Page 2 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
On me? Well, I’d tried to comb down the part of my hair that had been sticking up in the back when I woke up that morning, but I wasn’t sure how much luck I’d had. My jeans had holes in the knees, not from artful distressing pre-purchase, but from years of wear. I had on a clean shirt, but it was a T-shirt I’d gotten in high school, so it was starting to get holes along the collar. The tan leather motorcycle jacket definitely wasn’t helping, but damn it all, I drove a motorcycle. It was a sensible choice. Even if Mother’s usual argument against it was more about the color than the style. Apparently black was the only color leather jackets were allowed to be.
Mother, too, noticed the fact that my fashion sense didn’t live up to her standards, because she always did. She looked me over, her lips pursing in dissatisfaction. “Is that a shirt for...some kind of children’s breakfast cereal?”
Technically, it was not. It was a sexual innuendo about redheaded men being...well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell my mother that. Most people didn’t want to tell their Boomer or Gen X parents about sexual innuendos they thought would scandalize them. My mother? I had no idea how old she was, but “she’s from a different time” had never been more valid than it was with her.
Given her collection of ridiculously expensive and historically fascinating objects, I suspected she was by far the oldest vampire in the city. Like, Roman Empire old. Not that we discussed it. Whenever anyone asked about her age in mypresence, she always laughed and said “a lady never tells,” but in that sharp way that actually said “shut the fuck up and stop asking questions you don’t want the answers to.”
Anyway, all that to say that I smiled at her and pretended innocence. “What can I say? They’re magically delicious.”
She scrunched up her nose as though maybe she got the joke after all, shaking her head and sighing. “I suppose it will have to do.”
And that?
That was concerning.
My mother often, if not quite always, disapproved of what I wore. What I drove. What I ate. Basically every aspect of my life. But that comment implied there was something else happening. Something my clothes were required to “do.”
“If you’d told me to dress up?—”
“You would have told me you couldn’t make it,” she finished for me, and I winced, because she wasn’t exactly wrong.
I did own a button down shirt or two, but like...what was the point of being an adult, and being in charge of your own life, if you had to keep fulfilling other people’s ridiculous expectations?
I didn’t own a tuxedo, didn’t eat lima beans, and slept at night when I was tired, not during the day when my mother’s people expected it of me. I was maybe the only person in the world who was a morning person out of a sense of rebellion.
The important part was that I wasn’t going to change myself to make my mother happy. It wouldn’t work anyway. Growing up with Fiona Knight, I’d learned the one magical truth that had made my whole adulthood easier: it was impossible to truly please my mother, so I shouldn’t even try.
I shrugged and followed her into the house, through the great hall and into the dining room, where there was a guy already sitting at the table. He turned and stood as we walked in, andthe dude was...well, he was fucking hot. That was no surprise if he was someone from her work, because vampires were almost always hot. Not only did vamps tend to choose the most attractive partners among humans to turn, but something about the change somehow brought out everyone’s most attractive features, even if they hadn’t been great beauties beforehand.
With this guy, I suspected the change hadn’t had to work too hard. He had dark hair, almost black, that fell around his face in long strands. Stubble that looked like some combination of artistic and “screw it, I don’t feel like shaving today.” The blackest eyes I’d ever seen.
Black eyes. That was weird. Instantly, part of me wanted to get closer, to get a better look at?—
No way.
No fucking way.
I whipped around to look at my mother, and she was closing the dining room doors behind us. It gave me a great view of the back of her dress, which dipped down almost far enough to show that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Which was definitely a thing a guy wanted to know about his mom.
As she turned back to face us, she gave me a pained smile that said, very strongly, “shut up and don’t make a scene.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’m putting off a date for this, you know.”
She lifted a single perfect red brow at me, but didn’t call my bluff. “That’s lovely, dear. You’ll have to invite them over for dinner sometime if it works out. Lady or gentleman?”
And I couldn’t really answer that question, because the whole thing was a lie. So I went for my personal default. “Guy.”
She nodded and motioned me over to my usual chair. “Let me know when, and I’ll have Meg make us all dinner.”
Okay, so that was all...something. It meant that whatever this was, she hadn’t intended it to be a blind date. Probably. Ofcourse, she had never much liked me hanging around vampires anyway, so setting me up with one would have been weird.
Still, you never knew with my mother. She hadn’t become as powerful as she was by being simple and straightforward. No, I sometimes suspected the word “Byzantine” had been invented to refer to her. And unlike most people who thought things like that, I might actually have a mother old enough for it to be true.
The hot guy nodded to my mother as she reached the head of the table, and waited for her to sit down before reseating himself. “Senator Knight,” he rumbled, a hint of some kind of accent there. Irish, maybe?
I glanced down at my T-shirt with the horrible leprechaun caricature and tried not to cringe.
When I got to the table, my mother gave me her best serene smile while I seated myself, motioning to the man. “Flynn dear, this is Davin Byrne. He’s just joined us from the Dublin region. Davin, this is my son, Flynn Knight.”
