Sloane Briallen

We drove to the twenty-four-hour diner we used to frequent growing up. It was mostly staffed by late night servers who couldn’t care less about their customers, which was what we needed.

The whole theme of the diner was red and black—from the red booths with black tables to a matching counter with a red display case to the red-and-black checkered linoleum floor. The clicking of metal spatulas on a grill top filtered out from the kitchen pass-through.

There were two men nursing cups of coffee in the corner. From the looks of their clothes, homeless men trying to just be inside for an extended period of time. On the drive over, the car showed that the temperature had dropped down to the forties that night. Made sense why Genie was cold.

The server inside recognized Genie, smiling and waving at her. She brought us to a booth in the corner of the room and left us with menus.

Genie’s bronze-gold eyes were steady on the menu, but I could see she wasn’t taking anything in. She didn’t blink or catch that I was watching her.

She didn’t even notice when the waitress came up to us. I had to touch her hand before she looked away from the menu, eyebrows up in a question. When she saw the waitress, she smiled but it wasn’t bright like her smiles usually were.

She pointed to their classic burger on the menu and pointed to the fries under the side dishes. The waitress nodded and looked at me.

“Chocolate malt,” I said. “Thanks.”

She raised an eyebrow at a cold drink on a cold night but didn’t say anything. She took our menus and left. When I looked back at Genie, her eyes were on her hands, and she was picking at her nails.

I covered her hands with my own. It was a strange combination, our hands together. Hers were strong with short fingers, meant to carry heavy things and tell long stories. Mine were spidery and long, and they almost completely encompassed hers. Mine always seemed so awkward when I talked compared to her.

“What’s up?” I had to pull away a hand to ask, but I put it back immediately.

She bit her lip, looking down at where our hands touched. She pulled away one hand and struggled to form a word for a moment. Her hand was shaking.

After a moment, she said, “Can you tell me what happened to you first?”

I didn’t want to talk about what happened to me. I didn’t want to talk about Mickey and Bell, and moving to Minnesota, and becoming a vampire. I didn’t want to get into those feelings again. I didn’t want her to know how I let Karhi turn me into a vampire.

But I could also see that she didn’t want to tell me what had happened to her either. Why she was back with Mira. It hurt too much to talk, whatever it was.

I needed to be the adult here.

“Mickey and Bell disappeared on my eighteenth birthday.”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh my, God,” she said softly. Her voice was subdued and heavily accented. Genie had been raised orally, but she preferred signing to talking.

I sighed. “They were out to find sticks for marshmallows over the fire for my birthday. They never came back.

“We searched for them for days. I led search parties, and there were helicopters and dogs. But days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months . . . when I graduated from high school, I had to get the hell out. I couldn’t stay there, and I couldn’t come back here. I needed somewhere new.

“So, I left. When I turned eighteen, I started to receive the payments from my mom’s life insurance policy. There was a lot of money there, and I had saved it. I used it to move to Minnesota.

“And then, on my nineteenth birthday, Karhi Emelyn turned me.”

Genie stared at me, lips parted in disbelief. What? she mouthed.

I grimaced, nodding.

“You’re one of Dusky’s?”

“Once removed.”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, shaking her head. She opened her eyes, letting out a steadying breath. “Which one is he again? He’s a famous one, right?”

“He’s Ilona’s first child. The one who can look you in the eyes and make you forget what you were just doing or saying,” I nodded. “A neuropath.”

She grimaced. “Yikes.”

“That’s pretty much the life updates,” I shrugged. “I was like that and then Mira called, and now I’m here.”

I had stayed as detached as possible while telling the story. I didn’t want to talk about the deep depression I had sunk into or how it had been the reason I had let Karhi turn me. I didn’t want to talk about the nightmares after Mickey and Bell had disappeared where I found them dead. Or even worse, the dreams where they had come back alive.

Nor did I want to get into the fact that I was reasonably certain they were actually alive.

Genie had her hands back on the table; she was picking at them again.

“Your turn,” I said.

She bit her lip. “Mira will calm down eventually. Why don’t you ask her? She’ll tell you. She read our minds when we showed up at her house. She knows.”

