“I’ve heard all that. You’ve always told it that way.”
“But that wasn’t everything. I mean, that was everything I remembered, ever since I first met you. I’ve played it out over and over in my mind, and there was never a black chin. Until now. It’s like…watching a movie you’ve seen a million times, only now somebody has added a part that wasn’t there before. Just now, it just popped into my head.”
My heart sinks. Ever since I first met you, he said. Ever since he first met me…on the same night master vampire Henry Stadther compelled Brenner to forget everything he knew about vampires and the underworld. The next day, I forced Henry to reverse the compulsion, to restore Brenner’s memories.
“The compulsion,” I say, pulling back to look Brenner in his haunted eyes. “When Henry Stadther restored your memories, he must have held that part back.”
“The black chin.”
“It must mean something to him. Henry was fine with you remembering everything else, just not that one thing.”
The obvious one-word question—Why?—hangs in the air between us. But when Brenner voices it, I’m surprised to find that we’re thinking of different whys: “Why now?” he asks. “Why did the memory suddenly come back?”
The answer is very simple, and very bad. “There’s only one way a compulsion could be released without him being here in person, touching you.”
Brenner’s eyebrows raise. “He’s dead?”
I nod. “Like, just now. Somebody just killed Henry Stadther.”
I feel Brenner’s body tighten with repressed energy. This will revitalize the search for Haley’s killers. He wants to go. He wants to go now, go at this hard, and he won’t stop until he finds that black chin. Brenner will throw himself at this the only way he knows how: all caution to the wind, a bull in a china shop. My anxious butterflies scoff. More like, china in a bull shop. A human doesn’t belong in the underworld. He’ll be crushed. You can’t possibly keep him.
“I know,” I say to both the butterflies and Brenner, “I know, you want to jump on this—”
“Let’s go to the Agency.”
I grasp both sides of his collar, as though jerking on a dog’s leash. “We will.”
“Let’s go.”
“No, but—”
“This changes everything. Henry Stadther was hiding this. He knew something about those revenants.”
There, Brenner’s just given me an inch. I’ll take a mile. “Exactly! He knew something, and now he’s dead, Jay. Do you know how hard it is to kill a master vampire? Do you have any idea how long he’s lived? It’s…this is huge. Whatever happened, it’s a kick to the hornet’s nest. All the most powerful underworlders in Detroit will rampage for better positions on the food chain. Trust me, we don’t want any part of that.”
“What, so we do nothing?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m saying that this is way bigger than us, so we have to play the table, not the cards.”
Sighing, Brenner leans his head back against the wall, obviously frustrated to hear yet another of my endless poker analogies, or metaphors, or whatever the hell they are. I have to suppress a sigh myself. This is such a perfect moment for me to slug him in the shoulder and call him a jerk, even though on the inside I’m thrilled that Brenner finally feels comfortable enough to be exasperated by my bullshit. It’s such a real boyfriend moment.
“This is high stakes, Jay,” I explain. “Lots of players in the game. We’ve got a seat at the table, but we’re small fry. Everybody else has a way bigger stack of chips than us. We make one mistake, we’re out. So we hold our cards, and we wait.”
Brenner throws his hands up. “Wait?”
“Stay out of the crossfire,” I continue. “Play the table. Let the big stacks knock each other out. They’ll do most of the work for us. Some of those big stacks are on our side. The Agency is working on this.”
“Are they, though? We haven’t heard a thing.”
“A rogue necromancer creating revenant vampires? That’s top of the pile, trust me.”
“We should be working it. I don’t care what they say.”
“I’m not saying we won’t. I want to nail those bastards as much as you do.” I tug on his collar to emphasize my words. It’s such a fine line I have to walk on this issue. We both want the same thing. Our reasons, however, are very different.
Gently, Brenner pulls my hands from his collar. “It’s mine, Shayne.”
I’ve heard this before. On this subject, I know better than to fight him, even if I disagree. “I know.”
His eyes kindle with an iron will. “When we get to it, they’re mine for the killing. It has to be me.”
Well, I might have passed on the opportunity to revel in his real boyfriend moment, but I simply cannot deny myself a real girlfriend moment, so I lay the guilt on real thick when I say, “Right, it has to be you, even if that means getting yourself killed. Because it’s either you or them, right?”
Brenner eyes me cautiously, wary of a trap. “That’s right.”
Too easy. His ass is mine. “Oh, that’s right, huh? It’s you”—I poke him hard in the chest, my voice dripping with contempt—“or it’s them?” I turn my palms up. “Nobody else?”
Brenner exhales, breaking eye contact with me.
Now that the advantage is won, I soften my voice. “I get how important this is. You blame yourself. You think you owe a debt. Here’s the thing. The person you think you owe…I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m not. I’m right here, Jay. For me, it’s not either you or them.” I pull his chin toward me, so I can look into his eyes. “It has to be you that comes out of this. I don’t care about them.”
The air crackles between us. My heart soars with the intimacy of the moment. At last, after what seems like a lifetime, I’ve finally satisfied a small part of my aching need to make Brenner understand what he means to me.
In response, he says something I’ll never forget. Pulling his face away from my fingers, he says quietly, “But I won’t be me. Not really. Not until they’re gone.”
I feel the bitterness of an odd jealousy. His heart doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the pursuit of those monsters. He just said as much to my face. The butterflies swarm with a vengeance, chittering at me with I told you so, and This will end badly, and Run while you still can!
But I’m fast enough, I vow, mentally stomping my foot. I’m strong enough. And Lady Luck…I want to shake her in desperation. Threaten, beg, put a knife to her throat. You owe me.
“We can’t seem too eager,” I say sullenly. “Give me tomorrow to poke around the office, see what I can find out.”
Pulling me to him, Brenner folds his arms around my shoulders. As I grasp desperately at him, more classic song lyrics come to mind, though not as upbeat this time.
“Give Me Just One More Night.”
“Everytime You Go Away.”
I don’t know much…
I can’t help but finish that one: I don’t know much…but I know I love you.