Blood Bath & Beyond by Michelle Rowen

Author:Michelle Rowen [Rowen, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0451237641
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2012-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

We didn’t stick around. The damage had been done.

My mind reeled from what just happened. All so fast. We’d been close—I’d been close. Duncan was going to talk to me, with a little monetary coaxing. He would have told me who hired him to kill Bernard. Thierry would have been proven innocent—I mean, as soon as I got Markus to believe it. The point was, it would have been a step in the right direction instead of scrambling to keep my footing on this slippery slope.

I hated this. Every direction I turned just led to more failure and the day was fading fast. It was late afternoon by now—almost five o’clock. We’d been unconscious in the tunnels longer than I thought we were. That garlic dart had been extremely potent.

I sighed shakily. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Give up,” Victoria said.

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes you need to know when to quit. I wanted to figure it out, too, but it’s not looking like that’s possible.” She had her hand on her hip and was looking at her little pink cell phone. “The hunter’s dead and so’s your chance to clear sourpuss’s name. I’d take the hint if I were you. Besides, how long’s he been alive? Hundreds of years? I’d bet he’s done lots of bad stuff in his life way worse than what happened to Bernard. Maybe he deserves this.”

I didn’t say anything. Every word she spoke dropped on me like a tiny bomb. Not because I necessarily agreed with her, but because her point was painfully clear. Quitting would be what a lot of people do when they see their path is filled with rocks. That they’re fighting a losing battle. That they just stepped in quicksand and they better pull their foot out while it’s only an expensive shoe they’re going to lose and not the entire leg.

Had Thierry done bad things in his existence? I mean, I didn’t know half of it. A quarter of it. A hundredth of it, really. But I knew he had. The most recent skeleton I’d found in his closet was the group of hunters Bernard told me about who’d paid the ultimate price when Thierry had lost control of his bloodlust.

Was there an expiration date on evil acts? If you did something heinous a hundred years ago, did time and tide wash it all away? And if so, where was the line drawn? A century, a human lifetime, a decade?

How long did someone need to be actively redemptive before he was purged of all sins?

Yikes. My head throbbed just trying to wrap itself around questions like that. I wasn’t the right person to make these sorts of determinations. I wasn’t a lawyer or a judge or a jury. Had Thierry done enough in his six-hundred-plus years of life to land himself on death row? If so, did that mean he should be there now, even if it looked more like a luxury suite in a fabulous hotel?

And if I weren’t

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