always freaked me out.
“Hey there, Becks,” Piper said in a cheerful, upbeat voice that made me want to reach through the phone and strangle her. “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” I still couldn’t find my voice, but as usual that didn’t bother Piper. “I hear you had a lovely dinner with my boyfriend and his family. Luke loves them to death, I know, but I was never what you call impressed. Especially with that Cousin Marlene of his.” I could almost hear the eye-roll. “Impossible to get a word in edgewise around that one.”
It was a lovely irony to hear Piper complaining that someone else talked too much, but I had the feeling she expected me to comment on it, so I didn’t. I didn’t want to give her the slightest shred of satisfaction. I’d answered her call because I felt that I had to, but so far I saw no reason I actually had to talk to her.
Piper let out a huge, dramatic sigh. “Okay, okay. I know you’re mad at me. And I know this had to have been a really hard day for you. First Thanksgiving without your dad and all.”
It was all I could do to maintain my stony silence, and my teeth ground together so hard it made my head ache. But again, there was no need to give her the satisfaction.
“I’m telling you, Becks, you have no idea how much better you’ll feel if you just let it all go. Being out in the night, being part of it … Well, words can’t describe how awesome it is. It would be awesome even if your everyday life was all roses and sunshine, but when your life sucks like it does now…” Another big sigh. “You’re torturing yourself, clinging to the past, for no reason.”
“I’m not torturing myself!” I protested, unable to hold the words back. “You’re the one who’s torturing me.” A sob stole any other words I might have said, and I hated myself for not being able to stay in control.
“I know that’s how it looks from where you stand, Becks,” Piper said, and if I didn’t know better I would have sworn there was a hint of sympathy in her voice. “It’s tough love in the extreme, but I’m really trying to help you. You belong out here. You deserve a life without cares or worries or responsibilities. A life steeped in magic and power and just plain fun. That’s what I want for you, and as far as I can tell, the only way to get it for you is to make it impossible for you to tolerate the day.”
I laughed bitterly. “Yeah, right. You killed my father in a selfless act of charity.”
I could hear Piper’s smile in her voice. “I never said it was selfless. I love my new life, but I don’t want to give up all my friends to have it. Some of them have to go because they’re not suited to it.”
“Like Luke you mean?” I asked. I remembered she had told me once before that Luke would not be welcome, but I hadn’t thought much about what that might mean.
“Yeah, he’s a no-go. Too much of a goody-goody for this kind of life.”
It was against my better judgment to engage Piper in conversation, but I had to admit I had a lot of questions about the night world and about what had happened to the people who were lost to it. Whether I could trust Piper’s answers or not was a whole other question.
“So what am I, some kind of bad girl?” I asked, genuinely curious why Piper and Aleric seemed to think I was a good candidate to join them.
“It’s not that you’re a bad girl,” Piper said. “It’s just that you have the potential to be one. If you’d been raised by different parents, or maybe even if you’d just gone to a different school, you’d be a very different person right now. You have the makings of a hell-raiser, even if so far you’ve managed to shout all those feelings down.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I argued, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d been on a very different road back in the days when I was in middle school, tormented by my peers, called Becky the Brain by everyone I knew, and reviled for it. My parents had left me in that school for two long years after the bullying began, because they thought sending me to a private school would make them