‘Oh, wow!’ Brendan jumped up. ‘Ivy, that’s fantastic!’
But Mr Daniels only stared at her, his eyes burning. ‘What have you done?’
‘What?’ Ivy blurted, feeling herself stepping backwards without meaning to. ‘Surely, you must want to speak to your sister again . . . don’t you? I mean,’ she licked her lips, trying to regain her smile, ‘a Caesar salad can’t be worth all this animosity, can it?’
‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Mr Daniels swung around, turning his back on both of them. ‘You don’t understand the whole story.’
Brendan turned to his father. ‘Then help us understand.’
Mr Daniels growled out his words without looking at either of them. ‘Maybe you think the Twenty-First Law is silly, but my mother was a very superstitious vampire. Carla knew that Mother took the rules very seriously. That’s why she did it, even though she didn’t even like artichokes – and it was an artichoke, not a Caesar salad, by the way.’ He shook his head. ‘Carla was always rebellious, for no good reason. She broke that Law out of spite, just to show Mother she couldn’t make the rules.’
Ivy winced. ‘But still . . .’
‘No.’ Brendan’s dad turned back to stare at them, his face grim. ‘Do you think I’d be so stubborn that I wouldn’t forgive my sister for eating an artichoke?’ He clenched his hands into fists. ‘No. What I couldn’t forgive was that she broke that Law purely to hurt our mother – who was the best person I ever knew. And if Carla is coming back to Franklin Grove after all these years, then I know one thing . . . I won’t be here to tell her to leave again.’
What? Ivy went blank with shock. Before she could think of a word to say, Mr Daniels turned and charged out of the living room.
Stunned, she and Brendan stared at each other.
‘Could he really do it?’ Ivy whispered. ‘Would he really take you away from Franklin Grove?’
Brendan didn’t answer her out loud. But she saw the horror in his eyes, and she knew – Mr Daniels was not kidding.
Ivy wrapped her arms around him, and he buried his face in her hair. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she whispered.
But secretly, she thought: This is a total disaster.
Chapter Eight
Olivia looked around the dinner table the next night and sighed. This is the oddest dinner I’ve ever had at my bio-dad’s house . . . and that’s really saying something!
When she’d stopped by the house that evening, she’d hoped to grab a private moment with her stepmom to finally figure out what was going on. She’d arrived just as dinner was ready, though, so now there were four people sitting at the dining table . . . and three of them seemed to be in another world entirely.
Charles had a notepad open in his lap, which he never looked away from even as he forked steak into his mouth. Ivy looked glum as she picked at her sweet potato, obviously lost in her worries over Brendan. Lillian – who looked dressed for a royal banquet, rather than an ordinary dinner at home – seemed to have no appetite at all.
Weirder still, Lillian’s smartphone chirped in her handbag every few minutes. Charles didn’t even notice, and Lillian never moved to answer it – but her perfectly made-up face twitched every time it made a noise.
I can’t take this any more. It wasn’t just curiosity or nosiness for Olivia now. If someone didn’t tell her what was going on soon, she might actually explode!
Taking a deep breath, she set down her salad fork. ‘Lillian,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’
‘What?’ Lillian blinked, her mascaraed eyelashes dark against her pale skin. One hand moved to fidget with the emerald necklace around her neck. ‘Oh. Ah. Fine.’
Then she went straight back to pushing her uneaten steak around her plate, gold-and-silver bracelets rattling against each other on her wrist.
Time for Plan B: make Lillian and Charles talk to each other!
‘So, Dad,’ Olivia said brightly. ‘Has Lillian been to the museum yet? What did she think of the exhibit?’
‘Mmm?’ Charles didn’t even look up from his notepad, where he was busily scribbling notes even as he continued to eat.
Lillian’s words came out in a mumble. ‘Looking forward to Saturday, just like everyone else.’
Olivia forced extra peppiness into her smile. ‘But aren’t you impatient? Don’t you want a sneak peek?’
Lillian didn’t even look up. ‘I hate spoilers.’
Drat. Olivia’s shoulders slumped. A dinner table with a fabulous meal was just not the right setting for any kind of confrontation.