Irving thanked him and his footsteps continued. Hope shot into the office with the unconscious team member. The stairwell door creaked open before she had time to close hers. Her heel thumped the guard's arm. She carefully stepped over it and retreated into the shadows.
It was useless, of course. Nast was hunting for this missing guard. He'd see the body through the open doorway. He'd turn on the light and then...
Then what?
Did she have a choice?
Her heart battered her ribs, keeping double time with Irving's brisk, purposeful strides.
She gripped the tranq gun. A hair tickled her cheek, caught in an air current. It tickled back and forth, back and forth, making every inch of skin creep, every muscle tense, like a guitar tuner, cranking her nerves tighter and tighter.
Irving Nast's shadow passed the open door first. He strode past, eyes straight ahead, confident that his employee would come to him.
Hope watched him, her gaze fixed on his shoulder blade, gun trained on his upper arm. A perfect shot. Just pull the trigger.
She wasn't ready. Let him get past, while she took a moment to catch her breath, make a decision, yank that damn tickling hair out -
She fired.
Unprepared for the recoil, Hope was knocked back and, for a second, she thought she'd been shot. It was only as Nast faltered that she realized she'd pulled the trigger.
As he fell, she shuddered so hard she nearly dropped the gun. It wasn't chaos bliss but relief, so sweet it felt as good as chaos.
In pulling the trigger, she'd set her course. She'd shot him so now she had to follow through, had to kill him, as if in "accidentally" pulling that trigger, she'd absolved herself of responsibility for the rest. She had to go with the choice that she'd wanted to pick: their safety over the council.
To protect herself and Karl, Irving Nast had to die. That wasn't the demon talking. It was her, because all this talk of her and the demon was an artificial distinction that she knew in her heart was bullshit. There was no Hope and the demon. There was just Hope, and she wanted the threat of Irving Nast eliminated.
Then, as she pulled out the garrote wire, the zip of it slicing through the silence, she realized what she was about to do.
Rhys blamed the council for her reluctance to kill Irving, which proved that he understood Expisco demons as superficially as he did werewolves. It had nothing to do with laws. It was more than conscience, too.
Hope knew that taking a life was wrong. She felt that more deeply than Karl ever could. If she'd asked him why, when they needed to kill, he did it for them, he'd use that as an excuse: because he didn't mind and she did. The truth, as they both knew, was that the taking of a life was the one experience she'd denied the demon. Death was the demon's purest joy. A high like no other. If she took that life, would she find a new high? If so, could she live with that?
Enjoying death didn't have Hope wandering palliative care wards or racing to accident scenes. Her addiction was fed by serendipity - she took sustenance where she found it and never sought it out.
And yet...
Here was where Hope's drive to find her limits ended. Here she looked down from the precipice and saw the rest of her life consumed by a blaze of temptation and self-loathing.
She crouched beside Irving, garrote wire stretched between her hands. She knew she had to do it. Whatever the cost. Kill or be killed.
She pressed the wire against his throat. His skin whitened along it. She imagined that furrow filling with blood. Would he wake up at the last second, his windpipe severed, life-blood pumping out, gasping for breath, seeing her sitting there, patiently waiting for him to die?
Her bile rose. She swallowed it, burning down to her gut, adding to the roiling pit.
She couldn't do it. She couldn't. Not like this. Why a garrote? Why not a gun or a syringe of poison?
Was that what she wanted? A clean, quiet way to murder someone?
No, if she had to kill, it should be like this, messy and raw and undeniable.
She pushed down on the wire. A single spot of blood welled, then seeped along the wire.
Make it quick. If it's quick he won't wake -
Yes! If he didn't wake up, there wouldn't be any chaos.
Hope picked up the gun, ready to give Irving a second shot of the tranquilizer. Make sure he was out cold and then -