The Reluctant Vampire (32 page)

Drina instinctively started to glance around, but Harper was already pushing her to the side. Staggering, she grabbed at the gas pump to keep her feet and glanced back to see Harper throwing himself forward and to the ground, his hand outstretched as if he were a baseball player trying to catch a ground ball. The only thing missing was the baseball glove . . . and the ball, she thought as she saw the flaming bottle land in his open palm.

Harper immediately closed his eyes and briefly lowered his forehead to the cold pavement as if in thanks, then lifted his head and pulled the burning bit of cloth out of the top. He crushed it between his palm and the ground to put it out, then started to rise, holding the bottle like it was a venomous snake.

“Are you all right?” Drina asked, hurrying to his side, her eyes scanning the direction the bottle had come from. There was nothing to see, however. Whoever had thrown it was gone.

Harper nodded as he straightened beside her. “Sorry I pushed you.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said at once. “I didn’t even see it.”

“I spotted it as soon as Jason yelled. It was like a recurring nightmare,” he said dryly.

Drina squeezed his arm sympathetically, and then glanced around as Jason rushed to them.

“Man oh man, that was—
Man
!” he yelled, reaching them, his eyes round holes of shock and awe as he eyed Harper. “Man, you—That was—It was like,
woooooo.
” He flew his hand threw the air in an arc as if emulating the bottle’s trajectory. “And you were like
waaaaah.
” Mouth open, he mimicked Harper diving for the bottle, and then shook his head, and said, “Man, you kick ass. That was freaking
amazing
!”

Drina bit her lip and glanced from the young mortal to Harper to see him looking slightly embarrassed by the kid’s adoration. Clearing her throat to get Jason’s attention, she asked, “Did you see who threw it?”

Jason shook his head, “No, sorry, no. I just saw this firebird flying at the two of you and shouted and—” His gaze shifted back to Harper. “Wow, man. You could play for the Jays. We’d kick ass
every
game.”

“Yes, well, here, maybe you could dispose of this.” Harper handed him the bottle of fluid, and when Jason nodded and took it, he reached for his wallet and pulled out three twenties. As he handed them over, he said, “Sorry about forgetting to pay.”

“Oh, no problem,” Jason said at once. “I knew it wasn’t on purpose. We just got distracted with the security video. But, hey, this is too much,” he added, keeping two of the bills and offering the other back. “You only got forty bucks worth.”

“Keep it,” Harper said, urging Drina toward the car. “And thank you again.”

“Yeah, thanks! Hey, you two have a good night. And stay safe, huh?” Jason called as he turned back toward the store, and then Drina heard him mutter, “Man, that was something else.
Wow.
”

“You have a fan,” she said, as they got in the car.

Harper grimaced as he started the engine, but said, “He’s a good kid. A total geek, but he has the good sense to recognize a goddess when he sees her.”

“A goddess?” Drina asked on a laugh.

Harper nodded and shifted into drive to head out of the gas station. “He was sure your name must be Aphrodite or Venus.”

“Right,” she snorted.

“But he kept your clothes on in his head,” Harper announced, and added wryly, “Which raised him in my estimation. Like I said, a good kid.”

“And he saved us from a great deal of pain,” Drina added, her voice becoming more subdued.

“Pain?” he asked dryly. “Try saved our lives and his own too. If that bottle had landed, the whole damned place probably would have exploded. Those were gas pumps.”

Drina nodded and reached over to squeeze his legs. “He helped, but you did the saving. Nice catch,” she added quietly.

“That was desperation,” Harper said on a sigh as he pulled out onto the road. “I didn’t really notice the bottle, but I saw the flaming, fluttering cloth coming at us like a bird on fire and . . .” He shook his head. “It was the last thing I saw in the porch before it became an inferno. That time I didn’t know what it was and wasn’t quick enough to stop it. This time I was.”

Like a recurring nightmare,
she recalled his words and squeezed his leg again. But then frowned and glanced out the window, before announcing, “We have a problem. Two, actually.”

“Only two?” Harper asked dryly.

Drina smiled faintly, but said, “Stephanie wasn’t there. The attack was on us. It may not be Leonius.”