I shook my head, reaching over to brush away some hair from her face. “No. That’s cheating.”

She shuddered and looked down. She didn’t make eye contact as she said, “There was so. Much. Blood.”

I blinked. “What? I told you not to follow me to where Annie—”

She finally looked up at me and her eyes were glassy. “There was so much blood. Their bodies weren’t even all in one piece. I never saw what happened to Rolly’s left arm. It wasn’t even in the living room. And where was Shirley’s right leg?” Tears leaked down her face as my stomach slowly turned in horror. “Some pieces were on the dining room table on a dinner platter. I couldn’t even tell what it was? Intestines? Their hearts? What was it?”

I stared at her, my mouth agape. Mira had told me that they found Shirley and Rolando, their adoptive parents, dead. But I couldn’t have imagined this . . .

What was I supposed to say? I’d only seen shit like that in the movies. I suddenly felt like the world’s biggest asshole for making her talk about it. She was just a fucking kid, and here I was asking her to relieve her trauma in the middle of a diner.

“Frankie grabbed me, and we ran back to Mira’s. We’ve been there since.”

She stared at the back of the booth, just to the side of my shoulder. She was right in front of me, but her mind was far, far away.

“When did that happen?” I asked, making sure I was fully in her range of sight.

She focused on me, coming back from her memories. “It was two weeks ago. Mira thought we needed you, so she started trying to find you. Then we found you were gone from Washington and had Amos look for you. And he found you.” She bit her lip again, tugging on it hard before saying, “And then Mikko never came back after fight night.”

Jesus fucking Christ. All of this, just in the past two weeks.

Genie continued, probably to distract herself more than anything else. “So, she called you because she didn’t know what else to do. Amos had already left on that case with everyone else, otherwise she would have called him first.”

Amos was a private investigator we’d known growing up. He was a shapeshifter who’d done a lot for us. He was still doing things for them, I saw. He and his sister and her sister’s husband—the man I’d namedropped to get Davie J to give me the new plates and registration for the Jetta—had been a big and good part of our otherwise tumultuous childhoods.

“I’m here,” I finally said. What else could I say to that?

She nodded, wiping her eyes.

My malt and her burger came. From there it became harder to talk. Which was honestly probably what we needed. I didn’t think either of us had had the time to just sit in a comforting presence in so long.

It was just past seven in the morning when we went back to Mira’s house. Something I hadn’t really understood until Genie told me explicitly—everyone had been living at Mira’s house this whole time.

When I had lived here, her house had been a base of operations. We would pop back in if we needed clean clothes or somewhere to crash that wasn’t a concrete floor. But things had changed over the past four years. I guess it made sense—once Mickey and Bell’s parents had adopted me, and Genie and Frankie had been adopted, where else was there for Annie and Mikko? They were never going to get adopted out. So, they moved in with Mira.

“Are they dating?” I asked Genie as I turned onto Mira’s street.

“Mikko and Annie?” She was looking a lot better now that we weren’t talking about how she found her parents dead.

I nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “At the Samhain festival last year Mira slipped some cupid pixie dust in their drinks, and they almost fucked it out right there in the sand.”

I snorted. “Jesus. And we thought that’d never happen.”

“For real.” She smirked, chuckling.

I pulled up in front of the house.

“I’ll see you later,” I signed.

“No, come in.”

“They don’t want me here.”

“Fuck them,” she sneered. “Frankie’s been a fucking dick, and Mira is being ridiculous. I only need one mindreader’s seal of approval. Lina said you’re good, so you’re good.”She shook her head bitterly. “And I think our time at the diner was enough to show me who you are.” Her fists clenched.

I put a hand over hers, squeezing to reassure her. She glanced up at me, a small smile finding its way on her lips. “Thanks.”

I squeezed her hand again before opening my door.

We got out of the car and went up the walkway. I could only hear two heartbeats in the house, a human and a shapeshifter. I looked at Genie. “Where’s Lina and Mira?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “School? Mira’s dropping her off.”

My mouth dropped. “Right. Lina’s old enough . . .”

She smirked, opening the door and walking in. I followed her inside.

