“I need to talk to you,” he said, coming closer to me than he ever had before.
“About what?” I stepped back, but the table blocked me from going any farther.
“Why did you do it?” He grabbed my arm tight, almost tipping all the food off the plate and onto the ground. The tattoos on his skin looked garishly colorful compared to my pale arms. “I need to know why. I can’t handle it anymore.”
“Okay. What the heck are you talking about?” I pulled my arm from his grasp.
“Why did you save me from that Akh at the trance party? Why didn’t you let it kill me?”
I put the plate on the table. “Why would I let it kill you? I don’t want you to die.” I didn’t want to lose any more of the lost boys like I had Marcos.
Slade swallowed hard. “But I deserved it. I deserved to die.” A look of genuine confusion passed over his eyes. “I disobeyed a direct order from you. I couldn’t help you save your father. I couldn’t go into that fire. You should have punished me for refusing to go. That’s what Caleb would have done. But instead, you saved my life. Why? What do you have in store for me? What punishment could be worse than death by Akh? I can’t handle not knowing when the ax is finally going to drop. Just do it now and get it over with. Kill me.…”
I put my hand on his chest, stopping him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No one is going to kill you. You’re not even going to be punished. If you haven’t noticed, I’m nothing like Caleb. Neither is Daniel. I understand why you couldn’t go into that fire. You were afraid. I get that now. Werewolves fear fire because it’s one of the few things that can kill them.”
Slade nodded. “It can disintegrate an Urbat completely. Not even leave any bones behind. But the others were able to get over their fears and come to your aid. I couldn’t. I was petrified. But I swear, I wasn’t always such a coward.” He licked his lips. “You know, I’d just been accepted to train as a smoke jumper—those guys who jump out of airplanes in order to put out forest fires?”
I shook my head.
“It’s what I’ve always wanted to be—ever since I was a little boy. But the Shadow Kings took that away from me when they turned me into an Urbat. They took my whole life away.” Slade ran his fingers over the colorful flames on his forearm, tracing the lines. “I ink my arms with tattoos of flames, burn myself with a lighter, like I thought I could fool myself into believing I’d overcome my fears. But when faced with it, I caved. I failed you.”
“I understand. I really do.” The wolf in my own head had almost prevented me from being able to save my father. For someone who’d wanted to be a firefighter all his life, I could understand the shame and agony Slade must feel. “No harm is going to come to you for that.”
Slade grabbed my hand in a lightning-quick movement. “Thank you,” he said, squeezing my fingers. “Thank you.”
“Um. You’re welcome.” What else are you supposed to say when someone thanks you for not killing him? It’s not exactly a situation that comes up often—at least for normal people.
Tears welled in Slade’s eyes, shining brighter than the steel bar in his eyebrow. Slade crying was the last thing I’d ever expected to see. Caleb had really done a number on these boys.
“What I don’t get is that it sounds like you had a pretty good life—training to become a firefighter and all. How did Caleb even get his claws into you?”
Slade let go of my hand, almost as if he felt ashamed to touch me. “There was this girl. Lyla. Prettiest thing I’d ever seen.” A slight smile pulled on his lips like he was remembering her face, but then his chin began to tremble. “But she was in trouble. Needed money. I’d been street racing since high school, best driver around, but the winnings still weren’t enough. After a race one night, this guy approached me. Said his crew needed a driver for a job…” He glanced at the floor.
“You mean like for a heist?”
He nodded. “Normally, I’d say no. But the money he was offering was killer. Enough to pay Lyla’s debts and bring her out to Montana with me for training. Enough to start a new life. Only thing is, when the job was over, the guy says I can’t leave. That the job was my audition, and now I belonged to him. When I refused … Well, next thing I knew, I woke up in the warehouse with this.…” He pushed up his T-shirt sleeve and showed me the ragged crescent-shaped scar on his tricep.
I knew what it was, I had one myself. “Werewolf bite.”
“And they had Lyla. Turns out the guy she owed money to was the same guy who’d recruited me. They’d used her. And then they used her again to turn me—to get me to give in to the curse they’d infected me with.”
I imagined the scene unfolding in the warehouse. Slade waking up disoriented and confused, his arm throbbing with the burning venom of a werewolf bite. Caleb threatening Lyla, forcing Slade to give in to the raging wolf in his head in order to try to stop them from hurting her.
By the dark look in Slade’s eyes, I could tell the scene was playing out in his mind, also.
“What happened to Lyla?” My voice was barely more than a whisper.
Slade’s eyelids slid shut as he lowered his head. “She was the first person I killed after I turned into the wolf. I don’t remember much of what exactly happened—I was in such a frenzy. I thought I was going after the guy who held a knife to her throat, but she ended being the one I killed. I don’t know why I did it.”
“The wolf wants you to kill the person you love the most. She didn’t stand much of a chance once Caleb forced you to give in to the wolf.”
“It wasn’t Caleb.”
“What?”
“He was there. Caleb was always lurking up above in the warehouse. But the guy who recruited me, the guy who forced me to do what I did to Lyla—that was Talbot.”
I felt the air catch in my lungs. I shouldn’t have been shocked by this revelation. I should have seen it coming from the very beginning, since I’d already known that Talbot had been in charge of “recruitment” for Caleb’s gang of Shadow Kings. Talbot was the one who had supposedly had a talent for getting infected individuals to give in to the werewolf curse. He’d been given the task to recruit and change me—only he hadn’t.