“You were cross-eyed until you were five!” Ian shot back.
“Boys,” Halle said, her voice ringing with warning. She looked over her shoulder at Rosemary and lifted her eyebrows.
“Daniel, this is my family. The shortest one over there is Grant, and the other one is Seamus.”
“The pretty one,” Seamus added.
“And this is my Aunt Halle.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said with a nod. The boys were on the far side of the table, still standing near the back door. Halle was closer, but I knew better than to try to shake her hand. Not only was it…impolite to touch another Vampire’s mate that wasn’t family, but it would also most likely be uncomfortable for the woman.
Halle nodded back while the boys offered hellos.
“Strange that the two of you never met before,” Dalton said, leaning back in his chair.
“I think the last time we spoke, you’d just met,” I offered, while Halle sat silently.
“Makes sense,” Dalton replied. “Boys, go outside and make yourselves useful.”
Grant and Seamus deflated, but neither of them said a word as they turned back toward the door.
“There’s an old dirt bike under the tarp in the barn,” Gary said. “Picked it up at an estate sale. You get it workin’, you can have it.”
“No shit?” Grant asked, grinning.
“No shit. Go see what you can do.”
“Damn, Pop,” Rosemary said as she walked toward the stove. “Just giving stuff away.”
“You’ve already got one,” he replied with a scoff. “And it’s in much better condition than the piece of shit in the garage.”
Dalton laughed. “At least it’ll keep them busy.”
“For the next year, probably,” Gary agreed.
Rosemary ladled some kind of soup into two bowls and brought me one of them.
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
They must’ve put an extra leaf in the table, because it was much bigger than it had been when I left. Around it were folding chairs that I’d seen earlier in the day stacked against the side of the barn. I sat down in one between Gary and Halle as Rosemary sat down across from me. The empty bowls and glasses littering the table indicated that everyone else had already eaten.
Rosemary had waited for me to eat dinner.
“I doubt those two will stay away from the door for long, so we should probably jump right in,” Dalton said as I lifted a bite to my mouth.
It felt like Halle was staring a hole through the side of my face, but when I glanced at her, she was looking at her mate.
“I’ve brought over a file that has everything we know so far,” Dalton said, setting a USB drive down in the center of the table. “It’s embarrassingly small. We’ve been tracking the disappearances and mapping them, but there doesn’t seem to be a pattern beyond the fact that every Vampire was newly mated. Some came from large families. Some were loners. Many of them quit administrative roles in Command. Only a few had been on the teams, which we could take one of two ways. Either they didn’t think that taking highly trained Vampires was worth the hassle, or, more likely, the pool was just a lot smaller. There’ve only been fourteen team members who found their mates in the last ten years, and four of them were you and your brothers.”
“Add Billy Finau to that list of fourteen if you haven’t already,” I replied, setting my spoon down. “He showed up at our place, going on and on about how they’d taken his mate from a gas station and was desperate to get her back. We knewwe were on the militia’s radar, so we sent Charlie—my brother Zeke’s mate—into public, and they took the bait. Nabbed him at the grocery store like we were hoping, and we followed them back to the garage where Rosemary was being held.”
“You didn’t find Finau’s mate?” Dalton asked.
“She wasn’t there,” I replied. “And Finau disappeared. He took off while we were breaching the perimeter.”
“He knew she wasn’t there,” Gary said in understanding.
I nodded. “He was showing all the signs of the heat, so either they’re paying him very well to spend time away from his mate or they have her and they’re controlling him that way.”
