“I should have left you alone. When you asked us to be quiet, I should have said sure and we could’ve left.”
I shook my head. “Whatever happens now, I’m really glad you didn’t.”
“You say that because you don’t yet know” —he kissed the end of my nose— “just how bad this will get. I won’t blame you when you hate me.” He blinked. “I may not even care, because I’ll be something else. So I’m here to tell you that I’m sorry. Even if I don’t seem that way then, I am. I’m sorry.”
He hugged me, and I let him. There was so much to digest and a million questions to answer. But one had bugged me from the beginning before I even knew about this craziness. “Where are your mothers?”
“They’re vampires. It was part of the deal. Birth us and be made five years later.”
“And once they’re vampires, they don’t care about you anymore?” I closed my eyes. We couldn’t make that excuse for my mother. She was solidly human and flawed like all the rest of us.
He sighed. “Something happens to the women, almost an amnesia. They don’t really remember their lives the way men seem to. It seems easier to ship them off, according to my father, than keep them here with people trying to get them to remember. Plus, no, they wouldn’t be safe to their human children for a long time. So they go somewhere else, but I’m not clear on where. They rise from the dead in another location, and they leave.”
That didn’t make sense. “Are you sure they’re not killing them and just pretending that’s what they’re doing?”
“I am, actually. Tanner has seen the rising. His father supervises it and does the shipping off. Our mothers are just gone.” He sighed. “Let’s get back. I don’t want a lot of eyes on us. We’re always being watched, but I don’t need extra observation. It creeps me out how they watch me. Like they’re all waiting, counting the days until I’m dead.”
I looked around. “I don’t see anyone looking.”
“That’s right, you wouldn’t. But some day, you’ll feel it because you’ll have learned to tell. The longer you spend here, the more you’ll feel it.”
I swallowed. “Rowan, how long will I have to stay here?”
“Forever.” Griffin’s voice answered me. He stepped toward us, where he must have been waiting near Rowan’s house. “He might try to sugarcoat this a bit, but now that you’re in the know—and really, his dad put you incredibly in the know—they’ll never let you leave. That house with the servants? My guess is this time next year, you’ll be living there.”
“Griffin, fuck.” Rowan ran a hand through his hair. “You could be a little gentler about things.”
He shook his head. “Do you want more lies and easy words? Or do you want the truth, Maci? The hard truth sometimes is what’s called for.”
I didn’t want any more lies. Rowan stepped away from me, his gaze on the house. Ten of the servants rushed out the front door. I blinked. What had they been doing in there? “I better go look and see what they just did. One time, my father had them repaint all the walls while I was in school. No idea what that was.”
Griffin ran a hand through his dark hair. “Look, I don’t want to be harsh with you. That’s not, like…what I want to do.”
“I actually appreciated the truth. I…I can’t live here forever in that house, running around doing the deeds of vampires. This can’t be my life.”
Rowan shot Griffin a look before he headed toward his house. For his part, Griffin walked to me, putting his hands on my shoulders. “We can’t stop what happens to us, but maybe I can work out how to save you. I have a plan. Trust me for a little while. I don’t want you to live in that house either.”
“But maybe you will when you’re a vampire? You will want me to live there?”
He blinked. “When I’m a vampire, I’ll probably just want to kill you and drink your blood. I probably won’t care where you live, so let’s go with I care now.”
I laughed, despite the fact that none of this was at all funny. But darker was suddenly becoming ridiculously amusing. “All right, we’ll go with that.”
“When I look at you, you are the prettiest person I’ve ever seen. Like, the most beautiful ever. And I want to take care of you. Hold you. Make you laugh.” He visibly swallowed. “But when I look at you, it’s like I’ve already hurt you. I’ve already let you down. I feel that way every time I look at you. Why is that?”
I didn’t have an answer. “No clue. I think that is more about you than it is about me.”
He smirked at me. “Fair enough.”
“Why did you bother with all the things you’ve done? The valedictorian? The captain of the track team? Why did you do all of that if you knew there would be no future? Seems like a ton of effort.”
He took my hand in his and drew me to him. “We all want our life to count for something, right? We all want that. We want to know that what we did here mattered. For most people, they know they have time for that. They get to be grownups, at least. I mean, no one is guaranteed any particular amount of time, but people have an expectation of a certain bit of it. Mine ends next week. I knew that it would go fast. I wanted what I did here to matter during that time. Like all those trophies, they have my name on them. I’ll give a speech someone will remember.” He sighed. “That’s why I did it. That’s why I worked so hard at it.”
I touched his hand. “I think that’s beautiful.”
“Stupid and beautiful? Or dumb and…?”
I shook my head. “Just beautiful.”
“Well…I feel like playing basketball. You want to?”
That was one of the most abrupt jumps I’d ever heard in my life. “Really?”
He took my hand, pulling me with him. “Yes. There’s a ball in Rowan’s garage and a net on the other side of the house that they put up to distract us when we were young. Do you want to play?”
“I’ve never played. I mean…ever.” That wasn’t one of the things we did in gym. Mostly, we spent all our time on football and baseball. “So I don’t think I can play. I mean, I’ve seen it. I know how it’s done. But I’ve never, what’s it called? Dribbled or anything.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Then it is beyond time that we do something about that. Let’s end the day better than it has gone so far. You can at least say that you played basketball once. Maybe, when I’m gone—and you are an expert at it—you’ll remember me.”
“Griffin.” My voice was low because I could hardly speak. “I’m never going to forget you. I can promise you that.”
He winked at me. “Good.”
I followed him to the garage, which Griffin knew the code to get into, even though it was Rowan’s house, and grabbed a basketball out of a bin in the corner. I caught my breath. There were ten cars in the garage. I hadn’t even realized that was what it was from the outside, since the doors had been made to blend in. It just looked like part of the house. When we’d come earlier, he’d parked in the driveway.