"But she was already dead," Carmine said incredulously.

"No, Papá. She wasn't." An echo of a former life invaded Salvador's thoughts. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. He could feel that separation being built between himself and his father now, just as he could feel himself trembling. He expected nothing less than for his father to reject him, to kick him out, to disown him completely. He could already hear the booming baritone voice shouting in outrage.

But Carmine did not shout. The mercenary maintained his silence, stared at his son and waited. Patience was a virtue that both of his parents had in vast quantity. Salvador trembled when he looked into his father's eyes. Suddenly he could not read him. Carmine revealed nothing.

"I killed her," he repeated. He pushed out of his chair quickly. More chess pieces fell from the board and clattered against the floor. He paced over them, somehow managing not to step on them. "Some time in the night I dreamed of her. But it wasn't a dream." He shook his head, felt his brows knitting. No, it hadn't been a dream. He'd thought it had been a dream, but that's not what it had been at all. "I knew that when morning came."

Carmine said nothing, nor did he move. He only watched his son pace the floor of the study and listened to him ramble on. It was best that way.

He woke up in the middle of the night to a haze of pulsing and shadowed red. The room swirled with an ebbing tide of blood that washed in and out with every heartbeat. Thum-thump. Thum-thump. The landscape swayed side to side as if the eyes belonged to a body saturated with far too much alcohol. Thum-thump. Thum-thump.

"And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so."

There was a church service somewhere nearby. But there were voices downstairs. They were louder. They were speaking quietly, but he heard them loud and clear. The voices throbbed in his ears as a bleeding heart. Thum-thump. Thum-thump. The animal slid out of the bed and crumpled onto the floor, shivering.

He could still feel that shiver now, especially reflecting on it. "I was not myself," he whispered. "A hunger took over and called me out of bed. I became an animal creeping down the stairs. My fingers became claws, and I saw them." He lifted his hands to look at his own fingers, paused in his pacing to stare at his smooth human nails. He saw them as claws, but Carmine saw them as nails. The memories continued to play.

A man and a woman sat talking. The monster leapt off the stairs and plunged his claws into the man. Blood sprayed. The man gurgled on his last dying breath. The woman jumped into view. She screamed...

"First I killed the bartender. Men are stronger. Males challenge each other for mates and for food."

Carmine raised a brow at that. If his son could read his thoughts, he would have glimpsed the wonder. What had he done by asking to mate with the Linewalker? What had they created together?

Salvador began pacing again. "The female screamed, but she was mine. I won her. She didn't want to be mine, so she screamed..."

"Let me go! Please! Let me go! I'll do anything you want, just don't hurt me! No! No! Anything but that!"

He ripped his claws into her. If she would not be his mate then she would be food. She was worthless anyway. She screamed. Blood sprayed from her body and painted the walls. A savage beast tore into her flesh and ripped her limbs out of their sockets. A man shouted at the monster and fired a gun at it. Bullets ricocheted off the walls. Then the mans creamed. Thum-thump. Thum-thump. The man and the woman gurgled on their own blood. They both drowned in pools of searing hot red. Thum-thump...

"There were shouts outside," he continued. "Someone had seen me and called the police. They came and they shot at me. There was gunfire and blood everywhere, but they couldn't stop me. I craved justice. I hungered for retribution."

"Freeze! Get down on the ground now!"

The monster did not listen. The hunger inside was too intense. These men were obstacles that dared deny him his prey. Whispers in the wind told him they were trying to protect the lies...

"The lies," he murmured. Salvador closed his eyes and dropped onto the armrest of one of the plush chairs by the fireplace. He dropped his chin and reflected on it. "I went to hunt the lies. I went to destroy them. Back to the beginning."

Carmine shifted uneasily in his chair, but turned to look at his son when he settled down out of his pacing. He cleared his throat, waited ten seconds, and then dared to interrupt. "Ema and the church," he said, quietly. "What other lies were there?" He only knew of the priests and the orphanage, and of course the woman he had truthfully bedded so many years ago in Madrid.

"Ema was the first," Salvador said. "Her lie was the lie of living. I had to fix it. In the lie she was supposed to be dead. She wasn't my mother, but she was Juan's mother."

"Juan?" That bit of information startled the mercenary. If he understood precisely what his son was telling him, then that meant...

"Sí, Papá." He lifted his head to meet his father's gaze and stared long into those green depths. A color he could not see, but Carmine had told him the color once before. That sort of thing he never forgot. "You had a real son ... once."

The mercenary wasn't quite sure how to take this knowledge. Salvador could see it in his eyes. Carmine didn't need to say anything at all. Whenever something this intense was dropped into his father's hands, he was much like himself, an open book. The boy frowned some. He hadn't liked the revelation any more than his father did just now. "I ... had a son already?" It nearly made him dumbstruck. "I did not know. I..."

"No, Papá. Of course you didn't." Salvador got up and began pacing again. "You weren't meant to know. Nobody was. Not even me."

"Go on," Carmine insisted. Clearly there was more to this story, and now more than ever he wanted to hear the truth of it. His stoicism returned, but it was backed by a frown much like his son's. It certainly wasn't pleasant news.

