I pushed back from the fence, anger rising up like a fever to burn my cheeks and eyes. Silently I turned and stalked back down the hill, past the gas station to the truck, threw myself into the passenger side of the front seat then slammed the door shut.
Fine. If that was how she wanted to see this situation, then that was her choice. But she was f lat-out wrong, and I would prove it to her. When I took out Mr. Williams and was still the exact same guy she’d first fallen for, then she would understand.
“Where is—” Mr. Coleman said.
“She’s coming.”
A minute later Savannah appeared around the corner of the gas station. She got within twenty yards of the truck and hesitated. I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears like a clock ticking off the seconds.
Then she changed direction, opening the trailer’s door and climbing the metal steps to rejoin the girls instead.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. But after our talk this morning and my hope that we’d made up, it still felt like a slap in the face. And the sting didn’t stop there. It traveled all the way down like a glowing ember to join the ache that had already set up camp in my chest hours ago, building the burn into a full-f ledged fire.
The truck engine rumbled to life and the seat beneath me jerked forward as we continued our journey north in the complete opposite direction I should have been running toward.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on taking long, slow breaths past that fire in my lungs and throat.
The sooner I could go after Mr. Williams, the better for all of us.
SAVANNAH
It was during those long and seemingly endless days of driving north that Emily gasped.
I looked up from where I’d taken to lying on the couch. “What’s wrong?”
She stabbed a finger at the screen of Mom’s laptop, which she’d been using along with one of the many disposable phones Dad had picked up to surf the internet. “Jacksonville made the national news.”
I hopped up and moved to sit beside her so I could look, too. What I saw had me croaking out Mom’s name.
Rubbing her eyes, Mom emerged from her bedroom.
“Look,” I told her, my gaze glued to the screen as Emily clicked on a news video.
Mom slid onto the dinette bench at Emily’s other side then gasped. “Is that downtown Jacksonville?”
I nodded. “It’s on fire!”
The camera panned to show building after building on fire…including the hills in front of the Tomato Bowl. The fire was so high it blocked out parts of the stadium’s brown stone walls so that only the second f loor of the announcer’s booth could be seen, and even that was hard to make out behind the rolling clouds of black smoke.
“The vamps set Jacksonville on fire as retaliation?” Emily whispered.
“That looks more like spell fire,” Mom said. “See how it refuses to go out no matter how much water’s thrown on it, and it twists around almost as if it’s alive?”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Emily said. “Why would the Clann do that to their own headquarters?”
“How much do you want to bet the council sent some vamps to go after the Clann and things just got out of hand?” I pressed a shaky hand to my forehead. This was so much worse than I’d imagined. It was one thing to see Paris on fire as Mr. Williams’s war declaration, and another to see bonfires blazing all over the town I’d grown up in. Paris had never seemed truly real to me. I’d never gotten to see much of it in the two times the council had summoned me there. What I knew of it was more from movies, and who knew how much of that was even the actual city itself instead of some Hollywood set in California?
But this…this was far too real to be any movie set. I’d gone to countless home football games with the Charmers at the Tomato Bowl, walked down those smoke-covered streets and sidewalks before and after the games and to shop. That antiques store was where Nanna used to sell her crocheted blankets and custom filet crochet names.
“That’s the Jaycee building there,” Emily murmured, reaching out to touch the screen as a pile of crumbled timbers and a partial wall collapsed across from the Tomato Bowl. “All those homecoming dances we organized there…” She meant the dances that the JHS cheerleaders organized every year. The Charmers dance team always held our fundraiser dances out at the Junior Livestock Barn at the edge of town.
I sat back on the bench, unable to watch anymore. Then I gasped.
Oh, no. Anne and Carrie and Michelle and Ron…
I grabbed another of the burner phones and dialed Anne’s number from memory.
“Who are you calling?” Mom asked.
“Anne, to make sure everyone’s okay. Can you call Dad and let him know what’s happening?”
With a quick nod, Mom grabbed a phone.
“Hello?” Anne answered in a cautious tone.
“Anne!”
“Oh, my God, Sa—I mean, Cousin Sally!” she corrected herself just in time. “Did you hear the news about Jacksonville? The whole friggin town’s on fire!”
“I know, we just heard. We’re looking at the news videos online now. Is everyone okay? How’s Ron? Was he hurt in the attacks?”
“Everyone’s okay. He wasn’t on patrol when the v—when the fighting broke out. He went on patrol afterward, of course, but by then they were long gone. Can you believe the news is blaming this on gang violence?” She snorted.
The trailer lurched and rocked as Dad slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road.
I sighed and rubbed my pounding forehead. “What about the high school? Did it get hit?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Oh, by the way, I thought you said T, uh, you know who killed Dylan.”
“He did.”
“Not unless Dylan’s the next Jesus, because he was totally in school this week.”
I froze, feeling the blood draining from my face. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yep.” There was a beep. “I’m getting another call. It might be Ron checking in. He’s been calling me every half hour to make sure I’m all right.”
“Okay. Just save this number under, er, my name, and I’ll call or text again soon. You can text or call me, too, if anything else happens. Stay safe, and hug Ron for me.”
