“But not you.”
“Going after the shifters looked and smelled an awful lot like prejudice to me. And then it began to look a lot like genocide. Especially when he started adding other supernatural creatures—and even made vampires—to his list. Things got ugly.”
“How ugly?” I ask, though I’m not sure I actually want to know the answer. Not when Jaxon looks more grim than I’ve ever seen him. And not when he’s throwing around words like “genocide.”
“Ugly.” He refuses to elaborate. “Especially with our history.”
Again the blanks in my knowledge base make it impossible to understand what history he’s referring to. Instead of asking, I make a mental note to check the library or ask Macy.
“I tried to reason with Hudson, tried to talk him down. I even went to the king and queen to see if they could do something with him.”
I note how he calls his parents the king and queen instead of Mom and Dad, and for a second, I flash back to the first day I met him. To the chess table and the vampire queen and the things he said about what I thought at the time was just a chess piece.
It all makes so much more sense now.
“They couldn’t.”
“They wouldn’t,” he corrects. “So I tried to talk to him again. So did Byron and Mekhi and a few of the others who would have graduated with him. He didn’t listen. And one day he started a fight that was set to rip the whole world apart, had it been allowed to continue.”
“That’s when you stepped in.”
“I thought I could fix things. I thought I could talk him down. It didn’t work out like that.
He closes his eyes, and it makes him seem so far away. Until he opens them again, and I realize he is even more distant than I imagined.
“Do you know what it’s like to realize the brother you grew up revering is a total and complete sociopath?” he asks in a voice made more terrible by the reasonableness of it. “Can you imagine what it feels like to know that maybe if you hadn’t been so blind, so caught up in your hero worship and seen him for what he was sooner, a lot of people would still be alive?
“I had to kill him, Grace. There was no other choice. Truth be told, I don’t even regret doing it.” He says the last in a whisper, like he’s ashamed to even admit it.
“I don’t believe that,” I tell him. Guilt radiates off him, makes me hurt for him in a way I’ve never hurt for anyone before.
“I believe it was necessary. I believe you did what you had to do. But I don’t believe for one second that you don’t regret killing him.” He’s spent too much time torturing himself for that to be true.
He doesn’t answer right away, and I can’t help wondering if I said the wrong thing. Can’t help wondering if I just made everything worse.
“I regret that he had to be killed,” he finally says after a long silence passes between us. “I regret that my parents created him and molded him into the monster that he was. But I don’t regret that he’s gone now. If he wasn’t dead, no one in the entire world would be safe.”
My stomach plummets at his words. Instinctively, I want to deny them, but I’ve seen Jaxon’s power. I’ve seen what he can do when he controls it and what it can do on its own when he can’t. If Hudson’s power was anything close—without Jaxon’s morality to keep it in check—I can’t imagine what might happen.
“Did you have the same power, or—”
“Hudson could persuade anyone to do anything.” The words are as flat as his tone. As his eyes. “I don’t mean he could con people; I mean that he had the power to make people do whatever he wanted them to do. He could make them torture another person, could make them kill anyone he wanted to. He could start wars and launch bombs.”
A chill runs up my spine at his words, has the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up. Even before he looks straight at me and continues. “He could make you kill yourself, Grace. Or Macy. Or your uncle. Or me. He could make you do anything he wanted, and he did. Over and over and over again.
“No one could stop him. No one could resist him. And he knew it. So he took whatever he wanted and planned for more. And when he decided he was going to murder the shifters, just wipe them out of existence, I knew he wouldn’t stop there. The dragons would go, too. The witches. The made vampires. The humans.
“He would destroy them all— just because he could.”
He looks away, I think because he doesn’t want me to see his face. But I don’t need to look in his eyes to know how much this hurts him, not when I can hear it in his voice and feel it in the tension of his body against mine. “There were a lot of people who supported him, Grace. And a lot of people willing to stand in front of him to protect him and the vision he had for our species. I killed a lot of them to get to him. And then I killed him.”