CHAPTER 28

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Lilith loomed over him, fists set against her hips. "How did you manage to get in a fight?"

"I don't know," Hain said from his place slumped against the corridor wall outside of Memory. "The traditional way?"

"Yes, but how?" she said. "I mean, you're just, I don't know–"

"Kind of a coward?" Hain said, though he wasn't sure he believed it.

Not anymore. This was the second time in a single day that he'd rushed toward danger rather than away from it.

"No," she said, and stared hard into his eyes. "What you did takes courage, Hain. "

"Thanks." Hain's cheeks glowed pink with the compliment. "But I'm willing to bet you'd do the same if Boothe came after you."

"Boothe?" she said. "The Vrai who broke you from the cells?"

He nodded.

"That's not possible." Doubt painted a frown over her face. "The Vrai can't get through the walls of Promise, much less pick a fight with you inside of it."

"Technically, I think it was a knife fight, though there was only one knife between the two of us. Do both parties need knives for it to qualify as a legitimate knife fight?"

"This isn't a time to joke."

"Who says I'm joking?" he said. "I can't just run around bragging to people about getting in a knife fight with a Vrai if it doesn't count as an actual knife fight."

"This is serious, Hain," she said. "I need to know this was actually a Vrai."

"Unless hand tattoos have become the hot new trend over the past three hours, I think its safe to say it was a Vrai."

Lilith's face went white. "You saw the tattoos?"

"It's hard not to see someone's hands when they're trying to crush your skull with them." He shoved an open hand toward her. "Now, a little help, please?"

Lilith stared at the hand as if she'd never seen one.

Hain lifted one eyebrow at her. "This is the part where you help me off the floor."

"Sorry." She locked one hand in his, and heaved him to his feet. "I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around this. I don't understand why the Vrai are coming after you."

I can think of at least one reason, Hain thought, though he kept his voice firmly silent. Boothe had made his intentions known when he'd broken Hain from his cell. He'd wanted the ring. Though now, with Boothe's plan to get the ring thwarted, and Hain semi-safe within the haven proper, Hain wondered if Boothe had adopted murdering the ring's owner as a backup plan to taking it for himself.

Hain pushed all this from his mind as he tested weight on his injured foot, and was rewarded with pain lancing up his calf. Hain leaned back against the wall, his stomach roiling with nausea.

Lilith's hands were on his hips in a blink, steadying him. "Careful."

Hain's eyes fell to her hands, then back to her eyes. He raised an eyebrow.

"Is this your way of getting close to me, or are you just trying to make things as awkward as possible?"

"Shut up," Lilith said, but she jerked her hands away all the same. "I just didn't want you to fall."

"I'm not going to fall." Hain took a tentative step on the injured foot. It hurt only slightly less than it had the first time. "I'll be fine. Just give me a minute to walk it off."

"You won't be fine." Lilith's arm blocked him from walking any farther. "We need to get you down to Sanger."

Hain tapped a finger against his chin. "Sanger..." His eyes opened wide as if he'd just remembered. "Oh, you mean Sanger, the physician?" He wrinkled his nose. "No, I don't think that's the best idea."

"She already told me you argued, but that doesn't mean she won't fix whatever you did to your foot."

"Sanger hates me," he said. "In fact, if I wasn't so sure it was Boothe who'd attacked me, then Sanger might be high on my list of possible suspects."

"You're going."

"Um, no," he said. "I'm not."

"You," she said, her nostrils flaring, "are such an idiot."

Hain's mulish diplomacy paused the argument long enough for guards to meet them at Memory. Guards who, Hain discovered, were less than ready to believe that a Vrai could have been the attacker.

"The Vrai have been cleared from the haven streets, and none were ever sighted inside the haven proper," one of the guards assured him for the twentieth time after Hain insisted he'd seen the tattoo.

"I expect this kind of hysteria is common for humans," the other guard said. "As your mind is prone to creating patterns out of shadow, it's far more likely that fear made you think you saw a wolf head on your assailant's hand."

Hain wanted to argue more, but the mounting pain in his foot made convincing the guards sink to last on his priority list.

"It would be nice if people around here were willing to do their jobs," he shouted at their backs as they left.

"They're just doing what they think is best." She set a hand on his shoulder. "You can't blame them if your story seems a little hard to believe."

"They're telling me I imagined a Vrai attack," Hain said. "Is that part of their job?"

"You have to understand where they're coming from," she said. "The Vrai can't just walk into Promise. Everything is guarded. Everything is secure."

"If that's true, then how did that Vrai get me out of the cell?"

"That was different," she said, though Hain thought he heard some measure of doubt in her tone. "Besides, the Vrai shouldn't even be concerned with you anymore. The only reason they ever had to come after you was to use you as a bargaining chip to get inside the haven. If they were already in, then they'd have no reason to keep hunting you."

Hain thought back to what Boothe had said when he'd first stolen Hain from the cell. About the ring. That, he thought, was a much more likely reason for the Vrai to keep coming after him, but he kept this information to himself.

