I climb in as my backpack and small duffel finish flopping to a stop, and close my robe a little more before digging for my boots.
“We’ve got everything here under control! Don’t worry about deliveries or the store,” Leiza calls very excitedly, bouncing on her feet.
“This is a hunting trip to kill things, right?” I ask Vance directly, though my eyes are on the very happy omegas, who are animatedly waving from the porch now.
“Yes,” he states in a tone that assures me he’s not one bit happy I’m here.
“Why are they treating it like I’m going on spring break?” I ask, genuinely concerned about their level of enthusiasm.
I thought they were a little saner than this.
Emit snorts, but clears his expression quickly.
“Do I want to know what spring break is a euphemism for?” Vance asks Emit.
“You’re really that old?” I groan.
“Do you know how long a century is?” Vance asks me dryly.
“I averaged a C on vocab tests, so yeah,” I retort, matching his condescension.
Emit releases a rumble of laughter, as his body shakes with the force.
Then he pulls out and begins to drive us off on our hunt.
I’m so not adjusting this fast, but it seems I have no choice in the matter. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill, gaining size and momentum. Either I’ll boulder through anything when I reach the bottom, or I’ll simply go splat into a mountainside.
“Do you know how quickly the vernacular shifts and accents devolve, evolve, or simply cease to exist?” Vance asks me.
Now I feel a little talked down to. “No.”
“I swear he used to be fun,” Emit tells me, smiling at me through the rearview mirror like he has a secret to tell.
“I’ve only seen him be fun once, and then he disappeared,” I mutter to myself.
Vance clears his throat and adjusts his tie like he somehow heard that.
The pitiful moment of dejection is gone, but thanks to Damien rubbing that raw wound with his follow-up rejection…I need liquor instead of caffeine.
“Emit’s telling you the story,” Vance says idly, shifting topics like he doesn’t feel the urge to verbally spar with me.
He fidgets with the buttons on his shirt sleeves, and he moves on to the ones in the middle of his shirt.
“Gypsies do love telling their stories. Try to remember how different it was all those centuries ago, before trying to grasp the brutality of the era. Both before and after we sacrificed the Portocale gypsies,” Vance continues.
“I hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” Emit bites out.
“By this point, I’d pretty much already deduced that much,” I say as I hold one finger up. “Our C average students are geniuses compared to your top students of that clandestine era,” I deadpan as I cross my legs at the ankles and get comfortable in the back.
Vance cuts his gaze at me, even though his lips almost twitch.
“I’m pretty sure the omegas unpacked your cookware and used it for the first time. I guess a C average student can’t cook like—”
“You can’t argue with her like that. It makes you sound really weird and sad,” Emit cuts in, shaking his head as though he pities Vance. “I swear he was once fun,” he says again.
“Sitting in a bloody car and telling this story to a Portocale for the marginally small chance of relieving this curse before I have to close my eyes to the nightmares…is driving me slightly mad. And we’re hunting unregistered wolves. She could get herself fucking killed, because they’re unregistered. They have no alpha,” Vance rants, all humor gone as he fidgets twice as much.
Damien says Vance got the better end of the deal, but I never notice anyone else twitching the way Vance does. It’s the sort of thing done with a notable amount of compulsion.
I notice it more each time I’m around him. The way he’ll pull his jacket off, fold it neatly, lie it across the top of a chair, and then pick it up and put it on again.
He’s always moving and doing when I’m around him, never still for very long.
Emit’s eyes flick to mine, and something…different passes between us. I can’t get myself killed and he knows it.
We have a secret.
I’m not sure why my lips struggle to resist a smile, or why his mirror the action, but I watch his lips in the mirror as he watches the road. I’ve never really noticed all the playfulness in his eyes or in his expressions before.
The beard hides a bit of that.
It’s almost…liberating to have someone know and just treat it like it’s…normal. No shock. No real awe. Just simple understanding.
His eyes flick to mine again, catching me watching, and they narrow a little when I dart a very suspicious look away because some very inconvenient burning happens in my cheeks.
Nope. No. Nuh-uh. Whoa Nelly. Abso-fucking-lutely not.
I’m so not doing this again just because I’m a vulnerable idiot.
Vance is fidgeting in the front seat worse than usual, still not speaking to me about our night. Damien thought I was Idun—this vile, evil bitch who has done some apparently messed up shit.
I’m so not checking out Emit. Nope. My lesson has been learned.
Monsters hate my vagina. Anna would pity me so hard.
I stare right the hell out the window and pretend like I don’t feel the weight of his gaze hit me from time to time.
“So you kidnapped me for us all to ride along in uncomfortable silence?” I ask after two hours of said silence and two numb ass cheeks.
