He grumbled, but gave me a few more minutes to study the tree before saying, “Hey, I heard you say something to Corry before, but I forgot to ask. Is it really true that vampires need to be invited into a house?”
I turned around, forgetting the ornament I’d been examining. “Yes.”
His brow furrowed. “Why? I mean, what’s stopping them.”
“Magic,” I said briefly, but he made a rolling gesture with his index finger to indicate I should keep going. “Honestly? I have no friggin’ clue. Something to do with families and blessings and faith. You could ask Kirsten about it.”
He held up his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay. So that means vampires can’t come into this house, right?”
“Uh…yeah, that’s my bad.”
“The null thing again?”
I nodded. “The protective magic forms a bubble around the house, covering every possible entrance—all the doors, the pipes, the vents, the windows, even a damn chimney. It’s actually kind of like my radius.” I pointed in the direction we’d come from. “But anytime I get within ten feet of an exterior wall, I short that section out. Not the whole thing, it’s not built that way, but that specific area that touches my power.” Concern had spread across his face. I added, “As soon as your family comes back, living in the house and loving each other, it’ll come back, though. Don’t worry.”
He sighed. “I’m not worried about that, Scarlett. Hang on a minute.” He looked around the living room, eyes narrowed with concentration, and finally turned back to me. “Wait right here.”
“Jesse—” I started, but he’d disappeared back the way we had come. I heard the front door open, and a heartbeat later Max came bounding toward me, panting happily and doggy grinning like he’d just accomplished something amazing. I bent down to sit cross-legged on the floor, and Max put his front paws on one side of me and his back paws on the other, collapsing gleefully across my lap. He had to weigh sixty pounds. I laughed and petted him again, his tail whipping back and forth against a coffee table. If it hurt him, he didn’t seem to notice.
Jesse came back a few minutes later with a big armful of pillows and what looked like sleeping bags.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going to have a campout,” he announced.
I gave him a dubious look. “Excuse me?”
“Look,” he dropped the pile next to Max and me—Max craning his head at an impossible angle to lick Jesse’s face, as if not wanting him to feel excluded—and sat down. “We came in the front door, and walked into the house. We’re not within ten feet of an exterior anything, as far as I know, and the bathroom is farther in still. As long as we stay here, there’s only one way they could possibly come in, right?”
“Yeah, but, Jesse, we don’t have to sleep on the floor. I haven’t been in a sleeping bag since, like, high school. My people are not camping people.”
He was already shaking his head. “I thought about it. All of the upstairs bedrooms are against exterior walls.” He pointed to the couch at the far end of the living room. “That’s an exterior wall. I’ll move the couch closer, and you can sleep on that. I’ll take the floor.”
“You really think Olivia’s going to, what, dynamite your parents’ wall to get to me?” I said skeptically. “Ninja-jump through a second-story window?”
“No, I don’t,” he said primly, mock offended. “I think that sounds ridiculous. She shouldn’t know where my parents live. And I personally don’t think she could get within two hundred feet of the house without this mutt”—he pointed at Max, who was still panting and looking from one of our faces to the other like he was in heaven—“sounding the alarm, which is an impressive one. But the two things we know about Olivia for sure are that she’s motivated and that she’s completely nuts. I don’t want to risk it.”
“But—”
“Scarlett, for all you know, she could be working with a witch who can cast a spell to get them close to the house without making a sound, and to remove a damn chunk of the building.” My mouth snapped shut. That was kind of a good point. I’d once seen Kirsten drop a section of flooring down to rescue me when I was trapped in a basement. “Besides,” he overrode me, “I don’t want to not be able to sleep all night, imagining her and her crony creeping up on the house. This way they can only come at us from one possible direction, and that feels a lot safer to me than having the whole house exposed.”
I sighed and looked down at my lap. “What do you think?” I asked the dog, who focused on my face and wagged his tail hard enough for his butt to wiggle. He licked the air in front of his face a few times, having probably been trained that people didn’t want face kisses. I laughed. “Fine. Max says campout.”
I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. To my surprise, Molly had played nice and just packed flannel pants and a gray T-shirt as my pajamas. She ordinarily wouldn’t miss an opportunity to dick around with my wardrobe—it would be just like her to pack me, say, a negligee or something involving a thong—but she probably felt bad about being in on Dashiell’s plan to shanghai me. Well, good.
When I came out, Jesse was standing in the living room holding a big armful of quilts, with a cell phone tucked between one ear and his shoulder. When he saw me, he said into the phone, “Me too. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He dropped the blankets so he could hang up the phone.
“The girlfriend?” I said, in what I hoped was a casual manner.
“Yeah.” He fidgeted with the blankets for a second, making them into a nest on the floor.
“Is she…upset?” I asked, not even sure how I would feel about it if she was.