"What do you know about that Foew who started yelling during my first time meeting Hume?"

"Smith?" Lilith said. "I don't see what that has to do with the attack."

"Any chance he might have let the Vrai inside?"

"Impossible," she said, her tone one of finality.

"Why is it impossible," he said. "You heard how he said 'human'. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the shooter that day."

"In all fairness, you had just called the Foew–what was it? Abominations?"

"Monsters," he corrected. "And after this, I'm still not convinced of the contrary."

"Thank you for volunteering your feelings on that, yet again," Lilith said with a touch of impatience. "But as to your original question–no, he wouldn't have done this."

"You know him that well?"

"I know that no Foew would never work with a Vrai," she said. "And I know his reputation. He's respected. A good leader."

"Ah, yes. Respect and ability. That must be why Hume shouted him down during the meeting," Hain said sarcastically. "Must be a Foew thing, telling people to sit down and shut up because you value their opinion so much."

"That–."

"Nope. Sorry," Hain said over her.

"Hain I–"

"Sorry, Lilith, but you need to stop talking. I respect you way too much to listen to anything you have to say." He showed her a smug look. "See, I'm starting to fit in here perfectly."

"I was going to say that was different," she finished in an irritated tone. "Hume was elected by the entire haven, so he's the only one with the authority to lead. Smith spoke out of turn."

"And you think Smith understood that? Because from where I was standing, he looked less than excited about it." Hain laughed. "Of course, that was just before someone tried murdering me."

Lilith shot him a dark look. "You don't know these people like I do."

"What makes you so sure you know them at all?" Hain said. "Sanger claims that Smith is none too excited about your Dear Leader."

"What does it matter? Whoever tried to hurt you did it while Smith was speaking. So even if I thought he was capable of it–which I don't–he couldn't have been the culprit."

"You just told me he's a good leader," Hain said. "Couldn't he have convinced one of his loyal followers to smite the evil human on his behalf?"

"No." Her response came out so quickly it seemed to snap at his question's tail. "The Foew are better than that." She sighed, and opened her hands. "Look, I can't imagine how terrifying those experiences were, but accusing an innocent person won't do anything to help catch whoever did this. The guards are hunting for them right now. You just have to trust them."

Hain opened his mouth to say more, but a wave of pain in his foot sucked the breath from his lungs. Lilith's steadying hand on his arm was all that kept him from sprawling onto his face.

"That's it," she said, her hand clamped above his elbow. "We're going to see Sanger."

"No, we're not."

He tried to yank his arm free, but her grip was a clamped jaw on his arm as she swung him up over her shoulder.

"Yes," she said, starting off down the hall, "we are."

#

Sanger was surprisingly warm when she saw him, and Hain was shocked to find that she was willing to treat his injury. But the extent of her pleasant mood soon became apparent by her unwillingness to acknowledge any part of Hain but his foot.

"It's broken," she said, waving a small device over the limb. "Luckily for the foot, it's an easy fix."

Hain scowled. "I'd just like to go on record as saying that I am more than a foot."

Lilith's eyes flashed with warning at Hain, but Sanger merely smiled, waving her device over his injury while explaining to Lilith how immensely stupid one must be to break their foot while kicking a door. The device brought the pain to a dull throb almost instantly, though it did nothing to cool the simmering irritation Hain felt at Sanger's running commentary.

"The foot should stay still for at least ten minutes," Sanger said to no one in particular. "Give the bones a chance to knit together."

Hain scowled harder. "I'll relay the message."

Sanger's smirk betrayed a hint of her mood before leaving. The door clunked shut behind her when she left–her only parting remark.

Hain fumed, and the I-told-you-so was on his lips when someone knocked at the door. He and Lilith exchanged wary looks.

"Don't open it," Hain said with a hushed voice.

Lilith frowned. "Why not?"

"What if it's another attack?"

"And they're knocking?"

"Maybe they're trying to throw us off," he said. "Getting us to let our guard down so they can jump us."

"They already have an advantage." She flicked a finger toward his foot. "You're hobbled, remember?"

A heavy baritone voice spoke from the other side of the door. "If you're going to try and pretend the room is empty, then you might want to keep your voices down."

Hain cursed. Lilith chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"You," she said, then pointed to the door. "And him."

"You know who it is?"

Lilith laughed again. "I have an idea."

Hain vomited a pair of four-letter words. Lilith's eyebrows crawled toward her hair.

"Does that mean you want me to open it?"

"Whatever," Hain said, looking away bitterly. "Just do it."

"Should I tiptoe as well?" she asked, miming the action. "Just to throw him off?"

Hain waved her toward the door, his expression dripping with disgust.

Lilith's clear laugh made his blood hot as she walked to the door, and pulled it open. Hain's eyes narrowed to slashes at the would-be intruder, before his eyelids pulled open wide.

It was Smith. And he had a gun.

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