“I’ve thought of it.” A lot. Especially before Dad died. “I watched Dad. Saw how this job drove him. Put shadows in his eyes and silence between his words. I know what it costs to keep Ordinary safe.”
I didn’t think I’d ever told anyone else all that before. I didn’t think anyone had ever asked me.
“But you stayed. Why?” he asked softly.
“Dad. I wanted to make him proud. And Myra and Jean. I like looking after people. Making a difference. Maybe it’s pride. I like being a bridge, a guardian, a cop. They’re all me. That’s all me.”
“The pressure to follow his will is intense. I don’t think that’s me. That I’m someone who can follow like that.” Ryder shook his head then gave me a look that said he was done talking about it. “It’s new. I’ll deal, or find a way to break it. Not today.”
“Not today,” I agreed, and I was pretty sure those two words said a lot more. Probably I love you and I’m going to be okay.
“Nice of you two to finally join us,” Jean said as we walked past her into the building.
It was a small space, several degrees cooler than the outside and a little musty smelling over the very fresh scent of oranges. A wooden bench was tucked against the wall by the door and plastic pockets of brochures hung on the walls. The rest of the walls were covered by black and white historical photos and the glassed-in counter in the middle of the room held a few pictures and items, including the possible-ghost-daughter Harriett’s handkerchief and locket.
Ryder and I followed Jean through to the next room.
It was just slightly larger than the first room, most of the extra space being taken up by the metal spiral staircase that spun up and up, a plain brown rope latched across the bottom of the railing to discourage unattended exploring.
Mason Rouge lounged against the banister, his Friends of the Park uniform pressed and official-looking. “Hey, Chief, Ryder.”
Mason was half kelpie and a hell of a swimmer on the high school team. He’d been offered scholarships for colleges but had decided to stay here in Ordinary for a year. Other than wanting to be near the water he had grown up around, I wasn’t sure why he was lingering.
“Mason,” I said with a smile. “You decided on your college yet?”
He blushed a little, his already fair skin going red hot, and his slightly too-wide eyes narrowing as he crinkled his nose. “Maybe? I’ve narrowed it down to a couple, anyway. You trying to get rid of me?”
He tossed his head back and his nostrils widened. There was fire in those innocent eyes. He might only be half water-horse on his daddy Pat Rouge’s side, but he got a double helping of his mama Leora’s fire.
“Local boy does good only happens if local boy does something,” I teased.
He laughed and pointed at the patches above his pocket. A thin weave of thread, blue like a heron’s wing, wrapped his wrist and peeked out from under the right cuff of his shirt. “I am doing something. Spending my summer telling ghost stories and getting paid for it.”
“That’s gonna look good on a résumé.”
“They’re not looking at my résumé. They want me for my body.” He winked, and I saw a lot of his daddy in that.
“Good body, but your brain’s even better.”
That earned me a smile that was kind of shy and blushy. And that, was all Mason. He’d been a cute kid. It was good to see that the cute kid wasn’t lost under the wooing of sports scholarships and hints of the Olympics. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get on that. Everyone’s in the kitchen.”
The kitchen was actually the remainder of the house attached to the lighthouse. It had been renovated to show off the vaulted ceilings with bare wooden beams, and the natural stone fireplace. The kitchen part of the space was to the left, which took up a portion of the ocean view and made good use of it via a bank of windows. To the right of that was the dining table with even more windows showing off the north view of the ocean and shore.
The far side of the space was broken up by a wall that jutted out, hiding a couple cots back there for visitors who might be ill, or for the caretaker of the place to stay overnight if needed. It used to be a closed-in bedroom, but the remodel had taken that out in favor of a more open space that could be used as a meeting place if needed.
And that’s exactly what they were using it for.
Other than the kitchen, dining room table, bedroom, and the door to the bathroom, the rest of the place was a mix of couches and chairs. A few wooden tables gave extra sitting space against walls, one with a checkerboard, one with a stack of extra brochures, another with a box labeled: RAIN GEAR tucked beneath it.
