“She’s been my loyal companion for something like a century now,” Travis said. “Ever since Sunny and Nellie took over leading the clan. I retired to my domain in the woods, just me, Rosie, and enough weed and blood to go around. Can’t complain.”
Brennan swallowed around his dry throat, and the walls of the small shack somehow seemed closer than they’d been a minute ago. Now that he listened closer, the dog didn’t have a heartbeat. She was eerily silent.
Brennan wondered why an immortal being would choose to be alone, save for a vampire dog, in a shack in the middle of nowhere. But it occurred to him that maybe Travis hadn’t chosen this. That maybe everyone he’d ever loved had died and now Travis was the only one left to share war stories with new vampires and waste away.
While Brennan was pondering mortality, Travis had started answering one of Dom’s questions, and by the time Brennan tuned back into the conversation he seemed to be on a rant about the glory days of vampirism.
“—and Nellie probably talked smack and made nomads sound like a bunch of assholes,” Travis was saying, “but let me tell you, traveling the world with Sunny and Shea was the best century of my life.”
He paused, a faraway look in his eyes at the memory.
Travis had said not to overthink things, but that wasn’t something Brennan was capable of. He thought too much abouteverything.It was,according to his therapist, probably why he was depressed. In that moment, in that gross house that stank of weed and mold and god knew what else, Brennan felt disgusted with it all. Travis felt like a stark reminder that he wasn’thuman.None of them were, or would be again.
The part of his brain that sounded like his therapist was already troubleshooting, suggesting ways to cope as the familiar wave of panic and self-hate rose in his stomach.
Acknowledge the intrusive thought, then dismiss it.Except, that didn’t make his lack of humanity any less real. It wasn’t an intrusive thought if it was objectivelytrue.
Focus on your breathing and surroundings.Any of that would remind him of the people around him, the stench, the dog without a heartbeat, the sound of Travis’s voice around words he couldn’t focus on.
Brennan’s eyes snapped open as his swirling thoughts settled on the question he’d been afraid to ask all evening:What about Evelyn?
“—some war with the Germans, I don’t know, I was on a bender for most of the 1900s after ’28—”
Now that the thought was on his mind, he couldn’t bite it back.
“There’s a girl at my school who went missing the day we turned,” Brennan interrupted. “Evelyn VanMeter.”
Dom went still and stony. Travis looked at Brennan with amusement.
“Uh-oh,” Travis said, delighted, “he’s smarter than he looks.”
“What do you know?” Brennan pressed.
For a long moment, Brennan wasn’t sure whether anyone was going to answer, Travis smoking and grinning, Dom staring at her black-polished nails in her lap like they held the answers. “Evelyn was my sister,” Dom finally said. “She was in the wreck with me.”
Brennan’s blood turned to ice. If Travis couldn’t save her, then she must have died in the wreck. Unless—
The memory of Dom crying at brunch, the same round face and dark hair on Evelyn’s missing-person flyer, struck like a lightning bolt. He remembered the pink scrunchie on the ground, yards away from where the car had actually struck, now shoved in a drawer in his room. Dom’s sister—Evelyn—had died, and two new vampires emerged.
Brennan felt like a balloon was about to burst in his stomach, like he couldn’t breathe, or was breathing too much.
“Tell me she died in the wreck,” Brennan said.
“She was in the wreck with me—”
“And that’s how she died, right?” Brennan pushed, pleaded.
“My leg was broken and you were knocked out and bleedingsomuch. She went looking for help. She found Travis. He turned you to save your life.”
“And you, because you asked him to.”
His disgust at Dom’s choice must have been obvious, because Travis jumped in.
“Please, you think you were better off as a human?” Travis said. “Give it a few centuries, you’ll be thanking me.”
Brennan could barely comprehend the idea of existing in a few centuries, let alone being happy about it.
“Who killed Evelyn?” he demanded.
