Savage Wings: Book Three of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 31

At the front of the hall, standing directly in front of the stage, Charlie waited, looking the most impatient of them all, tapping his foot against the floor and clicking his tongue against his teeth. Close by and looking uncharacteristically jittery was Edward and with him was Blaine, who'd naturally seemed to gravitate towards the brutish compadre of Benjamin since we'd lost Garrick, and Alexander and Peter both of whom I'd met at the Millennium Mills. Fenton stood leaning against the platform with his arms folded across his chest. He was the only one who wasn't staring at me, preferring instead to look anywhere but, and my heart sank a little to see it. I stopped next to Lucius, feeling an affinity with the only other one here who had the ability to rouse that same look of suspicion in their eyes. He flashed me a wide grin, almost as if he were oblivious of what was about to happen, even though I knew he understood only too well.

"Okay," Harper said to them all, although his cold gaze rested most heavily upon Charlie. There was a weariness to his voice that I didn't expect, as if he had wrangled with them for hours about this and who knows, maybe he had. "Obviously the events of the past few days have caused some dissent amongst us. What happened yesterday was unexpected, to say the least. Some of you are worried. Some of you are frightened. You want answers, well, now's your chance."

He gestured towards me and for a moment, nobody spoke. A few furtive glances were cast around the hall, almost as if they were daring each other to speak, even though they had all no doubt been highly vocal before I'd been summoned here to face them.

It was, as I could have predicted, the stocky, shaven-headed vampire who spoke up first, his stance as defensive as his face was indignant. "Where's the Feeder?" he demanded.

"If you mean Amy, she's sleeping," I said. "She's had quite an ordeal, I think she deserves some rest. And she's not a Feeder anymore, so you can quit calling her one."

He snorted. "We only have your word for that."

"You were there, Charlie," I replied, trying to remain calm. I didn't want to give him my anger and frustration, knowing that if I did, I might as well have pulled the damn trigger myself. "You saw for yourself that she was cured. What came out of that room, was not the creature you put in there."

Fenton did look at me then, a fleeting look of curiosity that made me flush uncomfortably and then it was gone again, replaced with indifference and distance. Too much distance.

"So you reckon she's safe? One minute she wants to rip everyone's throat out and now everything's okay?"

God, how I hated his smug, sarcastic tone.

"Yes," I said. "She's perfectly safe. Do you think I would have been able to stay with her these past hours if she was still a Feeder? Trust me, she's cured."

Charlie sneered. "Well, you would say that seeing as you were the one that had everything to gain from the Feeder's supposed recovery."

"What have I gained, Charlie?" I snapped, unable to stop my voice from rising and echoing around the hall, prompting a few raised eyebrows and a rustle of alarmed voices. "I'm standing here in no better position than I was five days ago. You still don't trust me. You still think I made a bad decision. And what's worse is that now instead of you all judging me for being Vánagandr's wife, you're now all judging me for what I did in there. You're all looking at me like I'm the enemy, like you think I'm about to flip out and incinerate this whole place and everyone in it. So tell me, what the bloody hell have I gained from all of this?"

Harper shook his head. "Nobody thinks you're going to do that, Megan."

"You're a terrible bloody liar, Cain. You think I can't see what they're all thinking? That I can't see the way they're all looking at me?" I reached out my hand, letting the glow envelop my fingers and hearing a few of them gasp and feeling strangely satisfied and sickened at the same time when I saw some visibly draw back. "They don't trust this and they don't trust me."