by J. R. Ward
"I'm going to practice. So I drive better."
"Right. Even if the people around you drive dangerously, you're going to be aware and focused and trained to deal with whatever comes at you." He put his palm over his daggers, over his heart. "I have been out there fighting for a century, Bitty. And everything I take with me into the field--the weapons, the gear, the support in the form of my brothers--all of it is engineered to keep me safe. Is it a perfect system? No. But it's the best it gets, I promise you that."
Bitty's arms uncoiled and she looked down. The pink and green bracelet on her wrist was made out of faceted beads that sparkled like real gems. Moving the thing around and around, she took a deep breath.
"Are you...good at it? I mean, the fighting?"
God, he wished he was an accountant. He really did. Because if he were some pocket-protector'd numbers cruncher, he wouldn't be having to tell an innocent that he excelled at killing things.
"Are you?" she prompted.
"I'm very good at keeping myself and my brothers safe. I'm so good at it, they're having me teach younger people how to do it."
She nodded once again. "That's what they were saying. At Last Meal the other night. I heard people talking about you and the other Brothers teaching people."
"That's where I'm heading right now. While you hang here with Bella and Nalla, I'm meeting the trainee class out in Caldwell to show them how to stay safe."
Bitty tilted her head, her brown hair cascading over her shoulder. And he let her stare at him for as long as she wanted. If that made him a little late to work, who cared.
"You must be really good at it to be a teacher."
"I am. I swear to you, Bitty. I am effective and I take no more chances than I absolutely have to in order to get my job done."
"And the beast will keep you safe, won't he."
Rhage nodded. "You better believe it. You saw him. You know what he's like."
She smiled, sunshine replacing the worry. "He likes me."
"He loves you. But he doesn't love people who get aggressive with me."
"That makes me feel better."
"Good." He put his palms up, and as she high-fived him, he said, "You're never going to be alone, Bitty. I promise you."
In that moment, as he sought to relieve any and all of her anxiety--and his own, for that matter--he nearly came out with the one thing Bitty didn't know about her adoptive parents. Yes, her new old man had a dragon living under his skin, but her new mom had an even fancier secret.
Mary was a unique flavor of immortal. Thanks to the Scribe Virgin--and this remained true even though V's mahmen was no longer in charge--Mary did not age, and could choose when she went unto the Fade. It was a gift beyond measure, insulating this family in ways that other people's weren't.
Except Rhage stayed quiet on that front. Even though the knowledge might have helped Bitty in the moment, he really felt like it was Mary's information to share, not his.
"You're never going to be alone, Bitty," he repeated. "I swear to you."
--
As Mary sat behind her desk at Safe Place, she put her bag down and shrugged out of her parka. Extending her arm, she pulled the sleeve of her turtleneck up and smiled at the pink and green bracelet that twinkled at her wrist.
She and Bitty had made matching ones the other night, the pair of them sitting at Fritz's kitchen table in the mansion, a jewelry-making kit spread out everywhere, a huge array of clear plastic boxes holding a rainbow's worth of iridescent beads. They had talked about nothing and everything, and greeted each person who came in, and split a bag of Combos and a Mountain Dew. They had also made a necklace for Rhage, a different-colored bracelet for Lassiter, and braid for Nalla to play with. And even Boo had come over and curled up to watch, the black cat's green eyes inspecting everything.
In a mansion full of priceless stuff? That time together had been the most precious, irreplaceable thing.
Looking across her desk, Mary reached out and picked up a photograph of Bitty from two weeks before, when the little girl had been taking selfies with Rhage's phone. Bit was making a crazy face, her dark hair back-brushed until she looked like something out of an eighties glam metal band.
And in fact, Lassiter was over on the left, doing his best Nikki Sixx impression.
Unexpected tears pricked Mary's eyes. In all her life, she had never expected to be a woman who had pictures of a daughter at her work desk. Nah, that hypothetical, blessed, stranger of a person, that lucky female who had a husband and a family, and holidays to look forward to, and homemade things on her wrist? That had always been someone else, a stranger whose reality was something you watched on TV or saw in Maytag ads or overheard at the table next door in a restaurant.
While you were eating alone.
Mary Luce was the nurse to an ailing mother who had died horribly and too young. Mary Luce was the cancer survivor left infertile after chemo. Mary Luce was the ghost on the fringes, the shadow that passed unnoticed through a room, an allegory of where you didn't want to end up.
Except life had corkscrewed on her in the best of all possible ways. Now? She was exactly where she had never even dared to dream of being.
And yup, this unexpected destiny came with a not-too-small dose of PTSD. Hell, sometimes, when she woke up next to her gorgeous vampire of a husband? And especially now, when she tiptoed into another bedroom to check on Bitty at nightfall? She expected to wake up, back in her nightmare of a real life.
But no, she thought as she put the picture down. This was the real stuff. Here and now was the story she was living.
And it was...amazing. So full of love, family, and happiness that it felt as though the sun lived in the center of her chest.
