Covet (44 page)

Dad grumbled a swear word. “Okay, I’ll handle it.”

I hesitated. “If Mr. Williams does call you, you might want to ask him about how he’s using power to punish Dylan. He’s forcing his son to try and come up with ways to make me break the rules so you’ll do something dumb. They want to make you look weak and biased toward protecting your family instead of upholding Clann law so they can push for new leadership. And when Dylan’s less than successful at ticking me or Sav off…”

Dad’s eyes flared then narrowed to dangerous slits. “You’re kidding. He’s using power on his own son for punishment?”

I nodded. “It doesn’t leave a mark, so there’s no proof of the abuse.”

Dad swore again. “I’ll have a talk with the elders. We’ll figure something out to stop it. It would serve Mr. Williams right if his plan backfired and we banned him from the Clann.”

Something tight in my chest loosened, making me realize just how much I’d worried that the Clann might not do the right thing to help Dylan after all.

“Thanks, Dad.” I started to get up.

“Hey, tell me how the game went. Your mom and I were sorry we couldn’t be there.”

Well, maybe Dad had been. We both knew how Mom felt about descendants playing sports that might reveal their extra abilities. “You didn’t miss much. I played like crap. With everything that’s going on…”

“Tough to keep your head in the game?”

I nodded.

“Well, hopefully we’ll find some answers soon that’ll satisfy everyone and let this whole situation blow over.”

“Did you mean what you said on the phone about how the deaths could be a fake vamp attack?”

Dad’s big shoulders rose and fell. “It’s always possible someone’s playing on old fears. It could have even been a descendant behind it, for all we know right now. I went to the morgue with your mother. I saw the bodies and…” He swallowed hard, cleared his throat and continued. “Well, let’s just say I’ve got a feeling the situation’s not nearly as clear cut as your mother wants it to be.”

“You know, I get that vamps are dangerous to us. But what I don’t get is why all the hatred…people don’t sit around hating lions or tigers for doing what comes naturally to them. And we’re just as dangerous to the vamps, too.”

Dad propped an elbow on the desk and slowly rubbed the back of his neck. Finally he muttered, “Don’t let your mother know I told you, but…she lost both sets of her grandparents in the last war with the vamps. Her parents’ families were poor folks with neighboring farms. After her parents got married, when times got too hard to afford both places, their families decided to move in together and work as a team to try and save one of the farms. One night she and her sister and parents went into town. When they got back home, they found everyone else dead. The vamps must have hit their house as a group. She says she can still remember how it looked.”

Dad sighed and scrubbed a hand over his eyes, which had more than a few bags under them. “It must have been a pretty bad sight to see, especially as a little kid. She still has nightmares about it sometimes.”

The farmhouse from Mom’s thoughts last week, the one she was afraid to enter…

I tried to imagine coming home and finding my family murdered like that, and the rage I might feel afterwards. “Oh man.”

He nodded. “And she’s not the only one with memories and loss like that. Most of us lost at least one or two loved ones. It left a lot of scar tissue. So you see how it might take more than a few talks to convince everyone to settle down and forget the past.”

After about a minute of silence, I got up and headed for the door.

“Oh, by the way.” Dad’s voice stopped me in the doorway. “Your momma’s off to Tyler to pick up your sister and bring her home.”

“Why?” Couldn’t Emily drive herself? Had her car broken down or something?

“Emily came down with a nasty case of the flu. Can’t seem to stop puking. So you might want to drink extra orange juice this week and avoid your sister’s room.”

“Right. Thanks for the warning.” I went upstairs to my room to chill out on my bed with my MP3 player for a while. But my mind wouldn’t turn off.

It seemed being the Clann leader was a lot different than I’d thought. I’d always assumed that Dad had total power and could just make an order, and the Clann had to follow it. But he made it sound like he was some ordinary elected official who had to convince people to do what was needed.

Definitely not a job I was looking forward to taking over anytime soon.

He really should consider giving the role to Emily. She had always had the ability to sway people into seeing things from her point of view. She could convince you so well that within half an hour she’d have you believing it was your idea in the first place. And that was without using a spell.

Maybe I could talk him into seriously considering it.

