Chapter 8
After just one week of living at Diana Hunter’s apartment for the first time, my real home hidden in the mountains didn’t feel so real any longer. I stared at it through the windshield as familiarity and fear crashed over me.
“Go on, kiddo. Get out of here.” Diana’s voice was gentle. She tapped impatient fingers on the steering wheel. I’d gotten the sense that she wasn’t heartbroken to see me go, but I was twelve and the biggest emotions I’d felt in my life were a storm inside the glass jar of my chest.
“Will I see you again?” I couldn’t make my body move.
“I already told you. How about I come for your birthday this time? I won’t even make you eat cake.”
“I didn’t mind it.” I wasn’t a convincing liar. I’d forced the overly sweet dessert down my throat, and lingering too long on the memory still made me gag days later.
“Get your bags. Go home. Maybe if you stick to your training, one day you and I can hunt together. When you’re a grown-up. Look, Jo’s about to come strangle me. You better get over there.”
I had never faced more of a challenge than forcing myself out of Diana’s car.
I wanted to cry and beg her not to leave me, but I was too afraid that she might not want me to stay with her, so I kept it all locked below my throat.
I got the bag I’d packed a week ago and the paper gift bag my mom had given me, and I didn’t watch her drive away, back down the dirt road.
I went to Josephine and handed over the birthday present without her needing to ask.
She led me into the kitchen and had me sit at the end of the long dining table.
She sat at the head of it, her chair pulled out so that she was almost touching me.
I kept my eyes on the worn corner of the wood table while she made me explain everything I’d done while I was with Diana.
She took out my birthday gifts and laid them on the table.
The pocket knife, the dress, and then the sandals.
The gift bag had a tear in it near the handle, one I’d created myself from taking the dress out too many times, and I’d wanted to warn her not to split it even further, but she’d ripped it, barely another inch, and I collapsed into tears.
Jo pulled me into her arms and rubbed circles around my back to soothe me. She’d never done it before, and her warmth and her scent were so odd to me that I made myself stop crying.
“Go to bed,” she told me. “You’ll start your training again tomorrow.”
I did as she ordered, leaving my gifts behind, not daring to ask to keep them.
The bedroom I shared with my sisters was quiet, and it was a rarity to be in there alone.
Even though the sun was still streaming through the window next to my bed, I got myself under the safety of the covers and held my breath and barely moved until I was sure I would be alone.
Only then did I let myself cry. With my entire world shifting and changing beneath me, I cried myself to sleep.
* * *
Everything changed after my week with Diana.
Looking back, I still wasn’t sure if it was my own attitude that had changed from that one taste of life outside the Hunter Land, or if it was my grand and awkward entrance into puberty, or if, as I suspected at the time, Jo was acting on her subconscious desires to punish me.
Whatever it was, training became several degrees more brutal for me once I returned from that week away.
“Listen to me, Fallon.” Josephine’s voice was stone.
“You will hate every moment of this. You will hate every second of training, every cut, every bruise, every bitter tear that I squeeze out of you. You will come to hate me. I am your mother. I will accept your hate. When all of it feels too hard to go on, I just need you to remember one thing. I love you. I’m doing this because I love you.
No part of me will ever hate you, no matter how much it seems that way. ”
“You’re not my mother.” To her credit, she let me finish the sentence before slapping me so hard across the face my head twisted. I flexed the muscles in my jaw, testing the sting her hand had left behind. A high-pitched ringing screeched in my ear.
“You’ll learn.”
I stared up at her, silent so that my shock and rage could speak all the curses my tongue wasn’t allowed. Jo stared back, daring me to cross that line again. When I didn’t, she pushed me further.
“Cave. Until nightfall.”
“Why?”
She slapped me again, and I roared with anger, which earned me a slap on the ear hard enough to daze me. My entire head was ringing like a fire alarm at that point.
“Three days. Get your canteen and go.”
Three days? I didn’t dare utter that question aloud.
I’d never been in the cave that long, and it took all my power to blink back the angry, frightened tears that stung my eyes.
I stuffed my arms into my jacket and grabbed my full canteen, then stomped in boiling silence along the path that led to the cave entrance. Jo followed behind me.