Annie still lay on the couch in the living room on my right. To my left was the dining room, where Frankie was eating cereal. When he saw me, he put his spoon down and glared at me. “Why are you here?”

I toyed with the idea of just knocking his bowl on the floor before he could see me move. Just to fuck with him and maybe put a little bit of the fear of Sloane in him.

But, considering he had found his parents dead, and presumably tortured, I decided to act like an adult.

“Frankie, kindly go fuck yourself.” I said it and signed it for Genie’s benefit.

His lip curled and he stood up, almost knocking his cereal over as he did. He glared at me, searching for words.

When he couldn’t find them, he stomped out the front door, slamming it behind him. Genie made a noise of frustration and glared at me. “Was that necessary?”

“Very.”

She gave the ceiling a long-suffering look before following him out.

I took the bowl of Trix off the table and walked into the kitchen. I spooned out the cereal into the trash before dumping the milk and setting the bowl and spoon in the sink. “Always cleaning up after his messy ass,” I muttered.

The kitchen had two entrances, one through the dining room, and one into the hallway that went from the front door to the back door. It let out right by the stairs and into another entrance into the living room.

Annie was still asleep on the couch. Her bandages were pristine, and she had mostly healed. I couldn’t smell any blood, and her heartbeat was strong, almost twice as fast as a human. Her acorn skin was a little paler than I’d like—closer to an old, scaly acorn top than the young nut itself in color.

There was an old wooden chair in the corner of the living room. Two low bookshelves sat catty corner to each other behind the rocking chair. There were children’s books stacked on top of them with library bar codes.

The bookshelves themselves were filled with worn books purchased from garage sales, used bookstores, and library sales. Comic books, young adult novels, some classics—I smiled at them. I had been an avid reader and it had rubbed off on the others. Mira had been diagnosed with dyslexia as a kid, but it had really been the mindreading that made it too difficult for her to focus on words. I used to read to her, and she would listen both to the words and to the images that formed in my head as I read.

A sudden gasp behind me made me spin to look at Annie.

She was sitting up, just barely, with one arm propped behind her. Her other arm was cradling her ribs. Her hazel-green eyes were wide, the whites visible as she stared at me.

I took a defensive step away from her, crossing my arms in front of me, clasping my forearms with my hands. I knew she could smell me. She would be able to tell I was a vampire.

But what would that mean for how she treated me?

Finally, she laid back on the couch, putting her hand to her head. “This what we’re doing now?”

Hesitantly I put my arms down. “Do . . . what?”

“Have you actually fed on a human?”

“No.”

She opened one eye to look at me before closing it. “Why am I here?”

“I found you half dead in a warehouse by Van Buren. Someone or something tore you apart just before I got there.”

“What day is it?”

“Uh . . . Tuesday.” She was either taking this surprisingly well, or she was in complete denial.

She sat up suddenly, cursing as she remembered her healing ribs. They were probably no longer fully broken anymore, but they weren’t fully back together, either. She looked around, holding one arm to her stomach, her breaths harsh and heavy. “Where is everyone?”

“Frankie left because I pissed him off. Genie went with him. Mira is dropping Lina off at school. And Mikko is missing.”

She stared at me for a moment. Then she shook her head. “No.”

“No what?”

“He’s not doing coke again.”

I pressed my lips together. I had been avoiding saying it to anyone. I couldn’t find him in any of our old haunts. And I was afraid to go looking in the drug dens I used to know.

“He’s been clean, Sloane,” she said, shaking her head again. “He wouldn’t go back to that. He ain’t done nothing since you left.” Her shoulders were tense, her eyes hard. She wouldn’t budge on this.

But she also never had to walk Mikko through the end of a high. Even if they were together now, I had always been the one to find him when he fell off the wagon. I had always been the one who had to clean him up afterwards.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ve been looking for him. He wasn’t with you, and it didn’t seem like he’d been in that building at all.”

She laid back against the side of the couch. “Last I saw him was Saturday night. I won and we split. He was gonna give the money to Mira, and I was gonna meet up with some of my homegirls at a party and come back the next day. And when I got back here, he had never came home.”

“And you been searching for him since?”