I heard a racket on the stairs and stuck my head out the bedroom door just as Mom and Emily reached the second-floor landing.

“Hey, sis. Sorry you’re so sick. Need any help or…?”

“No, thanks,” she grumbled as she shuffled into her bedroom and flopped onto her bed.

“She’ll be fine,” Mom said, bringing up the rear with a glass full of murky greenish-brown fluid that could only be some terrible mix of herbs and spells. “We just need to get this down her, and keep it down long enough for it to kick in.”

Emily croaked, “Honestly, Mom, I’m not that sick.”

Yeah, right. She just didn’t want to drink that nasty crap Mom always shoved down our throats every time we got a sniffle.

“Oh please, you’ve been barfing for hours,” Mom argued. “Now hush up and let your mother take care of you for a while.”

I shut my door, grateful not to be Emily right now. I didn’t know what would be worse…alone in a dorm room with the flu, or suffering from Mom’s herbal drinks. But at least one good thing should come out of it. Mom would probably be too busy taking care of Emily for a few days to stir up any more anti-vamp attitudes within the various branches of the Clann. That ought to give Dad a chance to calm everyone down.

I tried to picture Mom on the phone with all of the descendants and cringed. Now that would be bad. Mom could stir up World War III in a matter of hours. As smart as Emily was, I wouldn’t put it past her to be faking the flu just to keep Mom too busy to nag Dad endlessly for a crackdown on vamps’ rights.

Later that night, I went to Emily’s door to check on her.

It sounded like she was barfing up everything and the kitchen sink in her adjoining bathroom.

I cracked her door open and called out, “Sis, do you—”

“Go away,” she moaned.

I eased the door shut and carefully stepped away from her room. I should have remembered how cranky she got when she was sick.

There was a girl who would never go down without a fight.

CHAPTER 30

The rest of the week was relatively peaceful, at least at school. Either Dad or Savannah must have put the fear into Dylan and the twins, because they left her alone.

On the home front, though, things were decidedly less than calm. Not only were Mom’s herbal drinks not working, but Emily and Mom were now arguing on a daily basis about sending Emily to the hospital or at least to Dr. Faulkner for a checkup. Apparently she wasn’t able to keep much down. Knowing how much Emily hated needles, I wasn’t surprised that she was refusing to go for a checkup. She would probably cave eventually; nobody stood up to Mom for long except maybe Dad. Then again, knowing Emily’s pride, she was more than likely already wanting to see a doctor and just refusing to go in order to show Mom she was in charge of her own life now.

This wasn’t the first time Emily and Mom had butted heads, and it wouldn’t be the last. The safest course of action for Dad and me and any other innocent bystanders was to stay out of the war zone as much as possible until either a winner or a truce was declared.

But on Friday afternoon when I came home and heard her sobbing in her room, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I knocked on her door. She sniffled and said, “What, Tristan?”

I opened the door an inch. “How did you know it was me?”

“Because Mom just barges in, and Dad’s too scared to cross the battle line.”

I opened the door a little wider. “How are you feeling? Can I get you anything? The latest
Cosmo
issue, one of those eye mask thingies, some nasal spray?” She looked beyond bad, her face swollen so much I could barely see her eyes. Her nose was painfully red, as if she’d blown it so many times she’d rubbed off the top layer of skin.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “I know, I look like crap.”

“Not to side with Mom here, but maybe you should go see a doctor.” Mom’s herbal drinks, nasty as they were, had never once failed to cure us of any illness within a day or two.

“I know. I should have gone yesterday.” She stared out the window on the wall opposite her bed. “I just…really don’t want to see that smug look of Mom’s if I give in.”

I tried not to smile. “So in the meantime you’re miserable. Very mature of you.”

She tossed a pillow at me. It went wide, harmlessly bouncing off the wall.

Her cell phone beeped on the nightstand. She grabbed it and froze while reading the screen.

“Your college buddies worrying about you?” I asked, nodding at her phone when she looked up with her eyebrows drawn in confusion.

“Oh. Yeah. I posted how sick I was on Facebook just so no one would think I was dead yet. Getting texts about it now.”

