More important, how was I going to get down?
I looked over at the tree.
It would take a superhuman jump, but, well, I had the ability. I just had to allow that part of me to surface.
“I’ll get the ladder,” Mom was shouting.
“Where did the vampire go?” Nikolai asked no one in particular as he scanned the street. “Damn, they’re fast.”
“I can get myself down,” I said, even though Mom was already starting toward the carriage house/garage. I closed my eyes and let the nighttime surround me in an embrace. I surrendered to its call, and when I opened them again, I was sure my pupils changed to catlike slits, because I could see everything as though it were the light of day. Fangs descended with a flash of pain. My body felt light and ... in tune, somehow, with the very fabric of nature.
The tree pulsed with a life of its own and seemed to reach out to me. I took a running jump, and fell into its awaiting arms. They caught me easily, and seemed to lead, like a stairway, to the ground.
Before Mom had even reached the backyard, I landed on the soft, richly scented grass. “Sorry,” I whispered to the tender shoots I’d crushed underfoot.
Nikolai’s eyes were wide, and his fist stayed clenched at his side. With my vampire sight, his blade burned white-hot. I could see its pointed tip jutting from the center of his knuckles. Power sizzled through his aura like tiny flashes of lightning.
Raising my hand to shield my eyes from the intensity, I turned my head.
“Is this why you invited me here tonight?” he asked, his tone remarkably calm, almost sad. “So I could see you, like this, with him?”
Okay, Ana, don’t mess it up this time.
I squared my shoulders and faced him. His aura continued to crackle. But if I didn’t look at the blade shimmering in his hand like a small sun, I could meet his gaze without blinking. “That wasn’t the plan, but—you know, we should talk about this.” I waved my hand to indicate my face and the fangs and the crazy cat eyes I was sure he noticed, even in the dark. “I feel like it’s coming between us.”
Mom came around the corner. She squeaked and dropped the ladder with a clang when she saw me standing there. “How did you get down? Please tell me you didn’t . . .” Her hand flew to her mouth, as she took in all that was my fabulous vampire self. “Oh, Ana! Don’t stand there looking like that!”
She made it sound like I was on the front lawn in my underwear. Mom was looking at me with undisguised horror.
My hands on my hips, I spun to tell her what I thought about all that, but Nikolai spoke first.
“It’s all right, Dr. Parker,” Nikolai said, using Mom’s honorific the way Elias called me “Highness.” “It’s under control. I just came by to ask Ana out for a malt.”
A malt? What was this, the 1950s?
“Oh, that sounds delightful,” Mom said, instantly forgetting her horror at seeing me all vamped up. It kind of freaked me out, the way Nik and my mom interacted. It was so clear that my mom wanted Nikolai and me to be together, like a normal couple, that she pushed to the point of being ... well, icky. Plus, she sort of fluttered around him. Like, she was all into him. I was doing my best not to gag, when my mom added, “Do you need some cash, Ana?”
I rarely refused the offer of money, even at a time like this. I had my hand out, but once again, Nik interrupted me before I could even start.
“I’ve got it covered, Dr. Parker.”
“Please, Nikolai, call me Amelia.”
Please don’t!
“I’ll have her home before eleven, Amelia.”
Ugh! He did!
Nikolai opened the car door with a rusty squeal. He gestured all gentlemanly-like for me to take a seat, as if I’d already agreed to this ridiculous malt.
“I’m not sure—”
“Oh, go ahead, sweetheart,” Mom said, pushing her round glasses up on her nose. She might be the most powerful witch in the Midwest, but she still looked like a frumpy college professor. Her blond curls spilled out from a makeshift bun. The fabric of her olive cotton skirt rode up a bit, and there was a greasy smear where she’d balanced the ladder against her ample hip. “You can even stay out to midnight, if you’re going to be with Nik.”
Whom, five minutes ago, you were telling to kill Elias.
“I have homework.”
“Do it in the morning,” Mom offered sweetly, if somewhat insincerely. I could see it pained her, the teacher, to even suggest such slacking.
“We do need to talk, Ana,” Nikolai reminded me gently. “Please.”
