“I’m supposed to be detained by you, remember?” He smiled, and it was full of irony as per usual. “I’m your big career-making capture.”
“I don’t have a career,” I said with a shrug. “The press has figured out about metahumans and the government is leaking like a sieve. All these years of closely holding the secret and now it’s busted loose in less time than it takes Shia La-whatshisname to unspool.”
He stared at me, and it felt like dawning comprehension came over him all at once. “You think you’re about to take the blame for … what? The explosion up north?” I nodded. “The extinction? Century?”
“Everything,” I said. “I figure I’ll catch everything that needs to be caught.”
He folded his hands in his lap, and I couldn’t read his expression for a moment. “They’re going to turn on you.”
I shrugged again. It was my expression of choice for the current state of events. “So it would seem.”
He looked deeply contemplative for a moment. “I wish I could say I didn’t see this coming …”
“Oh, please,” I said. “You didn’t see this coming.” I waved at him. “It’s obvious on your face.”
He frowned. “I … I think I’ve deceived a person or two in my time.”
“You haven’t needed to deceive anyone,” I said, dismissing him. “And why would you? Even when you were pretending to be Joshua Harding, you were practically begging for me to realize that there was more to you than I was seeing on the surface.”
I saw a gleam in his eye. “Maybe I just wanted you to realize there was more to me. Not everybody.”
“Still trying to impress me, huh?” I said, and it came out wary.
“Trying,” he said. “I don’t know how well it’s working, but I’m trying. Surrendering myself, aiding you in taking down Century even though you know I believed in the idea of what a better world could bring to us—” I rolled my eyes, just a little, before I could stop myself. “All right, well, you know, maybe we should just avoid that topic of conversation for a millennium or two.”
I put a hand over my face. “Won’t that be around the time you reach the end of your lifespan?”
“Could be,” he said. “Time starts to lose meaning for you after a while. We live a long time, our kind. Incubi and succubi have that going for them. Of course the downside is that even our own people hate us for our powers. I mean, metahuman vampirism isn’t as sexy as the movies make it look—”
“You’re rambling,” I said, and pulled the hand down from my eyes.
“I’m rambling,” he agreed, and I watched him rest both hands on his knees. “So … the campus is feeling pretty empty.”
“It should be totally empty.”
His eyes shifted left then up. “It is. You sent them all away.”
“Yep.”
“Alone at last.” He stared at me. “So … are you planning to shoot me?”
I stared back at him. “Not right now.”
He cracked a smile. “It’s a start. I’ll take it.”
I shrugged. “Would you even hold still if I told you I was going to shoot you?”
I could see the tension on his face in the form of his jaw halting partway open. He met my eyes and I could see the surrender. “Well, since you just told me I’m a horrible liar—”
“You proved it a second ago, incidentally, when you started to answer and froze up.”
“—no, I wouldn’t hold still and let you kill me.” He gave me a light shrug of his own. “I’ll submit to punishment for what I’ve done, but I’m not likely to sit still for the death penalty.”
“Well, then there we are,” I said. “I couldn’t shoot you if I wanted to. And I think we’ve already established it wouldn’t do any good anyway.” I glanced down. I was down to one pistol now anyhow, thanks to having to grab something in a hurry from the armory to replace the weapons I’d lost in the explosion.
“So why are you here?” he asked. “Now that everyone else is gone?”
“Because I have to deal with you,” I said.
“Even your friends left?”
“I sent them away,” I said. “And let’s get back to talking about you.”
“You want to talk about me?” He stared at me. “Why?”
“Because I’m secretly in love with you.”
He blinked in surprise. “Really?”
“No, not really,” I said and gave him a frown. “It’s because you’ve been a huge pain in my ass and the focal point for all my problems for the last year and a half, even when I didn’t know it. Wolfe and all the other Omega stooges came at me because they needed a succubus to try and bribe you with. Century came at me because you had Weissman steering them toward me. Winter turned on me because he was petrified you were going to kill him.”