Guardian by Carole Cummings

Author:Carole Cummings [Cummings, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy
ISBN: 978-1-63533-670-2
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

5

DALLIN WENT blank. Completely and utterly blank. Which was probably a good thing, because otherwise there was no telling what he might’ve done. What was a person supposed to do in a case like this? Had there ever been a case like this?

So he sat, stared, mind racing, heart pounding. Trying not to give the memories purchase. Trying not to let his hands close into fists. Trying not to launch himself at Calder and….

And do what?

Throttle him because he’d been used and exploited his entire life? Close his hands around the skinny throat and squeezesqueezesqueeze because a six-year-old boy had been made an addict? Watch as those damnable eyes bugged out their sockets, petechiae blooming and spider-walking the whites, because—

Because he killed your mother.

Dallin rubbed at his temple, slowly, because if he made Calder flinch, Dallin really might snap. He already couldn’t look at Calder; the fear in Calder’s face was doing things inside Dallin that made his chest burn and his gut clench itself into a hard fist. Dallin was this close to giving Calder a bloody reason to fear him.

He needed to get out of here, he needed to walk away, except he couldn’t. He wasn’t done yet. There was an open door in front of him, long-awaited information finally flowing through it, and if he walked away now, it might close, and close for good. This… whatever it was—problem, cock-up, big gigantic bloody political swamp—it was too big now, beyond anything Dallin had imagined, and he couldn’t pitch the best chance he’d had thus far to get a grip on it.

Except the big gigantic bloody political swamp had just got personal.

Right up until that last revelation, he’d been perfectly willing to believe Calder delusional. After all, the functionally insane made it their business to dream up fantastic scenarios that fit lock and key with reality—it was how they could keep themselves believing they were the sane ones and everyone else was crazy. But, even as Dallin was talking himself into believing this comforting theory, he knew too well it was its own form of self-delusion. There might well have been lies and half-truths scattered through Calder’s account, but the bulk of it felt like more truth than Dallin wanted to face.

And yet he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t let it be personal.

“How old?” he asked quietly.

Calder was sitting in a little ball on the cot, shaking, and staring at Dallin with eyes like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow. “S-sorry?”

Dallin’s jaw tightened. “How old were you when this happened?”

Calder seemed to think about that one carefully. “I don’t know. It was after the parapet.” He looked down, brow creased, sweaty fingers picking nervously at the wrappings on his hand. “I… I think.”

Dallin thought about it, doing the math in his head. He’d been twelve when his mother had shoved him onto that cart, and that had been more than twenty years ago, almost twenty-five. Calder said the parapet had happened after he was sixteen—by the sound of it, probably at least a few years after.

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