It was the “please” that did it. I felt the fangs click back into concealment, and the night dimmed around me. With a sigh, I slumped into the passenger side of Nik’s Toyota.
Apparently Nik was serious about the malt. We ended up in a booth in the back of Snuffy’s on Cleveland. The restaurant had an honest-to-goodness lunch counter, a jukebox, and red vinylcovered seats. Photos and framed newspaper articles featuring local sports stars from the seventies to the present day adorned the wall.
“Okay, this is surreally
Leave It to Beaver
,” I said, taking another look at the retro decor. “What are you up to, Nikolai Kirov?”
“I just really wanted a malt,” he said with a shrug. It was striking how much like a traditional vampire Nik looked. Under the fluorescent lights, his pale skin had an almost greenish cast. His hair was long enough to tie back, though he usually let it fall loosely to his shoulders. The studded leather jacket amped up the bad-boy vibe.
In contrast, Elias, the actual vampire, usually tended toward business-casual.
Weird.
After a gum-snapping waitress in her forties took our order—was this place for real?—I watched Nik studiously avoid me. He played with the corner of the paper place mat, instead, folding and unfolding the corner.
“My eyes are back to normal,” I assured him. “You
can
look at me.”
He leaned back against the booth, the leather creaking as he crossed his arms in front of his chest. Despite what I said, he stared at the watch on his wrist as he spoke. “Things are getting intense at home. You know, after I turned eighteen in October?” He sneaked a look at me, but didn’t wait to see my reaction. “Papa wants me to ‘graduate.’”
He didn’t mean from college, and I knew it. “But you can’t! You have to kill a vampire to do that.”
His sharp glance and a nervous check around the room made me realize I hadn’t said that as quietly as I probably should have. I wasn’t too worried. I’d hung around with Taylor’s friends when they talked about ax-murdering trolls encountered in computer games and no one ever looked twice. “I know,” he said, keeping his voice pitched low. “But I can’t hold him off much longer.”
“You’re going to have to,” I whispered harshly. “You can’t kill my friends.”
“Now they’re your friends? I thought they were just your ‘people.’”
I didn’t want to get into petty semantics. I struggled to keep my voice down. “You can’t kill anybody. It’s not right.”
Nikolai bowed his head, running his fingers through his hair. “I have to do something, soon.”
“Why don’t you tell your dad the truth? Tell him you don’t want to be a vampire hunter.”
He looked up at me then, his amber eyes flashing dangerously dark. “Because, Ana,” he said. “That’s
not
the truth.”
I pressed my back stiffly into the vinyl of the booth, trying to absorb what Nikolai had just said. When my brain couldn’t process it, I dumbly asked, “Are you saying you
want
to be a vampire hunter?”
He went back to fiddling with his place mat, as I tried to remember to breathe. My understanding had always been that Nikolai’s family expected him, as their only son, to take up his father’s paranormal vocation, but that Nik had his own feelings about the whole affair—even before we became involved. Had he changed his mind? I watched him intently, trying to read the answer in his posture, his movements.
Nikolai scratched the back of his neck, considering. He let out a measured sigh. “Look, I don’t know, Ana. I was serious about what I said to Constantine earlier. Vampires don’t belong here. Ask him and I’m sure he’d tell you he’d rather be home, beyond the Veil. You know as well as I do that their whole culture is based on homesickness.”
He seemed to want an answer, but all I had was a shrug. That jibed with what little I did know about vampire culture. Elias had told me that they based the hierarchy of their society on what they remembered of the place they’d been stolen from. The First Witch had ripped them from their home, and once on this side, it took a magical death at the hands of someone like Nikolai’s father to send them back.
Still, I didn’t see vampires lining up to throw themselves on Nik’s psychic blade.
“So you’re just performing a public service?” I couldn’t quite keep the snark from my tone.
“Wouldn’t the world be a better place without vampires?”
I might have had a smarter comeback if I hadn’t had my own doubts about being half vampire. Instead I pulled the paper wrapping from the straw and looked over at the kitchen as if I suddenly cared how long it took them to make my chocolate malt.
“You see my problem,” Nikolai said, as if my silence meant I agreed with him.
