Page 42

His coffee cup sat where he'd left it, full to the brim and stone cold. When I put my fingers against the side of it, there was frost on the outside.

River picked the spilled cup up off the floor. His hands weren't quite steady.

"Firefly." He kept his tone low, for my ears only. "He knew that mark."

"I know."

"Hazel, he knew it. He knew it and lied about it. The Fae don't…"

"They don't lie, I know. They mislead." I was folding the receipt back up very small, along creases I'd already made. "He never said he didn't know it. He said it wasn't theirs. Then he told me it's older than everything he's ever read, and then he told me to hide it from his own people as well as the vampires."

I put it in my bra, because pockets can be cut.

Across the lot the Dairy Queen had opened and somebody was turning the sign around. Out past the exit ramp the highway kept making its long tearing sound, and forty miles east of us my grandmother was sitting in a rebuilt building with my book on her desk.

Two houses. One says I'm an heir, one says I'm an abomination. Both of them right. And the tiebreaker is a man I have never met and one question about whether he meant for me to happen.

"Come on." I picked up the surviving coffee, ready to leave the place. "We're driving."

"Where?"

"Nowhere. In circles. All day." I shouldered the door open. "I think better moving, and I'm not standing still anywhere I can be blindsided by creatures that have been hiding for centuries. What is it about me that dragged them out of their holes and turned them chatty?"

Chapter Eleven

We drove until the sun disappeared behind the horizon again.

River drove for the second half because my hands had started shaking around three in the afternoon and neither of us said anything about the reason why. I put my feet on the dash in Stella's sneakers and watched Ohio go past in the other direction for a change. Somewhere around the Wellington water tower I fell asleep with my temple against the cold window and woke up an hour later with a crick in my neck and drool on my own shoulder. As subtly as I could I wiped it with the back of my hand.

He'd taken the long way. Of course, he had. County roads, no straight lines, the same loop we'd run the day before but backward, because whoever taught him to move like that taught him to be smart.

"You could have woken me," I said.

"You slept four hours in two days."

"That's not the reason, Blackman."

"It's a reason," he said, "which is what you're getting, or nothing at all," and I hated him for about a second and a half.

The STARLIT sign came up out of the dark with its dead E still hanging sideways, and the pop machine was still glowing under the office window. The parking lot was full again with a fresh crop of people who wanted the nearest bed to the exit ramp.

There was a gray Impala parked three spaces down from our unit with its engine off and a man sitting in it.

I had my hand on the door handle before River got the truck into park.

"Hazel, stop."

"I know that car." The door was already open.

"Hazel."

"I know that car, River."

I was out and crossing the wet asphalt in Stella's too-big sneakers when the driver's door opened, and Davon unfolded himself out of it looking like six days of bad sleep in a coat that needed replacing.

He'd lost weight. That's the first thing I noticed. His face had gone angular in a way that didn't suit him, and there was a shaving cut on his jaw that he hadn't noticed or he would've wiped the blood before it crusted on his skin. He stood there beside his own car with a manila folder held against his chest like a schoolbook.

We looked at each other across eight feet of concrete.