Chapter 21

I tore out of the garage, left my car in a lot near the Jolly Hellhound, and barked at the bartender to open the door in the back room

Last night, everything had been great here. The atmosphere was friendly, I’d been hanging out with Sachie and Olivier, and having fun texting Ezra. Now, I stormed past tables like I was going to war and bolted through the portal, ready to physically attack any Hellion who got in my way.

Skidding to a stop, I blinked to let my eyes adjust to the dark and silence until I’d gotten my bearings enough to see that I’d been brought through the portal to his inner sanctum instead of the foyer on the main floor.

It appeared as though a bomb had exploded in Ezra’s living room. The furniture, once arranged with care, lay shattered and overturned. His sofa was torn open in a snarl of untwisted metal springs and straw-colored stuffing, while the coffee table was splintered into jagged shards, scattered across the floor like broken bones. A curtain fluttered on its damaged rod like a flag waving surrender.

Deep gouges were carved into the walls, and the ceiling light was reduced to wires dangling precariously over glass embedded in the carpet.

The overcast night sky did fuck all to relieve the oppressive gloom in here.

“Ezra?” I called softly.

“In here.” He sounded so raw that I didn’t hesitate to enter his bedroom.

He sat on the floor with his back against a woebegone mattress leaning against the wall. His legs were splayed out, his shoulders were slumped, and his hair streamed back from the wind blowing in through the massive hole where the window once was, while the whitecaps of the waves churned and thrashed, mirroring the storm brewing in his eyes.

I kicked away part of the metal bedframe and lowered myself next to him. “Disrupting your environment as a commentary on the absurdity of striving for perfection. Nice.” I nodded. “If the gaming hell gig doesn’t work out, you’ve got a promising future as a performance artist.”

Ezra sighed, the sound shuddering out of him like his sadness was too vast to physically contain, and laid his head on my shoulder. “I’m so tired, Avi.”

“Because you keep fighting, Zee.”

“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.” He gave the ghost of a laugh. “From A to Zee.”

Hearing the phrase I used to jokingly say before giving him a smacking smooch made me smile wistfully.

We sat there together, the waves rocking the boat like a cradle.

The combination of that rhythm, the smell of the ocean, and leaning against Ezra lulled me into a drowsy stupor. “Did he admit to killing Roman?” I murmured.

“Natán Cardoso does not admit to anything,” Ezra scoffed. “If he was looking at a banana and you asked if it was yellow, he’d find a way to make you feel small for questioning him in the first place.”

“How can you be certain he did it?” I brushed away a carved chess piece that had rolled into my leg.

“I got Remy drunk after we spoke.”

I frowned, trying to place the name, then chuckled. We’d met Remy in the Crypt. The weaselly vamp had been ordered to attack Ezra and, instead, had ended up bonding with him like a puppy with its new owner. “Remy had dirt on your father?”

“Hell no.” Ezra pulled at rug fibers like they were weeds. “He asked how my night out with Alastair in London was.”

“Wait.” I pressed my fingers to my temples like I was summoning a thought, hoping to earn a ghost of a smile from Ezra. I didn’t. “This imaginary hang out happened while Roman was murdered?”

“The night before,” Ezra said. “Alastair was spotted in London by a mutual acquaintance who mentioned it to Remy. He questioned Alastair about why he was in Europe instead of in Babel overseeing the inventory of one of Natán’s clubs.

“Alastair fed him that lie.”

“He didn’t expect me to ever be in touch with Remy.” Ezra let the gathered fibers fall free. “Alastair, on the other hand, would have dirt on my father.”

“Or do his dirty work,” I said.

“That too. I still haven’t found anything to connect my father with the murders of those half shedim or the missing blood, but I swear, if he’s behind it…” His voice cracked. “I’m so sorry, Aviva.”

I found his hand and twined our fingers together. “Don’t start comparing the sins of our fathers, because I’m pretty certain I’ve got that one wrapped up.”

“So competitive,” he chided.

I shook my head. “Teasing aside, I hate that my suspicions about your dad were right. That’s brutal.”

“And yet, not one of the worst things he’s done.” He looked around the detritus of his room. “Sorry to make you witness my temper tantrum. I should clean this up.”

