The Last Argument

The Last Argument
Sophia pulled the metal chair back. The legs scraped against the concrete floor, a sharp, ugly screech that cut through the silence. She sat down and leaned forward.

"The FBI has fifty men on the ridge," Sophia said. "You're out of exits, Catherine."

"I didn't ask for an exit," Catherine said. She tilted her head, studying Sophia's face like a specimen pinned under glass. "I wanted to see what our blood looks like when it rots."

"You killed sixty people in Prague," Sophia said, her voice flat. "You bombed three safe houses in Colorado. You sent hit squads after teenagers who barely understood what was happening to their bodies."

"I took out threats," Catherine said. Not a flicker of remorse crossed her face. "You call them teenagers. I call them apex predators before their claws finish growing. You think you're building a new world. You're just setting the table for an extermination."

"We negotiated treaties," Sophia said. "We have legal recognition. We're building clinics, schools—"

"Treaties?" Catherine laughed, a short, dry bark. "Humans don't sign treaties with creatures that can tear their throats out in the dark. They sign truces while they build bigger cages. Grandmother Elena understood that. She spent seventy years pretending to be ordinary because she knew what would happen if the world saw what she was."

"Elena hid because she was terrified," Sophia snapped. "She lived in a closet and died alone in a room full of locked boxes. That's not wisdom, Catherine. That's cowardice."

"It was survival!" Catherine slammed both fists onto the table. The metal rang. Her calm cracked, exposing the raw, ugly fury underneath. "You think you're special because you can feel what trees feel? Because you can stitch a wolf's wound together with your bare hands? It's a disease, Sophia. An evolutionary mistake."

Sophia leaned back, watching her cousin's chest heave. "What happened to you?"

Catherine stared at her hands. Her fingers twitched, curling inward against her palms.

"I was twelve years old," Catherine said, her voice dropping into a rasp. "We were on a school trip in the Cascades. Mr. Miller, our biology teacher. He collapsed on the trail. Massive coronary. His face went gray, and he stopped breathing."

She stopped. Her throat moved as she swallowed dry air.

"I felt it," Catherine whispered. "The power. The heat in my chest. Grandmother's journals had told me what we were, but I'd never tried it. I threw myself on him. I put my hands on his chest. I tried to force his heart to beat."

"You weren't trained," Sophia said quietly.

"I boiled him from the inside out," Catherine said. Her eyes locked onto Sophia's with brutal intensity. "I didn't know how to regulate the current. I burned his nervous system to ash while twenty of my classmates stood there screaming. They saw the light coming through my fingers. They saw his skin blister. They knew."

The room was dead quiet except for the hum of the overhead bulb.

"My parents spent six years locking me in the basement whenever the current flared," Catherine continued, her tone freezing over again. "They gave me sedatives. They told me the truth every single night: we are dangerous. We are freaks of nature. And the moment normal humans realize what we can do, they will burn every single one of us to the ground."

"Your parents were wrong," Sophia said. "They broke you instead of teaching you."

"They taught me reality," Catherine said. "You're the one living in a fantasy. You think humans will share power? Look at human history, Sophia. Whenever one group has an advantage over another, it ends in blood. Either we rule them, or they wipe us out. There is no middle ground. There is no peace."

"I've seen the middle ground," Sophia said. "In Millbrook. In Portland. People living side by side."

"Exceptions," Catherine sneered. "Small towns playing house. The second the broader public realizes that a werewolf can rip through a bank vault or a Guardian can stop a general's heart across a room, the tanks will roll. And when they do, your precious registration lists will be their target directory."

"You killed families, Catherine," Sophia said, the disgust rising thick in her throat. "You murdered children in their sleep."

"A quick death is cleaner than what's coming for them," Catherine said. "I was trying to stop the bloodline before it spread. Before it provoked a war that wipes out millions."

Sophia looked at the woman across the table. She reached out with her senses, searching for a single thread of doubt, a crack in the armor, any remnant of the frightened twelve-year-old girl in the woods.

There was nothing. Only stone. Hard, cold, calcified hate.

"You really believe that," Sophia said.

"I know it," Catherine said. "And when the world turns on you, Sophia—when the government you trusted rounds up your pack and puts bullets in their heads—remember this room. Remember that you led them right to the slaughterhouse."

Sophia stood up. The chair didn't scrape this time.

"The federal agents are outside," Sophia said. "They're coming through the doors in two minutes. You're going to a maximum-security cell."

Catherine didn't move. She leaned back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap with terrifying composure. "A cell is fine. The trial will give me an audience. Every human in this country will hear the truth about what you are."

"Nobody is going to hear your truth," Sophia said, turning toward the heavy door. "They're just going to see a broken killer who hated her own reflection."

Sophia pushed the steel door open and walked out into the biting wind.