It didn’t take too long to load everyone and everything up. Bill and I always had go bags ready in our vehicles. Jessie didn’t have anything except what came with her from Denver. Plus, we were headed to her place anyway, so there wasn’t much point in getting her more stuff. All Annie had was a carry-on. I’d taken a little time earlier to go and rent yet another car, mostly because my Porsche wasn’t ever meant to be a long-distance vehicle. Of course, I could drive it a long way but there was no need to abuse a vintage piece of machinery that way. I dumped Annie’s carry-on into the rental’s trunk next to my go bag. Then, we were pulling out and headed to the highway. When Annie had voluntold me to be her ride, I hadn’t been thrilled with the idea. I wasn’t especially comfortable with her.

More to the point, I wasn’t comfortable having her along for this fight. I knew that Bill could fight. I knew that Jessie could fight. My street cred wasn’t on their level, but it was good enough that people knew I could hold my own in most magical brawls. Annie, though? I had a sneaking suspicion that she’d either never been in a fight or hadn’t been in one in a very long time. Not that having a healer around is a bad thing in a fight, especially one that may drag out for a while, but none of us were going to have the mental bandwidth to protect her and fight our own fights. I suspect that my raging dissatisfaction was obvious to her because she was very quiet for the first hour of that drive. I reveled a bit in that silence and prayed that it would continue. Of course, it didn’t. Of course, I wasn’t the one who broke the silence.

“Are you always this chatty in the car?” Annie asked.

The question felt pretty contrived, so I guess the silence had gotten to her.

“You clearly don’t understand how much time I spend driving alone in cars.”

“Where could you possibly need to drive that calls for extensive alone time in a car?”

“Grab a map of the country. Point to any random spot that isn’t near a major urban center. There are even odds I drove there at some point in the last few years.”

“Why?”

I spared her a look at that comment before I put my eyes back on the road. “There are some things in my go bag that wouldn’t go over very well at a TSA checkpoint.”

She seemed a little startled at that and blessed, blessed silence descended in the vehicle again for almost fifteen more minutes. Still, I could feel her working herself up to say something. She kept glancing over at me and opening her mouth. I finally got tired of it.

“For the love of God, just say whatever it is that you have to say.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “I don’t know you very much. Certainly not well enough to have a firm opinion about that. I’m grateful to you for helping when people got hurt, me included. That’s about as far as it goes.”

“Let me put it another way. You think I’m naïve, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What? Not even a second of hesitation?”

“Nope.”

“Is it because I’m not all gung-ho to kill people like the rest of you?” Annie demanded.

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I bit back on my first response and thought about it. “No, that’s not why. I think you’re naïve because you still think there’s a way to avoid killing those people. You still think that even though more experienced people have told you it is necessary.”

“There’s always an excuse for killing people. It doesn’t make those lives any less sacred. Once you take those lives, they’re gone forever. You end any chance that they’ll find a different path. Every opportunity for redemption is gone.”

It took me a second to realize that I was grinding my teeth. I did not want to have the sanctity of life argument on my way to a bloodbath. Maybe she thought that she could talk me out of it. I shook my head.

“Yeah, that makes a great excuse not to do anything.”

Annie glared at me. “Oh, so I’m a coward now, too?”

“Saying that all life is sacred is a really easy position to take when you haven’t been in mortal danger recently. It’s easy to take the moral high ground when you aren’t under threat. Let me tell you, it looks very damn different when you are staring your own mortality right in the face. I know it did to me when I was being tortured to death.”

That last comment seemed to take some of the wind out of Annie’s sails. She looked troubled by the idea.

I carried on. “Look, if all life is sacred, then my life is sacred. I mean to defend it.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” she insisted.

“Right? I’m not interested in what’s right or wrong at the moment. I’m looking at the practicalities. At least one person is coming to kill us. He’s got the power to do it. That’s the reality that me, Bill, and Jessie are up against.”

“I understand that, but there is always another path.”

“If Pierce Carter was just some garden-variety crazy person, yeah, there probably would be another way. Hell, Jessie and I would probably be on a plane to Majorca right now. The problem is that Carter isn’t just some crazy guy with a vendetta. Once he’s done with us, it’s back on mission for him. And his mission is bad for everyone. Not everyone we know. I mean everyone in the human race. For the rest of time. Find me an alternative to that outcome. Find me one that doesn’t involve someone in a violent, deadly showdown with Carter and I’m in.”

Annie’s eyes went wide in surprise at that. “What?”

“Look. I get what you’re saying. I do. My first solution to most problems isn’t leaving a lot of hats on the floor. I don’t even kill most of the supernatural threats I come up against.”

“Really?” Annie asked with an annoying amount of skepticism.

“Yes, really,” I snarked back. “I banish most of them back to wherever they come from.”

“What do you mean by most of them?”

“Well, we’ve got plenty of monsters that are native to this plane of existence. I can’t banish the homegrown variety. Sometimes, I can convince them to move on to somewhere they’re less likely to run across human beings. But that gets harder by the day. There just aren't that many places left for them to go. If they won’t leave, and they won’t stop killing people, I put them down.”

“Those creatures deserve a chance to live,” said Annie, crossing her arms.

“Oh my god, it’s like having a conversation with Bill.”

Annie went from stern to outraged in zero seconds flat. “I am nothing like that man.”

“Oh, but you are. The two of you see the world in exactly two shades. For you, it’s right and wrong. For him, it’s necessary and irrelevant. There’s nothing in between with either of you. Look, I get that you have strong feelings about, well, basically everything. I know you think you’re right. I mostly think you’re right, too. But I’m not going to let some guy kill me and destroy the world as we know it for a moral principle. I’m just not wired that way. I’m not asking you to get on board with it. I’m not asking you to participate. Honestly, I don’t even know why you’re here.”

“I’m not going to let Jessie die.”

That was when the light bulb went on for me. The whole aggravating conversation had precisely nothing to do with me. Annie wanted someone else to justify doing what needed to be done to her. I didn’t think I was the guy for that job. I’d justified it for myself, but I wasn’t nearly so invested in things like not killing as Annie. She really believed in all that life is sacred stuff. I saw it as a good guideline for most situations that didn’t involve proximity to people or things hellbent on ending my life. That was a gulf that I simply didn’t think I could bridge for her.

I finally answered her. “Then, don’t let her die. But you need to go into this understanding that you’ll have to find a way to live with it after. Nobody else can tell you how to do that.”