Chapter 12
Twelve
HAVEN
We stop for lunch, and when Becks finally gives me enough space to duck into the restroom, I take the chance I’ve been waiting for.
He hasn’t exactly been keen on letting me out of his sight, so this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to use the burner phone I bought behind his back at our last stop.
He’ll flip if he finds out I have it.
I hide in the bathroom stall, punch the number into the phone, and listen to it ring.
The phone rings once, twice, three times, and no one picks up. I tried my parents first, but both of their numbers are already disconnected. I’m hoping that means they shut down their phones so they couldn’t be tracked and not something worse.
I chew on my thumbnail, holding my breath as it rings again, willing Kendra to pick up because she’s the only other number that I have memorized besides my parents’.
Two more rings and then . . . “Hello?”
Her voice is groggy, like she just got up even though it’s midday. Kendra is not a morning person, so that’s entirely possible.
“Kendra, it’s Haven. I can’t tell you how happy I am you picked up,” I say in hushed tones.
“Haven? Why are you calling me from this weird number? I almost didn’t pick up. Who even calls anyone anymore? Only psychopaths and stalkers.”
I stare at the stall door, half-convinced Becks will come barreling through it any second. He wouldn’t care that it’s the women’s bathroom. If I’m gone too long, he’ll come looking. I don’t have much time.
“Never mind about that. I need you to do me a favor,” I say in a rush.
“Why are we whispering?” she asks, dropping her voice to match mine. “Is everything okay?”
My throat tightens when I try to respond. I shake my head. No, everything is certainly not okay. But I can’t even begin to discuss it all. There’s no time, and there’s so much she doesn’t know about me.
“Haven?” Kendra snaps when I don’t say anything for a few more moments. “Now you’re starting to scare me. What’s going on?”
“My parents and I were attacked last night,” I say, diving right in.
“What?” she shrieks, her voice stripped of any remnants of sleep.
“I’m okay, but my dad was stabbed.”
I wince when she all but screams, “Your dad was stabbed?”
“Who was stabbed?” I hear Tate’s muffled yell in the background. Kendra says something I can’t quite hear and then comes back on the line and says, “Tate’s here. I’m putting you on speaker.”
“What’s going on?” Tate immediately asks. “Kendra just screamed that your dad was stabbed?”
“It’s a really long story. But I was attacked last night on the way back from the library, but I’m all right. But then some guy jumped through our window and stabbed my dad.”
If I thought they’d take the news well, I was wrong.
They both start talking at once, firing questions I don’t have answers for. It takes a few minutes to calm them before I give a quick rundown. Someone’s after me, I’ve left town, and I’m safe for now.
Since I can’t exactly tell them a demon is hunting me, I say it’s a stalker. I just need them to quietly check in on my parents and make sure they’re okay.
“Where are you now?” Tate asks, her voice tight with concern.
“I’m still in West Virginia,” I say, keeping it vague.
“Haven, this is crazy,” she says. “Come back and we can go with you to the police. You can stay with us until your dad gets out of the hospital.”
“Didn’t you hear her?” Kendra says. “She’s on the run. There’s some psycho out there who wants to hurt her.”
“I heard her,” Tate says, and then she and Kendra start arguing about whether I should come back or stay away.
My eyes start to sting as I listen to the two of them bicker like an old married couple. I’m going to miss them so much.
“Listen,” I cut in, trying to regain control. “I don’t have much time. Text me only if you have news, okay? I need to keep communication to a minimum.”
“Why?” Tate asks.
I bite my bottom lip. “The guy I’m with doesn’t know I have a phone, and I want to keep it that way. He thinks it’s too dangerous to contact anyone. If he finds out, he’ll take it away. So don’t freak out if it takes me a while to reply, all right?”
There’s a short pause before Tate says, “You’re with a guy?”
“Um, kinda. He was there when I was attacked yesterday. He helped me get away.”
“I have a serious question,” she says slowly. “Have you been kidnapped?”
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it. “No, it’s not like that,” I say, though it kind of is.
“Is he hot?” Kendra cuts in, and I have to slap a hand over my mouth to keep from barking out another loud laugh.
“It’s not important if he’s hot or not,” Tate snaps. “We need to know what his deal is. What if he’s a psycho like the guy who attacked her?”