“Except that you’re about Stephanie’s height, wearing her coat, and your hair is tucked under a hat so you could easily have been mistaken for her,” he pointed out.

Drina glanced down at the bomber she wore and frowned as she realized he was right. That made her mouth tighten, and she said, “Which means we have a different set of problems.”

“That he doesn’t seem to be that concerned about keeping her alive for breeding since the explosion could have killed her,” Harper guessed.

Drina nodded.

“What’s the other?” he asked.

“Stephanie must have controlled the driver of the car.”

Harper took his foot off the gas, allowing the car to slow as he sought out her eyes. “You think so?”

“What would you do if someone suddenly popped up in the backseat of the car?” she asked quietly.

Harper’s head went back a bit as realization struck him. “The car didn’t slow, stop, or jerk to the side. It just continued smoothly up the road.” He frowned. “I didn’t know she could control mortals already.”

“Neither did I,” Drina said on a sigh. “And she shouldn’t be able to.”

“No,” he agreed, taking one hand from the steering wheel to cover hers on his leg. He was silent, considering this, and then said, “She could make him take her wherever she wanted.”

“Yes,” Drina agreed.

He thought for a minute, and then asked, “Where does her family live?”

“Windsor.” Marguerite had told her a bit about Stephanie in New York—what she’d been through, where her family was from, etc. Marguerite seemed to feel bad for Stephanie, but then so did Drina.

Harper nodded and pulled a U-turn on the empty road, heading back the way they’d come. The highway entrance was just beyond the gas station.

“Do you want to call Teddy before we leave the area?” he asked, as they approached the gas station.

Drina shook her head. “We’ll call from Windsor if we find her there.”

“It’s more than two hours away,” he warned.

Drina bit her lip but shook her head. “Anders will call Lucian, and he’ll have someone in the area head right over. I’d rather Stephanie wasn’t faced with strangers to deal with this.”

Harper nodded and squeezed her hand with understanding. They drove past the gas station and took the on-ramp to the highway.

Chapter Sixteen

“That’s it,” Harper murmured, slowing and pointing to a large two-story redbrick building.

“Don’t stop. I don’t want to scare her off if she’s here,” Drina said quietly. “Drive around the block. We’ll find somewhere to park and walk back.”

Harper eased his foot down on the gas, speeding up a bit to cruise up the road. At the corner, he turned right, then slowed to a stop as they passed the mouth of an alley that ran behind the houses.

“What do you think?” he asked quietly. “We could park on the road here and walk up the alley.”

Drina nodded silently and unbuckled her seat belt as he parked. Her gaze slid out the window to the lightening horizon. It had taken them far longer than the expected two hours to get here to Windsor and it was almost seven o’clock. There had been an accident on the highway. Emergency vehicles had blocked off the highway, stopping traffic completely while they’d removed the injured and the cars and cleaned up the mess.

They’d actually hit the city half an hour ago, but then they’d had to find a pay phone and phone book to look up the McGills. There had been a handful listed, but Drina hadn’t known Stephanie’s father’s name so they’d had to check almost all of them. As it turned out, Stephanie’s family’s phone number wasn’t listed, but eventually they’d hit a McGill who was related and Drina had pulled the address of the family home from the mind of the grumpy man who had answered the door. Now here they were, hours after they’d set out.

Drina hoped to God she hadn’t made a huge mistake by not calling Teddy’s house and letting Anders call Lucian. If anything bad had happened because she’d made that choice, she’d never forgive herself, she thought, as they got out of the car.

They were silent as they walked up the dark alley, counting houses as they went and watching for the two-story redbrick. Drina didn’t know what to expect or even what to do once they got there. Now that they’d reached Windsor, she was beginning to wonder if Stephanie really would have come this way. She must have known they’d think to check here. And if she
had
come here, would she have approached the house? Walked up and knocked? Was she inside even now, in the bosom of her family?

They slowed as they spotted the house ahead. At least three of the second-floor lights were glowing in the early-morning darkness, but they couldn’t see the first floor yet. The neighbor’s garage blocked their view of the McGills’ backyard. They had barely passed the garage in question when Harper caught Drina’s arm and drew her to a halt. He needn’t have bothered. She too had spotted the slender figure hugging the tree in the McGills’ backyard and had been about to stop herself.

