Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [10]
“Anita isn’t like any other woman I’ve ever met.”
Donna gave him another look. Edward had phrased it that way on purpose. He’d caught her jealous reasoning just as I had, and now he was playing to it. It was one way to explain my strange reaction to the engagement news without risk of blowing his cover. I guess I couldn’t blame him, but in a way I knew it was payback for my lack of social skills. His cover was important enough to him to let Donna think we’d been a couple, which meant it was pretty important to him. Edward and I had never had a single romantic thought about each other in our lives.
“I’ve got luggage,” I said.
“See,” Donna said, tugging on his arm.
“The carry-on bag wouldn’t hold all the guns.”
Donna stopped in the middle of saying something to Edward, then turned slowly to stare at me. Edward and I stopped walking because she had stopped. Her eyes were a little wide. She seemed to have caught her breath. She was staring at me, but not at my face. If it had been a guy, I might have accused him of staring at my chest, but that wasn’t exactly what she was looking at. I followed her gaze and found that my jacket had slipped back over my left side exposing my gun. It must have happened when I readjusted the bag coming off the escalator. Careless of me. I’m usually pretty careful about exposing my arsenal in public. It tends to make people nervous, just like now. I shifted the bag so that my jacket slid back over the shoulder holster like a curtain dropping back in place.
Donna drew a quick breath, blinked, and looked at my face. “You really do carry a gun.” Her voice held a sort of wonderment.
“I told you she did,” Edward said in his Ted voice.
“I know, I know,” Donna said. She shook her head. “I’ve just never been around a woman that . . . Do you kill as easily as Ted does?”
It was a very intelligent question, and meant that she’d been paying more attention to the real Edward than I’d given her credit for. So I answered the question truthfully. “No.”
Edward hugged her to him, eyes warning me over her head. “Anita doesn’t believe shifters are animals. She still thinks the monsters can be saved. It makes her squeamish sometimes.”
Donna stared at me. “My husband was killed by a werewolf. He was killed in front of me and Peter. Peter was only eight.”
I didn’t know what reaction she expected so I didn’t give her one. My face was neutral, interested, far from shocked. “What saved you?”
She nodded slowly, understanding the question. A werewolf tore her husband apart in front of her and her son, yet they were still alive and the husband wasn’t. Something had interceded, something had saved them.
“John, my husband, had loaded a rifle with silver shot. He’d dropped the gun in the attack. He’d wounded it but not enough.” Her eyes had gone distant with remembering. We stood in the bright airport, three people huddled in a small circle of silence and hushed voices and Donna’s wide eyes. I didn’t have to look at Edward to know that his face was as neutral as mine. She’d fallen silent, the horror still too fresh in her eyes. The look was enough. There was worse to come, or worse to her. Something she felt guilty about at the very least.
“John had just showed Peter how to shoot the week before. He was so little, but I let him take that gun. I let him shoot that monster. I let him stand his ground in the face of that thing, while I just huddled on the floor, frozen.”
That was it. That was the true horror for Donna. She’d allowed her child to protect her. Allowed her child to take the adult role of protector in the face of a nightmare. She’d failed the big test, and little Peter had passed into adulthood at a very tender age. No wonder he hated Edward. Peter had earned his right to be man of the house. He’d earned it in blood, and now his mother was going to remarry. Yeah, right.
Donna turned those haunted eyes to me. She blinked and seemed to be drawing herself back from the past as if it were a physical effort. She hadn’t made peace with the scene, or it wouldn’t have remained so vivid. If you can begin to