Chapter 25
I’d been gone from the ranch for just under two weeks in total. As I pulled up to my usual parking place in front of the house and gathered my purse and my bag, it felt like I’d been away for years.
Lily burst through the front door and ran across the yard to greet me just as I closed the car door.
Her eyes were big and bright, even more so with the dark eyeliner she’d taken to wearing.
I took the streak of red hair that hung over her shoulder against her natural blonde between my thumb and forefinger. “Cute,” I said.
“Fallon?”
“Do I look that bad?” I half-joked. Mornings on the ranch always had the same warm, earthy smell, and the illusion of years away from home folded in on itself. I was coming back.
“No. You don’t look bad. It’s just…” She was searching my face for answers. Seconds in, and it had been obvious that I failed. Amanda popped out through the door next, bending to fix the back of her shoes where she’d shoved her feet in. There wasn’t time to explain it all to Lily.
“It was a disaster. I failed halfway through. They ran me off, and I can’t go back.” With each awkward sentence I spilled, Lily’s eyes grew bigger. “Peter Fenton, that absolute idiot… he followed me.”
“To the Hunter’s Land?” Lily squeaked, bringing her hands to cover her shocked mouth. I nodded, giving her a look that said we’d talk about Hunter matters later.
“You’re home!” Amanda said. She gave me a side hug. “I really thought you’d be gone longer from the way you were talking about it.”
“Yeah, well…” I said, but the Hope boys were hustling over from the garage, so I waited for them so I’d only have to explain it all once.
“Little Miss Marlow, back already?” Nico said, pulling off his work gloves and sticking them into his back pocket.
A sandy layer of dust clung to his shirt, jeans, and the hair on his arms and head.
It mixed with the sweat on his face, coming down his temples in brown streaks.
Gabriel rubbed a dirty rag over his greasy hands.
“I’m back,” I announced, trying to keep it light.
“We’re gonna have to save the hugs for later, eh?” Gabriel Hope chuckled, holding up his mucky hands. “How was your family, Fallon? Bet they were so happy to see you, huh?”
“Ah, well, my mom was, at least,” I laughed thinly. I’d practiced these lines enough times that they actually sounded natural. “Family’s complicated, you know? But I’m glad I went.”
“We all kinda thought you might be gone for months or something,” Nico shrugged a shoulder, then tugged at his shirt a few times, popping away clouds of fine dust.
“I wasn’t sure how long they’d want me around. It was important for me to go, but I didn’t overstay my welcome.”
“And they’re okay?” Gabriel asked with polite restraint. “Their health and all that?”
Gabriel and Nico had made the assumption I was going because a family member was ill and potentially dying, and I’d let them keep their theories.
“Well, you know…” It was like that, wasn’t it? More symbolic deaths. Not just Fenton, but all the mothers, all the Hunters. “I was…able to say my goodbyes. In a way.”
The solemn turn made everyone quiet, eyes cast downward. “It’s always hard. Even when we expect it, the loss isn’t any lighter,” Gabriel said. “I am sorry, Fallon. We’re here to talk if you want.”
“You don’t gotta be all lonely cowboy about it,” Nico smiled. “Unless you want to be.”
“You’d know something about that, huh?” I said. My feet were back in the grassy front yard. I was back on Hope Ranch. I could keep moving forward. “Look at all I have. Hard to be lonely.”
“Awwww, how sweet,” Amanda crowed with mocking sweetness, and the little reunion broke apart with a bout of laughter.
“I have to get unpacked and get a shower. Thanks for the welcome. Glad to know you didn’t forget about me.”
Nico walked backwards and saluted before turning back to the garage with Gabriel.
Lily offered to take my bag, but I told the girls to scram and enjoy their summer once we’d made our way inside.
Amanda’s heavy eyes told me she’d been sleeping when I’d arrived, despite it being after 10 AM.
She was as nocturnal as a Hunter, and probably even more fierce.
Upstairs, Lily and I watched her disappear back into her dark room.
My own room hit me with an oddly unfamiliar smell — was that what I smelled like?
This was the scent that had driven Fenton wild?
Light powdery vanilla, musky wood, sunlight, covered over with a hint of dust. Nothing special to my new senses.
Lily closed the door, and to distract from the feeling of being trapped, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and started unpacking it.
