Page 63 of Caretaker

Chapter Twenty-One

By the time we left Miriam’s blood-soaked house, Clayton was once more in possession of his clothes and his weapons and was able to limp out under his own steam. He wasn’t okay—not by any stretch of the imagination—but he was whole, and he was healing rapidly.

Miriam stood in the doorway and watched us go, her eyes blank. I turned back to look at her before I got into the captain’s car, and we stared at each other, silent and grim.

She knew I was planning to kill her.

If she did as Rhys had suggested and gave herself to me, allowed me to dominate her, I would simply order her to hold still for her death. Maybe deciding whether she lived or died shouldn’t have been up to me. Maybe it would harm me, change me, make me the killer.

But I really didn’t care.

I’d called Derry while waiting for Clayton to get ready, and she promised to leave me a change of clothes at Rhys’s place. They’d be waiting for me when I got there.

I got into the car beside Clayton.

He stared straight ahead. “Your rage is not just for Miriam.”

I waited until Rhys backed out, then began to follow him. We were going to his house. I had no idea where else to take Clayton, and Rhys had offered.

I didn’t look at him. “All these years you put up with that shit. All this time you just go along with it. You don’t fight, you don’t find a way out. You just take it. You’re as messed up as she is.” God, my anger was enormous.

He stared out his window. “I hired a man to kill her.”

I jerked my head around to look at him. “What? When?”

“Years ago. He put a bullet in her brain.” He paused. “You saw how she repaired me.”

I nodded, then shuddered. “I wish I hadn’t.”

“She died when he shot her, and then I watched her mend herself. Her body reknits when she’s harmed. And she doesn’t need to do anything. It just is.”

“Why was Shane so worried she’d be killed hunting, then?”

“Shane doesn’t know her. No one knows Miriam Crow.”

“No one but you.”

He nodded. “I know her better than anyone else, and I still don’t know how to kill her. All she needs to regenerate is a drop of her blood, a flake of skin, or a strand of her hair. She regrows. Spawns. Regenerates. Whatever you call it, she cannot really die.”

“Everyone can die.”

He sighed. “A few years after the shooting I planted a bomb in her bedroom. I was with her when it detonated, and I know it blasted her into bits of blood and bone. She brought me back weeks later. We were in a different town, a different house. Physically, she was the same. Mentally, she was darker. She punished me for that attempt in ways I will never…” He put his fingers to his lips and fell into silence.

I did not want him to tell me how she’d hurt him, so I rushed in to fill the thick silence. “So when she dies, you won’t necessarily die? You said you watched her come back to life after the shooting.”

“She told me she has worked hard to make sure I won’t survive her death, so I don’t know.”

“Do you care?”

He turned from the window to watch me. “I would have given anything to die and stay dead. Now, I would regret leaving you. You need me—you need all of us—more than you understand. And my life no longer stretches out before me in endless darkness the way it did before I…before you. So yes, I care. But if my choices are either dying or spending eternity with Miriam, I would rather die.”

I swallowed hard, but it didn’t dislodge the knot in my throat. “I will fix this,” I vowed. “I’ll find a way.”

“Maybe. Maybe you will.”

“I have to free you,” I murmured. “How can I do that?”

“She would have to willingly transfer the control to you.” He shrugged. “She would have to willingly give you custody. And that will never happen.”