The array of mismatched throw rugs on the wooden floor helped to soak up some of the voices and conversations going on in the room.
Looked like we were the last to arrive.
On one side of the room, lounging in a couple couches and chairs, were the vampires. Old Rossi, the prime of the vampire clan, looked dark and lean and uncharacteristically tight as a coil as he sat in a chair. Gone was the frilly apron and friendly smile.
Behind him stood Evan, who usually worked at the cat rescue shelter in town, but right now looked like the bodyguard he actually was. The light-haired twins Page and Senta who were part of the emergency response personnel, were crammed on the couch. Next to them were Keenan and Axel: the former part of the night-shift at the local lumber yard, the latter a mechanic who repaired cars and farm equipment and had the arms to prove it.
The couches and chairs opposite were covered in werewolves.
Small, deadly, the steely quiet Granny was the alpha of her pack. She sat in the middle of the couch, her saucer glasses adding weird light to her eyes. Behind her were either sons or nephews or cousins or nieces, about ten of them, all bulky, all silent, all a part of the family, the pack. Burly Rudy sat on one side of Granny and on her other, to my huge surprise, was Jame.
I quickly noted that Fawn, his cousin, sat next to him, her hand on the back of his neck in comfort as much as in protection. She was glaring daggers at the vampires.
Other than Myra, the only other person in the room was a god.
Thanatos, Death himself, was the only god who had come to this meeting, though I had no idea why he was interested in what was going on.
“Hello, everyone,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Delaney,” Old Rossi greeted me, his voice low, even, and cool. No tea and friendship there. No New Age peace and love either. Just wariness, and deadly focus.
Granny Wolfe nodded but did not take her eyes off Rossi and his crew. Neither did any of the other Wolfes, who were all staring at the vamps like they were food that wouldn’t stop twitching.
“Rossi. Granny. Than. Good to see you all. This is neutral ground and there will be no blood shed here, no pain. We work together, we save Ben and kill Lavius. Understood?”
“Yes,” Rossi said.
“Delaney, you come sit down and we can see what we can see.” Granny pointed to her couch.
Myra stood across the room at parade rest. She gave me a look that probably mirrored my own. This tension between the two factions was going to catch fire. Sooner rather than later if we didn’t do something about it.
“Benoni is not dead,” Than said smoothly into the silence.
Crack, boom. Tension busted.
Jame’s swollen, red-rimmed eyes jerked to Death’s face.
“Benoni lives,” Than continued as if we were talking about upcoming movie times. “I would know if he did not. I believe you would too, Travail, is that not true?”
If Rossi was bothered by Death using his first name, he didn’t show it. If anything, some of the tightness around his eyes eased slightly, though his jaw still twitched as he ground his teeth together.
“I would know,” Rossi agreed softly.
“Yes, then. There is hope.” Than smiled, as if he had never had the chance to say that before and liked the sound of it. “Is there also tea?”
Jean moved over to the kitchen. ??
?I’ll see what I can find. Anyone else want tea?”
Silence, then Ryder finished strolling into the room bringing that confidence and challenge that sat so well on him and did something to center the room, to ground the moment into the reality of people gathering together to find solutions.
“Coffee, if you have it,” he said.
“Me too.” I pulled a chair over so that I was settled between both factions, Than and Myra directly across the room from me. Once I sat, Myra did too.
“Do you know where Ben is?” I asked Than.
“No. He is between life and death, as all of his kind are. To sense his location I would have to either regain my power, or he would have to transition into a state I could perceive: death. He would have to die. I would feel him then, even without my power. The passing of vampires is a heated thing, and all too rare to be overlooked.”
“You said you could find Lavius through the bite that ties me to him, right?” I asked Rossi. “We find him, we find Ben.”
“It could be done,” Rossi said. “But using that tie comes at a cost.”
