A terrible noise rose up from the crowd, more like the growl and whine of a hungry beast than words formed by people who could still think, feel pity, or know reason.
“We killed Charles Stryker in his bed for his crimes!” shouted Aunt Leila. “We killed James Stryker when we took this city! Now we have killed Mark Stryker. And we will kill the last of their villainous family soon. We will not let any one of the Light Council live. We will not have peace until we have blood!”
I looked at Ethan’s Uncle Mark swinging in his cage, and I knew that I had been wrong to think of him as the villain in my story, one whose power could crush me. I had been as wrong as Aunt Leila was to think that defeating the Strykers or even bringing down the Light city would change anything.
They brought out more of the Light Council, one after the other, and killed them before our eyes. They brought out the woman they called Bright Mariah in the Light city, and Bitter Mariah in the Dark, and when she was dead, a rebel held her head aloft on one of their spikes, her hair streaming and shining, a symbol the same way I was. The blood fell like rain and caused a joyful riot.
There was no escape from the ugliness in the human heart, the hate that led to this violence and all violence. It had taken my mother, tortured my father, taken my first home and was burning my second. I had struggled to be safe for years, but there was no way to be safe.
There were villains all around me. There was evil in the very air I breathed. There would be no final showdown, no end, no possibility of happiness after evil was vanquished.
The only choice, in the Light city or the Dark, was to be twisted or to break.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I went back with Aunt Leila to the Plaza Hotel, where the sans-merci had established their headquarters. She took me into one of the suites, and she washed her hands and face at the sink. I sat on a sofa and looked down at my clenched hands on the blue and white striped silk.
Aunt Leila seemed happy, as if the obscene show on the platform had been her notion of an ideal family outing. She was talking about the way the sans-merci intended to run the city they had taken: the Committee of the Free, set up to judge and punish the members of the Light regime, and how she thought Dad and I should be on it.
She wanted Ethan to be one of the first victims judged and condemned by the new committee. She wanted Ethan as her example of how life would be from now on. She thought I would actually support that.
“I’ll pass,” I said.
Aunt Leila looked up from the sink and frowned, sparkling drops caught in her long black hair. “It would not be any work. You would only have to make appearances. Of course you would not make decisions about what is best for the city. It would simply be good for you to be viewed as supporting us.”
She did not want real support or the real me.
I looked at her, and I remembered loving her, remembered eating cookies and learning the sword at her house, remembered her being all I had when my father was caged. I looked at her, and I could only see Mark Stryker, who had loved Ethan and still been ready to commit any atrocity. Now here was my aunt, and she loved me. I had not known two years ago that love was not enough to keep people from becoming monsters.
“I know how it would be,” I told Aunt Leila. “I attended meetings of the Light Council.”
“It is not the same thing at all!”
“Being your decoration instead of someone else’s?” I said. “Would I not be sitting and listening to new rules that kill new people? I’d be your golden-haired doll instead of Mark Stryker’s. No, thanks. I’ll pass. Unless—”
Aunt Leila laughed, the sound old and wise. “I will not spare any Stryker.”
And I, I found slowly, discovering the truth as if it was something I had found under dust in the attic of my own home, I did not want to join the committee. Not even to save Ethan. I was so tired of compromises and cowardice.
Aunt Leila looked at my face and sighed.
“Did you hear nothing of what I told you? Did you understand nothing of my story? That Ethan Stryker’s blood tortured your father and murdered your mother, my sister, and exiled you, my niece as dear as a daughter. That I have seen them do the same to countless families, and I will not stop until every drop of his blood has answered for mine. Doesn’t it matter, what they did?”
My mother gone, my father wrecked, my aunt twisted, my life ruined. If I thought about it too long, I felt the same consuming rage that Aunt Leila must have felt. If I had stayed with her instead of meeting Ethan, revenge might have been all I wanted as well. Rage might have consumed me until it was all there was left of me.
Mark Stryker had not suffered as Aunt Leila had suffered. Mark had no excuse for all he had done. But when you were making other people suffer, no excuse was good enough.