“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded oddly matter-of-fact about it. I couldn’t feel much, not yet. Not here. “Yes, he’s gone.” There was a lot of blood. A lot of it was on my hands, bright and red, still warm. There was a puddle of shallow water in a depression in the pavement near me, and without thinking I rinsed myself off in it; no burning, after. The draug weren’t hiding there, not that I’d have cared in this moment. “We need to get you all back to Founder’s Square now. I’ll come back for him.”

I’d never seen a vampire look so young, and so uncertain. I was completely freaking him out, I realized, and this was a kid who’d grown up with a fair amount of insanity and violence, and had inherited a great deal more when he’d crossed to the other side. I wondered what it was he saw in me that made him look so … tentative. “What about them?” he asked, and nodded toward the wounded by the truck.

I didn’t so much as glance that way again. “They can wait,” I said. “I’ll send help.” Maybe.

I knew that wasn’t logical, or reasonable, or even human, to leave three broken men out there to suffer, or to die, if the draug came back, but I wasn’t feeling logical, or reasonable, or human. Captain Obvious had shot Richard, and he hadn’t needed to do that. I’d already saved him. Ten more seconds, and we’d all have left here alive.

I understood why he’d done it; I’d had to fight not to do the same exact thing.

But I couldn’t forgive.

Michael didn’t argue with me. Maybe he, too, realized that I was in a very dangerous place—dangerous for Captain Obvious, for his men, for me, even for him if he tried to get in my way. He bowed his head, stood up, and went to the car. The sound of the door slamming was as final as the lid on a coffin.

I made sure Richard’s eyes were closed. I straightened him as best I could.

As I stood, suddenly and achingly aware of how very tired I was, how weary, the clouds parted, just a little, and a warm beam of wintry sunlight lanced through to bathe us both. I raised my face to it and closed my eyes for a few seconds. A better person might have thought that God was touching us to remind me that it wasn’t all darkness, that clouds passed, and storms ended.

But for now, it was just sun, and warmth, and it soon was gone as the clouds shifted again. Because just now, I wasn’t a person who believed in the future.

Only in what was right in front of me.

I kicked pieces of jellyfied draug out of my way to the driver’s side door of the cruiser. As I got inside, I heard Claire say, in a choked and very shaky voice, “There he is.”