“Let’s take a break,” Iona said. “I need blood. Really. Volunteers?”
“Can't you just miss a meal?” I asked, my head against the back of the chair, my eyes on the intricate mural painted on the ceiling. It was cherubs and puffy cotton candy clouds, with gold leaf pressed into the hair and harps of the winged babies. Too much of a happy image for how I was feeling at that moment. I looked away.
“Fine,” she muttered under her breath. “Let's see you miss a meal and let the hunger really set in.”
“I miss meals all the time,” Laura said. “It's fine.”
Iona gave her a sideways look. “Of course you do.”
That seemed to break up the meeting. Dad went over to Mom, who seemed lost in thought, and helped her out of the room, his arm around her shoulders. He shot me a look, and I knew our conversations weren't over.
“I have a little blood available,” Lockwood said to Iona, who went from sullen to pleasant in about half a tick.
“Your own?” she asked.
“I don't know whether Fae blood would be beneficial to you,” Lockwood said, leaving with Iona in tow, “but in my trunk I keep a supply on ice for my clientele...”
Laura yawned and stretched. “I might grab a shower. Maybe it will help me settle down.” She wandered out through the doors, trudging as though it were the middle of the night. Which it was.
I caught Mill looking at me with concern. We were the only two left in the room.
“I’m fine,” I said, looking away. A chill ran down my spine.
It was a lie, of course. And I'd been doing so well.
Chapter 10
“Listen, Cassie…” Mill said. “You don’t have to put on a brave face for me.”
Now that the room was totally empty, aside from Mill, me, and Byron’s puddle of black glop, I realized just how cold the room felt. How eerie.
“Can we…move out of here?” I asked.
“Sure,” Mill said, and together we left the dining room, passing through the shattered French doors that clung desperately to the hinges.
Once out in the hall, I was able to breathe a little more easily. Not a whole lot, but at least somewhat.
“Where do you want to go?” Mill asked. He was standing close, speaking in a low voice, but seemed unsure if I wanted any more contact than that.
“Honestly, there isn’t anywhere in this house that I want to be,” I said. “But it’s probably better if we stay close. I guess maybe... The kitchen?”
We walked down the hall to the ultra-sleek modern kitchen, with stainless steel appliances, dark granite counters and warm lighting beneath the cabinets.
It was like something out of a magazine. Why did a vampire need a place like this? I pinched my nose as I inhaled, and then coughed. The coffee pot was definitely molded over, enough that spores were probably filtering into the air.
“Why would Byron have brewed coffee?” I asked, and dumped the pot down the drain, holding my nose closed with my fingers.
“Because, among other quirks, Byron ate food sometimes,” Mill said. “Gross.”
I glanced at him. “You think it’s gross?”
He arched a brow at me. “I do remember what mold is, you know.”
I coughed just thinking about it coating my lungs. I turned on the hot water and stuck the glass pot underneath.
“You’re just looking for something to distract yourself, aren’t you?” Mill asked.
I stared at the water filling up the pot, bubbling and churning inside. It was exactly like my brain at the moment; ceaselessly moving, like a leaf caught in violent river rapids.
“Cassie... Please tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, deep voice low and gentle.
I looked up at him, seeing his expectant face, his thick eyebrows almost reaching his hairline on his tall forehead. Even if I hadn’t really thought so initially, he was handsome. His chiseled jawline, his high cheekbones, his dark blue eyes that were flecked with silver...
“I’m thinking I don’t really want coffee tomorrow, because it’s probably going to suck,” I said, looking away. “But...most of all, I feel guilty about putting everyone in this situation.”
“You didn’t—”
“I did, though,” I said, squeezing some sickly-sweet smelling orange soap into the pot, wrinkling my nose. It was almost worse than the moldy coffee. “If I hadn’t killed Theo, Draven never would have found out about me.”
“What was the alternative, though?” he asked. “Let yourself be killed?”
In some ways... That would be easier than what I had to deal with right now.
“Cassie…” Mill said in a warning tone, as if he could somehow read my thoughts.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I—”
I noticed Mill looking over his shoulder, and when I followed his gaze, I saw Dad in the doorway of the kitchen, trying to look like he wasn’t listening to our conversation.
“I’ll give you guys some space,” Mill said, then slunk out of the kitchen, giving my dad a nod as he passed.
Dad watched him walk down the hall for a minute before stepping into the cavernous kitchen. He gazed up at the copper pots hanging from a rack over the island.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Dad said, coming to stand by me at the sink.
I rolled up the sleeves of my sweatshirt and pulled a paper towel off the roll to scrub at the inside of the coffee pot. The warm water was almost up to my elbows, and there were little bubbles floating in the air around me, the light from the recessed bulbs overhead making them twinkle. It reminded me of Faerie, and everything pretty that I had seen there, with all the tiny rainbows swirling around the sudsy orbs.
“It wasn’t anything important,” I said, rinsing the paper towel off with more hot water before scrubbing at the pot again.
Dad leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest.
