“I made a mistake,” he tells me. “I teased her one day, not long before I died. Told her she’d love me forever. I was joking, just playing around, but…” He shakes his head. “I don’t get to do that, because my power makes it true. I knew better, but I forgot for one second, and all this happened.” He holds his hands out helplessly.
His words make everything inside me sit at attention. Because maybe Lia wasn’t as evil as I thought. Maybe she was just one more victim of power beyond someone’s control. It’s a hard thought to swallow after everything that’s happened, so I file it in my “Shit I Don’t Have Time For Today” folder and promise myself I’ll get back to it when I have more time.
“I’m trying to fix what I can,” he tells me. “I swear, Grace, the last thing I want to do right now is hurt you—or anyone. You just have to trust me. And if you try to kill the beast before the Trial, you’re going to die. If not by it, then by the Trial when you drag your broken ass into the arena.”
I can feel his despair, feel his agitation, and despite everything, I believe him. More, I realize, I’ve believed him for a while now.
“That’s not true,” I tell the group. “We have the four items. We could let Hudson out right now. That would give us two days to recover all our strength and train really hard, so we’ll actually have a chance of not dying.” I nod. “It’s the best option.”
“Over my dead fucking body,” Jaxon replies, ice dripping from every word he bites out.
93
Betrayal Is a
Four-Letter
Word
“Best option for whom exactly?” Flint demands, jaw tight and eyes blazing. “Not for the rest of us, that’s for damn sure.”
“I’m with Flint,” Eden says. “We can’t do that. We can’t let Hudson, with his power of persuasion, out in the world again. We just can’t.”
“I understand that you’re scared—” I start.
“We’re not scared,” Macy says. “We’re practical. We lived through Hudson once, until Jaxon and the rest of the Order finally found a way to bring him down. There’s no way we can risk letting him loose again. No way we can justify risking so many people’s lives just because it’s expedient for us.”
“What about risking our lives?” I ask. “Going against the Unkillable Beast won’t be easy. One of us could die—”
“It’s worth it,” Xavier says quietly, his voice and eyes as serious as I’ve ever seen them.
“Dying is worth it?” I repeat flatly. “Seriously?”
“Do you know how many people he killed?” Mekhi asks. “How many wolves and made vampires died because of Hudson? Because he thought born vampires were the most important species on the planet? His gift of persuasion is just too powerful.”
“That’s not what happened,” Hudson tells me, and there’s an underlying urgency in his voice. “I told you that, Grace.”
A memory of the scene with his father scratches at my mind. Why does everyone keep mentioning your gift of persuasion but not the fact that you can literally destroy matter with your mind? What about the memory with your dad? No offense, the fact that you can disintegrate things with a mere thought seems even scarier than the persuasion thing.
“Because they don’t know about it. No one does.” He sighs. “Well, except my parents. But my father believes the gift is unusable. That his attempts to force it to grow unfettered didn’t make it stronger, it made it go dormant.”
Why?
His impenetrable blue eyes hold mine, not a flicker of emotion moving in them. “Because he ran out of things to threaten that I love.”
The fact that he says it so simply, so emotionlessly, only makes it worse. Every word slams into me like a bullet, and I sink down on the couch, slowly bleeding out.
Finally, I whisper, connecting all the dots, “So he thinks when he couldn’t make you use it anymore, it just slowly atrophied?”
Hudson nods. “Why do you think he eventually let me leave the Vampire Court and attend Katmere? I was no longer of use to him.”
My heart breaks wide open for the little boy in that memory. And for the guy standing in front of me, too. But I don’t have time to analyze my feelings right now. I need to convince everyone that the devil they fear doesn’t exist.
I don’t bother to answer Mekhi. Instead, I plead with the group, “Are you really sure that you’ve got the full story? I know what you believe, but have you ever stopped to ask why he did what he did? Have you ever stopped to wonder if there was a justifiable reason?”