“You don’t have to make light of this, and you don’t have to apologize for being upset.”

“Then how about for being more like him than I want to be?”

“Stop it. Even if he’s a monster, you are not his clone.” I clasped my free hand over our intertwined ones.

“My mother always said el que la hace, la paga, what goes around comes around, but I don’t think there’s anything evil Natán could incite, that would be his undoing.” His shoulders slumped, his head bowed low in defeat.

I carefully set a broken light bulb on the top of an overturned chair next to us so no one stepped on it. “Forget Natán. Tell me about your mother.”

Ezra leaned away from me, his expression wary. Though he didn’t remove his hand from mine. “My mother? I lost her when I was little. There’s not much beyond random anecdotes to tell.”

“I don’t believe that. I bet that even though Natán raised you, Eva had a far greater influence on the man you are today.” I licked my lips nervously. “I looked her up because I was curious about her. Was that okay?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Other than Orly and my aunt, I don’t have anyone to talk about her with.”

“It was impressive how even after being struck by such tragedy when she was changed, she turned it around into a way to help others.”

“That was her to a T,” he said.

I worried my bottom lip between my teeth. “Hard to believe she ended it five years after the fact, when she sounded so hopeful about her life and loved you so much.”

“She wasn’t murdered, if that’s what you’re thinking. Well, not directly. I watched her walk into the sun.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “You were there?”

“Yeah. I was playing in the shade of the porch.”

Imagine witnessing your mother become dust in front of you, not even turning back to say goodbye. I shuddered. “Did something happen? Did someone show up?”

He roughly scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve gone over that day a million times, but I was so young. I don’t think anyone else was home except me. One thing I do remember, though, is that she’d been fighting with my father a lot in the days before she died.”

“Is that why you joined the Maccabees? You were hoping to find something since your parents were former operatives?”

He put his head back on my shoulder and leaned against me. “I wanted all the intel they had of the incident that ended with my parents turned into vampires. Once I was working for them, I got the official unredacted report, but everything corroborated what I already knew. My father killed a vampire in self-defence on a mission and her lover took revenge by turning two religious Jews.”

“Okay, but explain something to me. You were raised to be the Crimson Prince, right?”

“Yes, Avi. I didn’t dream of being an assassin when I was little. It was just a given. After I finished my MBA, I was expected to join the family business.”

“But you delayed going back to school when we were together. If you didn’t dump me because of Cherry Bomb, then why did you leave? It was tied to your mom, wasn’t it?”

“It was, but I haven’t been totally honest about learning you were a half shedim.”

I stiffened and tried to pull my hand away, but he tightened his grip.

“Hear me out. Please. The reason I was in Vancouver in the first place, that kayak trip? It was because I discovered that right before Mamá died, she received a phone call. The number had come from inside Maccabee HQ in Caracas.”

“Their old chapter,” I said.

He nodded. “Whatever she learned was so unbearable that she killed herself in front of her child. Combined with whatever my parents had been fighting about, well, Natán was culpable for her death in some way.” He picked the broken light bulb up off the chair. “After we lost Mamá, he’d sit night after night with this one tiny photo of her, until he burned it a few months after her funeral. Then we moved to Babel, and suddenly there was a much larger copy of that photo framed over the fireplace like some damned shrine that he could tour people past.” He winged the bulb at the wall.

I resolutely didn’t flinch.

“After I learned about the phone call,” he said, “my curiosity about why she’d done it turned into an obsession. I reasoned that the Maccabees could help me solve this and I fled Babel trying to figure out how to make that happen.”

“Then you met me. Why didn’t you just tell me about all this?”

He laughed. “I was trying to impress you, not scare you away with all my baggage.”

I elbowed him. “You wouldn’t have?—”

“Do you remember that barbecue you took me to?”

I blinked at his abrupt change of subject. “What barbecue?”

“Some Maccababies you’d been novices with were there. We’d been hanging out in the shade, and you were finishing up a popsicle, intending to introduce me to all your friends, but they iced you out for bringing a vampire. You came home and cried.”

I had a dim memory of the popsicle, and sitting and laughing with Ezra, so happy and proud to be with him, but not the rest. “I don’t remember that.”

