Night Huntress 07 - This Side of the Grave by Jeaniene Frost Read Free Book Online Page B

volatile emotions. Three months before and I would’ve ground all the activity in the Wreck Room to a halt with a furious squeeze of my mind. But with those borrowed abilities now gone, all I could do was lash out with my voice.
     
    “You have got to be kidding me,” I snapped to the room at large. “I thought it was crappy no one told me about Don’s condition, but who knew you guys had even more secrets up your sleeve!”
     
    “Everyone, take ten,” Dave called out. The dozens of team members stopped whatever grueling activity they’d been involved in to file out of the room—taking the door opposite the one I was closest to, I noticed.
     
    In minutes, the training room was empty of everyone but Cooper, Dave, Tate, Bones, Juan, and my mother, who was the only one aside from Bones who didn’t have a shamefaced expression.
     
    “Catherine, stop overreacting,” she said in a chiding way as she walked over to me. “After all, I’m not doing anything you haven’t done for over a decade.”
     
    “And I’ve almost gotten killed more times than I can count,” I shot back, resisting the urge to shake her.
     
    Her blue stare hardened. “I did get killed,” she replied flatly. “Hiding from the evil in this world did nothing to protect me. Not then and not the other times before it, either.”
     
    Guilt stabbed through me at her words, taking the edge off my anger. Aside from the night she met my father, every other time she’d been abused by vampires or ghouls had been because of me. Monsters didn’t fight fair, and when they came after me, they’d also come after those closest to me. The last vampire I’d tangled with thought forcibly changing my mother over would be just the thing to teach me a lesson. I was only sorry I couldn’t kill him more than once.
     
    “Quite a difference between hiding from danger and dashing headlong into its arms,” Bones noted in a more reasonable tone than I’d used. “Can’t undo the wrong that was done to you by getting in over your head, Justina.”
     
    “You’re right, I’m beyond fixing,” she said, bleakness flashing across features that looked like she was in her thirties instead of forty-six. “But other people aren’t,” she went on. “I can’t change what I am, but killing that vampire months ago showed me I can at least use it to make sure others don’t end up this way.”
     
    It’s like listening to me when I was younger , I thought in disbelief. For so long, I’d hated what I was and took out my ignorance and loathing on other vampires, thinking it would balance the scales against my father. If not for Bones showing me that evil was a decision, not a species, I might still be trapped in that vicious cycle of self-destruction.
     
    And this was twice in one day that I’d been on the receiving end of the same stubborn arguments I’d once used myself. I cast a quick, pleading glance upward. Any time you want to lay off the paybacks, God, that’d be great.
     
    “You could kill hundreds of rogue vampires and ghouls, but it still won’t make the pain go away,” I finally said, my sense of déjà vu growing as I repeated some of the same things Bones told me back then. “Believe me, I know. Only accepting yourself will make the hurt diminish, and that means accepting even the parts you don’t like or didn’t choose.”
     
    My mother looked away, blinking back a sudden pink shine in her eyes. “Really? Rodney accepted me. Look where that got him.”
     
    “Rodney didn’t just accept you, he loved you,” Bones said quietly. “Else he wouldn’t have died trying to save you.”
     
    She whirled until her back was to us, but even though her spine was straight, I saw her shoulders tremble. I wanted to hug her, but I knew sympathy would only be salt in the wound. A hug wouldn’t bring back the only man she’d had a real relationship with.
     
    “I’m going after every filthy bloodsucker I can,” she said after a long moment,