It honestly didn’t occurto her that she’d get away with it. She wasn’t sure what divine blessing carried her down that pergola without breaking her neck, or how she managed to avoid the guards that walked the perimeter of the property. When she slipped between a painfully narrow gap between the fencing by the private dock behind the house, she braced herself for alarms, for the ripple of wards being breached, for barking dogs, for anything.
But there was nothing but the faint sounds of people enjoying what appeared to be a laidback party and the rhythmic thud of boots as the guards did their patrols. Like always, Cecilia was right: Felix really didn’t expect her to run, so he hadn’t thought to increase the security for people exiting the grounds.
Her heart hammered in her ears as she kept low and followed a long dock that connected all the fancy homes to their even fancier boats. The paranoia that someone would catch her at any minute and tackle her to the ground increased her pace until she was jogging down the dock, toward another gate. Cecilia remained on the line, just in case, tucked safely in the pocket of Dahlia’s lounge pants.
She cursed her choice of clothing when they snagged on the sharpened ends of the fence that poked from the top of the locked gate. She yanked hard, tearing the fabric, and sent herself careening over the other side with a muffled yelp.
Dahlia landed hard, forcing the air from her lungs. There was some squawking from the vicinity of her pocket, but she didn’t have the breath to acknowledge it for several seconds.
When she got a bit of her wind back, she forced herself into a sitting position with considerable effort. Every part of her back and shoulder hurt, but nothing felt broken.
Retrieving her phone, she spared a second to mutter, “I’m fine. Just fell over a gate. Please shut up.”
“Don’t scare me like that, then!” Cecilia snapped.
Dahlia only grunted before shoving the phone back into her pocket. Her pace was considerably slower with her newfound limp, but she made it into some sort of small, ritzy park on the edge of the neighborhood before eventually navigating her way out into the city.
She hadn’t grown up in a city. Her formative years were spent in a small, nothing sort of town on the edge of the Sacramento basin. The first few months in San Francisco had been a continuous culture shock that forced her to adjust almost immediately. United Washington wasn’t exactly the same, but the indifference of the people was. No one looked twice at her torn pants or the leaves in her hair as she blended in with the nocturnal crowd.
Despite the late hour, the streets were packed with people doing shopping, pushing strollers, or going out for drinks. No one spared her a glance as she attempted to find her way to a public transit stop.
It turned out that the Metro wasn’t too dissimilar from San Francisco’s Muni. An m-lev train was an m-lev train, no matter what side of the continent it was on.
Dahlia had no idea where she was going, only that she needed to leave — no matter what the feeling in her gut was screaming at her. It seemed that the more distance she put between herself and Felix, the louder that screaming became.
It wasn’t just a new animal instinct to stay close to her food source. It was a deep, clawing yearning to go back to someone who, against all odds, made her feel special. The certainty that she was leaving something important behind was almost unbearable.
Settling back on her hard plastic seat, she put her phone to her ear again. “Okay, I’m on a train. What should I do now?”
“Come home?”
Dahlia winced. “I can’t do that. That’s the first place people would look. Which reminds me — whatever happens, donottalk to any strangers or vampires who come sniffing around my apartment, Cece. If someone asks about me, tell them you have no idea where I went. I won’t let you be involved in any of this.”
Cecilia choked. “What? You’re gonna just go on the run without me? Fuck you! That’s not allowed!”
Pinching her nose, Dahlia replied, “I’m not going on the run. I’m— I’m figuring shit out. I have to get my head right, and I can’t do that with everyone around me telling me what I should be doing or how I should feel about it. And I sure as shit can’t put you in danger. You’re the only family I have.”
“I don’t care about danger,” she stubbornly insisted. “We’re a duo. Wedoeverything together. We put thedoinduo,Dahlia. I’m not letting you run across the UTA and have a crisis about being a vampire while I sit on my ass and do nothing. You’re my best friend. Nothing about that has changed.”
Dahlia covered her face with her free hand and hunched her shoulders, letting her wavy blonde hair shadow her expression. Her voice was thick when she replied, “I love you, Cece. It’s going to be okay. I’ll call really soon, I promise.”
“Dahlia Francine McKnight, don’t you fucking hang up on?—”
She pocketed her phone and stood up from her seat. The slight swaying motion of the m-lev train forced her to keep her grip on the hand rails as she slipped around bored passengers to peer at the digital map on the wall. Her eyes were a little blurry, but she forced the tears away.
Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll call her when I get where I’m going.
The problem was that she had no idea where that should be. She’d never traveled farther than San Francisco. There were no friends to crash with in the Draakonriik or a farm to hide out on in the Shifter Alliance, the two closest territories to the Neutral Zone.
But she clearly couldn’t stay in United Washington. It was Vampire Central and, as far as she’d put together, the main hub of the syndicate. If she wanted space to figure out what she was going to do with the bullshit she’d been handed and whether she wanted what Felix was offering, then she had to at the very least leave the city.
Weighing her options, she decided that the best one was an interterritory m-lev train. Taking a plane would require identification, and she didn’t know how far Felix’s or Alastair’s reaches were. A train could get her out of the territory quickly enough and a ticket could be bought with the ID chip all citizens of the UTA had implanted into the meat of their right thumbs.
It took two line switches, but she eventually made it to Union Station. The bored teller behind the glossy window barely spared her a glance when she requested a ticket to Grand Central Station in New York. Another place she’d never been, but she figured a big city had to be easier to get lost in.
“Nocturnal car or diurnal car?”
“I’m sorry?”
