“And by then, Eirian was probably already here,” Asher grumbles. “If she’s working closely with him, then that might be wherever Jakob lives. She won’t want to risk being discovered.”
“So what do we do now?” Margot asks.
“We need to search,” Vlad says. “Eirian can hide her own magic, but she appears to have many fae at her disposal, and she may not be extending that privilege to the vampires. If we get close enough, we should be able to sense it.”
He includes me in that look, not just Asher. I bite my lip to suppress my grin. It’s bad. I know we’re on a serious job with incredibly serious consequences, but I can’t stop thinking about earlier tonight and his hands on me and—
Quinn nudges my foot with his. When I look up into his face, he raises his eyebrows. Right. Okay. Focus. Easier said than fucking done, quite frankly.
“So we go in pairs?” Margot seems eager to be on the move.
“No,” Vlad says. “Threes. Eirian is powerful, and we need to be prepared to come across her, too.”
I see the logic in it. There’s still every chance she’ll be coming after me, which puts whoever is with me at risk—and if we have to have one person with magic in every group, then the only other supernatural I’d be with would be Quinn, and I can’t imagine Vlad or Asher agreeing to that.
“I’ll go with you two,” Rachel says, looking at Asher and Quinn.
I open my mouth and close it again. Margot looks just as bewildered; we haven’t even talked about who’ll go with who yet.
Still, she seems to have made the decision for us. “Very well,” Vlad says. “Margot?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“We’ll cover the east of the city,” Asher says.
Vlad only nods in reply, and Rachel doesn’t look at me or Margot as she follows Asher and Quinn away. Margot shoves her hands in her pockets and frowns after them, then at me.
“She’s just… going through it, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt me, too. I mean, I get it. I’m in the wrong and I haven’t even really had a chance to apologise for that. She deserves an apology. But this job comes first. Should come first.
“This way,” Vlad says, and we both trail down the street after him. It’s awkward, the three of us walking together. I don’t want to leave Margot behind us because what if something happens? I don’t think Vlad will appreciate maybe having to make small talk, though she doesn’t seem too into that.
So I wander along awkwardly instead, my power pushing out to taste the air around us. There’s a general hint of magic in the air, but that could even be from us being here, so I pay it little mind.
“What’s it like then?” Margot asks. We’ve been walking for fifteen minutes or so, and every so often I reach out and nudge Vlad, directing him to go one way or the other.
“What’s what like?”
“Being a vampire.”
I sense Vlad’s sudden interest in the conversation, the bond between us tightening, just a little. Funny. I figure he knows so much about me—knowseverythingabout me—but we’ve kept somany truths from each other that maybe he doesn’t know that much at all.
I don’t mind that. We know enough to be familiar with each other; enough that I know when he said he loves me, he meant it, and that this is it for us for the rest of our lives. The rest of it will come with time.
“It’s fucking cool,” I say and can’t help the way I flush when she looks at me. “I mean, it’s not like the alternative—Well. Rachel wasn’t kidding about the car. And now? I’m fast. I’m strong. I’ve got a group of people who—”
I cut myself off when Margot’s eyebrows draw together. I get it. She probably doesn’t want to hear about my new family any more than Rachel would. Why should I be living a good life when I left everyone here to wonder what had happened to me?
I shove my hands into the pockets of my shorts, mood gone glum. After a moment, Margot sighs.
“Sorry,” she mutters.
I shake my head. “No, you—It’s fine. Just, there are worse things, you know?I’mthe one who fucked up in not letting everyone know here, but I’m not really sure what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know there were vampires in Margate or people who knew about them. By the time I even really thought about it, it had been months.”
Not that I didn’tthinkabout my family in all that time. But Vlad spent the first few months hovering over me because the expected bloodlust never came. Then he was all anxious about introducing me to the Huntsman, and whether he would even survive that confrontation—not that he told me that at the time, of course; that was something I worked out with hindsight.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine…” Margot blows out a breath and offers me a tentative smile. “Not like there’s an easy excuse, is there?”
