Free Tempted by P.C. Cast

It wasn’t playing God to let him die; he should never have been born.
    Stevie Rae shuddered. She continued to stand there as if she was frozen by the horror of what she’d done. What would her friends say if they found out she’d hidden a Raven Mocker? Would Zoey turn away from her? And what repercussions would this creature’s presence cause with the red fledglings,
all
of the red fledglings? As if they didn’t have enough dark, evil things to deal with?
    The nun had been right. He shouldn’t evoke pity in her. She was going to take the towels and stuff back to the green house, go inside the abbey, find Darius and tell him that there was a Raven Mocker in the shed. Then she’d let the warrior do his job. If he wasn’t dead already, Darius would take care of business. It would actually be putting the bird guy out of his misery. She let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in relief at her decision, and his red eyes opened and met hers.
    “Finish it . . .” the Raven Mocker’s voice was weak and filled with pain, but it was clearly, absolutely, undeniably human.
    And that was it. Stevie Rae realized the reason she hadn’t calledDallas and the rest of them when she’d discovered him. When he’d spoken before and told her to kill him, he’d sounded like a real guy—one who had been hurt and abandoned and scared. She hadn’t been able to kill him then, and she wasn’t able to turn away from him now. His voice made all the difference, because even though he looked like a being that shouldn’t be possible, he sounded like a regular guy who was so desperate and in such pain that he expected the very worst to happen to him.
    No, that was wrong. He didn’t just expect the very worst to happen to him, he wanted it to. What he had gone through was so horrible he couldn’t see any way out of it except through his own death. To Stevie Rae, even though what he’d been through was largely of his own making, that made him very, very human. She’d been there. She understood such complete hopelessness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Stevie Rae

    Stevie Rae controlled her automatic impulse to step back because guy voice or no guy voice, and the question of his humanity put temporarily aside, the honest truth was he was one big, bird guy whose blood smelled seriously wrong. And Stevie Rae was very much alone with him.
    “Look, I know you’re hurt and all, so you’re not thinkin’ right, but if I was gonna kill you I definitely wouldn’t have dragged you in here.” She made her voice sound normal and instead of backing away from him like she wanted to, she stood her ground and she met those cold red eyes that looked so bizarrely human.
    “Why won’t you kill me?” The words were little more than an agonized whisper, but the night was so silent that Stevie Rae had no trouble hearing him.
    She could have pretended she didn’t hear what he’d said, or at least didn’t understand him, but she was sick of evasions and lies, so she continued to hold his gaze and told him the truth, “Well, actually, that has a lot more to do with me than you, and that makes it a kinda long, confusing story. I guess mostly I’m not real sure why I won’t kill you, ’cept for the fact that I tend to do things my own way, and I can definitely say I’m not a big fan of killing.”
    He stared at her until she wanted to squirm under that strange red gaze. Finally he said, “You should.”
    Stevie Rae’s eyebrows went up. “I should know, I should kill ya, or I should do things my own way? You’re gonna have to be more specific.Oh, and you should also consider being less bossy. You’re not exactly in a position to tell me what I
should
do.”
    Obviously at the very end of his strength, his eyes had begun to close, but her words had him reopening them. She could see some kind of emotion changing his expression, but his face was so foreign, so unlike anything or anyone she was used to, that she couldn’t read him. His black