by Riley Storm
She went straight for her fridge, pulling out a vodka soda and tossing Pietro a beer. “Here.”
“Thanks,” he grunted, catching it with casual dexterity with one hand while he was using the other to pull his shoes off and leave them at the bottom of the stairs.
Taking a long swig, Claire looked him over as he approached.
“You look kind of rough,” she said. “Do you need medical attention or anything? You can go get it now. I don’t want you to suffer because of me now that I’m safe.”
Pietro waved her off. “No, I’m fine. Blood is blood. I’ve healed. Nothing to worry about, trust me. My body is used to more abuse than this.”
She started to laugh and then realized that he was telling the truth.
“Is life as a dragon that hard?” she asked curiously.
“We train hard,” Pietro said quietly, looking off at nothing. “For the longest time, we always thought it was pointless. A ‘just in case’ measure. For times like this. Times that didn’t exist until recently.”
Claire frowned. “This isn’t normal then?”
Pietro laughed, a biting sound. “Not at all. Until a year ago, things were dull, quiet, and calm. Just the way we liked them. Then, everything went haywire. People have been after us, trying to hurt us, divide us, capture us. Someone out there hates us. So I guess it’s a good thing we’ve been training hard this entire time.”
“Oh.” Claire wasn’t sure what else to say. “I see.”
“Sorry,” the big man said, shaking himself awake. “I didn’t mean to dump that all on you like that. Not what you need to hear right now. But you’ll be okay. We’ve come out ahead, and we’ll continue to. Exactly because we’ve been training. My point was though, I’ve been hurt worse, and my system heals quickly.”
“Okay.” Claire looked him over again, telling herself she wasn’t just eyeing his muscles. “What about the mess? Do you want to shower? Clean yourself up maybe?”
Pietro looked down at himself, hesitating. For a moment, she thought he was going to take her offer up, but in the end, he shook his head.
“No, I probably shouldn’t,” he said quietly, declining to explain why not.
He didn’t have to. She knew, she understood. If he started taking off his clothes, here in her house…
Claire lifted the can to her mouth and drank. Pietro’s arm flexed as he did the same. She eyed his biceps and then took another drink.
“Okay, so question time. Those two things were vampires, right?”
“Yup.” He drank again.
“I thought you said there was one of them? But we were attacked by two of them…”
Pietro sighed and downed the rest of his beer. “That’s because only one of them got into my mind. I wasn’t expecting them to have formed a symbiote.”
Claire stared blankly, blinking once. “Say what?”
He sighed. “You have to understand, we don’t know much about the creatures that come into our world either. It’s our job to stop them. Either drive them back or, if that fails, kill them. We’re pretty good at it. Generally speaking, things choose not to come through. The Gates are guarded twenty-four-seven by trained dragon shifters. It’s a death trap most times.”
“Except now.”
“Except now,” he said, crushing the can flat in his hand. “But rumor has it that vampires in our world grow stronger as time passes. They bond with one another. In extreme cases, their shared powers can even elevate one above the rest. Theoretically.”
“So, these two have bonded with one another? And now two of them are after me?” she asked, dismayed.
“It seems that way,” Pietro confirmed.
“How do we defeat them?” she asked. “No offense, but I don’t exactly want you to be following me around every time I step outside after the sun is down.
“We don’t,” Pietro rumbled. “I do.”
“You’re always here with me though,” she pointed out.
“There are others out there, looking for the vampires, tracking them, seeking out their lair,” Pietro explained. “Once they find it, we’ll go in and eradicate them before they become more of a problem.”
“More of a problem,” she said with a heavy sigh. “They’re already kind of a major problem for me.”
“If we don’t find them,” Pietro said. “They’ll become a problem for everyone.”
That sounded far more ominous than Claire wanted to know about after the way her night had already gone. But curiosity pushed her to know more. To find out more.
“How is that?” she asked.
“If they start creating more.”
“Ah,” she said, feeling like she understood that one at least. “The whole biting your neck and turning you into a vampire thing?”
“We think,” he agreed.
“You really don’t seem to know much about the creatures,” she pointed out, a bit harsher than was necessary.
Was it though? It’s my life that’s in jeopardy here, because of him. I wouldn’t mind having some straight answers for once. It would certainly make this easier to deal with, if nothing else.
“Like I said,” Pietro explained. “Things don’t come through very often. Contact between the two sides is sketchy at best, and we don’t really know how it’s done. To the best of my knowledge, dragons can’t even contact those on the other side. Only they have the magic to contact us. That doesn’t exactly give us much of a chance to find out more about them.”
Claire licked her lips, ready to blow off his excuse.
“About who?” a new voice asked.
Both of them spun to see that her parents had come down the stairs unannounced while they were talking.
Her father was looking back and forth between them.
“What’s going on here, Claire?” he asked sternly.
She swallowed nervously.
So much for putting this off until later.