“I’m not really sure what the daft animal is thinking at all,” Vance grumbles as he looks out the window too, sitting in front of me now that I’ve moved over more.
His eyes catch mine in the reflection of the window, and I feel weird again. “Any music or something?”
Worst. Road trip. Ever.
“No. No music. Your eardrums will split if he turns this thing on. I already saved us both from it. You’re welcome,” Vance tells me very seriously.
I’m not sure why I smile. Emit groans, and I sort of move back to the middle, witnessing one of those ensnaring moments where you can see a flash of the friendship they must have once had.
It’s in the subtle familiarity, the grudging comfort, and the ingrained comradery they less-than-subtly resent.
Vance starts over with messing with his buttons, glancing out the window. I realize his twitching is set to a rhythm during the bouts of silence, and I spend the next silent hour just counting the seconds between each twitch.
Ten seconds between buttons.
Forty seconds between tie adjustments.
Ten seconds of staring out the window.
Blink twice.
Start again.
My gaze flicks to Emit, whose eyes are on mine for a brief second in the mirror, before they return to the road.
“Quietest road trip ever,” I say just to break up the silence. Again. “Anna would be so jealous,” I add dryly.
Vance tenses, and I catch an error in his next two twitches, because they come in two seconds faster.
“We rode two hundred miles on horseback in complete silence. Even made camp in silence. Did everything in silence. It was hot a soldier route, but it was the quickest way in and out of—”
“He’s trying to say, we’ve been on quieter, longer road trips,” Emit cuts in, his lips twitching again as Vance makes a frustrated sound.
“So tell me about Idun and how she ended up tricking you into slaughtering the Portocale gypsies. Leiza said you were tricked,” I go on, throwing a metaphorical sledgehammer on the glass wall and getting it out of the way.
Vance’s twitching stops. They both grow impossibly more silent.
After a few minutes, Vance turns to look at me.
“The reason we don’t question the scent of Portocale blood, is because on that day, we just knew we’d smelled it all around,” he tells me a little coldly. “Emit and I were reconsidering our stance on the second sacrifice, despite the tension between us and the Portocale gypsies.”
“Why was there tension?” I ask, deciding we should start there.
“Edmond Portocale had fallen in love with Idun. See, Idun had decided we needed a sixth in our circle. She wanted to include the Portocale blood. We weren’t okay with that,” Emit says a little tightly.
“We’d been tricked into sharing her, and loved her too much to simply let her get away. To tell us she was going to actively start seeking someone else to love…it wasn’t okay,” Vance elaborates quietly.
“We’d started the altar six months before, when she made us believe one sacrifice could be enough,” Emit says as he cracks his neck.
“Blood magic and gypsy magic are a volatile combination when the right blood is behind it,” Vance carries on. “If we completed the second sacrifice, then immortality would be ours. It seemed too easy and impossible at the same time.”
I soak it all in, unsure what half of it means. Those who have all the information don’t always know which parts are confusing to those of us who don’t.
With them, it’s always like collecting a trail of breadcrumbs, leaving me only to guess where they all lead. I hope I don’t get baked in some crazy bitch’s oven when I finally find the end of the trail.
“Four gypsy first-borns were all that was needed for Idun to complete her circle,” Vance adds, as he faces me. “She might have fallen for us in her own way, but really she fell for the power she had over us when she convinced us to sacrifice the most important things to us and our families. All to have an eternity of life with her.”
I can’t imagine having someone love me that much. Let alone four people love me that much. It’s a little sick and twisted, but also morbidly romantic.
Anna would so hate Idun.
“Your wolves,” I say softly to Emit, a realization setting in.
Poor Emit.
“Feel no pity for me, Violet,” the wolf says with a slight edge, as though he’s offended, despite the fact he openly expresses his own guilt.
“My family had one prized possession,” Vance says very quietly. “A silver timepiece my grandfather left our family before the first time my family home was raided.”
I say nothing to that.
“We’re not trying to justify anything,” Vance goes on dispassionately, his twitching beginning again on the timed sequence he has. “At least not to you.”
He does the twitching so subtly that you almost have to watch him to really notice it.
“Damien said you’ll fall to the curse next,” I say quietly to Vance.
He gives a shrug of his shoulder. “When I fall asleep. I’m not in any hurry to fall asleep,” he tells me.
“At least it doesn’t put all of you down at the same time. Someone could use that to their advantage then.”
“The fewer people who know about Portocale gypsies and our weak links to them, the better. But Emit’s told his omegas, and Arion has shared things with his closest betas, and I’m sure Damien once shared it too, back when he had people who knew who he was,” Vance states with no emotion.