Chapter 16 #2
“Holy shit, you’re that meteorologist, the one with the movie quotes,” I say.
She’s famous for incorporating movie quotes into her forecasts.
“Take your umbrella today, but leave the cannoli.” Or, “On Wednesdays, we might wear pink, but don’t forget that sunscreen.
We don’t want any sunburns when that high reaches in the upper nineties. ”
She takes quote suggestions from her followers on social media and posts the results. She’s also got a crazy accurate track record for weather predictions … which makes a lot of sense now. When you have that kind of connection to water, it’s probably not hard to guess what it’s going to do.
She beams at me. “Maggie Chen-Wright, WMBB, Boston,” she says, before remembering that she’s scared of me and dropping her gaze again.
“My friend, she loves…” I pause and clear my throat. “She loved your videos. She kept submitting made-up suggestions, close but not quite right, hoping to trip you up. But you never fell for it.”
“IMDb is a girl’s best friend,” Maggie says, her gaze flitting between Devon and me as if this conversation is not quite what she expected, and she’s not sure whether to relax.
And honestly, I have no idea how to proceed here either.
“Look, I don’t want to get involved in grudge matches or empire building, okay?” Maggie says suddenly. “I just want to live my life.”
“Okay,” I say slowly.
“I have a fiancé,” she says. “He’s nice. I have a very public career. A life.” She lifts her shoulders in frustration. “One I want to keep as far from this bullshit as possible.” She pauses, glancing at me. “I mean, you know.”
I frown. What does that—
“I take where I can without hurting anyone.” She grimaces.
“Levi, my fiancé, had this running water feature put into our new house. He thinks I find the water sound soothing, even though it actually makes me feel like I need to pee, but it works. It’s gross, people taste better. But it does the trick.”
At least she’s honest, I guess?
“I did not choose my mother.” She hesitates. “My other mother.”
She’s like me, then. First-generation spawn.
“And I’m tired of the threats, the constant need for vigilance. I don’t want to be recruited into someone’s army or forced into defending myself and my little bit of territory so some rando can climb the ranks.” She rolls her eyes with an exasperated noise.
“So, you’re here,” I say, just trying to follow her train of thought.
She bobs her head. “When I heard the announcement about a new Death and the rumors that she didn’t kill people left and right because she’s trying to live a normal life, I wanted to check it out.”
“Trying” is very much the operative word lately.
“I want an alliance. If I’m allied with you, the others will leave me alone. And you don’t want what they want, so everyone wins,” Maggie says.
It sounds so simple when she puts it that way.
“And I’m not alone,” Maggie adds quickly. “There are others who want the same thing.” She waves a hand in a vague gesture back toward campus. “I just volunteered to be the one to … open discussions.”
The kid clears his throat loudly. “We volunteered.”
Maggie rolls her eyes with a sigh. “This is Shane. He’s … persistent.” Her mouth purses in exasperation. “The others were more than happy to let me handle it.”
Shane juts his chin out in greeting. “What’s up?” Then he steps forward into the space between us, hand extended.
“Wait, don’t—” Maggie starts.
The moment I touch Shane’s hand, an electrical charge zips from his palm to mine with an audible crack and pop of light.
I suck in a breath, jerking my arm back to shake out the burning sensation in my fingers.
“Damnit, Shane, I told you, people don’t think that’s funny!” Maggie snaps. Then she turns to me with a slightly panicked expression. “I’m so sorry, he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“What?” Shane demands. “It’s just a joke.” He grins. “Like one of those hand buzzer things.”
“You need to work on your timing, Shane, or you’ll be just a corpse,” Devon says, stepping up next to me. His tone is mild, but the cold threat tucked within is more than enough warning.
The grin falls off Shane’s face, and he ducks his head with a mumbled “Sorry.”
“His sire is Taranis,” Maggie says.
It takes me a second to place the name, longer than it should have, given what Shane just did.
Taranis is associated with lightning in the myths.
Feeds on electricity. Hundreds of years ago, it was just the human-generated kind (probably another source of vampire stories) but now with the advent of modern technology, Taranis—and his spawn—can probably feed on just about anything.
“Shane is still developing his abilities but he’s … strong.” Maggie draws in a deep breath. “His mother is worried about him being recruited. He needs an alliance, too.”
Now all the pieces are fitting together. “That’s why you were following me,” I say. “To confirm I wasn’t power hungry and randomly draining the life out of people.” Exactly as Devon had. Jesus, I might as well rent a fucking billboard.
“Yes! When I saw you try to save that girl, I knew you were different. But then I lost you when all the ambulances and the police showed up. It took me a while to track you down. Basically by revisiting all the places I’d seen you before, but obviously, you wouldn’t go to the police station again.
” She laughs and it sounds almost giddy.
Now that she’s found me and I haven’t lashed out at them, the relief floodgates have opened.
In the form of lots of words at rapid speed.
“Listen,” I begin. “I’ll tell you what I told Devon, I’m not going to—”
“And even though Branwick reopened last night, I didn’t think you’d go there,” Maggie continues, seeming not to have heard me. “Not with the explosion so nearby.”
My head is spinning; I can’t keep up. Branwick is open again? Since when? But then the rest of her sentence sinks in. “Explosion? What explosion?” I demand, an icy chill of foreboding slicing through my middle.
Maggie pauses, her hesitance returning. “Well, yes. Last night around midnight.”
Devon and I were here by that point. Too far to hear sirens or an explosion on campus.
“The university is saying it was a gas leak because it tore up the street a little. But I mean, clearly that’s not right.
Especially because the kids who died at that house, the administration is saying that was because of carbon monoxide poisoning.
I think they’re probably just trying to cover their asses because they don’t know what’s really going on—”
Shit, shit! I close the distance to stand directly in front of her. “What house, Maggie?”
She swallows audibly. “Uh, I don’t know. It’s down there by the sororities and fraternities. It’s brown, I think.”
A horrible calm numbness washes over me. It’s fine. Daan and Chessa are fine. They’re at Chessa’s parents’ house, probably still asleep or working very hard to ignore the smell of coffee brewing downstairs. Chessa’s dad is an early riser.
There’s no way they went back to campus last night. They’d only just left for Chessa’s parents’ house in town. They wouldn’t have done that. It would make no sense.
I turn on legs that feel stilted and wrong, as if my knees are bending the wrong direction, and hobble back toward the motel room.
“What’s wrong? Did I say something that upset her?” Maggie asks.
Dimly, I’m aware of Devon’s reassuring murmur to her behind me.
But my focus is zeroed in on the door we left partially open, then the bed with the tousled covers, and the flat black rectangle of a phone that’s charging on the nightstand.
My hands are shaking so hard, it’s hard for me to disentangle the phone from the cord and tap one of the contact numbers I saved—but did not call—last night.
When I finally manage it, the call rings twice before someone picks up.
“Hello?” a male voice asks.
I pull the phone away from my ear, double checking that I’ve hit the right contact. But it says Chessa’s name right there on the screen. “I’m sorry, I’m trying to reach—”
“Jocasta?” The voice now sounds utterly recognizable around the familiar syllables of my full name.
“Carter?” I ask, confused. “How did I … I didn’t call—”
“It’s Chessa’s phone,” Carter says. “She can’t have it with her in the ICU.”