Other than a few changes of clothes, hardly any of the contents had been disturbed.
The first thing I pulled out was my photo of me and Derrick, which I placed back in its home by my bed.
Oh. My blanket was missing. In the barn.
“Fallon?” Lily whispered. I hadn’t forgotten she was there, leaning against my door, but I wasn’t feeling particularly forthright in discussing the events of the past week. “Are you okay?”
I froze in my crouch, tucking my untouched clothes in the crook of my arm. I was going to wash them anyway, as if that could wash away the whole experience.
“I’ll be okay.”
“But right now?”
I had to stand and move before my spinning head crashed to the ground.
I collected my laundry bin from my closet and started stuffing it.
I had things to do. Tangible goals. Shower, laundry, lunch, cleaning the barn loft, erasing evidence of that phantom guest who’d failed at his one goddamn job and took me down with him, the bastard.
I’d never see him again, and if I did, I’d be a stranger.
“Right now I’m just…numb. Or trying to be.
” I gave up distracting myself and sat on the floor, cross-legged.
I could still move my clothes from the bag to the basket, and so I did it one article of clothing at a time, drawing out the process.
Lily sat a couple feet in front of me, her back against my chest of drawers.
“It was going really well. I was getting pieces of Blessings, and I was getting through every trial. I was just about to move on to the main event. That’s what it felt like, at least. Surviving in those woods alone, being hunted by vampires.
” Was I allowed to tell her this? No one had ever told me.
Well, Lily and I, it seemed, were both failures at being Hunters.
At least she’d walked away with dignity.
“And then Peter Fenton came? How?”
I’d asked myself the same thing, and it chilled me to consider his level of devotion.
No matter his obsession, I’d driven in a car for two hours in the daytime, and he couldn’t have simply followed his nose.
I rubbed my shoulder where he’d bitten me the morning I’d left.
I had an unfounded fear that his bite, his taking in my blood, had created some mystical tether between the two of us.
“I don’t know how. It doesn’t make any sense.
” A more mundane thought entered my mind, and I grabbed my purse to pull out his red journal.
I stroked the faux leather cover with my thumb and weighed the morality of reading it.
Even after he’d crashed my life and ruined my lifelong goal of becoming a Hunter, my qualms were still holding me back.
As if he deserved privacy when he’d given me none.
“Fallon? Did you have to…” She weakly mimed a staking motion.
“No. I saved him. Took an arrow for him, actually.” Her only response was a look of shock, waiting for me to laugh and reveal the joke.
“Really. Arrow straight in the shoulder. The pain made it impossible to think straight, and so I demanded they let Fenton go, and I’d leave with him. ” Lily’s mouth fell open.
I flipped through Fenton’s journal, rasping the pages together on purpose as I found where he’d left off with his last entry, three-quarters of the way through the notebook.
I went back a few pages, and my name popped from the page as if if were written in red ink against the black words.
I went to the entry before he’d moved to the ranch.
“And they just let you leave? With him?”
“Cora took all his memories. Of the Hunters, the Hunter Land. And of me.” I described it all, how Cora only had to lift a crystal to his head to do it.
I didn’t have any idea of the potential damage that might cause in Fenton’s brain, and I wouldn’t find out if I could help it.
“As far as Fenton knows, you and I and all the Hunters are strangers. He’s never heard of us. ” Them, some voice reminded me.
“No!” Lily said. “Will we be able to remind him?” I was momentarily stunned by her own sadness. She’d barely known the guy.
“We can’t. We won’t. He’s gone.”
“He was in love with you,” Lily said, reaching out to me but not touching me, a show of comfort in breaking a bit of news she thought I didn’t know.
“Not anymore.” I laughed at my own dark humor. How else was I supposed to deal?
“Oh, Fallon. So you didn’t get your Blessing, then.”
“Halfway. I have better senses, better healing. I got half the strength. It comes in parts, not all at once.”
“Will you have to give them back?”
“They’ll have to come and take them from me.”
“Are you okay?” She was even more worried now. I must have sounded unhinged.
“I will be.” I had to be. I had work to do now.
Lily quieted with her thoughts to keep her company, so I could fully concentrate on reading Fenton’s neatly scratchy musings in his diary, starting from two weeks ago. As I delved into his private musings, I mostly forgot what I’d been searching for in the first place.