They were all survivors, her, Rhage, and Bitty. She of her illness. Rhage of the curse he had to live with. Bitty of the unimaginable domestic abuse she and her mahmen had suffered at the hands of her birth father. The three of their lives had started to intersect here, at Safe Place, when Bitty and her mahmen had come in seeking shelter. And then Bitty's mother had died, leaving her an orphan.
The opportunity to take the girl in had seemed too good to be true. It still did, sometimes.
If they could just get through this six-month waiting period, the adoption would be final and Mary could take a deep breath. At least there were no relatives coming forward. Even though Bitty had talked initially about some uncle, her mother had never mentioned having a brother or disclosed anything about any blood relations, either during intake or in subsequent therapy sessions. Notices posted on closed Facebook and Yahoo groups had yielded nothing so far.
God willing, it would stay that way.
On that note, Mary signed in to the computer network, her heart starting to bang in her ribs, a sick flush blooming in her body. As social media aficionados went, she was below amateur status, the anti-Kardashian--and yet every night, but only once a night, she hopped onto Facebook.
And prayed she found nothing.
The FB group she checked was one specifically devoted to vampires, its closed roster restricted to members of the species. Created by V after the raids, moderated by Fritz's staff, the clearinghouse was an opportunity for folks to connect about anything from safe-house locations--always in code--to garage sales.
Scanning the posts in the last twenty-four hours, she exhaled in a rush. Not at thing.
The relief made her office spin around--at least until she went to check the Yahoo group. Recipe for Crock-Pot. Knitting group having a meeting...snowblower for sale...question about where to get a computer fixed...
Also nothing.
"Thank you, God," she whispered as she put another small check on her wall calendar.
Almost to the end of December, which meant they were nearly two whole months down. By May? They could move forward.
As her heart shifted out of tachycardia, she wondered how in the hell she was going to face this IT gauntlet another hundred and thirty times or so. But she had no other choice.
The good news was that she was able to stick to this once-and-only-once-a-night check. Otherwise she'd be on her damn phone every fifteen minutes.
She had to be fair, though, to whoever else might be out there. Extinguishing parental rights in blood relations was serious business, and with no modern precedents in the vampire race to follow, she, Marissa, as head of Safe Place, Wrath, the Blind King, and Saxton, the King's head counsel, had had to devise a procedure that provided an adequate notice period.
Emotions did not have waiting periods, however, and moms and dads who loved their kids couldn't toggle back the speed of their hearts.
As if Marissa could read minds, the female put her head in the open doorway. "Anything?"
Mary smiled at her boss and her dear friend. "Nothing. I swear, I have never been more excited for May to get here."
"I've always had a good feeling about this, you know."
"I don't want to jinx anything, so I'm staying quiet." Mary focused on the calendar again. "Hey, I'm not going to be in tomorrow night. Bitty's got her physical exam scheduled."
"Oh, that's right. Good luck--and it's too bad you have to go all the way in to Havers's."
"Doc Jane says she just doesn't have the appropriate knowledge base. Pediatrics for vampires is a thing, apparently."
Marissa smiled gently. "Well, my brother may be complicated for me personally, but I have never questioned his ability to provide good care to his patients. Bitty couldn't be in better hands."
"I'd really rather just keep her with us at the training center's clinic. But at the end of the day, what's right for her is all we care about."
"That's called being a good parent."
Mary looked at her bracelet. "Amen to that."
lise! Do not tell me you have been to university!"
As her father came charging out of his study, he looked as much like a raging bull as a whip-thin, utterly distinguished aristocrat could--which was, actually, not like a bull at all, but more like a European prince trying to flag his butler down. Felixe the Younger did have, however, a highly uncharacteristic flush to his face, and he had failed to button his evening jacket as he had rushed from his desk at her.
If he'd been a commoner, he would have been picking up pieces of furniture and throwing them around as he carpet-bombed the air with variations on an f-word theme.
And as she faced off at him, from out of nowhere, she heard that line from M*A*S*H: Winchesters do not sweat, we perspire. And Winchesters do not perspire.
Or something to that effect. You had to love Charles Emerson Winchester III.
"Explain yourself!"
There were a couple of ways to handle this, she supposed. Deny, deny, deny, but with a backpack hanging off her shoulder, those pesky snowflakes all over her, and the fact that she'd previously told him she was going to stay in and read? Hard sell, for one thing; for another, she detested lies. Another option was walking away, but that was a total no-go--she had been raised properly, and that meant that she couldn't be rude to her elders.
Annnnnd that left her with door number three.
The truth.
"I'vebeengoingbacktoschool." As her father frowned and leaned in toward her, she put some volume into her voice and slowed things down. "Yes, I have been going to school again."
Her father fell silent in shock and she studied him as if he were a stranger. He had a patrician face, the even features distilled by good breeding to the point that you were aware he was of masculine derivation, but the sexual affiliation was at a whisper, not a shout. His hair was dark, whereas hers was streaked with blond, and his eyes were pale gray, not blue. But their diction was identical and so were their good posture, their moderated affect...and their sense of values.
