Maybe that was naive of me, and maybe I was wrong about Fearson even being a part of the situation, but I was starting to think that together, Twist, Davin and I could handle anything that came at us.
I smiled at Mother and patted her hand, then pushed up off the bed. “It’s fine. We can handle ourselves. We’ve already fought off a bunch of vampires and their minions, and turned one dragon to the side of good. We’ve got this.”
She pursed her lips at me, clearly not quite agreeing, or at least still worried, but, well...that was never going to change, I realized.
I had to grow up and deal with things for myself, but nothing was ever going to change the fact that she was my mother, and she wanted to protect me from it all. She just couldn’t do that anymore.
It had taken me a while, but I was, in fact, an adult.
So after hugging her and then leaning down to give my father a quick squeeze, I turned and led Davin out of the room. My parents were adults too, after all, and they had a lot to work through in the coming days.
They would have to figure out how they fit together now, if they still did.
Twist met us downstairs, having finished whatever giant piece of meat she’d been fed for breakfast. I noted that all the vampires present were looking at her with either interest or trepidation.
As they should.
“Hey kiddo,” I said. “We’ve got to go down to the shop, make some work calls, and pack a couple bags. You want to go?”
“Of course, Father,” she answered. “Grandmother’s home smells funny filled with so many of the dead. I do not like it.”
Davin raised a brow at me, but I was not going to interpret that right in front of the vampires in question. So I reached down to scoop her up and tuck her into her pocket while explaining, “She wants some air too. It’s been a long couple of days.”
His smirk said he didn’t believe me for a second, or at least had a clue I’d buffered the kitten’s usual honest commentary.
Either way, less than two minutes later, we were climbing into Davin’s car and getting the hell out of there. It was odd, given the standing threat against me, that it was a relief to leave the safety of my mother’s home.
As we got to the highway that led back to the city, it was impossible to ignore the work crew already there, preparing to build the very wall my mother had been threatening the day before, all the way around her property. I wondered how tall it was going to be, and if anyone had bothered with permits before getting started.
Not that Avalon was ever going to tell my mother what kind of wall she was allowed to build. If she built a ten-foot wall and the city law said eight was the maximum, I was sure that it was city law, not my mother’s construction crew, that would be making changes.
The drive down into the city was always nice, but on this particular occasion, it felt a little like an escape. Not just from my mother’s overwhelming expectations and slightly smothering love, but from the entirety of vampires in Southern California, flocking to my mother’s side to protect her and her loved ones from a threat none of us quite understood.
It was silly that I was leaving when they had come in part to protect me from being kidnapped to power “the machine,” but it felt right. Not because I wanted to be alone, even. But because most of the people at my mother’s house weren’tmypeople.
If it had been Arthur and Amelia and Grady? That would have been a different conversation.
So instead of hiding out in my mother’s home, with vampires protecting me from dragons I didn’t even know, we headed down into town, toward my actual safe place. My shop. Right in the middle of all my friends.
It was odd to see it dark, and even though Olive had only been with us for a few weeks, strange to walk into the shopduring the day and not find her sitting at the front desk. I hoped she was safe, but I couldn’t imagine anyone linking us to a point where they would think hurting her would hurt me.
If there was one thing I’d learned that bad guys were good at, it was assuming other people were as sociopathic as they were.
Even Sexton, back when he’d thought only one of us was going to survive, had assumed I would do the same were our positions reversed. He hadn’t understood me at all then.
We made the calls, including Bethany, who had indeed been expecting us to reschedule. She wished me luck with whatever it was that was going on, and for a vampire, sounded pretty sincere in her well-wishes for my continued life.
If nothing else, I supposed it would inconvenience her for me to drop dead. Vampires were always good at seeing the absolute bottom line of any situation. Most of them had had many years to see the patterns people tended to follow, and what the usual result was. Plus, vamps who weren’t intelligent didn’t tend to live to ripe old ages.
Funny, how there were a lot of vamps I thought of as stodgy old people, but I’d never met one who wasn’t progressive. Except Gerald, and that hadn’t worked out so great for him.
Probably the serial killer guys, too.
Hmm.
Anyway, the work done, my bag packed, and Davin finished taping a sign to the door that said we would be out of office for the coming week, I sat down in my chair and looked to him. “So, first we go to your place for your bag. Then what?”
He lifted a brow at me, but he was already smiling, so I suspected he was in no bigger hurry to rush back to my mother’s place than I was. Funny, that.