As we ended the call, Dad and Tristan entered the trailer. Tristan’s and my gazes connected and held as I relayed everything Anne had said with one notable exception…the news about Dylan. But before my brain could figure out a way to deliver that tidbit of information in some gentler way, my stupid lips just blurted it out.
“Dylan’s alive.”
Tristan’s pupils dilated and he went still.
“Anne was positive?” Dad asked. “She saw him with her own eyes?”
I nodded, still staring at Tristan, feeling the relief wash over him so hard his knees threatened to give out. “I don’t know how. We all heard something in him crack when he hit the fireplace.”
“Maybe it was other bones in his body, like his ribs?” Mom suggested.
“Mmm, I don’t think so. I heard it, too. I definitely thought it was his spine,” Emily said.
“Maybe his father used the old ways to heal him,” Mom said.
“Mr. Williams? He’s too selfish for that,” Emily said.
Their ongoing debate faded into background noise as I watched Tristan grab the edge of the kitchen counter to steady himself. His reaction was everything I could have hoped for, and my vision blurred as emotion filled my chest. I stood up and walked over to him with a smile, stopping to rest my hands against his chest. There was the Tristan I knew and loved. I knew, in spite of all his claims otherwise, that he really had been torn up over Dylan’s death. His overwhelming relief now was the proof.
See? I told him silently. No one else needed to hear this, just him. I told you you’re not a killer any more than I am. We’re still the good guys, no matter how much blood we have to drink to stay alive.
He stared down at me, too many emotions racing through h
is mind for me to follow at first. His hands slowly rose up to cover mine.
“I may not be a killer yet. But I will be as soon as I can get close enough to Mr. Williams.” His hands gently but firmly pulled mine down and away from him. “Mr. Colbert, we should get this rig back on the road before anyone notices us here.”
My lips parted in shock as Tristan turned and exited the trailer without a backward glance. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad staring at me for a long moment before he left, too.
CHAPTER 15
TRISTAN
TWO MONTHS LATER
As much as I loved the great outdoors, a guy could only take so much of it before he started to miss a little technology in his life.
I found Ms. Evans and her dog outside taking an earlymorning walk, got the okay to use her living room TV, then headed inside the trailer. Through the bunk room’s closed door, I could hear Emily’s loud snoring, and beneath it the tiny sounds of music. Savannah must be having to listen to her MP3 player all night long to cover Emily’s log sawing.
Careful not to wake up either of the girls, I quietly searched through Ms. Evans’s DVD collection, figuring the best I would find would be a chick f lick. But at least it would be something to watch.
Huh. She had The Eagle on DVD, one of my favorites. I popped the movie in, turned the TV’s volume as low as it would go, then kicked back on the sofa and sighed. Oh, yeah, this was way better than being cooped up inside the truck.
Five minutes later, the bedroom door slid open. I quickly grabbed the remote and paused the movie, worried I’d woken up Emily. She was a bear when she first woke up, and not even the sight of Channing Tatum in a leather skirt would make up for disrupting her sleep.
Instead, Savannah slid the door shut, turned in midyawn and stumbled to a stop. Blinking in confusion at me, she slowly tugged her earbuds from her ears. “Oh. Tristan. Hi.”
“Hey.” The word came out as raw as if I were talking around a mouth full of gravel. I cleared my throat. “Did I wake you?”
She shook her head, shutting off her MP3 player.
When had talking to the one person I loved more than anyone or anything else on earth become so awkward?
“Want to watch TV with me?”
She shifted her weight and glanced at the TV screen. “Um, sure. What are you watching?”
“The Eagle.”
She blinked a couple of times. “What’s it about?”
War, I started to say, then realized that would make her instantly hate the movie. “It’s about a guy trying to recover the honor of his family’s name.”
She stared at me, and I could practically see her guard rising.
“It’s a Channing Tatum movie,” I added, remembering that she was a huge fan of his ever since seeing him dance in Step Up.
That did the trick. One corner of her mouth twitched as she took a step toward the couch.
I quickly sat up and swung my feet to the f loor to make room for her.
She hesitated then sat at the other end of the couch closest to the TV, even though it meant she would have to crane her head back at an uncomfortable angle to see the movie.
Two months ago she would have sat right beside me, curled up against me with my arm around her. But not today. I swallowed my disappointment, not wanting her to read it in my thoughts.
I restarted the movie from the beginning so she could get caught up. A couple of minutes later, her gaze darted sideways in my direction.
“Um, Tristan, could you stop staring at me? It’s kind of distracting.”
“Right. Sorry.” I forced myself to stare at the TV instead.
Halfway through the movie, Joan returned with her dog. As soon as they entered the trailer, Lucy started yapping and dived for my ankles.
What the… I yanked my legs up in the air out of the reach of its tiny snapping teeth, then stared at the dog in disbelief. It had to be the ugliest animal I’d ever seen, like some kind of deranged zombie dog with bald patches all over where its hair was falling out from mange or something. Yellow pee dribbled down its hind legs as it barked nonstop and leaped up in the air, doing its best to get at my feet. The smell of urine hit me so hard I nearly gagged and had to hold my breath.