Time for the Dad talk, huh? I was so tired that I didn’t even have it in me to fight back. It felt like life had taken a dive. And not a short dive, either, like into our swimming pool. No, the kind of dive that would get you to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
“I…want to apologize, Cass,” Dad said.
I blinked and looked up at him, pausing my furious scrubbing.
He was watching me steadily, lips pursed. He meant it. He actually wanted to apologize. To me. “Why?”
“I think that I’m starting to understand what’s been going on here,” he said. “All of this…stuff that’s been going on with you. You’ve been under insane pressure, haven’t you?”
My stomach flipped, and I looked away. I didn’t want him to see the sudden flush in my cheeks. I went back to scourging the pot.
“When did you find out about vampires, Cassie?” he asked.
“So you believe me?” I asked. “Puts you ahead of Mom, I guess.”
“Hard to ignore the evidence of my eyes,” he said. “Give your mom some time. But seriously…when did you find out about... all this?”
I turned back to the pot, and anger blossomed to life as I pulled out the old memories that I had been working so hard to bury.
“You can probably figure it out if you think back to when everything here started to go wrong,” I said, looking around the kitchen as if it might close its jaws down over me and swallow me whole. “It was the night I didn’t come home for the first time.”
Blood started pumping more quickly through my veins, my heart beating faster as I recalled the sensation of Byron playing cat and mouse with me and Xandra on a quiet street not far from home. “I had no idea Byron was a vampire, but…I was terrified. I was sure that I was going to die that night. That night was when I first broke my promise to give up lying.”
“Cassie…why didn’t you tell us?” Dad asked. His tone was mingled horror and sorrow. I hadn’t ever heard it from him before, and it made the knots in my stomach become even more pretzel-like.
“Because I couldn’t really believe it, so why would you?”
/>
“Because I’m your dad,” he said, “because I’m the one who’s supposed to be in your corner when no one else is, kiddo.”
“And you might have been,” I said, “if I hadn’t been such a damned liar that we had to leave our whole lives behind in New York.” I shook my head. “I just couldn’t see you guys buying the line, ‘So, the reason I didn’t come home last night? A vampire. Totally a vampire. For real this time, you guys’!” I rested my hands on the side of the sink for support, covered in bubbles. The water from the faucet still ran endlessly into the basin of the sink.
“So Byron was the one who kidnapped us?” my dad asked. “And that's him, back in the dining room?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling the silent judgment at me killing someone. I still had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I had actually killed anything, let alone someone who looked, sounded, and acted human.
“Mom and I assumed you were lying.” He sounded shell-shocked. “Or being lazy. We had no idea that…all this was going on.”
I had goosebumps, so I submerged my hands underneath the scalding water.
“You had no one to go to, and your entire world had been upended,” Dad said. “Mom and I were definitely not on your side, thinking this was nothing more than a continuation of everything that had happened in New York…”
“Yeah…” I said. What else was I supposed to say?
“Cass, I…” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything.”
“No, I do,” Dad said. “Everything that’s been going on with you, we didn’t know any of it. Byron kidnapping us was just the start of it, wasn’t it?”
I thought about all that had happened since then— the Instaphoto vampire gang, my sojourn to New York where I’d fought the Butcher and seen Jacquelyn turned into a vampire, my trip to Faerie where I’d been stuck in the middle of a magical war…
But to my dad, all I said was, “Yes. That was just the start.”
“I feel like, just looking in your eyes now, you’ve been through a whole world of pain that we didn’t even know about,” he said softly. “Whatever happened... I can see the guilt in you, in the way you won’t look at me right now. But you can’t blame yourself. These things that have happened, they’re not your fault.”
“Yes they are,” I said, thinking of Jacquelyn, in particular. If not for me, she’d be human, and safe at home in New York. Probably dating Gary Haze. Ugh.
“No, it’s not. You’re doing whatever you can to set things right. And sometimes, things just don’t go the way that we want them to…no matter how hard we try.”
My hand tightened around the paper towel in my hands, tearing it in two soapy pieces.
“I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” Dad said. “I don’t even recognize you. You’ve done things I can’t even imagine. Despite the whole world being against you…you persevered.”
I tried to swallow passed the giant lump in my throat.
“I’m just—” Dad started. “I am so sorry that we weren’t there for you.”
All those nights in my room, lying awake, staring at the ceiling, I had been all alone. They had no idea what I was going through.
The distance between me and my dad felt insurmountable in that moment. Everything that I had done, everything he had learned, it was just... Too much.
It would always be too much, wouldn’t it?
I feel like I don’t know you anymore.
It was because the person that I had become through these insane circumstances was entirely different from his little girl. She lay across an ocean of lies from where I stood. Of course he wouldn’t know me anymore. “Dad?” I said. “I—”
But my words were cut off by a crashing sound from out in the main hall. I dropped the pot in the sink and the glass shattered. My hands were still slippery with soapy water.
“What was that?” Dad asked, twisting around to look through the doorway.
“Someone’s coming in!” shouted Mill from down the hall.
