Well, all right. I’d given Triton my bit of what for. I hadn’t expected any response from him, so I suppose it was a victory that he’d answered me at all, however briefly.
What could be such a big darn deal that we couldn’t do a mind hookup? Was someone telepathically eavesdropping? Hunting Triton? It would have to be him, because I was a breeze to find. My crazy Covenant stalker did it, which is why Saber insisted on all the security.
Sitting here wondering what kind of danger I was in and where it was coming from wasn’t getting my homework done. Much as I loathed our current assignment on period furniture, I went to my desk and dropped the chain and charm in a tiki motif mug by the monitor. While the system booted, I added fabric softener to the wash load and grabbed a Fig Newton to chew on. Beat chewing on questions about Triton.
I waded into my History of Furnishings textbook wondering why anyone had thought heavy styles like baroque looked good. To me, they just looked hulking. And, once you got that furniture into a room, no way did you want to move it out again. Of course, the wealthy had servants to drag furniture around. I wondered how many had suffered hernias. Then again, people weren’t so mobile in earlier times. Family homes were passed down through generations and still were, for that matter. I set my chin on my fist and thought about my own family. I’d been raised with furniture just as chunky as some of the pieces in the book, though not as elaborately carved and costly. The tables and chairs, chests and bedsteads in my family home were sturdy, serviceable. They had to be to stand up to the beating that first my brothers, then my nieces and nephews gave them. Had my family missed the things they couldn’t take when they’d finally fled St. Augustine?
I looked at the full-page photo of an oak trestle table darkened to black brown with age. The surface looked pitted, scarred, beloved. I hesitated, then touched the photo with one fingertip and was jerked back in time. The children huddled under the table, shooed there by the women. They didn’t cry, but their eyes were huge and frightened as they peeked at me between their mothers’ skirts. I’d cared for these babies, coddled and laughed with them, but no more. I was a vampire now, and if they knew not what that meant, they’d been told stories enough to fear me.
I raised my gaze, and my heart bled to see the face of my mother contorted in horror. Her pallor was severe, so much so that I feared she would collapse. Instead, she gripped a cleaver in her arthritic, trembling hand. Two sisters-in-law, they who had chided me for not choosing a husband, wielded long knives and regarded me with loathing. My youngest sister— in-law, the one I best loved, clasped the newest baby to her breast. I ached to touch that fuzzy head, to croon a lullaby. To be a family again.
“Please, don’t be afraid,” I said over and over. “I’m here to warn you.”
They didn’t heed me. They couldn’t. Their terrified screams begging me to spare them and the children drowned my anguished voice, and I wept as I slipped out the garden door. They thought me a monster, with no soul, no love, no loyalty in my heart. They were wrong.
Later, I asked Triton to get them out of town so that King Normand could no longer threaten them, but I relinquished my family that day. I was alone with no one to love and no one to live for. I would survive or find a way to forever die. The memory faded, and I wondered for the first time if I had relatives somewhere. Descendants of my nieces and nephews who would be happy to learn about their ancestors and perhaps to know me. If so, they hadn’t shown up yet, which was telling in itself. I shook off the past and closed the textbook, then about screeched out of my skin when a hand landed on my shoulder. I spun in the old-fashioned swivel desk chair to face Saber.
“Easy, babe, it’s me.”
“Geez, make some noise next time,” I said, my heartbeat still in overdrive, my eyelashes wet with the remnants of tears.
“I did make noise, honey,” he said gently. “Are you okay? Is your vampire hearing on the fritz?”
“My hearing is fine. I was hyperfocused.” I surreptitiously wiped my cheeks dry. Then I noticed that, except for his shoes, he was dressed. I glanced at my dolphin desk clock. “Where are you going at three in the morning?”
“Daytona.”
“But you were just there, like, eighteen hours ago. What happened?”
He rubbed his hand over his whiskered cheek. “The cops found a guy in an alley a block from Ike’s club.”
“Dead?” I asked, rising to hug him.
He shook his head and held me. “The guy is alive for now, but he’s in shock and sporting some vicious fang marks. Not clean or neat.”
“You need to go talk to the victim?”