Salvador nodded and continued as instructed, still pacing. "I destroyed Ema. I cut down an inspector who was in my way. I felt their spirits cling to me as I ran from the gunfire..."

The men in uniforms shouted and continued to fire at the beast as it raced past them. Their lead officer went down in a flurry of claws and snarling outrage. He ripped the man apart. A few bullets impacted hard against his body, but they didn't stop him. The hunger was too intense to deny. They weren't his targets, however. His target was down the street, tucked away in an abandoned lot that once was a religious sanctuary.

He leapt over cars and dodged more gunfire. Bullets ripped across his legs and arms, but still did not stop him. He moved too fast for the others to pursue him. But the spirits were fast enough. They chased after him as he hurried down the street. The woman screamed and wailed. The man shouted and cried. "How could you? How could you?" He didn't listen to them. His destination was so close.

"I found the church," he said after a moment of pause. Disjointed thoughts and memories returned him to the present where time was right. "Only it wasn't the church as we left it."

"You said it was a ruin," the mercenary murmured, guessing.

Salvador nodded. "Sí. A ruin." He hadn't actually said that, but Carmine was pretty good at deducing such things. "The building was broken. Only its foundations left. I touched the stones and knew. It had burned down. Nobody bothered to rebuild it there. Some of the ghosts whispered about a curse. About a boy..."

He tumbled into the ruins and panted to catch his breath. How fast had he run? How much blood had he lost? It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he had arrived. Broken and blackened stonework was all that remained. That was less work he had to do. Less lies he had to destroy. The ghosts that followed him sobbed and cursed him. But there were other ghosts. One ghost in particular.

The boy stood in front of him, smiling serenely. He could see through his body, but he seemed so real. "You're the one," he growled at the boy.

"I'm the one," the boy replied.

"You brought me here?"

"I did," said the boy. He smiled and stretched his hand out to the monster. "Come. There is something you should see..."

Salvador shook his head abruptly. The memories were dizzying, and he could no longer pace. He dropped back onto the armrest of the plush chair, then slipped down into the seat. His legs remained on the armrest. Such an awkward angle. Pressing his hand against his forehead, he shut his eyes and tried to continue telling the story as best he could.

"Juan," his father whispered.

That settled his thoughts rather nicely. Salvador nodded just once. "Yes. Juan. His name was Juan. The story was the same, he told me. Ema had given birth to him..."

The woman sobbed and shook, knelt in the grass and begged for forgiveness.

"She left him there. She wasn't ready for a baby."

"You brought them together," Carmine guessed.

Again he nodded. "I guess I did, sí." Then he shook his head. "Did I do the right thing?" Pulling his hand away from his face, he looked up at his father imploringly. "Was I meant to?" He searched his father's eyes for the answer he could not find elsewhere. He felt the guilt rising like bile in the back of his throat.

Carmine eased out of his chair and for a moment stood there, looming. Then he stepped around the plush chair and knelt in front of it. He reached out and took his son's hand. Salvador was trembling. "How did he die?" It was the first thing that came to mind. Perhaps he had no answers. Or maybe he just wanted that one question answered first. His own question.

Salvador was certainly trembling. He felt cold and dead inside. His voice even shook a little when he gave the answer his father wanted to hear, but it was an abridged version of the truth. "He fell," he whispered. "Out of the bell tower."

"I told him he shouldn't go up there," one of the ghosts said. It was the ghost of Padre Benedicto. The specter shook his head. "Far too dangerous a place for a small boy."

"I liked it up there," said Juan's ghost. "It was quiet. I could get away from it all."

"That's where he first saw me," said another ghost. That ghost belonged to Padre Ramiro. He had been a plump old priest in life, and that character of him still showed in death as a spirit. At least this one smiled.

Padre Benedicto only frowned.

"He liked to go up there," Salvador told his father. "He said it was quiet and he could get away from everything."

Carmine smirked a little and squeezed his son's hand. A quiet chuckle shook the mercenary. "No son of mine should ever like being kept in a church," he said. The old bear shifted out of his kneeling position to sit on the floor. Even kneeling he still towered over his son, particularly with him crumpled in the chair like that.

Even Salvador couldn't resist the urge to smirk a little at that. "No. Visiting sometimes, but not being kept there." The amusement was short-lived, however. He sighed and closed his eyes.

"But you did not kill him." He could hear the relief in his father's tone.

"No. No I didn't. He was already dead before I came."

"Convenient," the mercenary commented. The relief was gone and had been replaced with suspicion. Carmine was not one to presume that anything the fae did was based on convenience.

Salvador heard that suspicion. He wasn't sure how to respond to it. "Time has no meaning for the fae," he murmured. Where had that come from? It was true, but he wasn't certain why he had said it.

"There isn't much that does have meaning to them."

"And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

Those words stung. A festering wound opened up deep inside, and Salvador actually felt a pain in his heart that had never been there before. He pulled his hand out of his father's grasp and sighed. The feeling made him shiver, made him feel colder inside than ever before. "No," he murmured. "No there isn't." The wall between them grew taller.