My stomach dropped, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Someone had just kicked in the front door.
Draven had found us.
Chapter 11
My heart pounded like a thundering drum in my head. I had been so sure that this place was safe. Draven barely knew Byron, if he knew him at all. How could he know where Byron lived? He couldn’t know where every vampire in his territory was at all times, could he? And how could he possibly guess we would have come here?
I looked around the kitchen for a weapon, anything that would work as a stake, as shrieking filled the air. Whether from my mother or Laura, I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that it was probably not Iona. Probably. Everyone else in the house was becoming aware that we had intruders.
My eyes fell on the knife block, and all of the knives inside had wooden handles. Would that work? I had no idea. If I plunged the knife in far enough, could that kill a vampire? Like a second-hand stake?
Using a steak knife as a stake. The irony was not lost on me.
I had nothing else. At the very least, maybe I could slash some skin if I had to. I pulled out the longest knife I could find, a blade that was probably used to gut fish or other meats. Vampires definitely felt pain, and if I had to cause them some, then that would have to be Plan A.
“Cassie, where are you going?” Dad shouted as I ran out into the hall.
“Stay there, Dad!” I called back.
From the sound of the footsteps behind me, I realized that he hadn’t listened to me.
I tore out into the foyer and stumbled to a stop as I saw three people standing just inside the door. All three were wearing long, black trench coats that grazed the floor. They had dark sunglasses covering their eyes and wore black boots with wicked heels on them.
What was this, a Matrix cosplay conference?
A flicker of movement caught my eye from above, and I looked up just in time to see Mill leap over the banister on the second floor and land beside me. He straightened, head cocked to the side slightly as he stared at the strangers— two women, one man, all leather clad.
The man had a long, thin black cane in his hand. One of the women pulled at the black ribbon choker around her neck, and as it came into contact with her hand, transformed into a rod of some sort, long and rigid. The third had withdrawn two silvery rods from the inside of her coat, and after ramming them together, end to end, created a single, cylindrical pole that reminded me a lot of a metallic chopstick.
And then, just as quickly, she shot brilliantly colored lights out of the end of it.
After being in Faerie, I didn’t even have to think about ducking. Magic was magic, no matter the source. I threw myself to the floor and yanked my dad down with me, dragging him by a handful of his shirt.
“What’s going on?” Dad asked, pale face sweating.
I dragged him, unresisting, around the corner to the living room. Mill must have been caught off guard by the magic, as well, because he had scrambled into the living room, too, huddling on the opposite side of the archway.
Flashes of green, blue, and red light, struck the wall over our heads, and I could see the reflection of the magic being shot up into the second floor off the ceiling.
I covered my head as another blue ball of light struck the wall over my head, creating a downpour of plaster around us, like rain in the Fall. My heart was racing, making it hard to think clearly. “I don’t know. Magic of some sort.”
“How do you know?” Dad asked.
“Because laser guns aren’t a real thing.” I peered around the corner as I heard Lockwood shout something unintelligible. Our Fae magician had entered the fight. “Ergo, magic.”
There was a flurry of more blues and reds, all bursting from the ends of their little instruments they had in their hands. Were they like wands?
“I don’t think so, ladies and gentleman.” Lockwood was just on the other side of the large foyer, throwing white hot balls of light in
their direction.
“We need to get out of here,” Mill shouted from the other side of the doorway.
There was a crackle like a firework, and little sparks fell to the carpet just beside my hand, singeing it. I yanked my hand away. “Who are these guys?”
“A wizard,” Mill said. “And witches.”
“Great, we’ve got a leather-bound Gandalf and two-thirds of the biker version of Hocus Pocus after us,” I said. “What are we going to do against their magic?”
“Overpower it, of course,” Mill said, and before I could even try and change his mind, he dashed out into the foyer.
Horrified, I stared around the corner and saw him sneak in behind Lockwood and use him as a shield. Lockwood was standing between our attackers and the living room. There was a great shimmering green shield surrounding the doorway, some sort of magical barrier to protect us.
Mill, it seemed, was able to get through. He ducked around Lockwood and threw himself at the cluster of black-cloaked magicians near the door. His movement hadn’t gone unnoticed, though. The woman on the end had been watching. With her long silvery rod, she shot a blast of green magic at him, and it struck him in the arm.
He hit the floor with a loud crash.
“No!” I shouted as I tried to get up to run to him. Dad grabbed my arm and yanked me back behind the wall.
“You can’t throw yourself into danger like that,” Dad said.
“But they hit Mill—”
“We have to wait,” Dad said under his breath.
“For what?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but we have to—”
I didn’t want to wait. I still had my knife, so I untangled myself from Dad’s grasp and scrambled behind the shimmering green barrier. I hesitated as I saw Mill struggle to his feet. The spellcasters apparently didn’t notice him, because he used the opportunity to throw himself at the nearest witch, knocking her over. The red spell she had been trying to send at Lockwood ricocheted off the ceiling and hit the floor, shattering marble tiles.
Her Lying Days Are Done Page 7
