Page 30 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"Err," he says again, and the not-knowing is worse than a lie. "If I learn they used him⁠—"

I want to launch the notebook at his head. I want him to defend my father so I can hate someone clean. "Don't come out with he was protecting me," I warn.

"I wasn't." He stays very still. "Secrets can be a kind of control. I know that better than most. He decided what you could carry. He never asked." A beat. "I've done the same to you. I'm not proud of it."

The obsidian shifts. It's been dead weight in my jacket all night. Now the lamp stutters, the light pulling thin and wrong. Frost feathers the edge of the notebook open in my lap—not the table, not my hands, just that one page. Beneath the dried ink, new lines surface, brown-gold, written in something never meant for ordinary light.

A mark I half-recognize. A broken string of numbers. And one word in my father's shorthand: Ashfield.

Nico goes rigid in a way I've never seen on him. He knows it. He doesn't say how.

"Nico."

"An old waystation. North. The peace faction kept it, before—" He stops himself, and the stopping tells me there's a before I won't get tonight.

That's when I hear it. Three doors down, the scrape of metal someone's testing. Not us. Someone late and methodical. A vial is taped under the third box's lid—my father's failsafe, a slow acid creeping for the spines, eating his work to keep it from the wrong hands. Thirty seconds, maybe less.

Decoys. Half these notebooks are blanks built to burn while the real one walks out. He rigged it so only someone who reads the way I read could pull the live one.

I pull it. The frost page, the bitten pencil, two field books in his true hand. The rest I leave to dissolve.

"Let's go," I tell Nico.

We cut out the back of the row, fast, the notebooks crushed to my chest like the last warm thing in the world.

In the car I don't cry. I'm too furious, and under the fury sits the thing I hate most: I still want to follow him. Ashfield. North. Another layer, not an answer.

He loved me, but he lied to me. I despise that both are written in the same hand.

20

NICO

The notebooks ride in Riley's lap like she's carrying a wound — both hands over them, as if pressure could keep something from leaking out. I drive north and track her using the corner of my vision.

She hasn't spoken since Ashfield left my mouth back in that storage unit. Two hundred miles of cracked highway, and all she's given me is the sound of her thumb worrying a frayed cover.

I could tell her it gets easier, but the truth is it doesn't get easier; you only get more efficient. And whatever I offer that resembles comfort, she'll hear it as something else.

"You recognized the name," she says at last. Not a question. "Back there. Your face did something."

"I know Ashfield."

She turns to the window. Wet pine flickers past, black, the kind of forest that drinks the light by four in the afternoon. "My dad wrote it in a cipher he made up when I was nine. And you just — know it. Like a street you used to live on."

"I did live there. After a fashion."

Her head comes around. I pull onto a logging cut where the asphalt gives up, kill the engine, and let the cold press in through the glass. A skin of frost holds in the ruts where the sun never reaches, too early for the season and too stubborn to be ordinary.

"Ashfield was a waystation. Years back. A faction ran it — vampires who thought the secret could be shared in pieces, carefully, with the right humans. Archivists. Scholars. People who wanted a record kept honest instead of buried." I watch my own breath fog and fade. "It was proof we could work alongside humans without it ending in disaster."

"And it did, I guess."

"Leadership decided the faction was a liability. Too many humans who knew too much. I was sent to oversee the removal of the records and the people guarding them."

"Removal."

"Use the word you're reaching for. You won't be wrong." She doesn't. "There was a woman who kept the history. She'd given years to that place. She thought I'd come to help her carry the books out. I did, but that wasn't how it ended. I was ordered to end the humans there. After that, others started calling me by my nickname, the Black Fang. I allowed it to keep them thinking I was brutal. Now, it's rare that another vampire crosses me."