She nodded.

“What happened last night?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The last I remember was walking down a street off Van Buren. And then . . . here.”

“How much did you win?” I asked.

“Six hundred.”

If I was still on base about coke prices, that would get him a couple eight-balls. If he had gone on a bender, it would already be gone.

Annie couldn’t read minds like Mira, but she still knew where my head was going. “He ain’t doing cocaine,” she growled. But the growl had a lot less heat than it should have. She was already drifting off to sleep again. Healing from injuries like hers was exhausting. I wondered if she would even remember our conversation.

I heard an engine outside. It sounded like the Tahoe. Mira was back. She and I still hadn’t really talked, and I wasn’t especially looking forward to it.

The trash in the kitchen was full and the perfect way to put off talking to Mira just a little longer. I took it out.

Her backyard was small, but cozy. Either side of it was blocked off by a wooden privacy fence. The back was separated from the alley by a short chain-link fence. Most houses in this neighborhood had put privacy fences up along the back of their yards to deter criminals, but nobody dared hit up Mira’s house for fear of what she, or any of her other band of misfits, would do when she found out.

I stuck the trash in the city garbage bin and headed back in the house.

Mira was in the living room, examining Annie. She glanced at me as I came in. “You talked to her?”

I nodded.

She stood, looking up at me. I was almost a foot taller than her. I raised an eyebrow, waiting to hear what she had to say.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said.

“It shouldn’t have to take two mindreaders to vet me.”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have had to defer to my five-year-old to figure it out.” She looked up, hazarding a small smile. “I’m really sorry, Sloane. And I’m really glad you’re here.”

Relief bloomed in my chest, and my shoulders relaxed for the first time since I had gotten the call from Mira.

“I was freaked out and it was all so much at one time.” She fidgeted at the hem of her shirt. “I guess I relied on instinct more than real knowledge. I know you. I shouldn’t have doubted you. Or Lina. She was so upset this morning, I almost couldn’t get her to school.”

I couldn’t help smiling at hearing that. I hadn’t even seen Lina in three or four years, but she was already so protective. She must have seen a lot in their heads growing up.

Mira pressed her hands against her nose; her voice was muffled as she continued. “I didn’t even realize Genie was gone until she was long gone.” She looked up at me from beneath her hands. “Do you hate me and Frankie?”

“A little.”

She winced.

“But I am glad to be home. The conditions are . . . less than desirable. But I’m still here. And you’re here.”

She smiled sheepishly, pulling her hands away from her face. “Come on.”

We moved into the dining room to sit at the table.

Something suddenly hit me, and I looked around. “Mira . . . where’s Molly?”

She smiled ruefully. “I wondered if you’d say something.”

She wasn’t in the house; I knew that. But I had hardly ever registered her before. Deadbeat mothers didn’t tend to occur to me.

“She was killed in a drug bust,” Mira said, looking down. “Supposedly she ‘assaulted a cop with a dirty needle’. More likely, she moved too fast, and they shot without looking.”

I smiled humorlessly. “Love cops.” The fake smile fell. “I’m so sorry, Mira.”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip. “It happened last October. Lina was here. She knew I was upset. It was the first time she used telepathy. That was when I realized I had to work harder to protect my baby and get us protection.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t have anything else to contribute.

“I do some odd jobs. But I spent so much time on these guys and her . . .”

“That you’re almost twenty-two and you have no real work experience, so no one will hire you.”

She nodded. “I tried to get a normal job. I worked at a CVS. But there were just too many people. I couldn’t block them out.”

I knew that. It was why I had my paycheck go mostly to her every two weeks.

She heard that last thought. “Yeah,” she said. “No, that money helped. You have no idea. I knew it was you.”

Of course, she had.

“And that, along with the money the others bring in, makes it easier. Especially the disability.”

Mira had been diagnosed with epilepsy because of her neuropathic abilities. She received disability benefits for it.

“I have money,” I said. “And I can get a job. I can—”

She shook her head. “I don’t want you to stay here with a bunch of deadbeats—”

I cut her off. “I stole money from Karhi. That’ll help us out. And I can come back and keep you afloat. I get inheritance from my mom, and I don’t need to eat. You have the house, and I can live here. I’m not going to abandon my family, okay? Not this time. We’ll get our shit together, just as soon as I find Mikko.”