“Lucy hates vampires,” Savannah explained with a sigh, also levitating her legs in the air so the dog couldn’t go after her ankles next. She stuck her left elbow on the couch’s armrest then rested the side of her head against her fist.
I got the distinct feeling she’d had to deal with this a lot over the past two months.
I looked at Ms. Evans, waiting for her to grab her dog and lock it up in her room immediately. Instead, she cooed baby-talk gibberish in its general direction while she spent two minutes making herself a cup of instant coffee in the microwave and I stared at her in disbelief.
Finally the microwave dinged. Ms. Evans retrieved her mug, sighed loudly then picked up her dog and took both the barking hellhound and her drink to her room. Even once the door was shut, Lucy continued to yap.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. Holy hell. Maybe hanging out in the truck and outside was better. At least it was quieter and my ankles were safer.
Savannah got up, carefully stepping over the yellow puddle on the linoleum, and opened the cabinet doors under the sink. She stood up with an empty plastic spray bottle in her hand and a frown on her face. “Uh-oh. Out of bleach. I’ll have to get some from the storage area. Be right back.” Forcing a tired smile, she took the spray bottle with her outside.
Why was Savannah cleaning up after her mother’s dog? And the way she automatically did it without hesitation made me think this must be a habit with them.
Something was off around here.
Then again, maybe this was some kind of arrangement they had worked out together?
If so, it wasn’t right. But why was Savannah going along with it instead of saying something? There was no way she could like having to clean up something as pungent as this dog pee, especially when it came from a dog who seemed determined to kill every vamp it came within ten yards of if given the opportunity.
The whole thing seemed warped. But I wasn’t exactly qualified to be the best judge of it, either. I didn’t know too much about Savannah’s relationship with her mother, other than that Ms. Evans had been gone on the road a lot even before Savannah had to move in with her dad after her grandmother’s death. And since then, Savannah had only seen her mother every few months, though they had seemed to stay in fairly regular contact through text messaging and phone calls. Maybe they got along better at a distance, like Emily and our mother?
Women and their mothers. They made no sense.
I sighed and grabbed the remote. When Savannah returned, she might want to see the part of the movie we’d missed during Lucy’s attempted attack.
I tried to rewind the movie to the point where Ms. Evans and her dog had interrupted. But I was unfamiliar with the remote’s buttons and must have hit the chapter skip button instead, which rewound the movie too far. The f loor cleanup was probably going to take a few minutes, so I let the movie play and turned up the volume to drown out the dog’s continued yapping from the other end of the trailer, planning on hitting Pause once we got to the right spot again in the movie.
Two minutes later, Emily barged out of the guest bedroom, the wild blond curls around her head and the murderous glare on her face making her look like a vengeful fallen angel come to kill every last demon in her path. “Would you turn that down? I’m not deaf, and I know you sure as heck aren’t, either!”
With one hand rubbing the top of her huge belly, which had seriously rounded out over the past couple of months, she waddled over to the kitchen and slammed things around while pouring herself a mug of milk from the fridge. More banging half drowned out the yapping dog while Emily searched for and retrieved a bag of graham crackers from the tiny slide-out pantry cabinet. Then, growling something unintelligible under her breath, Emily headed back through the kitchen in the directio
n of either the trailer’s exit or the bunk room.
Wherever she was headed, though, she didn’t reach it.
The trailer’s main door opened and Savannah stepped inside. Glancing at her, Emily forgot to watch where she was walking and stepped barefooted into the puddle Lucy had left behind.
Shrieking, Emily hopped on her clean foot all the way to the bathroom.
“Oh, crap,” Savannah muttered, vamp blurring from the trailer door to the kitchen where she grabbed a roll of paper towels. She vamp blurred again, reappearing in a crouch beside the urine puddle, which she began to clean up.
Great. Now she’ll be yelling for hours, Savannah thought to herself as she scrubbed the linoleum.
Shouldn’t her mother be cleaning up after her own dog? I thought to myself, forgetting Savannah could hear me. Two months of hanging out with her dad had spoiled me into being able to think anything I wanted without fear of Savannah’s reaction.
Savannah’s head popped up, her mouth open in surprise. She dropped her head again, refocusing on cleaning every last speck of mess. Normally Mom cleans up after Lucy, but since Lucy does it constantly, sometimes Mom forgets to come back and clean it up for a while. Which of course drives Emily nuts and sometimes even triggers her nausea from the smell. So it’s easier for me to just go ahead and clean it up.
But all I heard was how it upset Emily.
The shower turned on in the bathroom. Emily must have decided to clean her foot off in the shower stall. Seconds later, another shriek filled the trailer from the bathroom.
The dog’s barking grew louder as Ms. Evans slid open her bedroom door and stuck her head out, using a foot to keep her dog from escaping past her. “What happened?”
Emily reemerged from the bathroom with a dripping hairball pinched between her thumb and index finger. “First I step in a puddle of pee left by your dog, and then when I go to wash my foot off in the shower, I find this!”
“Is it yours?” Ms. Evans asked, eyebrows raised over tired, I-couldn’t-care-less eyes.