“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I recited the age-old line as I slathered cream cheese onto a blueberry bagel for myself and grabbed an apple slice from Evan’s pile of fruit.
“Yeah, well other enemies can’t kill you with a single bite,” Evan said from where he stood, cutting oranges and apples to put in sack lunches like we were good little boys and girls trotting off to school. He elbowed Malcolm, who slumped next to him, head on his elbow, zonked after an entire night strategizing with Callum’s gang. “Come on man, back me up.”
Malcolm glanced at me and just yawned. “Somehow, Hayley pulls off crazy shit. Where’s the coffee?”
We were on our fourth container of gas station cold brew. Gray reached into the cooler and grabbed him another one, handing it over. Malcolm cracked the tab on the top and then took a long pull.
Evan was still stuck on the vampire issue. He didn’t trust Callum, had sat grumpily through our entire negotiation, eyeing Callum’s friends and eventually pointing out that there were three more of them in the distance.
He’d been right.
At any point last night, the gang of vampires could have ended us. But they hadn’t. So, all in all, I was feeling rather confident about the alliance. Evan didn’t feel the same. “If that guy gives me ‘eat me’ eyes, I’m shifting,” Evan huffed.
“I don’t think he’d trust you to give him good head,” Z quipped. “So I doubt he’ll be giving you ‘eat me’ eyes.”
“High five!” Gray raised his palm and Z smacked it.
“Okay, yeah. I walked into that one. But still. We had a plan.” Evan said grumpily, before taking another bite.
I shook my head. “It was a fragile plan at best. And we still are waiting for delivery of that tournament sphere.”
Gray bit his lip. “They haven’t caught the dickhead yet.”
I turned and made a ‘see, I’m right’ face at Evan. “We can’t touch Matthew in his current state. But they can.”
“You trust him with them?” Evan’s skepticism twisted his mouth into a grimace and he picked violently at one of the blueberries in his bagel.
“I trust that Callum’s enough like me. He doesn’t want to be alone in the world.”
The truth of my statement exploded across the table, casting a solemn cloud over everyone’s faces. “That’s what started all of this,” I remind my brother’s best friend. My entire family had fallen apart and Mom had sent me away. That utter sense of loneliness had been a festering pit in my stomach. I could only imagine that being the only sane vampire in the midst of that awful lab would create a similar need to find companionship. To build a family.
I had.
He’d just started his.
But both of our families were still incomplete.
Evan stared at me for a long moment, the beautiful blue of his eyes softening in regret. Then he held out his arm and I tucked myself into it as he gave me a big bear hug.
Luckily, Callum and his friends had been working in a randomized pattern, breaking into Institutes and then cherry-picking vampires that Callum wanted to add to his crew, probably because he was operating with a limited amount of serum, was trying to do this shit while being hunted, and because most vampires were wilder than wild and impossible to control. I hadn’t asked who he picked or why.
I’d just told him the institute that we wanted to break into, and he provided me the names of two other vampires he wanted to free from that particular prison.
The agreement was pretty simple: We would take out any magic designed to trap vampires, and they would protect us from any crazed vampires and help us get Matthew to a safe location, one Gray’s gang had set up.
Callum had asked why. When I’d explained that I didn’t want pinheads fucking up my brother, that I wanted to save Matthew, he’d tilted his head and studied me for a full two minutes—weighing my sincerity and honesty—before nodding and consenting to my proposed alliance.
I slid out from underneath Evan’s arm and went to stand behind Malcolm. My handsome anarchist was drinking coffee and flipping again through his notes about ghosts. “You should definitely ask Lysa about salt.” He tapped his lip.
I leaned down and placed a kiss on his head. “I will. But you need to eat. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
“I wish you’d reconsider the funeral,” Z grumbled as he peeled an orange.
I just gave a shrug. We’d already discussed Mom’s funeral ad nauseum. I was going to stand in the trees, cover myself in shadows, and only stay for a minute. I just wanted to say goodbye and I felt like those compromises were more than enough.
Gray fiddled with the police scanner, which was malfunctioning. He turned it around and blasted a thin line of air at it, trying to clean out any dust, but that didn’t work. I walked over and used my light to trace the electrical connections inside of the machine, but they seemed to be working.
“Think they’re blocking the signal?” I asked Gray.
He shrugged a shoulder. “Guess it’s possible.”
“Wonder what they don’t want people to hear?”
“Maybe they don’t want them to hear how they’ve set up a perimeter around a certain funeral so they can catch suspected killers who come near,” Evan snarked.
I flipped him off for being mouthy. And possibly right.
Gray unlocked his new burner phone and downloaded a radio app. He opened it just in time for us to hear the following: “The Mars campaign has made a new pledge, in light of the recent tragedy in the tri-state area. Mr. Mars has stated that if he’s elected, he’ll ensure that vampiric institutes are relocated to an international space station. Here’s a clip of a speech he gave in New York City last night.”
We all listened with bated breath as Gray’s dad started to speak. “We shouldn’t have to fear for our children. We need a solution that’s both humane and safe for everyone involved.”
Gray growled and shook his head. “Asshole.” He turned his brown eyes to me and there was a fire in them that I rarely saw, the kind built out of years of resentment. “You know why my father loves space so much? No damn laws. He’ll get those vampires up there and use them for whatever he wants. You think that what we saw at the Pinnacle was bad?” He shook his head. “My dad’s worse.” He shoved his bench away from the table, stood up, and stomped off toward one of the other picnic spots.
It was the first time I’d ever heard Gray talk about his father in detail. I knew that there was bad blood because of Gray’s party boy persona. But now I realized that perhaps the party boy antics were Gray’s way of either distancing himself from his dad, or denying the man an heir.
I wasn’t exactly certain which it was. But Lysa’s comment from the night we’d brought Gray in came back to me. She’d said Gray had been scratched by vampires before. What exactly had Mr. Mars done with vampires?
I stood slowly, nodding at the others before I wandered closer to Gray. I stopped just under the awning of the other picnic area, not wanting to encroach too far if he wanted true privacy, but also wanting to be nearby, in case Gray decided he wanted to talk.
He glanced over at me after a minute. Then he sighed and sat down on one of the tables, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.