Chapter 17
Caspian made sure Davin and I had his phone number before leaving, then he nodded to my mother, who returned the gesture stiffly, and he was gone.
“You’re not—” my mother started, but she stopped herself.
She must know that we had to do this. There was no choice.
Our situations were just exactly reversed from yesterday.
I was the one who was taking over, whether that was what I wanted or not, and she was left behind taking care of herself and my father. I imagined it wasn’t a situation she’d ever been in before.
Well, except for the thing people had continually implied to me about my mother having previous children. So maybe they’d gone to fight their own battles, and it hadn’t gone so well.
I rounded the bed to sit next to her and leaned on her shoulder, like I had so many times as a child.
“I can handle this, Mother. I promise. Plus Caspian will be there.” I opted not to mention Sexton, since she didn’t trust him, and frankly, I’d been assuming Davin would come, but . . . he was a computer guy.
Was he also a badass? Sure. But assuming he’d throw himself into danger on my behalf was rude at best.
Davin, who’d followed me to my mother’s side, seemed to be able to read my mind as usual, and snorted. “And me. I won’t be letting you get yourself killed. No betrayals today.”
Mother looked up at him, confused, and he sighed and shook his head. “Something Wu Mei said. She’s got a strange view on what people owe to their loved ones.”
Mother rolled her eyes. “She would. Horrible woman.”
I refrained from pointing out how alike Mother and Mei were, since fighting was not the goal.
“You’re not ready for this,” she finally whispered. “I didn’t prepare you for this. I never wanted—” Her voice broke, and she looked away toward the window, her eyes wet.
I reached up and gently turned her chin till she was facing me again.
“I know you didn’t want this. I don’t want you to ever be in danger either.
But you did prepare me for this. You taught me how to take care of myself, even if I was the worst student ever.
You pushed me out of the nest, remember?
You shoved poor unsuspecting Davin at me.
I know you would never want me in danger, but I’m all grown up, Mother.
And you raised me to be able to deal with that. ”
“I didn’t, though,” she insisted, shaking her head, but instead of meeting my eye, she closed hers. “I . . . I protected you. I stopped things from hurting you, and now you . . . you’re so innocent. You don’t know—”
“Mother. I’m not. I promise you, I’m not.” I leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I doubt anyone’s ever ready to march into danger, but you prepared me for this as well as you could. Plus there’s Caspian and Davin.”
“Against dragons,” she said, almost spat, and it was a denial of sorts. Then she pursed her lips and sighed, before finally meeting my eye. “Take care of them?”
“Of course. That’s how you taught me.” Because if there was one thing growing up my mother’s son had taught me, it was that helping others wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was necessary.
If you knowingly sat back and did nothing while others suffered or died, then you were complicit in their fate.
Every good general was on the front lines with their soldiers. Every good parent stood between their child and the world. If you cared about someone, you tried to take care of them in whatever way you could.
And me? Mother and my raven friend had raised me to care about everyone.
No wonder I was always exhausted.
“Now, unless I misunderstood the conversation I overheard this morning, Davin and I need to go down to the office and put a sign on the door saying we’re going to be closed a few days.
And I need to call Bethany to reschedule our appointment to install her system.
I think she’ll understand, since I’m sure every vamp in town knows something is going on by now. ”
“Except Gerald,” Davin said, a tiny smirk in his voice.
I rolled my neck to look up at him and rolled my eyes. “Seriously? I think now that he’s re . . . un . . . dead . . . whatever. He never knew shit and now he never will.”
The smirk didn’t drop for a second, but Davin glanced over at my mother, then dragged the subject back into the proper direction. “We can also pack some bags and get lunch while we’re out.”
“There’s a dragon out there who wants you dead,” my mother protested. “Everyone is here to protect you.”
It was a fair point, but also, one dragon? One maybe prematurely old dragon, who had already been intimidated by my friends once? I wasn’t afraid of Fearson.
Maybe that was naive of me, and maybe I was wrong about Fearson even being a part of the situation, but I was starting to think that together, Twist, Davin and I could handle anything that came at us.
I smiled at Mother and patted her hand, then pushed up off the bed. “It’s fine. We can handle ourselves. We’ve already fought off a bunch of vampires and their minions, and turned one dragon to the side of good. We’ve got this.”
She pursed her lips at me, clearly not quite agreeing, or at least still worried, but, well . . . that was never going to change, I realized.
I had to grow up and deal with things for myself, but nothing was ever going to change the fact that she was my mother, and she wanted to protect me from it all. She just couldn’t do that anymore.
It had taken me a while, but I was, in fact, an adult.
