The point was clear: Horrible, evil crimes had occurred for decades, if not centuries. Justice needed to be served, and that meant killing the Alphas. After weeks of stories, I thought I was ready for it.
Then, Liam changed tactics.
“Do I really need visual aides?” I asked as he handed me a tattered sheet of paper. “I’m having enough bad dreams as it is.” Which he probably knew from the noises I woke myself up making. Every day featured a new story, and every night I saw it unfold in my dreams. I had stared into the face of more dead little girls than I could handle. I really didn’t need to add another to their number.
“Her name is Ananda,” Liam said, taking the chair opposite me. I tilted the paper towards the lantern to see the image of a girl with big brown eyes and two thick black braids. She was sticking out her tongue and pulling up her nose to make it look like a pig’s snout. The page was folded down the middle and I flipped it over to another picture. In this one she was wearing a pink feather boa, a giant green beaded necklace, and a giant, floppy purple hat.
“She was a Shifter?” Knowing the little girl who appeared so full of life in these pictures was murdered made my stomach hurt.
“Nope. She’s a Seer.”
Well, this was new and interesting.
“She’s still alive?”
“Yep.”
“And not a Shifter?”
“Nope.”
Okay… “So, who is she?”
Liam handed me another piece of paper. There were several pictures on this one of the girl, people who were obviously her parents, and another familiar face.
“I don’t understand.”
“Ananda is Sarvarna’s little sister. They adore one another despite, or maybe because of, their fifteen year age difference.” He tapped on a picture which showed an Olan Mills-style family portrait. “When Sarvarna became Alpha, she insisted her family move into the Den. She eats dinner with them every night and makes time to either watch a movie or play board games with them at least once a week.”
The Sarvarna in the pictures didn’t look like a baby killer. She looked like an average girl with an average family who she loved. I felt a heavy weight in my chest and told myself it was just frustration over Liam wasting my time with this.
“I’m assuming you have a point?”
“The point is for you to understand who Sarvarna is. She’s a person, Scout, just like us. She has a family and friends. She feels happiness and pain and sadness. She’ll bleed when you stab her, and cry when she’s hurt.”
In my head, I saw Talley’s vision, but in reverse. The knife was in my hand, and I was sliding it into Sarvarna’s gut. I saw the blood blossom across her shirt, heard her screams rip from her throat, and even smelled the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know. You need to understand how she truly, honestly thinks she’s doing the right thing. You need to see her as something other than evil incarnate, and still want to kill her.”
I scrubbed my hands against my face. Once upon a time I would have worried about smearing what little makeup I wore, but I hadn’t worn any in so long I forgot what it felt like. Since July I had been living out of a single duffle bag. The selection of clothes may have changed two or three times, but the maximum number of outfits I had to choose from at any one time was four, and that was matching different tops with different bottoms. I've never considered myself a girly girl, but I realized there was something about putting on a nice outfit and taking the time to make sure you looked as nice as possible that made you feel more human, more connected to society. Sitting in a cabin, God only knows how many miles from civilization, wearing the same flannel-lined jeans, thermal, and sweater I wore the day before, I found it hard to remember how the real world worked. Normal people didn’t have blood stains on the cuffs of their sweater from dinner preparation. Normal people didn’t train night and day to the point of obsession. And normal people didn’t look at a picture of a smiling family and think about how easy it would be to kill one of them and leave the others to suffer.
“How do you do it?” My voice was muffled by my hands, which were still pressed against my face.
“How do I do what?”
I let my hands fall away and took a deep breath. “Push it all out of your head. How do you kill someone and not let it kill you?”
Liam’s face went blank, and his tone was lifeless. “How many people do you think I’ve killed, Scout?”
“I don’t know. How many people have you killed, Liam?”
He sat perfectly still, save the clenching of his right hand. “One.”
“One?” But that would mean… “The first time you killed someone was that night by the lake? When you killed Hashim?”
“What? You thought I was a serial killer or something?”
I flinched at the anger in his voice and immediately felt horrible. Of course I hadn’t thought he was a serial killer, but for some reason I assumed he had killed others. Why was that? And why did I suddenly feel as though I had been unfair to the boy sitting across the table?
Instead of addressing the issue of me being an assuming ass, I turned the conversation back to my original topic. “Do you still think about it? About what happened? About him?” When Liam didn’t respond, I pushed on. “I can make it through most days without thinking about him now, but in the beginning, when we were doing nothing but driving around for days on end, I couldn’t get Travis's face out of my head. I know I did what I had to do, but I still feel guilty.” That didn’t seem strong enough a word, or really encompass the chaos of emotions just uttering his name caused. “Sometimes I’ll get this queasy feeling in my stomach and not know why. Then, I’ll realize that I was thinking about something that reminded me of him. Like sometimes, right before a snow storm, the sky will turn the same color as his eyes. And even though I’m not actually thinking, ‘Hey, that sky is the same color of Travis’s eyes,’ I get the achy, queasy feeling anyway and have to work out why it’s there.”
Liam’s face still didn’t betray any emotion, but his shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch. “I can hear him scream. It was just a short burst of sound, but it’s like the vibrations are trapped in my ear, constantly bouncing around, making it where I’m unable to escape the last noise he ever made.”