Of all the people in the world, Claire wasn’t supposed to tell her to let this go.
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Claire reached halfway across the table and rested her hand there, palm down, the closest she got to physical touch.
Ember breathed deep and held it, then let it out slowly. Her chest remained tight. She got up from the café table in Claire’s alcove kitchen and walked to the sliding-glass door. She stared out onto the dark patio, dim under a porch light with only one working bulb. A moth danced against the screen, bounced back, tried again. That thwarted frustration was too relatable at the moment. She pressed her palm to the glass.
“Poppy literally doesn’t know where he is. Her own kid.”
“I admit that part’s unusual. But no one kidnapped him, Ember, really. Quinn had to agree to stay with the pack, and for minors the parents have to agree too. In writing, I think.”
“They…” She had to breathe deep again. She crossed to the table, sank into her chair, and curved her hands around the seat. “They signed away their parental rights?”
“It’s not a legal court document, but the pack requires official consent for guardianship. Anyway Quinn’s going to be an adult in five years. It’s not like Poppy and Blake said goodbye to a toddler.”
Not a toddler but certainly a child. A child with gangly limbs, sprouting so fast Ember had to look up at him already. A child with a voice that cracked. A child who still grinned and bounded up with his loping stride whenever she visited. Her throat closed as her eyes burned.
“I’m sorry, Em. But I promise you it’s not what you think it is.”
“The pack took his phone away.”
“Or there’s no signal where he is. Or he turned the phone off himself because he’s going through a lot of junk right now and wants space to sort through it.”
“I just want to see him. That’s not unreasonable.”
Claire gave a long sigh and rocked her chair onto its back legs, keeping it balanced on the striped accent rug with her feet tucked around the front legs. It was her classic thinking pose and one of the mysteries of Claire—how she challenged the rules of gravity and won.
“You can locate him,” Ember said.
“They wouldn’t take a minor out of the country, but there’s nothing legal keeping him in Virginia. He could be anywhere in the US, including Alaska. He could be untraceable. Some packs go entirely off the grid.”
“And some don’t.” They might as well hope for the least complicated scenario until it was proved wrong.
Another long sigh. The more often Claire sighed, the more likely she was about to give in.
Ember fidgeted in her chair and sloshed the ice cubes in her latte. She preferred hot drinks even in the summer—unless she was hanging out at Claire’s condo. Like most vampires, Claire hated air conditioning even in July. At the moment, while Ember sweated through the back of her tank top and sipped her drink partly to cool down, Claire wore a black fleece pullover, the hood up over her cropped dark-brown hair. She’d put it on five minutes after cranking the AC upon Ember’s arrival. But she didn’t complain.
In apology for showing up five minutes after a desperate text (and for needing the AC), Ember had brought her a steaming salted caramel macchiato, extra salt. It was long gone, of course. Claire gulped her beverages, whether the liquid in question was coffee or Type A.
“Claire, please. I have begged until I’m blue in the face, but Poppy won’t even tell me their names, the ones who came for him. She doesn’t want to anger them.”
“Smart plan.”
Cowardly plan if it meant never seeing Quinn again, and according to Poppy those were the terms of the pack. If Poppy had been even one tenth aloof toward her kid in the past, maybe her ability to live with this would make more sense, but she wasn’t that kind of mom. She should want to see Quinn. She said shedidwant to, but she did nothing to make it happen.
“Groups averse to visitors are usually hiding something,” Ember said.
“And you’re the person to call them on it.”
She shrugged. Nobody else was going to.
“This is a bad idea,” Claire said.
“Give me a better one.”
“At least wait a few months. Let Quinn settle in. It’s been—what, three weeks?”
“He’s been through a full moon with them already.” Eighteen days ago. She tracked the moon now with a vigilance that bordered on obsession. “I don’t want him to go through another one by himself.”
“He’s not by himself.”
