Bride

“Sorry, I’ll let the matter go.” For now. “Please, don’t leave. I’m sure you came here to . . . What do you do here, anyway? Scratch your claws? Howl at the moon?”

“Deflea myself.”

“See? I wouldn’t want to be in your way. Do go on.” I wait for him to pick critters out of his hair. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping, anyway? You are not nocturnal.” It’s past midnight. Prime awake time for me, the cicadas, and no one else for miles.

“I don’t sleep much.”

Right. Ana said that. When she mentioned that he had . . . “Insomnia!”

His eyebrow quirks. “You seem overjoyed by my inability to get decent rest.”

“Yes. No. But Ana mentioned you had pneumonia, and . . .”

He smiles. “She mixes up words often.”

“Yup.”

“According to Google, which I apparently don’t know how to use”—his side look is blistering—“it’s normal for her age.” He looks pensive for a long moment as his smile sobers.

“I can’t imagine how difficult it must be.”

“Learning to talk?”

“That, too. But also, raising a young child. Out of the blue.”

“Not as difficult as being raised by some asshole who doesn’t know to buy a car seat for you, or gives you Skittles before bed because you’re hungry, or lets you watch The Exorcist because he’s never seen it, but the protagonist is a young girl, and he figures that you’ll identify with her.”

“Wow. Serena and I watched that at fifteen and slept with the lights on for months.”

“Ana watched it at six and will need expensive therapy well into her forties.”

I wince. “I’m sorry. For Ana, mostly, but also for you. People usually ease into parenthood. We’re not born knowing how to change diapers.”

“Ana’s potty-trained. Not by me, obviously—I’d have somehow managed to teach her to piss out of her nose.” He runs a hand over his short hair and then rubs his neck. “I was unprepared for her. Still am. And she’s so fucking forgiving.”

I rest my temple on my knees, studying the way he stares into the distance, wondering how many nights he’s comes up here in the witching hour. To make decisions for thousands. To beat himself up for not being perfect. Despite how competent, self-denying, and assured he appears to be, Lowe might not like himself very much.

“You used to live in Europe? Where?”

He seems surprised by my question. “Zurich.”

“Studying?”

His shoulders heave with a sigh. “At first. Then working.”

“Architecture, right? I don’t fully get it. Buildings are kind of boring. I’m grateful they don’t fall on top of my head, though.”

“I don’t get how one can type stuff into a machine all day and not be terrified of a robot uprising. I’m grateful for Mario Kart, though.”

“Fair enough.” I smile at his tone, because it’s the poutiest I’ve ever heard. I must have found his touchy spot. “I do like the style of this home,” I volunteer magnanimously.

“It’s called biomorphic.”

“How do you know? You learned it in school?”

“That, and I designed it as a present for my mother.”

“Oh.” Wow. I guess he’s not just an architect—he’s a good architect. “When you studied, did you do the Human thing?” Their school system is often the only option, simply because there’s more of them, and they invest in education infrastructure. In Vampyre society, and I assume among Weres, too, formal degrees are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The skills that come with them, however, are priceless. If we want to acquire them, we create fake IDs and use them to enroll at Human universities. Vampyres tend to take online classes (because of the fangs, and the whole third-degree burns in the sunlight thing). Weres are undetectable to Humans’ naked eye, and could come and go from their society more easily, but Humans have installed technology that singles out faster-than-normal heartbeats and higher body temperatures in plenty of places. Honestly, I’m just lucky they never expected Vampyres would go to the trouble of filing their own fangs and never developed the same degree of paranoia about us.

“Zurich was different, actually.”

“Different?”

“Weres and Humans were attending openly. A few Vampyres, too. All living in the city.”

“Wow.” I know there are places like that around the world, where the local history between the species is not so fraught, and living side by side, if not together, is considered normal. It’s still hard to imagine, though. “Did you have a Vampyre girlfriend?” I point at my ring finger. “Once you go Vamp, you can never go back, huh?”

He gives me a long-suffering look. “You’ll be astonished to hear the Vampyres didn’t hang out with us.”

“How snobby.” I fold my hand back in my lap, but start playing with my wedding band. “Why all the way to Zurich? Were you on the run from Roscoe?”

“On the run?” His cheeks stretch into an amused grin. “Roscoe was never a threat. Not to me.”

“That’s brave of you. Or narcissistic.”

“Both, maybe,” he acknowledges. Then quickly turns serious. “It’s hard to explain dominance to someone who doesn’t have the hardware to understand it.”

“Lowe, was that a computer metaphor?” I get another of those don’t-sass-me looks, and laugh. “Come on. At least try to explain it.”

He shakes his head. “If you met someone without a nose and had to explain to them what a smell feels like, what would you tell them?” He looks at me expectantly. And I open my mouth half a dozen times—only to close it just as many, frustrated. “Yup.” He doesn’t even sound too told-you-so-y. “It was like that with Roscoe. He was a grown adult, I was barely past puberty, but I always knew that he was never going to win a fight against me, and he always knew it, and everyone in the pack knew it, too. As much as I despise him now, I’m thankful that he gave me long enough without a reason to challenge him.”

Without becoming a despotic leader, he means. “What changed him?”

“Hard to say. His views escalated very suddenly.” He licks his full lips, looking faraway, in the grip of a memory. “I got the phone call and didn’t even have the time to stop by my apartment on the way to the airport. My mother had vocally opposed a raid. She was wounded, and Ana was defenseless.”

“Shit.”

“It was eleven hours and forty minutes from the moment I got the phone call until I pulled up Cal’s driveway and found Ana sobbing in Misha’s room.” His tone is emotionless, almost disturbingly so. “I was terrified.”

I can’t imagine. Or can I? Those first few days after Serena was gone, and I was so frantically preoccupied with looking for her that it didn’t occur to me to bathe or feed until my head pounded and my body was feverish.

“Did you ever get to go back to Zurich? To pick up your stuff? To . . .” Get closure. Say goodbye to the life you’d built. Maybe you had friends, a girlfriend, a favorite takeout place. Maybe you used to sleep in in the morning, or take long weekend trips to travel around Europe and check out . . . buildings, or something. Maybe you had dreams. Did you go back to retrieve those?

He shakes his head. “My landlord mailed a couple of things. Threw out the rest.” He scratches his jaw. “Feel kinda bad for leaving my dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.”

I chuckle. “It’s kind of your thing, isn’t it?”

“What?” He turns to me.

“Blaming yourself for being anything less than perfect.”

“If you want to wash my dishes, by all means.”

“Shush.” I lightly bump my shoulder into his, like I do with Serena when she’s being obtuse. He stiffens, stills in a breathless sort of tension for a moment, then slowly relaxes as I pull away. “So, this dominance thing. Is Cal the second most dominant Were in the pack?” This sounds foreign, like picking words at random. Magnetic fridge poetry.

“We’re not a military organization. There’s no strict hierarchy within the pack. Cal just happens to be someone I trust.”