Page 20 of Caution

Wouldn’t I remember being bitten?

But if you’re only half, maybe not?

And what didhalfeven mean?

Was the process incomplete?

Or did it simply only affect half of me?

So was it about DNA?

Was only one side of me susceptible to vampire… infection?

Or… was I born like this?

So mymotherwas the one who’d been a vampire? Or had she been bitten?

She couldn’t be a vampire. She died, and vampires were immortal, right?

Except for super specific circumstances.

Their specific weaknesses.

Like sunlight, and garlic, and wood stakes, and… what were the other stereotypes?

Silver.

But… Cassius had silver fangs.

So maybe the fiction didn’t line up with reality.

Assuming any of this was actually reality, and not some insane fever dream.

But it had to be that, right?

This is wild.

And Cassius still wasn’tactuallyanswering questions, though I had so many I could feel it eating away at me. Every answer just seemed to set more uncertainty into bloom.

The roses.

A sudden recollection hit me.

The way those creatures—he’d called them leeches—had shrank away from those roses I dropped and the explanation Cassius gave…

They couldn’t come near me because of the roses.

The Blacks wouldn’t let me plant a field of them anywhere near.

And then…

Damn.

Memories swept through me in a flood. Years and years of my mother surrounding us with roses, the way my little body had reacted to them as a child, the efforts she’d taken to build my immunity to them.

It wasn’t just because she loved the flowers so much.

She was protecting me.

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