Page 111 of Only a Monster

‘What was your plan in coming here?’ he said.

‘To talk,’ Joan said. ‘To talk to you.’

His mouth turned down. ‘To distract me while someone attacks us?’

‘No.’

‘Is someone here with you? Is someone else coming? Are there weapons involved? Explosives?’

‘No,’ Joan said. Explosives? ‘No. No.’ Did he really think so little of her? But he’d already made it clear that taking any time at all was the same as murder in his eyes. It was why he killed monsters.

Joan remembered the look on his face when he’d found his family dead in his childhood house. She thought of Gran lying dead. Between them, there’d been so much blood. ‘Nick,’ she said. She let the compulsion speak the truth for her. ‘I came here to talk to you. That’s the truth. You know I can’t lie right now.’

His eyes were as cold as when he’d addressed Edmund Oliver. ‘Talk, then. What do you want?’

What did she want? There were too many answers to that question. She wanted her family back. She wanted none of this to have happened. She wanted to be with Nick. She couldn’t lie to herself. Not with the drug in her body. Not with him right here. She wanted him, even after everything that had happened between them. Even after what he’d done, she still only ever wanted to be in a room with him. She hated it, but she couldn’t deny it.

To her relief, the drug didn’t know which answer to force from her. She could pick one true thing. ‘Peace,’ she said. ‘Between monsters and humans.’

‘Peace?’ Nick was still leaning back as though relaxed. But his mouth tightened. ‘I killed your family, Joan. Are you saying you could ever forgive me for it?’

‘No,’ Joan blurted, forced to answer.

Nick seemed to stop breathing for a second. ‘No,’ he said softly.

‘Just like you could never get over the fact that I’m a monster,’ Joan said.

Nick’s answer took longer to come this time. ‘No,’ he said. Something about the pause made Joan wish he’d been compelled to speak the truth too.

But he didn’t need to take a truth drug. He never lied—not directly. Joan’s breath hitched. So there it was, the harsh truth of it.

If Jamie’s story was true, then Joan and Nick had been together in another timeline. If the story was true, then the new timeline was still trying to repair itself by bringing them back together, over and over. But it was doomed to fail. What was broken between them couldn’t be fixed.

‘I’m not talking about peace between you and me,’ she said. It hurt to say it.

‘There’ll never be peace between monsters and humans,’ he said. ‘Not as long as monsters steal time. And you can’t help yourselves. You all crave it.’

Joan shook her head. She didn’t.

‘You crave time travel.’

The compulsion answered for her. ‘Yes,’ she blurted. She pressed her lips together. She’d barely admitted that even to herself. The method of travel was a kind of focused yearning, and the yearning was always there in the background. It had been there as long as she could remember, in her love of history. ‘I can control it.’ She was relieved to hear herself say it. If the compulsion allowed it, then surely it must be true.

‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’ Joan sat up and tried to inch closer to him. Her heart thudded when he pulled back his feet fast. ‘Stop. Stop asking me questions,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop myself from answering. And I have to tell you . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘You told me about your family. The man who killed them—’

‘Is dead.’

‘I know. You killed him.’

‘Every monster knows that,’ he said. ‘It’s in all your childhood stories.’

Joan had never thought about how Nick might see those stories: his own suffering as a fairy tale.

‘You broke his neck.’

Nick stilled. That wasn’t in the stories.

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