The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(33)

“Still?”

Bran flushes and mumbles something I can’t make out. Then he clears his throat. “Vic, who has an actual guest room with a bed and a door and its own bathroom, has offered to put you up. The living room and kitchen will be a bit stuffed because the girls are here, but you’ll have the room and bathroom to yourself.”

“I thought his girls were all off at college?” Ian replies.

“They are. Inara, Victoria-Bliss, and Priya arrived today.”

Crap. I’d completely forgotten they were planning to come down. Normally Inara and Victoria-Bliss—survivors of the Garden and the sociopath who tried to make them as beautiful and ephemeral as butterflies—spend Halloween, and thus the anniversary of the explosion and subsequent madness, with Keely. Her kidnapping and rape ultimately proved the impetus for the Garden’s violent end, and all of the survivors are protective of her, Inara most of all. Priya was never connected to the Garden, except that she became friends with Inara and Victoria-Bliss through Eddison and the team.

This year, however, Keely Rudolph is a freshman at Stanford University, and while the girls would gladly have schlepped to California for her, she told them not to. She said she was ready to face it on her own. I have no doubt they’ll all spend the next few days glued to their phones and texting like crazy, but it’s a really good sign that she feels up to this. Being so young, and her plight being made so very public, Keely was victimized once by the Gardener and again by everyone else.

In the meanwhile, though, the girls already had the week off from work, so they decided to come down here, and Priya decided to join them. They live and work up in New York, and Priya splits her time between their apartment and the house she and her mother share in Paris. It means all three of them visit frequently.

Some families shatter with trauma, and some families shatter without it. Either way, Inara and Victoria-Bliss didn’t really have anything to go back to. So the team adopted them instead, and something about the combination of Vic’s warmth and compassion, Mercedes’s understanding and endless kindness, and Bran’s prickly protectiveness made them feel at home. It’ll be good to see them, despite everything going on.

Vic clears his throat to draw our attention; he stands in the doorway with a pair of women’s shoes in his hand.

The three of us look at him, baffled, then at the shoes, at my bare feet, and back at him.

Whoops.

“You left these in my office; you might want them for when you leave the building,” he says mildly, and walks closer to set them at my feet. “It’s probably best if we all head out,” he continues once he straightens. “Ian, if you’d rather stay with Eddison or Eliza, I won’t be offended, but the offer is there, and my wife and mother live to feed people.”

Ian absently combs his fingers through his beard and gives Bran a considering look. “Few years back, you came for a visit with a box of pastries,” he says.

“His mother made them.”

“Agent Hanoverian, I’m your grateful guest.”

Vic chuckles, and even Bran manages to smirk. “Then let’s all head out, and we’ll get you settled in. You two, go home. Shower. Change. Take a nap if you can. Dinner won’t be for three or four hours yet.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop that,” he chides, as he has for the last four years.

I shrug. I know he doesn’t like being called sir, but bad habits have a way of resurfacing in fatigue. “Okay?” I ask Bran.

“Good enough.”

Which means he wants some time alone. I can do that.

They wait for me to finish cleaning up and follow me out to the garage to make sure I leave. I suppose I can’t entirely blame them, obnoxious as it is.

Three hours was not enough sleep.

I’m not quite too tired to drive, but I’m tired enough I don’t feel entirely comfortable doing it. It’s the state of over-attention, where everything feels a little too real but also not-real. Liminal space, as Shira likes to call it. Points of transition where the sense of time and reality skews, making us more open to new experiences.

Speaking of Shira . . .

Up in the apartment, I drop my bag on the table, dig out the pack of cigarettes from the cabinet over the fridge, and grab my lighter from the coffee table drawer on my way to the sliding glass door that splits my apartment from the tiny balcony outside. The entire balcony is filled with a sturdy cloth hammock on a stand, and I collapse down onto it, lighting a cigarette.

Shira and I both picked up smoking in college, more out of defiance than any better reason. It was the same time I dyed my hair red and she went from ginger to brunette. Neither of us actually liked smoking all that much, but it was a habit, and college was stressful enough that it didn’t seem to be worth the hassle to quit. We cut ourselves back after college, holding each other accountable to one smoke a day. And then four years ago, not long after I moved here, she and her husband discovered they were expecting, and neither of us smoked for a while.

Which is when I realized there are some times, thankfully few and far between, when the cigarettes are actually useful. The times when I’m too over-trained to give into a panic attack but am also not really okay, when it feels like everything’s about to claw out of my skin and I need to stuff it back down into my bones where it belongs—then the act, the ritual of smoking a cigarette, is queerly calming.