“Oh, I want to hurt someone.”
That’s good.
“It’s really not,” I said, almost choking on the words.
They hurt you. Hurt you worse than anything. Only one way to make that better, to cure yourself of the pain, Little Doll. And Wolfe can show you, oh yes, he can—
“Ugh.”
He is not wrong, Gavrikov said.
“Listen to the voice of reason. The guy who wanted to blow up the entire city of Minneapolis to spare everyone the pain of living.”
It is natural to want to hurt someone back, when you’ve been hurt. When my father turned on me and my sister, I—
“Thanks for the input.”
Blood answers blood, Bjorn said within me. There is only one response to what they have done to you.
“Says you.”
Little Doll, the voice came again, cloying, preying. Wouldn’t it feel good? They hurt you so … wouldn’t it just be right to make them pay, just a little? I felt something within me stir. Why wouldn’t that make sense? Wouldn’t it just be … fair? To make them pay for leaving him like … that. I gasped and a vision of Zack, dead, staring up at me, flashed in front of my eyes, and my breathing picked up, quick breaths in and out, almost hyperventilating.
Soothing, Little Doll, long breaths, slow, in and out. I took the advice of the words in my ear, and my breathing began to slow as I calmed. Yes, that’s it. Like that. Think of them, and you get … riled. But think of what you could do to them to repay them, and slow down, savor it, breathe it in slowly …
I didn’t want to listen, but I did. There was an agony inside, a clashing cymbal and drums playing in my ears, and I kept seeing that moment, their faces, the ones who had done this.
His face, weathered and old. I had trusted him.
“I’m not a murderer.”
They are, came Gavrikov’s voice again. They did this to you. Against your will. Forced you to … the cruelest thing anyone could ever—
They deserve it, Bjorn said. He pretended to be your friend, they all did, and then, in a moment, they turned on you, took advantage of you, used your own body to perpetrate a horror upon him and yourself—
He will never be able to leave you now, Wolfe said, and I felt a stir in the back of my head from Zack at that—a stir, and nothing more. They’ve saddled you with the proof of their horrific betrayal for now and all time, so cruel a thing to do to such an innocent sweetness like the Little Doll … made her trust them, fed her and pretended to love her, and then—
It was as though I could hear a snap in my head, of fingers or something else, and then the darkness around me turned red, tinged with crimson. I took long, slow breaths, but they weren’t relaxing, they were seething. I saw them all, one by one—
Parks. His long, gray hair and beard, my woolly mentor.
Clary. Stupid idiot. Rocks for brains and skin.
Eve. Colder than even Winter. Hated me. Always had, I think.
Bastian. Led them all. Let it happen. Talked Parks into doing it.
And Winter. I felt a flare of heat at the thought of him. He was ice and had been for as long as I had known him. I wanted to melt him, to draw some emotion out of him, to make him cast aside that glacial exterior, hear the flames lick at him, hear him scream the way Zack had—
There was a silence in my head. I knew they were there, still, in the back, waiting. “All right,” I said, breathing, seething. “All right, yes. I want them to hurt. I want them to suffer like I suffered.” I felt my teeth grind together. “But I can’t do this by myself. I can’t—” I flinched, in the darkness, in the box. “I don’t know how to—”
So easy, came the rasp of Wolfe again. So simple. The Wolfe can help, oh yes, he can. And the others, too, he added hastily, can help the Little Doll take her first steps into this new, brave, bad world, her first steps into the one that we have walked in since long before the Little Doll was even born … experienced guides, oh yes. I could almost feel Bjorn and Gavrikov nodding with him, and as much as that should have chilled me, it didn’t. I felt a vague sense of relief, as though I were finally doing … something. Anything. Other than sitting here, wallowing in misery.
But the Little Doll will have to find them first, Wolfe said, and I heard the eagerness. Can the Little Doll do this?
“Yes,” I said after a long pause, and my voice almost cracked. “Yes. But I’m going to need … a little more help.”
3.
The bar was dark when I walked in, and a faint neon glow from a hundred different beer signs that hung on the walls painted the room. The bouncer inside the door looked me up and down with a wary eye and beckoned. I handed him my driver’s license—or one with my picture on it, anyway, a spare I kept at my house along with an additional FBI I.D. and some other papers in case of an emergency. There was a scent of something being fried in the air, and the bouncer looked at me with smoky eyes, to my license, then back to me. He shrugged and handed it over. I walked on past him without even a breath of care. If he hadn’t let me pass, it would have been his problem, not mine.