Page 59 of Slayer Mom
“Maybe. I wasn’t around back then. You could ask your husband.”
I sighed heavily and banged my head against the door. “What kind of old creep hits on eighteen-year-old girls?”
“Were you that young? That is peculiar. Most eighteen-year-olds are remarkably obtuse. I prefer forty-years old and older.”
“How old are you?”
He smiled at me. “Older than I look.”
“I asked him to marry me.”
He raised his brows. “Did you?”
“Yeah. We’d been hanging out for a year, and one night we were lying on the windshield of my crap car looking at stars. He was telling me about the different myths about the constellations, and I just thought that I wanted to spend the rest of my life like that. What was he thinking? I vant to suck her blood?”
“He dated you for a year?”
“Not really. He wouldn’t date me. He’d do thingswith me, but nothing romantic. He was always reading big old books and looking puzzled when I crashed him at the pizza place. He was so cute when I stole his glasses, so vulnerable and helpless. I loved it. I loved him. He was probably checking out Tom, the slayer. That makes sense. He wouldn’t have hung around for me, at least not at first. Tom was training me in the ways of the slayer way back then. I guess there must be something about me. Maybe my parents are actually important people, not loser crack addicts like my foster parents told me they were.”
“Maybe so. Morning’s coming. With nightfall, the Queen rises. I’d appreciate it if you did what you could to put the king back together again.”
He climbed on his bike and headed out with a low rumble. Hazen should get a bike like that. It was pretty sexy.
I sat there drinking my decaf pumpkin spice and thinking deep thoughts. I drank until it was gone. I probably shouldn’t drink things from a werewolf alpha who had sent two of his men to kidnap me, but he seemed like a decent guy. If the zombie queen was rising tomorrow night, I needed to bring my family together. My monster family. And I needed to clean up the water in the kitchen. What kind of mother was I? The kind that cleaned up messes, not the kind that made them.
Right. Time to put on some pants. Tom could probably find me some real protective leather, not the cheap pleather crap that was past the point of no return.
I tightened my belt and went back inside to face reality and wrestle it back into the family I’d given my life for.
sixteen
. . .
First thingI did was throw my coffee cup at Hazen. In the split-second of distraction, I jumped on Wat, knocking us both onto the couch. I wrapped my legs around him and waved the handkerchief around.
“Hazen, now is not the time to do this. Wat, chill out or you’re going back to that special school on the next plane. Lock, stand up and stop looking guilty. No, you shouldn’t have almost killed me, but these things happen. You’re still my son, and I still love you. Now, can we all talk about how we’re going to take down the zombie queen once and for all? It would be ideal if we got her in a situation where she was forced to remove the marking, so I didn’t have to bathe so much, but I realize that may not be possible. So, what is possible? I have no idea. I need illumination. Hazen, can you give me that?”
Hazen was staring at the coffee cup in his hand, like he hadn’t heard me. “We’re all monsters,” he finally answered. “What difference does it make if we’re zombies or vampires?”
I exhaled heavily. That sounded an awful lot like self-pity. “Really? You lied to me throughout our whole marriage. You’re definitely a monster, but you can learn to be honest, and I can try to understandyou. We’re definitely going to marriage counseling after all of this. I mean, if your Grand Royal Master deigns to do that kind of crap with a humble exterminator.” I scowled at him. He could have been less of a complete jerk as the Grand Master, unless he couldn’t have.
He raised his head slowly, and his face melted into something between the harsh lines of the Grand Master I knew and the more human Hazen, only so very pale, and with such very dark eyes. “You are willing to consider being married to a monster?”
Dang, he was freaky. He didn’t look like the Hazen I knew, but he was, and if he was also something else that I didn’t know, well, I wouldn’t know until I knew whether he was someone I wanted to live with, but I wouldn’t know until I tried. If that even made sense.
“Yes. I love you. I love our children. I want to try, although I have no idea what that looks like. I’m not staying in an abusive relationship, and if you mess with my mind, Wat will let me know, and then I’ll probably stake you somewhere tender and then leave you. But trying is a good place to start.”
“You shouldn’t trust him,” Wat said, scowling terrifically with that really creepy red stare.
I sighed heavily. I would have to get used to monster children, too. “What do you think that he’s going to do to me?”
“Turn you into a vampire.” He was so matter-of-fact. “That’s what he’s been doing. Letting you drink his blood? Drinking yours? He wants to turn you gradually, so you’re less likely to die, but it is what he wants.”
“I do too,” Lock said, suddenly. “If you were a vampire, I wouldn’t want to drink your blood. You wouldn’t be so hard to kill. You’d stop getting older.What are the drawbacks? I can’t think of a single one.”
“I’m not going to turn your mother,” Hazen said, still staring at me, like he was trying to bore a hole through my brain, or like I was the most important thing in the universe and he was incapable of looking away. Both options were super uncomfortable. “Lucy, I won’t turn you unless you ask me to. I promise. Wat, I swear. I did adapt her memories so that she forgot about Lock. That did change her, not the memories as much as the attack. It hurt part of her soul to have one she loved rip her apart. I wasn’t aware that he was my birth son until he called me to tell me that he’d killed her.” His voice cracked. I’d never heard his voice crack before. He blinked, one very intentional blink that looked brighter, maybe watery, maybe bloody, I don’t know. “No vampire has ever had children before. It shouldn’t be possible, but it is, and I love you. I will always love you. I won’t ever stop, because I’ll live forever.” He made it sound so epically sad.
“Don’t believe him,” Wat said, scowling at Hazen, then Lock, then me. “I mean, about the living forever part, you can believe that, but not the other stuff.”
