How many miles had they traveled? How far had they come? She shook off the questions. The real world was waiting to pull her back, back to memories and words exchanged. Back to the memory of those folders and the people Nix had killed.
“Your pupils are dilated.” Nix’s voice was all around her. She shivered with the sound of it. Suddenly, the two of them were standing very close together. Faded, Claire could do things, say things, take what she wanted.
No rejection.
No fear.
The moment they touched, the fade exploded outward from their bodies, the world around them going instantly and unnaturally still.
“Oh.” The sound Nix made as her skin met his was halfway between a hum and hallelujah. Gone was the darkness in his eyes. Gone was the way he kept pushing her—back, back, back. He brought his hands up, fanned his fingers out on either side of her face.
Nix and Claire and nothing.
That was when Claire realized they were standing in a cemetery. It shouldn’t have mattered. Nothing did, but the second she caught the name on the closest tombstone, Claire’s brain switched back on.
Evan Sykes.
Eleven.
Even though Claire didn’t care about the real world, even though she wasn’t a part of it, even though the fade was her world now—
She couldn’t help reading the words on the tombstone.
BELOVED HUSBAND. LOVING FATHER. CIVIL SERVANT.
Water park for dogs.
Ultimately, that was the thought that did it, because faded Claire didn’t care about the gravestone or the words, but real Claire remembered seeing the news. She remembered thinking that the world moved on so fast, and then she thought of her parents, moving on without her. She wondered if they’d get her a tombstone if she never came back.
Wondered if they’d even noticed she was gone.
Reality was a crushing weight against Claire’s chest. For a moment, when she lost her fade, she couldn’t breathe.
“Claire?” Nix lost his fade on the heels of hers. Realizing that his hands were still on her face, he made a choking sound in the back of his throat and pried them away. His eyes went to the tombstone. Claire’s stomach sank.
This was why Nix had brought her here.
Monster, an unnatural knowing said from the pit of her bowels. Nix wanted her to think he was a monster. Because by some definitions—most of them, probably—he was.
“Evan Sykes.” Claire said the name out loud, like that would make the man less dead. Like it would change the fact that even if The Society had pulled the trigger, Nix had willingly played gun.
“Senator Evan Sykes,” Nix echoed. “A man with an underage girlfriend, a serious drug problem, and the most melodic voice on the Senate floor.” Nix paused, but Claire couldn’t bring herself to say a word. “I saw her. The girl he was dating. She was younger than you. Completely in love with him, as was his wife. His own daughter spent most of her nights sleeping over at other people’s houses. I try not to wonder why.”
“He was a Null.” Claire finally found her voice. Before she’d looked at Nix’s files, the word hadn’t meant anything to her. She’d never thought a person could be evil, really evil, deep down inside. But now she’d seen firsthand evidence of what some of Nix’s targets had done. If Nulls really were soulless, if they didn’t care about other people, if they were just born like that and couldn’t help it—
“This is real, Claire.” Nix said the words gently, but Claire felt her temper flare up. She was sick of him acting like she didn’t know that.
“Maybe we should go someplace private to talk?” she suggested tersely. Nix arched an eyebrow at her, and she realized the obvious: even without fading, she and Nix were so very unnoticeable that they didn’t have to worry about things like eavesdroppers, even when Nix was practically confessing to murder at a public figure’s tombstone.
“It can’t be a coincidence.”
Nix eyed her warily. “What can’t be a coincidence?”
“The fact that he’s a senator.” Claire had divided Nix’s kills into piles—and Sykes hadn’t been the only senator.
“I told you. Plenty of Nulls go into politics. They’re good at it. Too good.” Nix looked down, his dark hair falling to obscure his eyes from her view.
“But Evan Sykes was—” Claire checked the tombstone. “He was almost fifty. How long had he been in politics? And why did The Society decide he had to die now?”
“He must have slipped past our earlier screening measures.”
Claire realized with a start that Nix had said our. This was the boy who The Society had raised. This was the killer who had bathed in Seven’s blood—but he was also the boy who had saved her. Kissed her. Taught her to fade.
She couldn’t just give up on him. She couldn’t walk away.
“This is what I am, Claire. This is what I do. This is why when I say it’s over, you run. You run, you hide, and you get the hell away from me.”
Claire walked toward him and then past him. “Come on.”
Nix hesitated, and for a moment, she thought he’d let her walk away without batting an eye. Like fingernails on a chalkboard, the rejection grated. But then, in an instant, he was beside her, his long stride easily overtaking hers.
“Where are we going?”
Claire met his gaze and stuck to short answers. “The library.”
The library? He’d taken her to the good senator’s grave to scare some sense into her, to force her to see what he and The Society were capable of doing, and now she wanted to go to the library?
For a few seconds there, Nix had actually thought that he’d succeeded. He’d seen it in the rings of her hazel eyes, the way her gaze lingered on the grave of the man he’d put down like a rabid dog.
And now they were going to the library.
“We’re going to find out more about the senator. You see, there’s this thing called the internet.”
Sarcasm. Claire is being sarcastic.
“I know what the internet is,” Nix replied tautly. “I’ve killed people who use it.”
Ten had been an up-and-coming technology mogul who dabbled in human trafficking on the side.
“You mean you’ve never gone online yourself?” From the expression on Claire’s face, you would have thought he’d announced that he never bathed.
“I live in an eight by eight room with no windows and a door that’s padlocked for show. What do you think?” He didn’t realize until he’d said the words out loud that she wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that. He hadn’t told her.