magic elixirs.
“Darcy,” I said, “you don’t want to know.”
She leaned across the counter and surveyed the carnage with quick precision of a field surgeon. “Quad shot venti S’more Mocha, extra whipped cream,” she said, pronouncing her prescription with a nod of certainty.
“Marry me?” I asked.
She fixed me with a megawatt grin. “Honey, if I ever decide to ride the magic carpet, you’ll be my first.”
“Deal.” I perused the display of designer mugs while she flitted around behind the counter like a healer from another time. Then I was looking at Dan’s table, my eyes drawn to his notes by a word that landed in my subconscious like a bag of concrete.
Vampires.
“They’re everywhere,” Dan whispered across the table to a pair of rapt, watery blue eyes. “It’s the Spring Lambing.”
I inched closer, shuffling along a display of paperweights.
“But that’s not even the half of it,” Dan continued in hushed tones. “The werewolves, they know. And they let it happen. Every ten years, all over the world.”
Dan was staring up at me now. Any pretense of eavesdropping had been blown about the time I planted my elbows on his table and sandwiched my head in my upturned palms.
“Danno,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter 12
“Dan told me everything.”
Mark sniffed the air, nostrils twitching. “Quad shot venti S’more Mocha, extra whipped cream?” He set his pen aside, folding his hands on top the papers on his broad oak desk. “How many of those have you had?”
“Why does that matter?” The pain exploded in my forehead as I sucked down another icy straw-full. “Four?”
“Fuck.” He massaged his temples with fingers I knew to have expert knowledge of human musculature. “I’m not having this conversation with you when you’re on the sauce.”
“Is it true?”
“There’s true, and then there’s true,” he said.
“You just repeated the same word twice with a slightly different emphasis. That doesn’t work on me anymore. But the sex thing still has some mileage. You want to make a suggestive comment or something?”
Mark raised a dark eyebrow at me and leaned back in his chair. “That’s the whipped cream talking, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” I admitted. “Sucks having your bluff called, doesn’t it?”
He pushed himself away from me with a disgusted sigh.
“So?” I asked. “Is it true?”
“You need to take her.” Joseph Abernathy had appeared from the clear blue ether, leaning in Mark’s doorway.
Mark cast a gritty look at his father. “Great idea. Let’s just bring a sixteen ounce ribeye to a dog fight while we’re at it.”
“Aww!” I said, oddly touched. “You think I’m a ribeye?”
“How is she supposed to decide if she doesn’t know what being the heir really means. You can’t keep her from that world forever.” Joseph shrugged away from the doorframe and paced toward the desk.
“Right. How am I supposed to decide if—wait...are you saying I’m a ribeye because I have a lot of marbling?” I plopped myself down in my usual spot on the couch that I had almost agreed to have a litter of Abernathy’s puppy on earlier that day.
“I’m not trying to keep her away from that world,” Abernathy said. “I’m trying to keep that world away from her.”
“Because sixteen ounces is a huge steak,” I added. “And it would be really easy for me to assume you’re speaking proportionally here.”
“How long do you think you can do that?” Joseph asked. “The last few decades have cost a king’s ransom in blood and treasure, and that with some pretty near misses.”
“So are we talking a dry-aged ribeye here? Because now that I think of it, there are some pretty troubling implications there too.”
“You try protecting this woman sometime.” Abernathy gestured toward the couch with an impatient jerk of his chin. “When she’s not hopping in the car with murderers, she’s offering to sharpen their knives.”
“Mock if you will,” I said, folding my legs beneath me. “Good cutlery is as much a part of a proper eating experience as the food on the plate.”
“Even if you’re the entree?” Mark asked.
I slurped down the last gulp of condensed sugary slush at the bottom of my recyclable plastic cup and tried to smile, only to realize that I couldn’t feel my face. “What were we talking about?”
Mark and Joseph looked at me, then each other. Something crackled between them like a static tightrope.
“You’re coming to the state dinner,” Mark announced, his eyes remaining fixed on his father, even as he addressed me.
“State dinner? For what?” I asked.
Mark turned to face me then, perhaps wanting to see how his next words would