“I doubt it.” What in the world was wrong with me? He brought out the worst in me, the parts I’d tried my whole life to tamp down. The mouthy, sassy girl who got in trouble for making inappropriate jokes during Sunday school. I’d almost forgotten about her. She’d been far more like her yaya than Mother had wanted.
We stood there staring into each other’s eyes for several minutes. He frowned, opened his mouth, shut it again, and then smiled. A slow curling of his lips, just enough to show the flash of white teeth again.
“Oh, I think I like you. Apparently you are right, I can’t make you do what I want. At least not in the conventional sense. You seem immune to being rolled, and there’s some fire in there. You weren’t always a firebrand, though, were you?” Remo reached out and touched a finger under my chin. I twisted my head away from him and batted his hand away. The feel of his skin on mine was far too personal.
“Did I give you permission to touch me? No, I didn’t. Let me be crystal clear. You don’t touch me or my brother without permission.” I stepped back. “Tad, we’re leaving.”
“There are no cars that come out this way. No public transit.” Remo smirked.
“We’ll walk. We have a lot to talk about. And we won’t turn into crispy critters when the sun comes up.” I herded Tad ahead of me as if I knew where I was going. I waved to Dahlia as we went by. “Thanks.” She tossed me something and I caught it. A set of keys.
“Take it. I’ll catch up with you later.” She winked at me and I winked back.
Remo growled from behind us. “Dahlia, you are going to end up in the box.”
I didn’t know what the box was, but I doubted it was anything good. I couldn’t let her suffer for us. I stiffened and spun. “Dahlia, you want to come with us?”
“Yeah”—she glanced at her boss, then to us—“I do.”
Remo smacked the wall next to him, and the room trembled along with the remaining vampires. “I am the law here. I will not be disobeyed.”
“Really? That’s what Oberfluffel said. He was the law and I had to respect him. You want my respect? You can earn it.”
Remo’s lips twitched. “Oberfluffel?”
“Whatever his name was. He thought he was in charge, and you showed him he wasn’t. Maybe you’re about to get the same rude awakening, Remo.” I purred his name a little too much, and something in the air shifted. His eyes widened, and he drew in a slow breath.
“What are you that you can draw me?”
“Never you mind, it’s not a single bit of your beeswax.” I gripped Tad tight, unable to believe the words that flowed out of me.
Dahlia and I pushed Tad ahead of us, leaving behind a vampire mob boss with, at last glance, his chin on the floor.
I handed the keys back to Dahlia, and she ran ahead of us to a tiny purple punch-buggy car. I laughed and piled in, Tad with me.
“Dahlia,” Tad said, “you can’t leave here. The sun will come up and Alena is right. Crispy critters are not the worst of it.”
“Worried about me, lover?” She smiled. “I’ll be fine. There’s a safe house in the city, we can go there for the night. Remo will calm down. He always does. He’s really not as bad as he seems. He’s just on edge right now.”
“He’s a horrible donkey butt,” I said as we sped out of the castle and back the way we’d just come.
She snickered. “You mean an ass?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Still not cussing?”
“No. I’ve broken so many rules, at least I can hold to that one. It’s simple.”
Tad shook his head. “You aren’t breaking rules, Lena. You’re surviving. There are no rules when it comes to making it in this life.”
I shrank into my seat and stared out at the night sky; the cold stars so far above us had in the past been a source of solace, a thought that one day when I was dead and gone I’d be there, in the heavens, with all my loved ones who’d gone on before me.
Dahlia reached over and took my hand. “The loneliness fades. Honest.”
I put a hand over my eyes, tears slipping past them. From behind me, Tad reached forward. “Don’t cry. She’s right, it will get better.”
But they didn’t know why I was crying. It wasn’t the loneliness, though that was there under my skin too. It was the reality of being forced to face that maybe everything I’d believed for my entire life was no longer what I could hold on to, not even with my fingertips.
The rock I’d thought was solid turned out to be nothing but a pile of sand that tried to hold me down, burying me under the weight of beliefs I could no longer turn to for solace because now, I was everything I’d once believed was evil.
How did one reconcile a belief system with a reality like that? There was only one answer.
You didn’t.
We reached the safe house, and Dahlia let us in with a flourish of one hand. “Make yourselves at home, I’ve got a few things to do.”
The morning was a few hours off, but she disappeared as soon as she made sure we knew where everything was.
“She’s gone to feed,” Tad said, and I startled.
“Feed?”
“Drink blood. They probably have someone chained up in the basement. They’re animals, sis. Seriously. You can’t be friends with—”
I pushed past him, running in my bare feet after Dahlia. She wasn’t like that; I couldn’t believe it of her that she would be okay with holding someone against their will. Through the house I bolted, skidding to a stop on the white tile floor of the kitchen. The fridge door was open, and Dahlia peeked out around it. “You hungry?”