I turned my phone on rather than staring out the window at the gothic city around us. Vast was stunning, with its dark architecture that reminded everyone that it had been a vampire stronghold at one point. I was used to it, though.
When the screen lit up, I groaned.
Fifty-three missed calls from my mom.
Forty-eight from my dad.
Thirty-one from my sister.
Twenty-nine from my sister-in-law.
Mom had definitely confiscated all of their phones and was rotating between them, hoping that I’d miraculously pick up after one of the calls. Harper had only tried eight times, so I was sure her and my mom were probably talking or texting frequently.
The device buzzed over and over as my messages finally caught up to me.
Between my family’s group text thread, the Guild’s reminder notifications, and my coworkers’ group chat, there were thousands.
There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to read all of those.
I opened the messages to get rid of the irritating red dots that told me the texts were new, then pulled up my list of calls and hit the button to dial my mom’s number.
I’d be back at the apartment I shared with Harper in ten minutes, so if she was there, I’d talk to her then. Otherwise, I’d call her next. She would handle the extra ten minutes of waiting better than my mom.
Mom answered on the first ring, her voice demanding. “Bloom?”
“Hey, Mom.” I closed my eyes, leaning against the back of my seat and bracing myself for however the hell this conversation was going to go.
Not well, probably.
“What happened after the wolf took you? Did he hurt you? Are you okay? Where are you? Why does the internet say you’re hismate? They’re wrong, right?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Sothatwas how the conversation was going to go.
“He bit me twice, but that’s it. I’m otherwise fine. They realized pretty quickly that I didn’t kill Steven, and locked me in a guest apartment while they tried to figure out who did. I need to feed, so they let me go.”
“What did she say?” my dad asked, his voice sounding far away.
“Put her on speaker already, mom,” my sister, Whimsy, ordered.
“She’s okay?” my sister-in-law, Mouse, checked.
My eyes stung at their voices.
They were pains in my ass, but there had been a few hours where I honestly wondered if I would ever see or hear from them again.
“Okay, you’re on speaker,” my mom said. “She’s fine.”
“I am,” I agreed.
“The internet is wrong about the mate thing, right?” Whimsy demanded.
“What does it say?”
“Someone claims that the Alpha bit you, and that werewolves bite their mates too,” my mom explained.
I grimaced. “They’re not wrong.”
