AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d told police that he’d been involved in the fight. Malone, according to what we knew of him, was six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. He was strong and powerful, while O’Neal was slight and no more than five seven, even if his file said he was an inch taller and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. In his dreams maybe. I didn’t exactly see him holding his own in a fight with just Malone, let alone a struggle with both him and a full blood. They had very nearly killed him. Why had he lied for Malone to the police? Because he was in thrall to him and couldn’t give him up.
The bigger question was what was Malone up to? Why had he tried to stage his own death and leave clues that pointed toward Jace? Surely this wasn’t meant for us Hunters. We’d know that blood loss wouldn’t kill a vampire. Hell, it hadn’t even been vampire blood. Maybe he was trying to have Jace arrested for some twisted reason of his own. Just to fuck with him or because he was angry at him about something. Or was it only to convince Jace that he had no choice but to leave his family behind and come with him quietly? To just give in to the darkness.
Certainly, I’d had my own struggles with it. When my friends and I were attacked, we’d been young college students, traveling around from one hostel to another and even occasionally staying in campsites to save even more money. Our families had no idea where we were, other than “backpacking through Europe,” and we didn’t keep in close contact. We were unwittingly perfect for the vampires’ purposes, and unknown to us, a nest had been tracking us for a couple of weeks before they struck.
Malone had been known to have contacts among other vampires in the past, but he wasn’t, as far as we could tell, a part of any nest. Probably because he was so flamboyant. Other vampires would have shunned him if they’d known about it. We’d found a small nest in the town cemetery near Atlanta, and we had come straight from there to see first Toby and then Jace. We thought Malone might have been running to Jace’s house, because we hadn’t found his body among the others we’d killed. It would help account for where he’d been for the last couple of days since he staged his disappearance.But where was he now?
Now that we’d been to see both Jace and Toby and interviewed them, our interest in Malone was out in the open, and the fact he’d pretended to disappear was ample proof that he might have been one step ahead of us anyway. Had he known we were coming? We weren’t sure exactly what he was up to or why he’d cooked up such an elaborate ruse.
His behavior was odd, and we had to be very careful not to spook him and make him run again. We hoped this strange connection to Jason O’Neal would be enough to keep him close, for a while at least. Jace was, in my opinion, living on borrowed time.
We’d give Jace time to think about his story and then come back to talk to him again. In the meantime, we needed to find Malone and as soon as possible. If he was staying away from Jace’s house now because of us, we may have only a short time before bodies started to show up all over Atlanta.
****
Jace
I kept myself busy the rest of the morning, or as busy as I could. After patching up the cut on Tyler’s finger, I had settled him in front of the TV with his bowl of Fruit Loops, including an entire sliced banana. Then I took a shower and got dressed. I stood in front of the mirror for a longer time than usual while I was shaving, looking at the damages on my face—and my neck. How had that gotten there? What the fuck had I done to myself? The mark on my neck was raw and painful, so why couldn’t I remember doing this? I dabbed some antibiotic on it and wondered about it for the hundredth time since the detective had pointed it out to me.
It looked like the awful hickeys Dylan used to give me in New York until I’d put my foot down and made him stop—or at least slow down. He’d told me didn’t mean to, but sometimes he got carried away by how much he loved me. How had I ever thought that was sexy?
I heard my mother in the kitchen, so I hurried through my routine and went out to stop her from making me food. She liked to fix me what she called a “good breakfast” on weekends, whether I wanted it or not. I was glad she was feeling well enough to do it, but I wasn’t feeling at all well myself that morning, and a heavy breakfast of bacon eggs, and pancakes was the last thing I wanted, even though I knew my mom meant well. I was dragging and felt exhausted ever since the night of Halloween. I made a mental note to contact my doctor to see about vitamins.
I stood in the doorway watching my mother for a few moments before I went in the kitchen. My dad’s death had financially devastated my mother, and we were all just now recovering. My dad had been playing golf when the heart attack the doctors called the “widow maker” hit him a few months before I left New York City. No one knew exactly who had come up with that term, but it referred to the kind of heart attack where the main artery to the heart was blocked right at the beginning of its course, and then the whole artery went down after it. This essentially meant that the whole front wall of my dad’s heart had collapsed. As far as heart attacks go, it was a big one, with big, dire consequences, and the doctors said he was probably dead that day before he hit the green space at the ninth hole.
I found out later, after I’d come back home to live that he had heavily mortgaged the house. He’d been trying to pay for an expensive school for my brother, Tyler, out of his salary as a high school Literature and Drama teacher. My dad had been telling my mother that his state teacher’s insurance covered my brother’s tuition at the special school.It did not.
It was only after he passed away that my mother discovered he didn’t have any extra insurance policies, not even on the mortgages, so she had only the equivalency of one year of his teacher’s salary to try to pay all of his final expenses. She managed to pay for the funeral and catch up the mortgage and a few of the bills, but there just wasn’t enough to do any more. She had her own small teacher’s pension and Social Security, but that was it. She didn’t tell me the extent of what was happening, because she said later that she didn’t want me to give up my dream of New York City to come back home.
As a result of keeping it all to herself and trying to cope with my father’s death, Tyler’s grief and the bills, she fell into a serious depression. By the time I came home, she was spending most days in bed, and Tyler had been sent away, because my aunt tried to enforce rules on Tyler and found him unmanageable.
I sat down at the table and my mom turned to smile at me. “Is your brother up yet?”
“Yes, I think he’s already watching one of his shows.”
“Has he had his cereal?” Tyler disliked bacon and eggs, along with almost everything else—actually, the list of foods he tolerated was fairly short. Fruit Loops with banana, chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, ice cream and French fries. Everything else was a struggle.
“Yes, he ate breakfast already. He’s fine. I had some early visitors, and I guess he heard us. He decided to cut up some banana for his cereal instead of waiting for me. He cut his finger, but it wasn’t too bad. I put some antibiotic ointment on it and a Band-Aid.”
“Your father was the one who started giving him banana in his cereal,” she said, sighing a little. “Bless his little heart.” It wasn’t clear if she was blessing my dad’s or Tyler’s little heart, but it probably didn’t matter. She came over to sit beside me at the kitchen table.
“Honey, who were those visitors anyway? Was it something to do with work?”
“No, Mom. They were police officers. Detectives. They were asking me about Dylan.”
One eyebrow tilted up. “Really?” She shook her head. “Dylan’s not a nice man. I wish you wouldn’t see him anymore.”
Not a nice man. Coming from my mom, who never had a cross word for anybody, these were strong words.
“Dylan and I aren’t together anymore. We broke up and we’re just…friends, I guess you’d call it.”
“I don’t like to talk bad about the young man, but you know what they always say—with friends like him, you don’t need enemies.”
I had to grin at her, not because of the cliché—I’d been hearing those kinds of things all my life from her—but because it was so unusual for her to dislike anyone as much as she did Dylan.
“Really, Mom, I’m not seeing him anymore. Not since the other day.”
“Well, good. And why were the police here asking about him? What has he done now?”