Of course it did. I resisted the urge to throw up my hands in frustration. Why couldn’t anything be easy and why didn’t anyone let me in on this stuff from the get-go?
“All right. Fine. What’s the cost? Let’s get paying.”
The front door opened and we all paused while Mason welcomed what sounded like a dozen kids and a half dozen adults. He started into the tour spiel and I pitched my voice a little lower so the tourists wouldn’t hear me.
“It’s blood, right? I have to give up some blood to track him?”
Rossi’s gaze was sharp and hungry. I raised one eyebrow, not falling for the deadly vampire routine. I’d hauled him in for indecent exposure for streaking down the beach and through the middle of town three times in the last couple years. I wasn’t afraid of him.
“More than blood, Delaney.”
I waited. We all waited.
Jame got tired of waiting first.
Jame growled, a low, painful sound that snagged and caught somewhere in his chest. “What. Price.” His voice was gravel and sand, eyes glassy with fever, color too green and gray beneath the bruises. Sweat peppered his forehead and ran a thin line down his temples.
He looked like he’d been hit by a truck that had backed up, run him over again, and then pulled a trailer over his bones.
Fawn’s hand on his upper arm held him stiffly propped against the couch. Granny radiated strength and power and protection at his other side.
“It is nothing you can pay, Jame,” Rossi said with more kindness than I’d ever heard out of him.
“I’ll pay it,” I said. I was the one attached to the vampire, it only made sense I’d pay the price of being used as a human GPS unit.
“No,” Myra and Jean both said at the same time Ryder said, “Not happening.”
So, yeah, it was great to have a cheering squad, but I knew how this kind of paying-the-price stuff went down. I could deal with it. It was my place to deal with it.
“What price, if not blood, strigoi?” Granny’s voice didn’t carry kindness. Just flinty anger and more than a little hatred for Rossi’s kind in general and Rossi himself in particular.
“Dark magic.”
Okay, that was not what I expected him to say.
“Dark magic is what he wants,” Rossi said. “It is what he has come to our land for, what he has killed for. To find him, we must give him what he will use to destroy Ben, this town, all of us. He will gut us on our own good intentions.”
“We have dark magic?” Ryder asked. “It’s a…thing? That we have here?”
Rossi’s gaze didn’t leave Jame’s. “Yes. I have it here.”
Jame’s shallow breaths turned into a panting, frantic whine. “Pay. Pay it. Pay it pay it pay it.”
It was heartbreaking.
Granny slipped her hand onto Jame’s. She turned his hand over and drew her fingers across his bare wrist. Then she pressed her palm against his, linking their fingers tight enough it looked like it hurt.
“Hush now,” she said so softly, so gently. “Hush. He is yours. He is always and only yours. We will find him. We will put him in your arms. You will feel his heart beat.”
Jame swallowed, a thick, hard motion. Then he dropped his gaze from Rossi and slumped, his eyes closed, his shoulders hunched. Whatever energy it had taken for him to demand, to beg, was gone now, leaving him exhausted.
I wanted to reach out and comfort him, wanted to wipe away the tears running down his face. Fawn shifted on the couch so that her arm was across his back, and pulled his face into the curve between her shoulder and face, hiding him with her body from all eyes in the room. She held him, whispering comforting things.
“You have the magic that monster demands and you haven’t given it to him?” Granny snarled. “You have refused? You have left one of mine to suffer?” Her words rumbled, the undertone a sound no little old lady should be capable of, a sub-audible growl that I felt in my spine, base of my skull, the shivers of fear.
“Peace,” Rossi said. “I have reason to keep the book hidden from him all these years. Surrendering it to him would sign our end. Not just one of yours. Not just one of mine. All of us.” Rossi’s hands clenched so tightly on the arms of the chair, trying to hold him to his seat, I heard wood creak.
“Give the book of dark magic to me.”
Her words were an order. A demand. A threat. Werewolves shifted, moving out from behind the couch, shoulders tipped, muscles bunched, ready. Ready to fight for their own, even if it meant killing people who had been, if not exactly friends, neighbors.