So after hugging her and then leaning down to give my father a quick squeeze, I turned and led Davin out of the room. My parents were adults too, after all, and they had a lot to work through in the coming days.
They would have to figure out how they fit together now, if they still did.
Twist met us downstairs, having finished whatever giant piece of meat she’d been fed for breakfast. I noted that all the vampires present were looking at her with either interest or trepidation.
As they should.
“Hey kiddo,” I said. “We’ve got to go down to the shop, make some work calls, and pack a couple bags. You want to go?”
“Of course, Father,” she answered. “Grandmother’s home smells funny filled with so many of the dead. I do not like it.”
Davin raised a brow at me, but I was not going to interpret that right in front of the vampires in question. So I reached down to scoop her up and tuck her into her pocket while explaining, “She wants some air too. It’s been a long couple of days.”
His smirk said he didn’t believe me for a second, or at least had a clue I’d buffered the kitten’s usual honest commentary.
Either way, less than two minutes later, we were climbing into Davin’s car and getting the hell out of there. It was odd, given the standing threat against me, that it was a relief to leave the safety of my mother’s home.
As we got to the highway that led back to the city, it was impossible to ignore the work crew already there, preparing to build the very wall my mother had been threatening the day before, all the way around her property.
I wondered how tall it was going to be, and if anyone had bothered with permits before getting started.
Not that Avalon was ever going to tell my mother what kind of wall she was allowed to build. If she built a ten-foot wall and the city law said eight was the maximum, I was sure that it was city law, not my mother’s construction crew, that would be making changes.
The drive down into the city was always nice, but on this particular occasion, it felt a little like an escape.
Not just from my mother’s overwhelming expectations and slightly smothering love, but from the entirety of vampires in Southern California, flocking to my mother’s side to protect her and her loved ones from a threat none of us quite understood.
It was silly that I was leaving when they had come in part to protect me from being kidnapped to power “the machine,” but it felt right. Not because I wanted to be alone, even. But because most of the people at my mother’s house weren’t my people.
If it had been Arthur and Amelia and Grady? That would have been a different conversation.
So instead of hiding out in my mother’s home, with vampires protecting me from dragons I didn’t even know, we headed down into town, toward my actual safe place. My shop. Right in the middle of all my friends.
It was odd to see it dark, and even though Olive had only been with us for a few weeks, strange to walk into the shop during the day and not find her sitting at the front desk.
I hoped she was safe, but I couldn’t imagine anyone linking us to a point where they would think hurting her would hurt me.
If there was one thing I’d learned that bad guys were good at, it was assuming other people were as sociopathic as they were.
Even Sexton, back when he’d thought only one of us was going to survive, had assumed I would do the same were our positions reversed. He hadn’t understood me at all then.
We made the calls, including Bethany, who had indeed been expecting us to reschedule. She wished me luck with whatever it was that was going on, and for a vampire, sounded pretty sincere in her well-wishes for my continued life.
If nothing else, I supposed it would inconvenience her for me to drop dead.
Vampires were always good at seeing the absolute bottom line of any situation.
Most of them had had many years to see the patterns people tended to follow, and what the usual result was.
Plus, vamps who weren’t intelligent didn’t tend to live to ripe old ages.
Funny, how there were a lot of vamps I thought of as stodgy old people, but I’d never met one who wasn’t progressive. Except Gerald, and that hadn’t worked out so great for him.
Probably the serial killer guys, too.
Hmm.
Anyway, the work done, my bag packed, and Davin finished taping a sign to the door that said we would be out of office for the coming week, I sat down in my chair and looked to him. “So, first we go to your place for your bag. Then what?”
He lifted a brow at me, but he was already smiling, so I suspected he was in no bigger hurry to rush back to my mother’s place than I was. Funny, that.
“Well, we could stay at mine a while. Order some of that noxious hot curry you like.”
I smirked back at him. “That sounds like half a good time.”
“Half?” His voice was oh-so-casual as he asked what was definitely not a real question.
“You know what I’d rather do with the rest of my night instead of—as well as eating some fabulous curry?”
He swallowed a laugh, covering his mouth as his shoulders shook, but then he wiped his face clean of—most—emotion and looked at me ever so seriously. “What would you like to do?”
The bell over the door tinkled and I almost threw the three-hole punch sitting on my desk at it.
It only got worse when we turned to see who it was, and found Carmen Aguilar standing in the doorway looking like Mimi from La Boheme—bedraggled and miserable, clearly having been crying, and possibly about to die of tuberculosis.
Well, probably not that one, since I didn’t think even tuberculosis could kill vampires.