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Before I can react, she jumps across the table at me, pulling down my collar. What she sees is two half-dollar-sized bruises around two points of injection, with black discoloration all along my neck.
“Those didn’t look that bad the last time I saw you,” she said. “What have you been doing? Are you still meeting him in secret?”
“Not at all,” I say, knowing what question will follow that.
“Then how does your neck look like that?” She asks. “If you’re not leaving your house, and my protection sigils did their job…”
I’ll admit it. When I’m operating on very little sleep, I have a terrible poker face.
“Oh my God!” She yells. We have the entire food court looking at us now. A little kid, about seven or eight, drops his slushie on the ground, and actually starts to cry.
I grab Rory by the arm, leading her away from the eyes of the public, toward an abandoned kiosk. I’m grateful she doesn’t fight me.
“If we miss the new Captain Patriot, you’re refunding me the tickets,” she says.
“We’re not missing the movie,” I counter. “We’ve got like forty minutes to get there.”
She stands looking down at me, legs far apart, arms crossed, leering.
“Why the hell wouldn’t you tell me the wards didn’t work?”
“Maybe for the same reason you didn’t tell me you were putting them up in the first place,” I argue. “I didn’t want them up.”
“So you found some witch skilled enough to take them down for you? How much did that set you back?”
I don’t say anything in response.
“Wait. Did you hire a witch to take them down?”
I shake my head, looking at the kid in the distance. His parents attempt to console him, telling him they’ll buy him ice cream instead.
“What do you mean, you didn’t get a witch to take them down?” She asks rhetorically. “Surely, he didn’t remove the wards himself.”
She chuckles. I’m not sure how to lie to her anymore.
She knows too much.
“Oh my God!” She screams for a third time. “This guy broke through my wards, and you’re not the least bit worried?”
“Why should I be worried?”
“It takes an extremely powerful vampire to just toss aside a ward spell like that. You’re messing with somebody very old, and very skilled.”
I scoff.
“I’m not ‘messing’ with anything,” I say. “He’s my lover. You can accept that, or you can get out of the way.”
“This is out of my hands, Quinn.”
We shuffle to the left as a couple tries to pass us to get to the restroom, not noticing they needed to get by until they were in our faces about it.
“If this guy’s too powerful even for my ward spells, I think we need to go to PEACE.”
I laugh in response. This catches her off guard, and I worry that I’ve offended her somehow.
“Fat load of good that’ll do,” I say. “With everything that goes on in this city, and how much crime runs rampant, you think PEACE is going to fix our problem?”
“I don’t know,” she replies. “We have to try.”
