Unsure what to believe, I returned to the matter at hand. “The Order…where is it based?” He had to know, given all the information he possessed.
Marco smiled. “Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more.”
Appearing at my side in a blink, Butch growled. “You get one conversation with her, asshole. Nothing more.”
Smile widening, Marco said to me, “You’ll come back, sweetheart. Do you want to know how I know that? It’s because you’re good. If you can help someone, you will. If someone relies on you, you’ll do your best not to let them down. Right now, people are relying on you to get answers from me, aren’t they?”
“This isn’t a game, Marco, stop playing me.”
His expression softened. “Playing you? I’m not doing that, sweetheart. But if I drag this out long enough for you all to realise I’m not the person you’re looking for, I get to live and I get my freedom. I rather like living. The moment I’m no longer of any use to anyone here, he’ll end me. And we both know it.”
I couldn’t deny that.
Marco turned his back on me and walked to the bed. “Tomorrow, Imani.”
Barely holding back a frustrated growl, I spoke to Jared. We’re done here.
In a matter of moments, he appeared and teleported us to the living area of his beach house, where Sam was waiting. I gave the couple a rundown of everything Marco said.
“Do we think Marco’s spinning us some tales?” I asked, relaxing on the sofa. Butch was combing his fingers through my hair.
“I don’t know,” said Jared.
Sam took a sip of her NST. “I’ll talk to Antonio, find out what he knows about The Order—if it even exists at all. This could be just a case of Marco trying to seem useful so we let him live.”
“He wants Imani to visit him again,” said Butch. “He’ll drip feed us info so that he gets to see her.”
“I’ll talk to him again tomorrow. He might tell us where The Order is based.” Not that I was particularly optimistic about that.
“What did you get from him, Fletch?” Sam asked.
Fletcher put his empty NST bottle on the coffee table. “Given everything he’s done, I expected him to be hollow inside. He’s not. There’s a lot going on in that dark mind. But even though his emotions are intense, they lack any real depth. He despises Butch, which I doubt comes as a surprise to anyone. He probably sees him as an interloper.”
“He sees Imani as a possession,” said Butch.
“He does want to own her, but it’s more than that.” Fletcher turned to me. “He has this nagging sense of boredom, but you stimulate him. Amuse him. Even soften him a bit. You’re important to him. He cares for you about as much as he’s capable of caring for someone; it’s more like he’s formed an attachment to you. What I know is that the bloke wouldn’t cause you physical harm. He sees himself as your protector.”
Well that blew a lot of theories out of the water.
Jared exhaled heavily. “We’re missing something.”
Totally. Hopefully Marco would give us the missing pieces of this shitty puzzle, but having that knowledge gave him power; I very much doubted he’d want to give that up.
“You look tired,” Sam told me.
At dusk, I’d felt great. But my strength had waned as the night went on. The good news was… “I’m not as tired as I was last night.” I’d take that as a win.
“If you want to postpone your conversation with Lazarus and Annalise, it’s totally fine,” she assured me.
Shit, I’d completely forgotten about that. “I want to talk to him.” I had some questions for him, like had Juliet been telling the truth about Marco and had Lazarus lied to me all these years?
Sam, Jared, Butch, and I headed to the Grand High Pair’s office, where Jared set up the teleconference call. Soon enough, the faces of Lazarus and Annalise were on one of the monitor screens.
“Imani, you cannot imagine how relieved I am to see you alive,” said Lazarus.
Annalise nodded. “My beautiful girl, I am so sorry for what happened to you. It grieves me that you were harmed in such a way and right under my roof.”
I shrugged. “What’s done is done.”
“I see that the cure did not work.” Lazarus’ eyes narrowed. “Although your irises lost the amber glow. In what other ways have you changed? How is it that you survived the transition?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Annalise looked at Sam. “Have you questioned Marco, Tait, and Juliet? People came forward to say the three were nowhere near Imani during the concert.”