So, yes, she did feel as though she had done something wrong. Even though she was past her transition, arguably of age especially if you applied a human standard, and had done nothing more reckless than sit in a quiet library for three hours grading papers.
"Are you...have you...how can you..." It was a while before her father could get through an entire sentence. "I forbade you to go there! After the raids, I explicitly told you that it was unsafe and that you were not to be permitted to go! And that was before..."
Elise closed her eyes. That last sentence wasn't finished because it was That Which Was Not Discussed.
Allishon's name hadn't been uttered since the night word had come unto the household that she had passed. They hadn't even had a Fade ceremony for her.
"Well!" he demanded. "What have you to say for yourself!"
"I'm sorry, Father, but I--"
"How can you possibly be so delinquent! If your mahmen were still alive, she would be apoplectic! How long has this been going on?"
"A year."
"A year!"
At that moment, the butler came scurrying in from the back of the house, as if he had heard the disturbance and was concerned some crazy person had broken in to the mansion for which he was responsible. When the doggen got a gander at her father? He backed off fast as a mouse before a cat.
"You have been going for a year?" her father hissed, his voice shaking. "How have you--you have been lying to me? For that long?"
Elise shucked her backpack and put it between her feet. "Father, what was I to do?"
"Stay here! It is dangerous in Caldwell!"
"But the raids are over. And even when they occurred, the slayers were hitting vampire targets, not human ones. It's a human school--"
"Humans are savages! You know exactly how much damage they do to each other! You see the news--the guns, the violence! Even if they were not targeting you as another species, you could get caught in the crossfire!"
As Elise's eyes drifted to the high ceiling, she searched for some correct combination of words to make this all go away.
"We're not doing this here." Her father's voice dropped. "In my study. Now."
When he jabbed a finger to his open door, she picked up her backpack and headed in that direction. Behind her, tight on her heels, her father fell into a full march, and she was not surprised when the carved door clapped shut, closing them in together.
The room was lovely, a fire crackling in the hearth, cheery light flickering over the leather chairs, the first editions on the mahogany shelves, the oil paintings of hunting dogs that her father had owned in the Old Country.
"Sit down," he snapped, though not loudly.
She knew exactly where he wanted her and she went to the chair across from his desk, lowering herself into its antique contours and being sure to keep her pack with her. The last thing she wanted was for him to take it away from her.
In the midst of this confrontation, the thing represented her freedom.
Felixe sat down and linked his fingers together as if he were attempting to control himself. "You know exactly what happens when a female goes out of the home unattended."
Elise looked up at the ceiling again and was careful to keep her voice low. "I'm not like Allishon."
"You're out in the human world. Just like her."
"I know where she went. It was not to university, Father."
"I'm not going to discuss the particulars and neither are you. What you are going to do is swear to me, right here and now, that you will not violate my trust again. That you will stay here and--"
Elise bolted up out of the seat before she was aware of moving. "I can't waste my life sitting here, night by night, going nowhere and doing nothing but needlepoint. I want my advanced degree, I want to finish what I started! I want a life!"
As he recoiled, he seemed as surprised by the outburst as she was. And to defuse the insubordination, Elise sank back down into the chair. "I'm sorry, Father. I don't mean to speak rashly, it's just...why can't you understand that I want to be free to live?"
"That is not your station and you know it. I have been more than lenient with you, but that time has passed. I will be entertaining suitable males for mating--"
Elise let her head fall back. "I wan
t more than that, Father."
"Your first cousin is dead. After they already lost their son in the raids! You see the suffering of her parents nightly in this house! Do you want that for me? Do you care so little for me that you want me to mourn my only daughter after I've already lost my shellan?"
Swallowing a groan, she stared across the desktop. The objects upon it--the sterling-silver-framed pictures of her and her mother, the pens in their holders, the ashtray in which one of his pipes sat--were as familiar as the backs of her own hands, things that she had never not known. They were also part of the comfort of home, symbols of the security that she at once valued, but also wanted to escape.
"Well?" her father said. "Do you want that for me?"
"What I want is to talk about her." Elise sat forward. "No one ever speaks about Allishon. I don't even know how she died. Peyton came here and talked to the three of you behind closed doors--next thing I know, her room is shut up tight, Auntie has taken to her bed, and Uncle looks like a zombie. Nobody has told me anything. There's no Fade ceremony, no mourning, just this shut-off void in the midst of everyone suffering. Why can't we just come forward and be honest--"
"This is not about your cousin--"
"Her name is Allishon. Why can't you say her name?"
Her father's thin lips got even thinner. "Do not attempt to distract me from the real problem. Which is you lying to me whilst you put yourself in danger. What happened to your cousin is in the past. There is no cause for conversation."
Elise shook her head. "You're so wrong about that. And if you're going to try to use whatever tragedy happened to her to persuade me, then you better tell me what really happened."
"I don't have to explain anything to you." Her father banged a fist into his desk, making one of the framed photographs jump. "You are my daughter. That is a sufficiency unto itself."
