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Nolan looked visibly relieved to learn I was the one in trouble tonight rather than him. Suddenly I felt like we’d just been busted by our father for stealing his car, but I was the one getting yelled at because I was the oldest.
I trudged down the hall to Keaty’s office, and a minute later he announced his arrival by quietly shutting the door. I didn’t glance back at him, choosing to wait until he took his seat across the desk from me.
Nothing in his expression had changed, which notched my anxiety up a few points. If he at least looked mad, I might be able to appropriately steel myself, but this whole nonchalant lack-of-emotion thing put me more on edge.
“I trust your trip to Paris was…fulfilling.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and slipped a newspaper towards me.
It was a Parisian periodical, written in French—of course—but even with my relatively rusty grasp on the written language, I could work out what the front-page article was about.
Corps décapité découvert dans le metro.
Headless body found in metro.
“Of course what the article fails to mention is how the body turned to ashes the moment they brought it out into the sunlight.” He took the paper back and replaced it in the drawer. Did he have a scrapbook somewhere to commemorate all my fuckups? He might need more than one.
“I killed Peyton.” I hoped he might see the silver lining in the whole thing.
He looked moderately impressed, but only for a nanosecond. “I’m glad you were able to clear your plate of one pest, but at what cost? This isn’t the most subtle way you could have gone about it.”
There was no sense in drudging up the details of everything that had gone down that night in the sewers. Keaty would think I was making excuses, which would be true. “It was either kill him there or lose him, maybe forever. I wasn’t about to let him slip through my fingers.”
“You found him once.”
“And it took me months. I needed to finish him, and I did. End of story.”
“What do your Tribunal partners have to say about this?” he asked.
My internal alarms started sounding at the mention of my two Tribunal counterparts, Juan Carlos and Sig. I had made every effort to avoid them since my return from California, but there were certain aspects of the position that made avoidance impossible. Among them, our regular disciplinary meetings.
I felt sorry for any vampire whose punishment fell to me during those sessions, because I had been extra cold due to my lack of desire to be there.
“I only got back into the city a few hours ago. I haven’t been to see the Tribunal yet.”
I still hadn’t adjusted to the whole Sig situation. Sig, the Tribunal’s leader, was also my…something. My father’s sire’s sire. Which meant his vampire blood was what lit the undead spark in me. Which made all the times he’d hit on me really fucking creepy. He didn’t view it as a family connection in the traditional sense, but that didn’t keep me from getting squicked out by the idea of us sharing blood.
Basically, he was my great-great-grandfather, but in the vampire world there was nothing to forbid you from screwing your family. Figuratively and literally.
I’d never been bothered by the idea of sires bedding their vampire children. I knew Rebecca—Holden’s sire—tended to play bedroom favorites with her creations, enjoying their company until she got bored of them and made someone new.
But now that I was on one side of a vampire family line, I couldn’t get past the idea of Sig and I being related. Maybe it was unbearably Western of me and a glaring representation of the culture I’d been raised in, but there was no way in hell I’d ever flirt with the idea of a roll in the sheets with Sig again.
Yeeeeeuck.
Things had never advanced very far between us, but in the past I’d sometimes found the idea of him appealing. After all, it was hard not to be flattered when a gorgeous two-thousand-year-old vampire lavished all sorts of attention on me.
Now I didn’t know what to think. His motivations were a mystery to me, and if I dwelled on the whole thing too long, it made me dizzy.
So instead of discussing it with him like a rational adult, I avoided him, hoping the whole thing would just go away.
Too bad I’d gone and made a huge mess of things in France. Killing Peyton wasn’t my biggest concern. Peyton was a known rogue, and as a Tribunal leader I had the freedom to issue death warrants on a whim. The much bigger issues at hand were the very public way in which I’d killed him and the fact a dozen baby vampires were running around Paris who knew exactly what I was.
I’d be stunned if the big Secret gossip wasn’t already stateside.
If I could skip town long enough to get my affairs in order, I would come back and face the music like a big girl. But I couldn’t leave Grandmere unprotected in her time of need. Callum could say whatever he wanted about Ben and Fairfax being able to protect her, but I wouldn’t rest easy until Mercy was in the ground.
Keaty was right. I had one problem off my plate, but I wasn’t going to feel a sense of satisfaction until the whole thing was clear, and that meant finding my mother and putting her down for good.
“I think it’s
