“Yes, I’ll look in a second, honey,” Lora said patiently, pushing a stray string of blonde gray hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. If this fucking pan didn’t get clean soon… She gave up with a sigh and decided to resign it to soaking for the rest of the night.
She looked around the kitchen again and realized that the house felt emptier than usual.
“Where is Lisette?”
Carter picked at a corner of the dish she’d just left to soak. He hadn’t been interested in eating the lasagne, but old wet cheese was apparently a delicacy he couldn’t resist. “At a sleepover. Remember?”
She did remember. Eleven-year-olds and their sleepovers were like vampires and their blood. Chip must have dropped her off. Lora didn’t remember giving permission, but it was probably harmless. Lisette still carried a unicorn stuffy. She wasn’t going to be getting into trouble.
“I need my boots, Mom. For football. Tryouts are tomorrow.”
Of course they were. It was a small mercy he was asking now, though, and not at seven in the morning when she’d been asleep for half an hour following a late shift.
“When did you last see them?”
Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. Last year?”
The odds that they’d still fit were low, but Lora really did not want to have to buy new boots right now. Maybe he could squeeze his toes in for practice tomorrow and then she could go to the store before her shift, or maybe after. Or maybe, if she was really lucky, during. One of the upsides of working for an eternal vampire was that Maddox had a loose sense of time. She tried not to take advantage of that.
“Check the attic,” she told Carter. “I’ll go check the garden shed; I think I moved some things out there over spring.”
Carter went in the direction of the attic, sort of. He mostly gravitated toward the television, where he was going to try to get a sip of Chuck’s beer while Chuck pretended he didn’t notice. It was a terrible habit, but Chuck insisted that the French drank wine from the time they were born.
She went out to the garden, flashlight in hand. The shed was right in the backyard, used to store everything she couldn’t deal with being in the house anymore. It had been installed to provide somewhere to store tools to plant seedlings and do general gardening, but she hadn’t had time to do any of it, and like everything else in her life, it had been generally consumed by the business of family.
The door opened reluctantly, squealing on hinges that really needed a squirt of lubricant.
Something moved in the darkness. Something was moving around in the garden shed. She forgot about the boots, and the wasted lasagne, and the pan that would never be the same again. Her cop instincts kicked in, every hair on the back of her neck standing uselessly erect.
She swung her flashlight around, expecting to see the shining eyes of a rat or maybe a raccoon. She did get eye shine, but not of the small animal variety. Human eyes shone back at her, and then, more creepily than simply being there, they blinked.
Reflex made her point her pistol at the intruder, except she didn’t have a pistol, so it was actually a plastic garden stake. Close enough.
“Who are you?”
Whoever it was, they were wounded. She could smell blood. It was thick and congealed. She could have easily missed it, given the stench coming from the nearby compost.
“You know who I am,” a familiar voice grunted.
“Ivan!”
There was no response. He squinted his eyes and tried to lift a filthy hand to cover them.
“Stop fucking pointing that thing in my face.”
She did not stop pointing the thing.
“I told you to stay away from my family. Don’t think I won’t fucking shoot you, Ivan. What are you doing here?”
“Dying. Mostly.” He gritted the words
She shone the light down and saw that he did indeed have a great many wounds. He was naked, and he was absolutely lacerated from the waist down. They smell wasn’t coming from the compost bin. It was coming from him. His wounds had turned septic. To say that he was dying was probably not an overstatement.
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. Three days? Hard to keep track of time when you're rotting.”
“You need to go to the hospital.”
“Can’t.”
“You can. And you will.”
“If you try to call anyone to help, I’ll shift and I’ll kill them.”
She sighed. This had gone from terrifying to terribly inconvenient.
“You can’t be here, Ivan.”
“I can’t be anywhere else.”
“I’ll call Maddox. He will know what to do.”
“Who do you think did this to me?” Ivan growled. “It was Maddox. He has a whole pack of wolves at his command now. Our son was only the first. There’s at least twenty there now. And they all want me dead.”