“We all know that doesn’t mean they weren’t behind what happened to Imani,” said Sam.
“Yes,” sighed Lazarus. “But I’m unable to prove it. As much as I want vengeance for Imani, I cannot brand someone guilty unless I can be certain that they are. My gut tells me it was Tait, but if I punish her based on my gut and it turns out I was wrong, the person who is truly responsible would go unpunished. Imani would then not have the justice she deserves.”
“You won’t need to punish her, Lazarus,” said Sam. “That’s our show.”
He stilled. “They, including Imani, are my vampires. The punishment is mine to deliver.”
“Wrong. Come on, Lazarus, did you think I brought them here for tea, cakes, and a pop quiz?”
“I have witnessed via V-Tube your idea of interrogations. I do not want my vampires subjected to that—not when at least two of them are innocent.”
“I’m not asking for your permission, Lazarus.”
“I do not appreciate you taking over this situation.”
Sam leaned forward. “Do you really think I give a flying fuck about what you appreciate? Whoever injected Imani did so believing the serum would kill her. I take an attack on my vampires very seriously. An attack on my friend? That’s a mistake of epic proportions, so do not fuck with my patience.”
Sinking back into her chair, she went on, “It’s really not me you should be worried about. Butch is exponentially pissed, and there won’t be any way of holding him back from slaughtering the person responsible for what happened to Imani. Not that I’ll try to hold him back.”
“No one could hold me back,” Butch told him. “And I don’t fucking like it that you don’t seem as anxious to find out who hurt Imani as you should. Part of me wonders if you’re just so curious to understand how Imani survived that it’s overridden your concern. And part of me wonders if what you’d love to do most right now is take her to a lab and perform test after test until you finally find out why she survived what others didn’t—and just what exactly she’s become.”
If Annalise’s downcast expression was much to go by, Butch was right about the latter. And he clearly knew it, because a growl rumbled out of him that caused the siblings to tense. “She’s a person, not a fucking lab rat. There’ll be no testing her; she’s been through enough.”
“I wholeheartedly agree,” Annalise assured him. “And so does Lazarus.” Her brother didn’t confirm that but nor did he deny it.
“It’s hard to trust the word of someone who has potentially lied to her since the night he met her.”
Lazarus blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Did Marco really abandon me, Lazarus?” I asked. “Or was that a lie?”
A heavy sigh left him. “He told you.”
“No, Juliet did the talking. But you should have told me.”
“I did not lie to hurt you, Imani. It was part of his punishment. He Turned you to keep you. He is not the first vampire in history to have done that to someone of course, but I was determined that he would be the last of my nest to do it. You’re a good person, Imani. Compassionate. Forgiving. If you had forgiven Marco and the two of you had reconciled, what do you think that would have taught him and the others in my nest?”
Sam was the one who replied, “That it would all work out fine in the end.”
“Yes. It would teach them that braving my punishment would be worth it because, in the end, all would be fine between them and the vampire they Turned. So I made you hate him. It stopped you from going back to him, and it was something he had to live with. He did not abandon you. People are interchangeable for him, but I think Marco sees you as a person in your own right. I believe something in you…spoke to him, if you will. But that was not a justifiable reason for him to do what he did, and for that he was punished.”
Okay, I sort of understood that. There was no point in getting riled about it, because it hadn’t been personal to me; the whole thing was much bigger than me and Marco. Lazarus had needed to set an example. “Did it work?”
“No one has since committed such an act,” replied Lazarus. “I am sorry if you feel hurt that I lied to you. But it was the best for all concerned. And it has potentially saved a lot of humans from unwillingly being Turned.”
That wasn’t something I could or ever would be angry about.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
(Butch)
I didn’t think I’d ever gawked before, but Imani had a way of shocking the shit out of me. I wasn’t in a great mood since she’d insisted on partaking in the training session. In my opinion, she needed more time to recover. But as she looked just as good as she claimed to feel, I didn’t push her on it. I decided that I’d keep a close watch on her instead.