“Well, cheer up, kid. The flu usually only lasts a few days. You should be getting better soon.”

Tears filled her eyes. “Right. I know that.” She groped for a tissue, missing the box by six inches. I held the box closer to her. Her “thanks” came out muffled through a wad of Kleenex.

I was going to sit on the edge of her bed to talk and picked up her phone to move it out of the way.

She snatched it back and stuffed it under the covers.

“Paranoid much?” I asked. “I wasn’t going to read it.”

“No, I know that.” She wouldn’t look at me. “I just…have friends Mom probably wouldn’t like, and the less you know about them, the less she can pick the info out of your brain.”

“What kind of friends are we talking about here?” I’d heard of college students getting into drugs and stuff while away from home, but Emily had never seemed the type to do any of that. She valued her intelligence too much to risk the brain damage.

“Oh you know. Rockers. Computer geeks. Hardcore video gamers. Anyone who’s not ‘cool’ enough in her book.”

Mom was a little obsessed with our family image. Sometimes I got the feeling that she must have been a social misfit while growing up and was trying to live through her kids.

“Still running a fever?” I felt her forehead like Mom used to do for me on the rare occasion that I caught a virus. “Yeah, you feel warm. I’ll grab you some meds.”

I got up but she waved off the offer. “Don’t bother. They make me too queasy. It’ll all come right back up.”

“How often are you barfing?”

She rested her head against her pillows and closed her eyes. “I’ve lost count. Pretty much all day and night with some naps in between. I’ve thrown up so much my abs are killing me. I could have sworn I was working out enough before now!”

Starting to feel useless, I refilled her water glass with fresh water from the bathroom. “Hey, how about some of that drinkable flu medicine stuff? I think Dad got some the last time he got sick and didn’t want Mom to know.” Even Dad hated the herbal drinks.

She made a face. “We can try it. But I’ll probably barf it up, too.”

I ran downstairs to the kitchen and found the medicine hidden behind Dad’s stash of junk food in the cabinet over the fridge that Mom was too short to reach. After nuking a mug of water and stirring in the meds as directed, I brought the drink back upstairs to Emily.

“Mom left a note on the fridge. Apparently she’s going to try some new herbs on you. She said she was going into town for supplies.”

“Great.” Emily was texting again, her face set in the darkest scowl I’d ever seen.

“Man, you are addicted to that thing,” I joked.

She grunted in response, barely even glancing my way as I set the steaming mug on the nightstand.

“Anything else I can fetch for the flu princess?” I asked.

“No. Thanks, Tristan.” She smiled at me, which would have looked normal on her any other week but this one. Today it looked forced. “Maybe later I’ll go outside and get some fresh air.”

“If you do, bundle up and don’t go too far,” I warned. “It’s like fifty degrees out there.”

Not that Mom would let her out the door anyways once she got home.

“You going to be around later?” she mumbled, her thumbs flying over her phone’s keypad.

“I don’t know. Why?”

She lifted a shoulder an inch in a weak half shrug. “It’s Friday. I’m just worried about your nonexistent social life since you got dumped. Twice.”

Ouch. “You know, that case of flu you’ve got really brings out the mean in your eyes.”

She sighed. “Sorry. I just meant you should go out and do something. Football and Sav aren’t the end-all and be-all of life.”

It was my turn to grunt in response. “Quit worrying about me and get some rest.”

* * *

Later Mom came home and went to check on Emily. I could hear their conversation from across the hall.

“Oh, Emily,” Mom sighed. “I just came home from the store. Why didn’t you tell me you needed more Sprite and crackers then?”

“Because I didn’t know I needed them then,” Emily said. “I just read where someone suggested it on Facebook. They said it was the cure-all for any kind of queasiness. Well, except for food poisoning, I guess. They promised it might settle my stomach till the virus has run its course.”

Mom stood in the open doorway to Emily’s room. “I just don’t understand why the healing drinks aren’t working this time.”

“I don’t think I’m really sick anymore. I actually feel much better overall. It’s just my stomach that’s irritated now.”

Apparently the drinkable flu medicine was working. Dad would love hearing that his choice of meds was better than Mom’s herbs and magic.