The Vampire Hunter's Daughter: Complete Collection(68)

Alice stared down at the table, and Oscar nodded.

“It’s okay. I’m here,” Drew said, but it was more to reassure them because neither of us would have left them alone, anyway.

I nodded. “All right. Let's go then.”

I grabbed my crutches, and Luke picked his keys off the hook by the door.



I opened the door to Gavin’s room and expected to see him lying there like before. He was lying there like I’d left him, but I was surprised to see a blond-haired woman sitting in the chair beside his bed. She must have heard me hobbling through the door on my crutches, because she lifted her head and turned toward me. When she did, I saw Drew’s eyes stare back at me, and I realized she must be Gavin and Drew’s mother.

“Um… hi.” I wasn’t sure what to say. I was biased against her already, and I didn’t even know her. “I just came to see how Gavin was doing today.”

“You must be Chloe.” She didn’t smile or offer to shake hands with me.

Maybe she was mad at me. The only reason Gavin got shot was because of me, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable she might be mad at me. I looked down at the sterile white floor and fiddled with my hands. I mumbled. “Uh, I’m sorry Gavin got shot.”

She made a noise that sounded sort of like an ‘uh huh’.

So I continued to babble. “But it was nice of him to come and help rescue me.”

Gavin’s mother nodded and reached for his hand. “Yes. Thankfully, he is going to be all right. He'll live to hunt another day. We take this risk on every mission.” She eyeballed me and pinched her lips together. “Hopefully, next time, his head will be in the right place, and he might avoid being injured. Not to mention the fact that he never should have been on an unauthorized mission in the first place.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about, but I think she blamed me, and maybe Drew, for Gavin being in the hospital.

It was time to go.

“Well, I gotta go. Will you tell him I stopped by?”

“Of course,” she told me with a little bit of snoot coating her voice. She turned back to Gavin, basically dismissing me.

“Well… bye.” As smoothly as I could, I backed away from her and out the door. Once I was back in the hallway, I couldn’t help but mutter, “Nice meeting you, too.”

Man, I really liked that woman less and less, and I barely knew her at all.

Luke was waiting for me at the nurses’ station. He leaned on the counter and chatted it up with a couple of the pretty, dark-haired ones and drank coffee out of a little paper cup. I guess he’d made some friends while he was laid up in here after the attack.

“I’m ready,” I told him and hobbled on by.

“What happened?” he asked, hurrying to catch up with me.

I stopped at the elevator and slammed the button for the main floor. “Nothing…”

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

The elevator door opened. “His mom was there.” We both stepped inside. “She just seemed… rude, I guess.”

Luke didn’t look surprised. I guess he probably didn’t like her much either, considering how close he was with Drew. I couldn’t see him defending her after knowing Drew all that time.

“Daphne Turner is…,” he paused, trying to find the right words, “somewhat strange.” He didn't look certain of his choice of words.

“Well, I didn’t really like her much, just from what I’d heard about her… and now, her being rude to me, too, didn’t help her case any.”

The elevator doors swooshed open, and Luke held them while I hobbled out.

“Drew told you about Gavin?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but he wouldn’t have if I hadn’t made him.”

“It is a big deal for him to tell you about all that.”

“I know,” I told him. That was the end of the conversation.

We crossed the hospital lobby and exited through the front doors. I felt bad for Drew, but maybe he was better off without a mother like her in his life. I felt horrible even thinking something like that. No one should be without a mother, but I couldn’t imagine who would want one that had the ability to leave her child as a baby and then live in the same town with him without ever trying to make contact.

I felt like smacking her.

When we arrived home, Drew paced the living room again while Alice and Oscar sat on the couch and watched him. They looked cozy sitting there together. Oscar had his arm thrown over the back of the couch behind Alice. Well, I couldn’t really complain. She needed comfort and attention, and Oscar was nice, and hot, too.

“What’s going on?” I asked when Luke and I came through the door. “How long has he been doing that?”

I leaned my crutches against the end of the couch and flopped down next to Alice.

Drew didn’t give either of them a chance to answer. “We had to drive up to the gate and meet with some guy who is apparently a courier for Trevor’s lawyer.”

I felt my jaw drop, and a quick glance showed Luke’s hanging open, too. For a minute, I couldn’t find my voice. The first of my concerns, before anything else, was the safety of everyone here. I worried we had unintentionally brought the danger to them.

“What did he want?” Luke asked.