Keys found, I looked up. “That’s cheating,” I protested.
“Unless you wanted to cook for me. I don’t mind eating in,” he pressed with half a shrug. “It’s the fights you know. Have to keep up my strength. I’ll even take a shower.”
“Wow. A shower. That’s it. I’m in,” I said, deadpan. He waited, grinning. I realized I wouldn’t win if I didn’t muster up more energy to fight—and I might just not mind losing, anyhow. “If I say I’ll see you at seven, can I finally go home?”
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll see you at seven then, Lucas. Good-bye.” I waited until he got into his car before I got into my own.
Lucas’s truck followed me all the way home, and he didn’t get out of it, good to his word. Any more people hanging out in my apartment, and I’d have to start charging rent.
Minnie greeted me at the door, and Gideon was still communing electronically with my wall. “You’d better not be stealing cable,” I told him and went into the back.
A shower washed the last of the potentially imaginary vaporized puke smell out of my hair, I ate the very end of Christmas’s leftover mashed potatoes, and I crawled into bed at a quarter to nine.
* * *
I think I slept like the dead. Not as dead as Veronica, but close. I woke at six P.M. to a dark house, and a snuggling happy cat. Out the window I saw a dark sky and falling snow.
One hour to kill before dinner. I wondered how tonight would go. Company I could talk to, that wasn’t plugged into my wall or resting inside of my closet, might be nice, even if it was under duress.
It was in the silent dark when I was home alone, dealing with all my problems by myself, that I could admit that I missed Ti. He was the last man I’d dated. Zombie, really … but he’d felt like a man. Like a grown-up. Someone I could count on and rely on, up until when he’d left me. He had reasons for going, and they’d sounded valid, but I couldn’t rationalize away feeling left behind, especially when there was no guarantee he’d be coming back. There’d been a brief, so brief, window when I thought I wouldn’t have to be alone again, and that made my current loneliness sharp, nestled against my breast like a viper.
I decided not to feel bad about going out on my not-a-date tonight. Instead of tricky potential feelings with Asher, Lucas would be a better, less entangled, way to feel in control. He was handsome, and hey, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone out with a dog.
“What do you think about that, Minnie?” I asked, and reached over to knuckle her head.
My phone rang, and UNKNOWN NUMBER lit up its screen. A part of me got excited, and then another part of me squashed that part back into the box with the tight lid where it belonged.
“Hello?”
“Edie Spence?”
It wasn’t a voice I knew. Unknown really meant unknown. “Yes,” I answered, swallowing down a small knot of disappointment in my throat, trying to pretend it’d never been there anyhow.
“Are you alone right now?”
“Is this a prank?”
“It’s Viktor. Don’t hang up.” I waited on the other end of the line. “You have to listen to me—I’m not the one trying to kill you, I’m being set up. They just need an excuse to kill me, the same way they killed my father. Anything a member of the Deepest Snow pack has to tell you is a lie.”
I sat quietly in bed. “How do you expect me to believe you?”
“How can I prove it?” Viktor gave a rueful laugh. “If I could, don’t you think I would? But they’ve set me up—and there’s orders now to slaughter me on sight. I don’t have time or opportunity to come up with proof. I only know how they are, how they’ve been in the past. They murdered my father, and killed half my father’s pack. They’ll kill you too.”
“Why would they need to kill me to get to you?”
“Either you’re a convenient excuse to do away with me—or you have something they want.”
“They’re weres. We don’t run in the same circles.”
“Then whose circles do you run in?”
I pulled my phone away and frowned at it. Employed by vampires, indeed. “I thought vampires hated weres, and vice versa.”
“Oh, we do. But seven years ago a vampire from House Grey met with my father, and after that he met Winter to talk about a truce. That truce was the last time he was seen alive. Winter killed him, and his own son too, to hide whatever my father learned. They said he’d killed Fenris and then fused our packs—they stole my birthright from me!”
I blinked, trying to understand—wondering if I should even try, since Viktor sounded increasingly wild as he went on.