The vampires did not move at all. They went impossibly still, focused as arrows drawn home, taut and ready to fly.
In about half a second we were going to see the two biggest supernatural factions in our town broken and bleeding on the lighthouse floor. Ended not by the ancient enemy outside our border, but by the mistrust in each other.
Maybe that was why Than was here. There were about to be a lot of vampire deaths to not overlook.
“Who wants tea?” Jean stormed into the space between the vamps and weres with a tray of six steaming mugs in her hands, putting herself square in the middle of the battle zone.
Myra stood. I was half a second behind her. Ryder surged to his feet too, all of us clogging the space next to Jean, putting our mortal bodies in direct firing range of the other creatures.
No one spoke. There was only breathing, too loud, the rush of my heartbeat, also too loud, and the muted sound of feet walking up the metal spiral ladder to the lantern room.
There were civilians here. Innocents who had no part of the vampire werewolf war. People I was sworn to protect.
“Ease off,” I said to Rossi. I turned my gaze to each vamp. “We have humans out there, and I will not have this historical landmark go down in the record books for mass murder.”
Rossi twitched just one eyebrow as a fang slipped down to press into the soft mound of his lip. He otherwise didn’t move or look away from me. Didn’t challenge my authority.
Yet.
It was an acknowledgment. Not a big one, but enough to let me know he didn’t want to fight the werewolves. Not over this.
Just enough to let me know he was furious that his old enemy, his one-time brother-at-arms had taken Ben, who Rossi thought of as a son. There was hunger in the killing gaze Rossi leveled at me. The hunger for revenge.
“If any of you draw werewolf blood I will kick you out of Ordinary. Permanently. We do not kill our own within this border. We do not kill each other.”
I turned to Granny. She stood now, the illusion of age flung away so that all I could see was her strength, her power.
“You will not draw vampire blood on my soil. If you do, the Wolfe family will be exiled.”
She narrowed her eyes, weighing the truth of my words against her need for violence.
“We will wipe Lavius off the face of this earth,” I said. “Th
at is our war. That is the fight we take on together.”
“When?” It was still a challenge. Still an alpha wolf furious for one of her own enduring pain she could not end.
Jame pushed up to his feet, breath coming too fast and shallow, every fiber in his body, every beat of his battered heart unable to stay still, needing instead to rise, to stand, to fight.
To save his love.
“Two days,” I said to Jame. “On the full moon we will kill Lavius and burn his bones. But tonight, tonight we will use this bite, my blood, and dark magic to find Ben.” I could feel Rossi tense behind me.
No sound filled the space except for Jame’s soft groan and the distant sound of Mason droning on about the lighthouse keeper’s broken-hearted daughter who, having received word that her beloved sailor had perished at sea, threw herself to the rocks below.
“You must rest, Jame.” I was close enough to him to press my fingers on his arm. “You are going to have to put Ben back together when we bring him home. You need to be as whole as possible for him. Strong for him.”
Jame was a big man, built wide and thick like most of his family. He was as fit and hard-muscled as any firefighter in his prime. But under the stress of his internal and external wounds, he seemed smaller, more vulnerable. It was painful to see him working so hard just to stay on his feet.
His wounds had nearly put him in a coma. Lavius breaking the soul connection to Ben–Ben’s bite freely given and freely taken by Jame–had nearly killed him.
I hadn’t asked Rossi how long mates survived when that link between them was broken.
I could guess it wasn’t very long.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Death cooed.
The tension between vamps and weres snapped, as every head jerked toward him.
The weres snarled, the vamps made that weird clicking sound at the back of their throats, all of them hunters locked on prey.
Than didn’t seem to notice any of it. “Is it an oolong?” he asked. “I do enjoy a good oolong.”
Of course he was more interested in his tea. These kinds of things, the very real struggle of the living trying to survive, was something he’d never been all that involved in.