“He’s not a psycho. He’s . . . a friend of the family.” A bit of a stretch, but I can’t exactly explain he’s best friends with the twin sister that up until last night I thought had been murdered as an infant.
Kendra whispers into the phone, “But he’s hot, isn’t he? I’m getting those vibes.”
“You have no idea,” I finally admit.
“Okay, so are we talking regular hot, or like Adonis level?”
“Kendra!” Tate admonishes her.
“Think blond Adonis with an eighteen pack.”
Someone gasps, probably Kendra. “Oh, girl, are you finally going to get some, because—wait, is it that blond hottie I caught checking you out yesterday? Because that was kinda stalker behavior.”
“What blond hottie?” Tate asks.
“When Haven and I were—” she starts, but I really don’t have time for this. I’ve already been in the bathroom too long.
As if on cue, there’s a light knock and then Becks’ voice filters through the door. “Haven, everything all right in there?”
My stomach jumps into my throat. I’m out of time.
“He’s back. I gotta go,” I quickly whisper into the phone. “But remember, don’t call this number, and only text with an update. And I . . . I love you both.” I don’t give them a chance to quiz me more before ending the call.
“I’ll be right out,” I yell back to Becks, my cheeks burning at the thought of what he probably assumes I’ve been doing in here for so long.
I’m suddenly not sure if it’s a good or bad thing you can’t die of embarrassment.
Rushing out of the stall, I quickly wash my hands, noting that my face is as red as it feels, and then bust through the door to find Becks leaned up against the wall, arms crossed and a frown on his handsome face.
“Who were you talking to?” he asks, his brow furrowed.
“Talking to?” I ask, playing dumb.
“I thought I heard you saying something before I knocked.”
“You were listening in at the women’s bathroom door?” I give him a wide-eyed look that’s meant to make him uncomfortable enough to drop it. “That’s weird.”
“No, I wasn’t—it wasn’t like that,” he says, color appearing high on his cheeks.
“You know people report stuff like that.”
He scrubs a hand down his face, and I feel a thrill of victory when he mumbles, “Never mind, let’s just get out of here,” and turns toward the exit.
I absently rub the back of my head, my stomach churning with worry for my parents, and guilt over hiding the phone from Becks.
“Is it sore?” he asks, his low rumble breaking me from my trance.
“Huh?”
“Your head.” His gaze flicks in my direction before returning to the road.
“Yeah, it is,” I admit. “But I don’t remember getting hit there.”
A muscle in Becks’ jaw tics. “It’s probably from being dragged.”
Oh, right. It hurts in the place the guy grabbed me by the hair. A shudder runs through me. “You saw that, huh?”
Pressing his lips together, Becks nods. It might be my imagination, but I swear I smell the faint hint of ash and smoke.
“From a distance, before I reached you.”
“Good times,” I say, my lame attempt at a joke, but it falls flat. Becks doesn’t even crack a smile.
Embarrassed, I duck my head and stare out the window.
Minutes drag by, and then out of nowhere, Becks says, “I’m sorry.”
I peer over to see he’s white-knuckling the steering wheel, the muscle in his jaw still ticcing.
“What for?”
He glances over, his face a stone mask. “For not getting there sooner,” he says, taking me aback.
His gaze returns to the road. “I followed you through the woods that night, planning on knocking on your door after you’d gotten home and talking with you and your parents at the same time.
But I didn’t know exactly how to break the news that your sister was alive and there was a demon hunting you, so I dragged my feet. ”
I shift, angling toward him. “Becks, it’s not your fault I was attacked. You know that. Right?”
That muscle tics again. “If I’d approached you earlier in the day, when I first spotted you, or followed you more closely last night, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”
Cocking my head, I regard him. Is he really taking blame for what happened?
“You know, you’re right,” I say, and he flinches. “Or we could blame the fact that I decided to cut through the woods instead of taking the lighted path. If we want to go deeper, if my parents hadn’t decided to bring me into the world, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.”
The quick look he gives me says that he doesn’t think those are the same.
“We can play the ‘what if’ game all day, but it’s never going to change the past. At the end of the day, if you hadn’t been there last night, I’d probably be dead right now. My parents most likely too.”
“I don’t know if I should get credit for saving you when it might have been my fault the demon found you in the first place,” he says, referring to the leak in the Order.
I shrug. “You say this demon’s been hunting me for a while, and killing innocent girls along the way, right?”
