He paused, and maybe, maybe for a moment, he felt a twist of guilt. He remembered the sudden ecstatic relief of sinking his knife into the chimera's stomach in the haunted house, only for it to give way to treacherous, nauseated disgust when she screamed, when the blood ran and it looked like his. Whatever this thing was, in that moment it sounded more like Taym to his own ears than Zeke ever had.
He fought it. "Be brave," he said, the teenage voice abandoned. "And cooperate, or this will go badly."
And he let it go. He'd take the candies, not to Caelius, but to H; at least some of them. The majority went to Edith, along with a dispassionate, clinical report of his initial failure but his success in retrieving useful information; forwarded copies of the school maps, the notes.
And he told them to question the thing in the lockup, and he told them he wanted to listen. "And," he told them, hating himself for it, "don't be any harder than you have to be. Unless it doesn't cooperate. In that case," he said, "do whatever the ******** you have to do."
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