Page 13 of Sins of the Fathers
Grady gave Dawson a look. “Yeah, she’s a Rottweiler, but she loves butterflies and belly rubs.”
“You’ve got to get past those teeth and that bark to get to the belly,” Dawson countered. “She looks fierce enough to make someone piss themselves. The rest is our little secret.”
They were quiet for a while as the miles sped past before Grady finally broke the silence. “Do you think the people who got killed by the ghosts knew what their ancestors did?”
Dawson seemed to think about the question for a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe some of them—but I doubt they realized that it caused what killed them. We like to think that the evil people do dies with them, but that saying about the sins of the fathers being visited onto the third and fourth generations? That’s true far too often.”
They came back to the house, and Grady ran a hot shower, peeling off his dirt and grass-stained clothing, eager to get the smell of smoke out of his hair and lighter fluid off his skin. He stepped under the hot water, and Dawson joined him a moment later, just as anxious to wash away the stench of death.
He didn’t expect Dawson to angle them face to face, pulling Grady into a tight embrace. “Scared the shit out of me, Grady, when that damn ghost tossed you around. I was afraid you wouldn’t get back up. And then when he tried to throw you into the fire—I think my heart stopped.”
Grady hugged him back just as fiercely. In the heat of the fight, he hadn’t had time to be afraid, but now that the danger was over and his mind replayed the scene in detail, Grady realized just how bad it might have been.
“I’m okay, Daw,” he murmured, needing skin-on-skin contact to ground him in the living world and the here-and-now. “You kept shooting and covered me. That’s what counted.”
Grady’s hands slid over Dawson’s shoulders and arms, down his chest and back, quick triage from long practice, checking for injuries.
“I’m going to have some technicolor bruises from how I landed, but no blood,” Dawson told him, doing the same careful assessment of Grady. They spoke in hushed tones like the shower was a confessional, a world apart from what lay outside the steam-filled room.
“Yeah, I’ll be black-and-blue for sure, but no bones broken,” Grady told him. “We’re safe. We’re alive. We’re together. That’s all that ever matters.”
Pressed against each other under the warm water, there was no mistaking that both their cocks were hard. Grady pushed Dawson so that his back was to the shower wall, and they wrapped their hands around their stiff dicks, fast and dirty, as they kissed with a clack of teeth and devouring mouths. Sex as proof of life, not seduction, to take the edge off and reassure that they were both here and breathing.
Afterward, they soaped and shampooed quickly, in a hurry to let the fear and desperation wash away with the jizz, dirt, and ashes. A brisk towel off and fresh clothes left Grady feeling human again, although the hunt had fucked with his emotions, and he knew he’d see the hanging tree in his dreams.
“Come on,” Dawson said. “Let’s get some ibuprofen before we’re moving like old men, and I’ll order pizza. Don’t feel much like cooking after all that.”
Dawson headed for the kitchen to phone in the order. Grady wandered into the spare bedroom as a thought surged to the fore, and he felt the need to validate a memory. He went into the closet and took down a storage box he hadn’t touched since he had cleaned up his father’s things after the werewolf attack.
Which is how Dawson found him later, sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, engrossed in his father’s hunting journal.
“You disappeared,” Dawson joked. “Thought I might have to send out a search team.” He paused, frowning as he spotted the book in Grady’s hands. “What’s that?”
Grady looked up and realized he’d zoned out for longer than he thought. “Sorry. Today reminded me of something Dad told me about a long time ago, and after we got out of the shower, I wanted to look it up and see what he wrote about it. I guess I got a little distracted.”
Dawson sat down next to him on the floor. “The pizza still has another fifteen minutes before it’ll be here. You can bring anything you want into the living room—easier on your back than sitting here.”
“I really didn’t expect to spend so much time,” Grady replied. “There were some vampire hunts he did before we worked together, and I wondered how his lore squared up against our not-vamps today. Not as much in common as I thought, but then…”
“What?” Dawson’s concerned tone suggested that he picked up on Grady’s mood.
“I never looked through all of Dad’s notes before. I kept my hunting diary on my computer and bugged him to let me transcribe his, but he always had a reason to put me off. If we needed anything from his old hunts, he looked it up. And then when he died, I couldn’t bring myself to go through it because the memories hurt too much.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming…”
Grady nodded and looked up with wet eyes. “Dad’s parents were killed in an explosion. Which is how he ended up being adopted by Grandpa Michael and becoming a King. But as time went on, he became convinced that their deaths were retaliation for one of their hunts. And, Daw, he believed that your father started to investigate, and that’s what got your parents killed.”
Grady met Dawson’s gaze and saw the shock that mirrored his own. Grief, too, although Dawson’s parents had been dead for seven years. Grady knew that mourning his father swelled and receded like the tide, better some days and worse on others, but never gone.
“Holy shit,” Dawson finally said in a voice just above a whisper. “What if he was right?”
“If he was right,” Grady said, surprised his voice sounded level when his feelings were a mess, “was there more to the werewolf hunt that killed Dad than we thought? Was he—werewe—supposed to be next?”
“Knox got roofied,” Dawson replied, and Grady could practically see the synapses firing behind his eyes as his mind linked information. “Random or related?”
“And what does Denny know?” Grady breathed. “Did his brothers keep him out of it—or did he hide what he knows to keep us safe?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Fuck—my brain hurts.”
The doorbell made both of them jump. “Pizza,” Dawson said with a weak smile, but Grady noticed that he slipped his gun into the back of his waistband when he went to open the door.