Chapter Sixteen
Claire
Shooting Pietro a look, Claire took a deep breath. There was no avoiding it. She was going to have this conversation.
The least she could do, however, was spare Pietro the ugliness of all the yelling, shouting, and crying that was likely to come as she had it out with her parents.
“Thank you for walking me home and ensuring I got here safely,” she said in a polite, formal tone, hoping he would get the hint.
He didn’t.
Pietro opened his mouth to protest, but Claire narrowed her eyes at him before he could say anything. His mouth closed as he glanced over at her parents. Claire could almost hear him say ‘ah’, as understanding dawned.
Call me, she mouthed at him and then stepped to the side so he could go past her and grab his shoes. There was a long, awkward silence as he inched his way past her parents, both of whom eyed him and his bloodstained appearance with great suspicion.
This is definitely not going to be pretty, she thought to herself dully, wondering how soon it could be done and over with, and what the end result was going to be.
Both her parents were normally quite calm people who preferred to simply talk through issues to resolve them. Then again, they’d also never come down the stairs to confront their felony criminal daughter and a stranger covered in blood before.
Her father appeared ready to burst a vein in his forehead, while her mother had gone even quieter than before, a sure sign that she was experiencing very strong emotions.
An answering upwelling of emotions, brought on by what she’d experienced earlier in the night, surged through her as the door closed behind Pietro. She lashed out at her parents without waiting for them to speak first.
“Well then, go on,” she said. “Get it over and done with then. Tell me how you can’t believe it and everything. Don’t hold back.”
There was silence for a moment after her outburst, both her parents stunned by it.
Of course. Their perfect little daughter. How could they ever understand?
“But Clair
e…why?” her mom blurted out.
Claire rolled her head to the side and looked at her mom. “Do you really want an answer to that? Or are you just going to keep judging me no matter what?”
“That’s enough of that attitude,” her father said, trying to lay down the law.
“You know,” she said, looking at her father. “I think maybe I’m entitled to a bit of attitude, considering someone else came and bailed me out when my own parents were too ashamed of me to even come visit! I didn’t expect you to pay the bail, but not even coming to see me?”
That had hurt, she knew, and Claire was fighting back tears, blinking rapidly, pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Everything she could think of to try and stop it from happening. The tears would come, but later. Not now.
“We were just so shocked,” her father said. “It all happened so fast. They were here, then you were gone. Without any surprise or argument. You just went with them like you knew it was true.”
“It’s because I did know,” Claire cried. “Because I did it!”
“But why?” her mother asked softly, shaking her head.
Claire shook her head. “I doubt you’d understand. I don’t even understand now that I look back, and I was the one who made the choice to do it.”
“There must have been some reason at the time though,” her father said. “Something that made you think it was a good idea or that you needed to do it.”
Claire snorted angrily as she thought back to what those days had been like. “Yeah. A boy. Said he needed my help, and I was so wrapped up in wanting to please him that I agreed to it. Thought he’d like me more if I did. What an idiot.”
“A boy,” her mother said, shaking her head.
“Yeah, mom. A boy. Cause you never did anything stupid when you were younger either,” she said with biting acidity, referencing the fact that her mother had been married once before she’d met Claire’s father. It wasn’t a secret, nobody cared, but it proved Claire’s point perfectly.
“Claire,” her father said sharply.
“The point is, I wasn’t thinking right,” she said angrily, not responding to her father but switching the subject back to herself, in silent acknowledgment that maybe her comment hadn’t been necessary. “I don’t like what I did. That’s why I pleaded guilty. Why I didn’t try to run.”
“You’ve been running for months now,” her father pointed out. “You even came here, using our house as a hideout.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “No dad. For a lawyer, you’re being awfully thick about this. I wasn’t running at all. Until this morning, the video wasn’t even available. It had been stolen from the dealership and kept as leverage over me by my ex-boyfriend.”
“He was blackmailing you?” her father asked quietly.
“Yes. He put it out there to punish me because I didn’t stay with him. I never ran from the law.”
There was silence between them all as her parents processed this data, trying to reconcile it with the image they had of their daughter. As they did, the overwhelming impression that Claire was getting was one of disappointment.
That hit harder than any anger or loss of temper ever could. The knowledge that she’d let her parents down cut deeper than most knives. Although Claire might have been rebelling since she was seventeen with her choice of men, inside of her was still a little girl in a tutu seeking her parents’ pride and approval.
A pride that she’d had until this morning, when it had been stripped from her as easily as the deputy had put the handcuffs on.
“Oh, Claire,” her mother said softly.
“We’re sorry,” her father said.
She frowned. “What are you sorry for?”
It didn’t have the feel of a ‘sorry for not coming to see you in jail’ sort of apology. This was something else.
“For failing you,” her father said somberly. “For not raising you properly. We tried to give you a good upbringing, to keep you away from this sort of life, but obviously we didn’t do a good enough job.”
Claire’s mouth dropped open. “Unbelievable,” she said, astonished. “You’re just trying to turn this into something about you?”
