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“I don’t mind.” Patrice shrugged.
Lucas and I shared a look. We kind of did mind, but in an ideal world, Mom and Dad would’ve taken Balthazar and Patrice away with them so we could make out on the couch. That wasn’t going to happen.
Doing her eerie maternal-telepathy thing, Mom sighed sympathetically. “I guess there are times when no amount of privacy from the parents is enough, huh?”
“Evernight is definitely a challenging place to date,” Lucas agreed. Balthazar acted really interested in the Billie Holliday album cover all of a sudden.
Remembering how I’d shot Balthazar down, I cast about for any way to lighten the moment for him, then remembered a funny story I could tell. “Hey, at least it isn’t as bad for us as it was for your great-grandfather-whatever. Right, Lucas?” Lucas gave me a blank look. His face went pale, like I’d said something scary. Surely he was thinking about the wrong thing.
“Is this a family anecdote?” Mom asked. “Those are usually the best kind.” Everyone was listening now.
“One of Lucas’s ancestors came to Evernight, a great-grandfather or something around a hundred and fifty years ago. Come on, you tell it better!” I elbowed Lucas, but now his body was totally tense, as rigid as a board. He had said the story was a secret, but that had to be a joke, didn’t it? A story more than a hundred years old couldn’t be a secret. Maybe Lucas thought it was embarrassing, but I couldn’t see why he’d be ashamed of something that didn’t really have anything to do with him. “Anyway, he came here to study. He got into a duel with one of the other students, maybe over a girl, and they fought right in the great hall. That’s how that one stained-glass window was broken—did you know that? Neither of them died, but they expelled him, and…”
My voice trailed off as I saw that my parents and Balthazar had all gone completely still. They were staring at Lucas. His fingers were digging into my shoulder.
The only other person in the room who looked as confused as I felt was Patrice. “They let humans in before?”
“No,” Balthazar said sharply. “Never.”
“You had an ancestor who was a vampire?” I was astonished. “Lucas, you never knew this? Is that even possible?”
“I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with.” My father stood up slowly. He wasn’t a very tall man, yet something about the way he loomed over us on the sofa was incredibly intimidating. “I don’t think that at all.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago.” Mom’s voice shook. “That was when…the one time that they…”
Dad never took his eyes off Lucas. “Yes.”
Then he grabbed Lucas by the throat.
I screamed. Had Dad gone crazy? Suddenly Lucas pushed his arms through my father’s, prying him off, and then Lucas’s fist smashed into Dad’s nose. Blood sprayed out, wet drops hitting me across the face.
“Stop! What are you doing? Stop!” I cried.
Everything after that happened so fast. Balthazar pulled me away from the fight, hard, so that I stumbled and fell onto the floor. He threw a punch at Lucas, too, but Lucas ducked it. Patrice wrapped her arms around me, screaming loudly, and because of that unable to move. My mother slammed one of the wooden dinner chairs onto the floor so forcefully that it broke. I thought at first that she was trying to get the guys’ attention, to figure out what the hell was going on, but instead she took one of the chair legs in her hand as a club and swung it into the small of Lucas’s back.
He shouted in pain, but instantly he spun, broke Mom’s grip, and left her clutching her hand. Dad and Balthazar were both on Lucas, trying to fight him as one, but he was as fast as they were, blocking every blow. I remembered the pizza parlor and the fight there. As formidable as Lucas had come across then, that had been nothing. This was how he could really fight—powerful enough to fend off two vampires at once.
I was strong enough to fight with them, but I didn’t want to fight my parents for Lucas, or Lucas for my parents, not until I understood what the hell had just happened.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked. “Stop it, everyone, stop it!”
They didn’t stop. My father swung at Lucas’s gut, and when Lucas dodged it, he seemed to fall backward—but he was faking, crouching to grab the chair leg my mother had dropped. Immediately Dad and Balthazar edged backward, and I realized Lucas now possessed a stake. Maybe he couldn’t kill either of them forever with that alone, but he could take them out of commission.
Patrice screamed in my ear as Lucas plunged the stake toward Balthazar’s chest. Balthazar leaped backward, only barely avoiding the blow. I could see a cut along his cheekbone, crescent shaped from Lucas’s fist. Then, to my horror, Lucas focused on my father. He was actually trying to stake Dad.
“Lucas, don’t!” I pleaded. “Mom, tell him to—Where’s Mom?” She seemed to have vanished while I was distracted by the fight.
“She’s run downstairs for help.” My father’s words came out in a growl. “Mrs. Bethany will be here soon, and then we’ll get this taken care of.”
Lucas only hesitated for a second. “Bianca, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Lucas?”
His eyes met mine. “I love you.”
And then he ran, out the door, down the steps. At first all of us were too stunned to do anything, but then Dad and Balthazar took off after him. I turned to Patrice, who still huddled next to me on the floor. “Do you understand any of this?”
“No.” She ran her hands over her smooth, plaited hair, as if she could erase her earlier panic by fixing her own appearance. Nothing else mattered to her.
