“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“What a surprise.” He eyed me. “I will say I was surprised by what happened between you and the master. While I didn’t feel that you would be together very long, I didn’t think it would end so soon, given his questionable infatuation with you and your abnormal stubbornness.”
I smiled at him. “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. Give me a hug?”
He took a step back from me. “For a moment, despite your numerous flaws and issues, I think he was…” He cleared his throat. “Happy is much too large of a word, really. But perhaps… hmm, I’m not really sure. Perhaps not unhappy would be a better way to describe his mood of late.”
“Please stop. All of these gushing compliments will go to my head. If I hear from Amy I’ll tell her you’re looking for her, okay?”
He nodded stiffly. “Very well.”
As I walked away from him, I touched the gold chain I wore—the Carastrand—and thought about what Veronique had said earlier. Maybe she was making it up. Maybe she’d heard wrong or had forgotten the details after so long. If she was right and the magic holding my nightwalker back was a fading thing, then I was going to be in bigger trouble than I already was.
Gideon said the grimoire was mine if I handed over the Red Devil so he could have a challenging kill to keep his mind off his problems.
Obviously that was out of the question. Thierry might have pissed me off a lot lately, but I wasn’t selling him out for an easy answer to my issues.
The eradication wasn’t an option for me because of the memory issue. It was worst-case scenario only, and the kid who’d do it wouldn’t agree to go through with it even if I wanted him to.
There had to be a third option. I hoped the strand would hold out long enough for me to figure out what it was.
Too many eggs to juggle at the moment; it was inevitable that some of them would end up broken. The only question was, which ones?
When I got back to George’s bungalow, there was something on my doorstep I hadn’t been expecting.
It was pasty, stringy, greasy and it wore a “Death Suck” concert T-shirt.
The Darkness was waiting for me.
The Darkness did not look happy.
The Darkness had somebody with him—a middle-aged woman with red hair who had him by his upper arm so tightly that even from a distance it looked painful.
I walked up the driveway and gave them both a guarded but curious look. How did he even know where I lived?
“Looking for me?” I asked.
The woman shook the kid. “Tell her.”
“Fine. Fine, okay? Geez, Mom, let go of me.”
She unhanded him. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”
The kid hissed out a breath and looked at me. “It was wrong of me to take your money yesterday. I’m really sorry. I’ve come to return it to you.”
After another poke from his mother, the kid extended his hand, which held the thousand-
dollar retainer from yesterday. I walked up to them, studied them to see if there were any catches or tricks, and then took the money.
“Thank you.”
“Whatever. I got another job that pays way better anyhow.”
“Yippy for you.”
The kid absently scratched at a pimple on his chin. His pasty gothboy skin was sickly looking under the cloudy skies. Terrific. This was the person I was relying on for my tenuous Plan B? It was a good reminder how desperate I was.
“Okay, Steven, we need to get going.” His mother’s voice was firm.
“I have to take a leak. I had that Big Gulp and I can’t make it all the way back home or
I’m going to explode.”
“Feel free to use my bathroom,” I said. “It’s the least I can do.”
They followed me inside. George was sitting on the couch watching TV and he looked over at us.
Steven’s mother frowned. “We rang the doorbell several times, you know.”
“Yup, I heard you,” George said. “But your kid makes me jumpy.”
Steven clutched his lower region, and he looked very uncomfortable. I pointed him in the right direction and he disappeared down the short hallway.
“I’m very sorry about my son.” The woman extended her hand. “I’m Meredith Kendall.”
I shook her hand. “It’s not a problem.”
It was a problem, but I didn’t want to go into any further detail because I had no idea how much she knew about what her son was capable of. Finding out your son was a wizard who practiced black magic was a little higher on the parental panic scale than finding out he smoked cigarettes.
“This isn’t the first time, you see,” she said. “And it doesn’t always turn out quite so well in the end. There have been… issues.”
Yeah, I bet.
“Really,” she continued, “I suppose it should be common sense not to hand over large sums of money to children, but vampires have different morals than the rest of us normal people.”
Alrighty then. So she knew what I was and wasn’t screaming or whipping out a wooden stake. Except for the veiled insult, that was encouraging.
“Obviously you’re very savvy about this sort of thing.” I decided to ignore her ignorance instead of educating her about what vampires actually were. There were only so many hours in the day. “How did you find out where I lived?”
“Steven did a location spell. I allowed the small bit of magic because it is important that he learn his lesson.” She wrung her hands anxiously. “I thought that moving out of the country might curb his interest in the occult, but I don’t think it’s going to be as easy a solution as I’d hoped. He’s beginning to remind me a great deal of his father.”
“He said his father had passed away,” I said.
She let out a long, shaky sigh. “Vanquished is the correct term, actually.”