I didn’t spare her a look as I ducked in through the entrance and sat on the smooth floor with my back to her. I clutched my fear and anger and sadness like it was all I had, and I wouldn’t share it with her.
“You saw a piece of the world, Fallon, but it’s not yours to enjoy. It’s yours to protect. You will die protecting it, and every moment until that death will hurt. I want you to meditate on that.”
I had a few more seconds of sunlight before my mother moved the round stone that fit on the cave mouth like a door.
Everything was dark, and not even a sliver of light came through the perfect seal of the door, and it would be that way for three days.
There was no accompanying silence, though.
That was the true punishment of time spent in the cave.
Screams, growls, laughter, an array of frightening and indeterminate noises echoed from somewhere deeper below the earth until they were only whispers when they reached my ears.
It would be my constant companion in the dark until Josephine released me.
None of my sisters knew what the sounds were or where they came from.
I gasped at a particularly loud roar. I crossed my legs and hugged my arms around my body, and finally let out the cries I’d been holding back, drowning out the other noises.
* * *
Peter Fenton
I’d parked my bike off the main road up in the mountains, hidden behind some trees, then walked the rest of the way to Lazaro’s home.
I didn’t want him to know I was coming, and the motorcycle wasn’t exactly subtle.
The walk hadn’t done anything to soothe my anger, and so I pounded hard enough on the front door to leave a dent. Served the bastard right.
Lazaro opened the door, and I pushed my way in, thanks to his better half’s earlier invite. He let me, of course, and I met his amused smile with my own pissy glare.
“What the fuck, man?” I demanded. I glanced inside his enormous home, hoping Selena wasn’t around to hear this.
“Good evening to you, too, Peter. What do you want?”
“Could you fucking not send your boys after Fallon Marlow? Fallon Hunter? Whatever the fuck you know her as?”
My asshole “brother” was dressed in a button-down and slacks, even in his own home. He turned his back on me, and I followed right behind him all the way to the kitchen.
“Were you involved in that?” Laz’s voice had gone all business. He pulled a bottle of blood from his fridge and held it up to me in an unspoken offer that I refused with a shake of my head. “She was on a romantic date with another man. Don’t tell me you were there.”
Oh, I was there. For all of it. Not that I was going to tell on myself about all that.
I’d gathered that Fallon was invited to that fancy vampire party, even with her keeping it all from me, likely to spare my feelings.
I’d found a nearby rooftop with a vantage point that looked over the entrance of that vampire museum, and I was rewarded for my patient vigilance when Fallon stepped out of that vehicle in the most gorgeous dress I’d ever seen on her.
She was a vision straight from heaven, and I’d have liked to kill the toothless vamp who got to have her on his arm.
One distant look at Fallon all dressed up wasn’t enough for a greedy motherfucker like me, though.
I planted my ass on that rooftop, determined to wait hours to see her again.
Of course, a different source of entertainment had come when my very own brother popped out from the second-floor balcony and onto the rooftop of the museum to make an infuriating phone call to one of his employees.
The instructions had been simple. Follow Fallon and kill her before the night was over.
“You called a fucking hitman on her, brother. Can’t even fight your own battles now?”
He wasn’t looking at me under the guise of warming his blood in that ingenious little appliance, much like the one he’d given me, that heated it to just above human body temperature. The scent of hot blood was nearly a distraction.
“Did you help her? I didn’t hear back from Kaspar.”
“She’s a Hunter. Kaspar’s dead. Ash in the wind, right in front of the cop she’s dating.
Was dating.” I smiled. Whatever trouble I might have gotten into over all this was worth those seconds I’d been replaying in my head for the past day.
Fallon defended me against her man. She’d chosen me over him. That meant something.
“Hmmm.” Laz leaned on his kitchen counter with his mug of blood, his gaze somewhere over my shoulder as if uninterested in the conversation.
“We had a deal, Lazaro.”
A sweet little heartbeat had me as distracted as Laz was, though.
I turned to Selena, and her gorgeous presence scrubbed away at my anger.
I happily accepted her warm hug, tucking her into my chest and exchanging a few greetings.
The woman was getting the raw end of the deal being with Lazaro.
There was no way he was worshiping her as much as she deserved.