Drina released a slow breath, a good deal of tension sliding out of her as she took in Stephanie’s lonely figure. It looked like she hadn’t approached the house but had simply stood in the cold, dark night watching it . . . in nothing but joggers, a T-shirt, and a thick woolly sweater, Drina noted, taking in what the girl was wearing. The kid must be freezing, she thought with a frown, then sighed and turned to gesture to Harper to wait here.

When he nodded, she turned and started silently forward. Drina was perhaps six feet behind Stephanie, when the girl said, “It took you long enough to get here.”

Drina stopped, and then grimaced and continued forward at a more natural pace.

“What took you so long?” Stephanie asked, as Drina paused a little beside and behind her.

“There was an accident on the highway, traffic was stopped for hours,” Drina explained, and then smiled wryly, and asked, “You expected me to figure out you’d come here?”

Stephanie shrugged. “Where else would I go?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Hours.” Stephanie leaned her head wearily against the tree and sighed. “I’ve just been standing here watching the house.”

Drina shifted her gaze back to the McGills’ home. There were lights glowing on the ground floor too, she saw, but all the activity was in the kitchen. She could see into the room quite clearly through a pair of sliding glass doors that led out onto a deck. The vertical blinds were open, revealing a dining-room table and a kitchen beyond. There were three kids and a man who she guessed was Stephanie’s father at the table. An adult female, no doubt her mother, and more kids, older ones, were moving around the kitchen, pouring coffee and toasting toast.

“The blinds were closed, but Mom opened them when they got up. She likes to watch the sun rise,” Stephanie said quietly.

Drina focused on the mother, but said, “You controlled the man from the gas station and made him drive you here.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“You didn’t tell me you could control people already,” Drina said quietly.

Stephanie shrugged. “I didn’t really know until I tried tonight.”

Drina closed her eyes. If making a man drive her two hours to Windsor was her baby step at mind control, the kid was scary skilled. It just made her worry more for her. Pushing that thought aside, she said, “I’m surprised you just stood out here and didn’t go in.”

Stephanie smiled bitterly. “I was going to. That was the plan on the way down here. I’d come home, and Mom would put her arms around me and tell me she loved me and that everything was going to be all right. And Dad would call me his little girl, which I always used to hate, but would kill to hear now.”

The yearning in her voice was painful to hear, and Drina had to swallow a lump in her throat. Stephanie was just a kid. She wanted her family. She’d asked for none of this. Clearing her throat, Drina asked, “What stopped you?”

“I’d just be messing up their lives,” Stephanie said with a shrug. “I know Lucian did something to them to make them forget me. I’d just mess that up.”

“They haven’t forgotten you, Stephanie,” Drina said firmly, shrugging out of her coat and moving closer to drape it over her shoulders. The nanos would be using up blood at an accelerated rate keeping her from freezing in this weather, and they didn’t have any blood to give the girl. Sighing, she rubbed her arms briefly, and added, “Lucian just sent people to veil their memories and probably alter them a bit.”

“I know the veiling bit is so they don’t suffer so much from losing Dani and me, but how did they alter their memories and why?” she asked quietly.

“They would have made their memories of your faces fuzzier, more vague, so that they wouldn’t recognize you if they came across you accidentally.”

“Accidentally?” Stephanie asked dryly. “You mean so they wouldn’t recognize me if I came knocking.”

“No,” Drina assured her. “If you walked up to the door, and knocked and said, ‘Mommy, it’s me, Stephanie,’ the veil would be torn. They would remember. But if they happened to see you on a street, or bumped into you in passing and never spoke, chances are they wouldn’t. That’s why it’s done. So that you aren’t accidentally revealed to be alive.”

“So if I walked up right now and knocked on the sliding glass door, I could make them remember me?” she asked, staring at the people in the house.

“Yes,” Drina admitted.

“But you’d stop me from doing that, wouldn’t you?”

Drina hesitated, and then shook her head. “No. If you really want to, I won’t stop you.”

Stephanie turned to look at her sharply, her eyes widening with surprise. “You mean that.”