A range of emotions flashed across her face before she finally said, “Okay.” She smiled for a moment, and it made me feel warm.

“So, you think Mikko is sleeping off a coke bender somewhere,” she said.

The brief moment of quiet I had felt when she smiled disappeared. “I don’t know, man. Maybe? They separated on purpose after she won the fight. He was supposed to come back here to give you the cash. Then he disappeared and Annie gets the shit beaten out of her while looking for him? We’ve both seen what happens when a dealer thinks they got ripped off. I don’t know how much the scene has changed in the past few years—but everyone knows Annie and Mikko are tight. They probably wanted money from her either because Mikko has disappeared with a bunch of coke or . . .” I didn’t say what the “or” was. I couldn’t think about Mikko being dead somewhere. I couldn’t.

“I don’t—” She stopped, looking at the front door quizzically. I followed her gaze, listening.

Heavy footsteps thumped up the front walkway. A moment later, there was a rapping on the door. “Phoenix PD,” a deep male voice called out.

I looked at Mira, confused.

“Fuck,” she cursed quietly, standing up. “Follow my lead.”

I hadn’t come across Phoenix PD in years. And most of it hadn’t been good.

She opened the door. A white cop in a button-up black shirt with black pants stood there. A gun and a taser were holstered on his belt along with a baton. His shoes were heavy black work boots with steel toes.

“Hello?” Mira asked. She only opened the door halfway.

“Mira Ríordan?” he asked.

“Who’s asking?”

“Officer Jared Hammer, ma’am.”

“Credentials?”

A look of annoyance passed across his face. Behind him I saw a police car parked in front of the walkway.

He pulled his badge off his belt and held it up for her to see.

After a moment, of scrutiny, she said, “Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Jean Carwyn and Frank Cirocco. We were told they might be here.” He glanced at me for a moment before deciding I wasn’t important.

“Why are you looking for them?” she asked.

“We just want to ask them some questions about the deaths of Shirley and Rolando Castillo. We haven’t been able to find them, and we thought they might know something.”

Mira narrowed her eyes. “You can’t possibly think they killed them.”

“We just want to ask them questions, ma’am.”

“I haven’t seen them,” she shrugged. “They were here a couple days ago.”

“Ma’am, if you—”

He was interrupted by the radio attached to his shoulder. “Hammer, 10-19 to the station.”

Officer Jared Hammer turned his head and pushed his radio. “10-4.” He looked back at us. “Thank you, ma’am.” He turned away and went back to his cruiser.

I looked at Mira. “What was that?”

She shook her head, making a noise of frustration. She muttered her response to keep the cop from hearing. “Genie and Frankie ran as soon as they found their parents’ bodies. The police want to know why they didn’t report it. This cop isn’t really involved in it; he was pulled in to assist. Probably why he was quick to go back to his station when he was called.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic.” I watched as the cop started up his car again and drove off. “Just what we need, Genie and Frankie with pigs.

“I told them to lay low after the deaths. I told them the police might suspect them.”

“And they didn’t listen. Fucking shocker.” I shook my head, turning to look at something moving in my peripheries.

Two men walked towards us. I hadn’t seen them coming up because the house next door had a row of hedges blocking off their yard from Mira’s.

The breath disappeared from my lungs like ice water had been dumped over my head. Cold shock spread through my chest, squeezing my heart.

Dully, I heard Mira say, confusion in her voice, “Mickey? Bell?”

“No,” I whispered, putting my hand to my chest and grabbing my necklace. The magic prickled through my shirt. I searched their arms.

There they were: cuffs on Mickey’s arms, bracelets on Bell’s.

I tightened my grip on my necklace. “Alive,” I whispered. My mouth was dry, my tongue like sandpaper as I spoke. “Here.”

“Sloane,” Mickey started, taking a step forward.

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. Ice froze my chest, desperation clawing at my throat to scream. I held it back. “No,” I whispered. “I can’t.”

I fled.