“I do,” he said darkly. “I wanted to make you smile, not be the reason for your tears.”

I stared up at the ceiling. All this time, I’d had an almost fairy tale–like recollection of our time together until the fateful night of our breakup.

Had it been easier to frame our being together in a purely positive light because it allowed me to paint him as the villain for ending the most perfect relationship ever, instead of acknowledging there were other, very real reasons we might not have made it?

“Graduating to full Maccabee status meant the world to you,” he said, “and I couldn’t tell you that I planned to use them to learn the truth. You’d be waiting for me to ask you to help me, force you to choose who you were loyal to. And maybe part of me was scared that if I stayed, I’d do just that.”

“So, me telling you about Cherry was just an excuse for you to do what you were always going to do? Leave?” There was no familiar flare of anger.

I, too, was tired of fighting.

Plus, for the first time ever, Ezra was being totally honest with me.

“I was happier with you than I’d ever been.” His sweet smile was reminiscent of the one he’d train on me back when we were together. “Mamá was dead, and knowing why wouldn’t bring her back. I’d convinced myself to stay, and I was ready to tell you everything about who I was, and hope you’d still want me.” His expression darkened. “Then my father showed up in Vancouver.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I’d never stuck around in one place for anyone before and Natán got curious. Never a good thing.”

“Natán never learned I was an infernal, he found out you were dating a Maccabee.”

“Not just any Maccabee. The daughter of his old friend. What a perfect way to ingratiate himself with you, then use you.” Ezra smiled bitterly. “Like father like son.”

“It’s not the same.”

He shrugged. “I used the timing of your revelation about Cherry as an excuse. Better to hurt you over being a half shedim than drag you into something much worse. I told myself that I had to do this for my mother. Go back to Natán and play nice until I had a way to uncover the truth of her death. Believe it or not, I also did it for Michael.”

“Why?”

“She was one of the few people from my parents’ operative life who stayed friends with them. She remained close with Mamá and I was grateful for that. I couldn’t give my father ammunition to hurt her. Either of you.”

“You did hurt me though,” I said gently.

“It was the lesser of many evils at that point.” He shook his head. “That’s not entirely true. I was so obsessed with knowing what had happened to my mother, that I justified hurting you. I can’t take that back, but I’ve regretted it every single day since then and…” He searched my face. “How do you feel about dinner?”

“Do I finally get to try the buffet?”

He shot me an exasperated look.

“Oh, you meant you buy me dinner, like a date?” I shifted uneasily. “Look, you had a shock and I’m totally here for you?—”

“But I don’t want a pity date,” he mocked in a terrible impression of me. “You’re feeling vulnerable and that’s making you nostalgic. Our sex is still off the charts, but—” He made a “blah blah blah” motion with his hand.

“You forgot the part where if you really wanted me back you had six years to reach out,” I said.

“I was too busy lying to myself about being better off without you.”

I slammed a hand on the ground. “You fuck up or play games and then drop these truths that are supposed to disarm me and make it all better. It doesn’t work that way.”

Ezra sagged back against the mattress. “You’re right.”

My chest filled with an achy hollow feeling at how easily he agreed.

“I’ve forced you into going along with my decisions,” he said. “If we’re going to have a shot, then it has to be as a meeting of equals.” He opened his hand, freeing me.

My fingers looked so fragile resting on his palm.

“If I’ve blown it,” he said, “I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting that, but I’ll accept your decision and I’ll always be there for you. But if I can prove I’m a man worth giving a second chance to, then let me do that. Please.”

Ezra had given me honesty.

I looked around the wreckage of the room, born of the wreckage of Ezra’s life. Except unlike the furniture to be trashed, maybe he’d had to break in order to heal stronger than ever. Embrace the art of damage and fuse those pieces back together with gold into a new, no less beautiful piece.

Just like I had.

That was all well and good, but I still didn’t see how to bridge the divide between me being a Maccabee and him running the Copper Hell.

Ezra watched me patiently, not pressing for an answer.

All I had to do was stand up and he’d let me go. That ship would sail into the horizon, never to be seen again. It would be that easy, a small shape fading into nothing, and we’d be done.