He nods.
“Then it would have found me eventually. It was only a matter of time. And who knows how many more innocent girls it would have killed if it didn’t find me last night. So when you look at it that way, you didn’t just save my life, you stopped it from hurting anyone else.”
When he glances at me out of the corner of his eye, one brow is cocked, and there’s a whisper of a smile on his face. “That’s a positive way of looking at it.”
“That’s me. I’m a glass half full type of girl.”
“Hmm,” is his only response, before he changes the subject. “I’ve been wondering about something.”
“Yes?”
He doesn’t look at me when he asks, “Why didn’t you use your magic against your attacker? You clearly have some defense training, but if you’d used your magic, you might have had a chance on your own.”
I blow out a frustrated breath of air. “I tried, but I don’t really know how to control and use my magic. It’s unreliable, and so I couldn’t reach it.”
“Have you ever trained with your magic?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Why?”
“A few reasons. Most of them had to do with keeping me hidden. My parents don’t trust anyone, especially not other creatures, and for all intents and purposes, they’re basically human, so there was no one to teach me.
The other big reason is that they believed my magic might potentially draw whoever, or whatever, was after me. Like accidently send out a beacon.”
He turns his head, his eyebrows hiked up his forehead. “Is that true?”
I shrug. “Who knows. But they had a theory that because of the prophecy, my magic is different than other creatures’ and using it might inadvertently attract the evil we were hiding from.”
“If your magic is as powerful as the prophecy says, learning to use it might be what protects you from the demon someday.”
“I suppose that could be true as well, but is it worth the risk?”
Becks seems to mull it over for a few minutes.
It’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once.
But without someone to guide me, it never really mattered.
On my own, I was more likely to accidentally blow something up, or set our house on fire, than anything else, so I resigned myself to live a magicless life a long time ago.
Now it only ever came out on accident, like it had at the Halloween party, and when I sent a fireball at Becks.
It was always destructive, which made me scared of it.
“When was the last time you used your magic, accidently or otherwise? Before the fire at the frat house, that is?”
“Hmm.” I have to think back because it has been so long.
“It’s been a couple of years, actually. The beginning of my senior year of high school.
I got startled and accidentally blew up my parents’ grill in the back yard.
Shot it at least twenty feet in the air,” I say with a chuckle, remembering the look on my dad’s face when the whole grill shot straight up like a rocket, sparks igniting underneath it and all.
But then I sober. “We moved right after, packing our things that very night. By the morning, we were gone.”
I liked that school. I had started to feel, not exactly like I was fitting in, but that I was settling in. The school after that was in a small town. Everyone there had known each other since birth and so I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was bullied the rest of the year.
A warm hand lands on my knee and gives it a slight squeeze. “I’m sorry you’ve had to live like that your whole life.”
I give my head a small shake, brushing the memory off. “It’s not your fault. And besides, it kept me alive for years, so I really shouldn’t complain.”
The look on Becks’ face is not exactly pity, but close. It says that he’d understand if I wanted him to. Something about that warms me, and a soft flutter of butterfly wings stirs in my stomach.
Becks looks away, and the spell is broken.
“Since you haven’t used your magic since the demon was released, I’m not sure if that’s what drew the demon to you, or if it found you through me.
I understand the caution, but I’d feel better if you had at least a little training in that area.
Maybe at the very least I can teach you how to bring it forth. ”
“Really?” I ask, perking up. The thought of learning how to use my magic causes a thrill of excitement to run through me. “Do you think it’s safe?”
“I think at this point it’s worth the risk. I’ve been meaning to ask: what type of creature are you anyway? That would give a good idea on where to start.”
My gut tightens. That is something else my parents hammered into me. To never, ever, reveal my creature origin.
“I don’t know.”
My stomach sours at the lie, and I look out the window, not wanting to meet Becks’ gaze.
“Really?” he asks, surprised.
I shrug. “I’ve pretty much ignored my powers.”
“Hmm.” I can practically hear the gears turning in his head. “It’s probably safe to rule out a vampire, unless you have a secret desire to drink blood I don’t know about.”
Scrunching my nose, I shake my head. Becks laughs lightly.
“I’ve seen you use fire magic, and you said you blew something up. Those powers could make you a fae or any number of types of shifters. Maybe we can figure it out together.”
I force a smile. “Yeah, maybe.”