Grandma Lucy is still alive. I’ll go to her. I’ll tell her what happened. I’ll tell her you didn’t leave her—
No! I would rather she believe I ran off than know this was my fate. She will be old now. She deserves peace. David further retreated.
But you didn’t leave them! It’s not your fault!
I said no, Kieran. Leave it. And I will leave you. A funny thing, becoming what I am. All the things you believed were from the darkness of fairy tales are real. She isn’t the first vampire I’ve seen. Or even the twentieth. I could kill her. Free you of the bondage she’s placed you in.
Kieran would regret this later. Undoubtedly, he would remember this moment, as his own life came to a close, as him throwing away his final chance to escape this.
But he found he couldn’t hurt Elisabeth. He couldn’t just order her death, no matter what she’d done.
No. I can handle this. I’ll be fine.
David didn’t respond. He slipped back into the shadows.
He was gone.
Kieran stumbled backward into Elisabeth’s arms and passed out.
12
Kelley
“Kelley. Here’s what I need you to understand. I can call upon every Deschanel between here and Baton Rouge, and they’ll come at my command. They’ll come without hesitation. But this does us no good if we cannot locate where Kieran has been taken.”
Sweat poured from Kelley’s brow as he watched Colleen Deschanel with a mix of respect and fear. She’d said that Kieran’s life hung upon his ability to draw deep into a skill he’d only just discovered and never been trained to use. But all she’d done was tell him to dig deeper. She’d never said how.
“There’s not one way to do it,” Colleen replied, evidently reading his mind. Had she been doing it all along? “All seers have their own techniques. Their own methods. You must find yours.”
“But how?”
“It may help to think of what you were doing when your visions came to you. We can return to those moments and see where they lead us,” Colleen said.
He wished he’d taken her up on a drink after all. His mouth was a bed of cotton as he swallowed, waffling between her request and wondering if Kieran was already dead. If he was too late.
“Can’t we call in other seers? Ask them if they’ve seen him?”
“The seers in this family know to contact me if they had any visions at all about one of us. If anyone else had seen Kieran, I would’ve known before you showed up on my doorstep.”
“We can’t ask them to try and see if they can see what I saw?”
“Visions don’t work that way. Seers have no command over what they’re shown. They cannot summon a vision. But a trained seer can learn to harness the details. Now, go back to where you were when this vision came to you.”
“I was just driving.”
“Where? What time of day?”
“To school. No, I was going home from school. Afternoon.”
“And when you saw Dillon? And your mother?”
Kelley tapped his frustration out through his toes, eager to get on with it. To get to Kieran before the vampire ate him. “I don’t know!”
“Of course you know,” Colleen said, calm as a still lake. “These were big moments for you, Kelley. You’ll never forget where you were when you had your first visions.”
“Driving, I guess, too. We’re wasting time!”
“And where were you driving when you saw Dillon?”
“She’s going to kill him!”
“Certainly, so focus. Where were you going?”
“Home!”
“Very good. And when you saw your mother being robbed?”
“I was going home, okay? But that doesn’t help. I still can’t see where he is!”
Colleen smiled. “Not yet. I’ll grab my purse. Your car is out front?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“We’re going to drive home.”
13
Elisabeth
“You will tell me what just happened!” Elisabeth demanded, standing over Kieran. She’d laid him on the couch, hoping he’d wake quickly, and when he didn’t, she slapped him back into consciousness. “And don’t try to deny it, I saw it with my own eyes!”
Kieran’s head bobbed as he struggled to sit upright. “I talked to him.”
“You did what?”
“I talked to him. I don’t know how. He said he smelled the magic on me.” Kieran’s eyes rolled back and this time Elisabeth climbed up onto his lap. She took his face in her hands and moved it hard, back and forth.
“Kieran, wake up!”
“I’m awake,” he lied.
“Tell me. What he said. What you said.”
Kieran’s eyes fluttered open. The way he looked at her set her belly aflame. “I told