“Not until…” Cain said, urging me to finish my sentence.
“You know what I was going to say.”
“But you should say it, Mercy.”
“Not until…” I grimaced. “What’s the point of saying it out loud, anyway? I know what happened.”
“Something about saying things out loud forces us to accept them. It challenges our denial.”
“Denial works for me just fine, thank you very much.”
“Does it really?”
“That’s what I just said. Why do you think just asking me that is going to change my mind?”
“I’m not asking you to change your mind, Mercy. I’m simply suggesting you might try being honest with yourself.”
I huffed. “That’s not why I came here today, Cain. I came to tell you I haven’t made my mind up yet about the council.”
“Then why didn’t you just reschedule our appointment?”
“Because Rutherford is a pain in the ass to deal with.”
Cain grinned widely. “That’s not why.”
I shrugged. “It seems you know why, then. So why don’t you tell me?”
“That’s not how this works, Mercy.”
“This isn’t a fucking therapy session, Cain. We’re discussing your proposal. Nothing more.”
Cain shrugged. “Isn’t life just one big therapy session?”
“Well, that would be convenient for you. Then you could just charge people’s insurance any time you had a conversation with them.”
“Evasiveness is the first clue, Mercy.”
“The first clue about what?”
“That I’m getting close to the truth. You came here because you actually wanted to talk to me. Because you don’t talk about Ramon’s death with anyone else. Because you can’t talk about it with anyone else.”
“I do talk about Ramon’s death.”
“You just said it, you know.”
“Said what?”
“That he died.”
“Not necessarily. I mean, it’s possible to talk about someone’s death as a future possibility.”
“But when it comes to Ramon, it isn’t a future possibility. It happened.”
I bit my lip. “Yeah, so. It happened. And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”
“Has it occurred to you that maybe you don’t need to do anything about it? Maybe that’s the problem. You feel responsible, which means you won’t address it until you think you have some way of dealing with it, of trying to fix it. I mean, how many times did you bring Ramon back from hell? In fact, didn’t you actually go to hell yourself once, in the flesh, to bring him back?”
“I did,” I said. “And if there’s a way to put his wraith, his spirit, back into a body, you can be sure I’ll figure it out.”
“You’re a smart girl, a powerful witch, and a terrifyingly capable vampire. But that doesn’t mean you can bring him back, Mercy.”
I shrugged. “Hailey brought Moll back.”
“And how did that turn out?”
“Well, she came back with Lucifer inside her. But she’d made a bargain with the devil centuries before that. Ramon never made any deals with the devil like that.”
“And your brother, when you brought him back from hell…”
“That’s different,” I said. “He’d been tortured there for so long… And Edwin didn’t come back in his own body. He came back trapped in mine.”
“But so far, every person you know who came back from the dead came back with something different about them. Something frightening.”
“Nothing unmanageable.”
“And then there’s you, Mercy. You came back from the dead. Twice, in fact. And it changed you, too.”
“Yeah, it made me a badass vampire bitch. What’s your point?”
“But not badass enough to save Ramon.”
I took a deep breath. “Man, fuck you.”
“But it’s the truth, Mercy. You couldn’t save him then. You can’t save him now.”
“That’s not true. I could have saved him then if I had the power I have now, the power my sisters and I have from the Morrigan.”
“But your half-sister, Julie. She didn’t even take material form until after Ramon died. Until after the demon who possessed him released the flambeaux and she took it back.”
“Yeah, so.”
“The point is that the power you have now, from the Morrigan, from the three-fold goddess, requires all three of you. You couldn’t get this power, Mercy, if Ramon hadn’t died. You’re beating yourself up for not yet having a power that you never could have had if he hadn’t died to begin with.”
I sighed. “I’m not paying you for this session, Cain.”
“You never pay me, Mercy.”
“Yeah, well. Just letting you know, you can’t start charging me. I didn’t ask for this.”
“But I think we’ve made some progress today, don’t you?”
“I still don’t know if I want to lead the council. I’m sorry. I know that’s why you were head-shrinking me. To convince me to agree to…”
“You think I talk to you about these things so I can get you to do what I want?”
I shrugged. “Everyone has their own motivations for the things they do. We’re all selfish at the end of the day.”
Cain pressed his lips together. “Just remember. The council doesn’t have to be what it was. If you take it over, it can be what you want it to be. But without someone to unite vampire-kind, how do you expect the vampires around the world to act as the demons close in?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure they’d fight back.”
“Some might. But can you be sure that’s the way every vampire would channel his anger and fear?”
I shrugged. “My plan is to not let the demon problem get that far. If I take them out before they spread any further…”
“And if you succeed in that way, they’ll make you their leader, their savior, whether you like it or not. It seems to me the answer is clear. You’re going to lead vampire-kind. The question is whether you do it now or later.”
I shook my head. “I could still fail. And I could just let the world’s vampires go crazy in the wake of my failure. Let them enjoy their last hurrahs.”
“But you wouldn’t, would you?”
I shook my head. “Just give me a couple more days to think about it, okay? This is a big commitment. And you know how I feel about responsibility.”
“Responsibility?” Cain asked. “What’s that?”
Chapter Four
“What the hell is going on?” I asked as I walked in the house and saw Fred, Hailey, and Julie all huddled around our big-screen television with video-game controllers in their hands.
“Minecraft!” Hailey shouted. “We have four controllers. Join us, Mercy!”
I narrowed my brow. “I’m not interested.”
Hailey reached into a big paper bag and popped something into her mouth.