“But I don’t,” I said. “If it’s really just that simple—that the vampires don’t belong here—why doesn’t the Council of Witches concoct a spell to send them all back? Tidy up their problem, as it were?”
The waitress came with our drinks. She put out tall glasses and shook the malts from the metal containers. The smile she gave Nik and me was sly, like she thought we were a cute couple.
Once she left, Nik returned to my question. “I suspect you’re part of the reason.” To my confused look, he added, “No one knows what will happen to you if they do something like that.”
I shook my head. The ice-cream drink was so thick I used a spoon to take a bite, and then I waved the tip of it at Nik. “Vampires have been around since the first goddess cultures in the Stone Age. My dad came over under one of the Ramses pharaohs. Witches could have solved their vampire problem well before I was born.”
“The talisman was only lost a few decades ago. They were useful to the witches before.”
Before.
It was a much more loaded word than it seemed.
Before
the secret war,
before
the vampires contrived to steal the mysterious talisman that kept them in thrall, and
before
it was lost to both parties—or hidden; I was never sure.
“And,” I said, slurping a big mouthful of malt now that it was soft enough, “there are those vampires who have stayed loyal servants. No one wants to lose their ‘useful’ slaves.”
Nikolai grimaced at his glass. “Yeah, there’s that.”
I was glad that it seemed that we both found that idea distasteful. “It’s weird,” I said, taking a long sip of my malt. “I’ve never understood why anyone would stay with someone who used to, you know,
own
them.”
Nik lifted his shoulder. “Vampires had been our slaves for thousands of years. It was the life they knew. I suppose it was comforting for some to stay.”
“Sounds like the party line,” I said with a sneer.
“How do you explain it?”
I couldn’t.
But there was a lot I didn’t understand about vampires. The “loyal servant” faction was the reason I had an honor guard. Occasionally, one of them tried to kill my dad, and a couple of times last year, at least, they went after me.
I think that was the other reason my mom hated seeing the Igors trailing me; it reminded her of the problems in her own camp. If someone in the coven was sending servants to assassinate my dad or me, they weren’t playing by the rules of the truce.
I never could figure out why anyone would want my dad dead—or deader, anyway. Okay, so Khan thought he was a sexist or whatever, but he always seemed okay to me. It wasn’t like I saw evidence of his provoking witches all the time.
“You know, if you guys would just leave the free vampires alone, there’d be peace,” I said, pushing my malt glass away. Since awakening the half-vampire part of me, I noticed it didn’t take much food to fill me up. “What is your beef with them, anyway?”
Nik seemed to have lost interest in his malt as well. “You’re serious?”
“What?”
“Your dad is a menace, Ana.”
“In what way?” I meant the question to be sincere, but from the way Nik frowned, I must have sounded a bit defensive.
“He incites his people to violence against us. Why do you think the coven recruited my dad from Russia?”
Actually, I’d never considered that they had. I always thought that Nikolai’s dad moved to America for the same reasons Taylor’s family did, because this was supposed to be the promised land for immigrants. I guess that seemed silly when I thought about it that way. “Uh,” was my only intelligible response.
“Most covens in America don’t need hunters. Your dad has made the Midwest region extraspecial.”
Maybe if Nikolai hadn’t sneered at that point, I would have reacted better. “My dad?” I sputtered. “Maybe your dad fed you a load of bull. Did it ever occur to you that maybe your dad was brought over to threaten mine?”
Nikolai’s jaw tightened. “It’s getting late. We should get you home. We don’t want your mom worrying.”
“Don’t be like that,” I said, following him as he made his way to the cash register with the bill. “I didn’t mean to blurt that out,” I added, which was true, even though I did think it was possible that Mr. Vampire Hunter might be a bit biased against my dad. “Whatever.”
I chewed on my lip as he paid up and we walked out to where the car was parked along the street. I was trying to decide how to put what I wanted to say. I sat for a long time before buckling up, and finally gave up on diplomacy. “It really bothers you—what I am—doesn’t it?”
He didn’t say anything, and I’d have to turn on my vampire eyes to read his expression in the darkened interior of the car.