“Claire, that’s not what—”
She cut her father off. “Why can’t you just be supportive of me as I try to fix my life? I’m trying to make atonement for the mistake I made. All I want from you is support. Acknowledgment that I am smart enough to know I screwed up and am trying to fix it. But no, you can’t even give me that!”
“We have been supportive Claire,” her mother said. “We gave you a good upbringing. We helped pay for college. Gave you money when you were trying to find your way up in Kennewick Falls. Don’t say we haven’t been supportive.”
Claire shook her head. “You also hounded me relentlessly for good grades. Rarely, if ever, let me go out with friends until I was sixteen. You wanted to make sure I was doing all the right extracurriculars. You wanted me to be the perfect child, but you ignored who I really was!”
“We didn’t push you into the life of crime,” her father said. “Why, we even gave you this whole guest apartment to stay in any time you came to visit. Even if it was for an extended period, like the past few weeks.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, looking around. “You know what. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I have been relying on you too much. Asking too much of you. I’m going to go stay somewhere else then. I wouldn’t want to burden you with the reminders of your ‘failure.’”
Her father winced at the dripping sarcasm, but he didn’t say anything either. Claire’s mother looked thoroughly unhappy about the way the situation was breaking down, but she didn’t protest either.
“Perfect,” Claire muttered. “I’ll pack my stuff.”
Just where the hell am I supposed to go now?
Chapter Seventeen
Pietro
Pietro was trying hard to convince himself that the wandering path he’d taken through Five Peaks since exiting the Owens’ residence wasn’t random. That he was, in fact, keeping an eye out for any signs of places the vampires might have taken up as a lair. He was hunting, he told himself as he walked, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched over.
The passersby were few, and several gave him odd looks when they realized the stains on his skin and clothing weren’t mud but rather the ruddy-brown of dried blood instead. Given that it was too early for Halloween, he didn’t blame any of them. Not that he was inclined to stop and explain.
Claire is safe, he reminded himself. So why are you moping?
He walked out into the street, and a horn blared as he didn’t check for traffic, the car jerking partially into the oncoming lane to move around him. There was no denying it, he was moping. Sulking, perhaps. It made no sense either. The request to leave Claire’s place so she could have a discussion with her parents was perfectly reasonable.
So, why did he feel like he should have stayed?
“Because you wanted to stay,” he told himself. “And you didn’t get what you wanted. Suck it up.”
It was true. There was no fooling himself. He’d hoped to stay. To perhaps be introduced to her parents. Instead, she’d dismissed him, leaving him as a stranger, and that hurt Pietro. It shouldn’t because he wasn’t anyone to her. Not in a sense that justified his staying for what was likely to be an extremely awkward conversation.
Yet he found himself wishing he was.
His footsteps were slowly carrying him toward the place that he rented in town, but there was no rush. Nothing awaited him once he arrived. It would just be him.
The phone in his pocket went off, the noise breaking into his mind as he fumbled rapidly for the device. Nobody would be calling him at this time of night if it weren’t urgent. Something was wrong.
When he saw the Caller ID, his blood congealed with fear.
“Claire?” he said, answering it in a rush. “Is everything okay?”
“I can’t stay,” she said numbly. “Not with them. I have to leave.
But I have nowhere else to go.”
He frowned. What the heck had happened in the half hour since he’d left? Were things really that bad between Claire and her parents? He’d thought their relationship rather strong. Sure, they hadn’t looked impressed when he’d walked past them, but who would be impressed to find their daughter alone in the basement with a man covered in blood?
“I can’t go to Lilly’s,” Claire continued in that same dull tone. “She’s always with Trent and is probably up on the mountain anyway.”
“You can come stay with me,” he said, giving her what he knew she was looking for but was too ashamed to ask. “That’s not a problem.”
“Up the mountain?” Claire asked uncertainly.
“That would be the safest place,” he agreed. “My place here in town is a rental. I can’t be sure of the strength of the threshold there.”
Claire was quiet for a moment, digesting that. “I don’t really want to leave town though,” she said after a moment.
“Oh,” he said, trying to think of a way to convince her without getting too pushy.
“Besides, that might violate the terms of my bail.”
Pietro straightened. “I hadn’t thought of that part,” he admitted. “We definitely don’t want to break any of those rules, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah,” Claire sighed heavily. “I know. I’m going to treat this thing properly. Do my time, however long that ends up being. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”
“Good,” he said, perhaps a bit too strongly. “I don’t want you too either.”
If she did that, then Claire would be gone from him for longer. That too was something Pietro did not want, though he didn’t say anything about it. Now was not the time to burden Claire with more worries. She had enough on her plate without him adding to it. So he would keep quiet, refraining from telling her his thoughts.
Not to mention the need for her to avoid jail due to its lack of security. She would be an easy target for the vamps in there, unprotected by anyone prepared to deal with the Hunters.
