outcome with it had failed. He’d consulted what programing notes Leah had written in her book and read every line of code a dozen times, but there was something wrong still. Something he was missing.
He could identify the complex coding for how Mercer’s robotic arms were meant to move, which seemed perfectly functional, and had finished parts of the coding for the sensor inputs—touch, visual, audio, movement—so it had to be something in the section that combined both, predicting what the cord’s output should have been based on the sensory data.
There were detections for whether something was a ‘person’ or whether it was a ‘threat’. In that threat category, there were fall threats, seize threats, hold threats, and more, all of which worked in tandem with a variety of monitors that seemed like coding for a wearable medical device—indicators of stress, Rahil figured—and a peculiar line of coding forif person, disable. But none of it seemed to actually do anything. So therehadto be something wrong. Something to fix.
If he could get it working, at least when he was gone, he would know Lydia was safe, and Mercer less anxious for it. That was right; that was good—it would make leaving them more manageable. Less horrible.
Rahil nodded to himself, ignoring the slicing pain in his heart. He could do this. For them. In a sea of wrong choices, it was perhaps the only one that was positively right.
He’d go back to his original plan: he wouldn’t see Mercer, just grab Leah’s project and quietly return it when he’d finished, and that would be that. Then, at least—at least—Mercer would have gotten something nice out of their relationship. Not something that could make up for the pain, but still.
Shaking and aching, Rahil set back off through the little forest. He dodged the fence to the yard that bordered Mercer’s and slipped out of the woods. Everything seemed quiet, no sign of Mercer, thankfully. Rahil sprinted through the sunlit space between the shed and the trees, his chin lowered and his hood bouncing against his forehead. Kat barked at him excitedly from inside the glass backdoor, her tail wagging. He waved at her as he turned into the shed. The sliding door was closed, but as he grabbed it to yank it open, it rolled on its own.
Rahil ran into the shed’s current occupant: a man, a little shorter than Rahil. Anthony? But no—
Rahil’s scrambled thoughts got no further as the man’s knee collided with Rahil’s gut. The rush of pain seemed to trigger a fresh cascade of sun-shakes, and he stumbled, unable to dodge as the stranger jerked around him, fist crashing into the back of Rahil’s head.
Darkness flared. The world spun. Rahil’s shoulder slammed into the bench, a sharp ache pounding from his kneecaps a moment later. He tried to blink away the pain clouding his vision, but the blurry shadow of the man grabbed one of his arms and yanked it to the side. Agony speared from the center of his palm, a blade pinning his hand to the side of the workbench behind him. He could not move—could not think.
The thrum of holy silver tingled through Rahil, weakening him. A whimpering sound echoed in his ears.
He followed the source of the noise to—Lydia.
Rahil’s heart crashed into his ribcage, adrenaline shooting through his body at the sight of Lydia lying on the floor, her wrists and ankles bound and a gag shoved in her mouth. The edges of her eyes were red, but behind them was nothing but fire. It brought Rahil back to life.
He thrashed, only resulting in a fresh burst of pain from his hand. Instead, he opened his mouth. “Merc—”
The man shoved him against the bench, one hand slamming down on Rahil’s mouth. He pressed the holy silver to Rahil’s neck, and Rahil could feel the way it tore through his usual strength, worsened by the sun-poisoning already working its way through his body.
“Ah ah ah,” the man hissed. “No courageous human is coming to rescueyou.”
A chill ran through Rahil.
He knew this man—by purpose if not by face—the subtle cruelty, the disrespect for property, the disregard for life. But now that he had William Douglas standing in front of him, he recognized his face too: the full head of silvering hair, the sharp eyes and thin smile. He’d swiped right on him a few months earlier. It had only taken a few messages back and forth to unmatch. Nothing specific had stuck in his memory, but he recalled being unable to shake the uncomfortable gut instinct that any meeting with the man would be his last.
There was a reason vampires who advertised themselves like he did went missing from time to time, and Rahil feared a perpetrator of the problem was standing in front of him. And now that problem had Lydia.
