Consume

CHAPTER 25

"I'll check the entrance," Savannah whispered before disappearing.
Rubbing her forearms, Emily asked, "Are they back already? We should get out of here."
"Still clear," Savannah called out in a stage whisper from the living room.
Emily and I frowned at each other. "Maybe a spell on the apartment somewhere?" I suggested.
Emily looked at the kid, crossing her arms above her rounded tummy and rubbing a finger across her lips. "Why can't he remember?"
I saw her line of thought. "A memory spell. It's got to be."
"Mmm-hmm. But where?" I glanced around the room. It was pretty Spartan in here, just a desk with some papers and pens, the small f lat screen on the wall and the XBox console with a short stack of games beside it.
"If someone doesn't want him to remember that night, they'd have to put the spell directly on something he'd keep close to him at all times."
I looked the kid over, then froze. His left wrist sported a round watch on a black leather band. It had to be charmed. He wasn't wearing anything else except clothes, which I doubted anyone would charm since he'd change them daily.
I unfastened the watch and lifted one of the bands. On the tan underside of the leather was stamped a Celtic braid design.
"Looks like a vamp ward," Emily said. "Could be double charmed as a memory confuser, too, though."
Remembering how one of Emily's vamp wards had knocked Savannah out and nearly killed her, I cringed. Good thing we'd made those vamp ward blockers before coming here. But it was another reason we'd have to hurry this interrogation along before the vamp ward wore out the blockers or vice versa. If this vamp ward was anything like the ones my mother once made for me and Emily, it would trigger a silent alarm to its maker to signal that the ward had just been taken off.
"Mac, you need to be quick now. Can you remember what happened when you got home?"
He shook his head.
I looked at Emily.
"Try taking it farther away from him."
I whispered Savannah's name. She appeared at my side, took the watch and disappeared back to the living room.
"How about now?" she questioned.
"Mac, now can you remember?"
The frown melted from Mac's face. "Whoa. Yeah, now I can. I was walking up the street toward my house, and I saw two guys leave my house and cross the street. They stopped by a big black SUV to talk. Something about them looked wrong. That weird feeling got stronger." His heartbeat sped up, its thumping filling the room. I swallowed hard and tried not to pay attention to it. "I crouched down on the sidewalk and snuck closer to them, using the parked cars to hide me, so I could hear what they were saying."
Emily and I both leaned in closer. "What were they saying? Did you recognize any of them?"
Savannah reappeared in the room without the watch, which she must have left in the living room. But instead of joining us by the bed, she circled it and opened the window. Don't listen to his heartbeat, she told me silently. It'll trigger the bloodlust in you if the fear pheromones haven't already. He's afraid of the vamps he's describing. One of them must have been Gowin.
"Go on," I said, working not to inhale through my nose as Mac's heartbeat seemed to grow still louder.
"They were talking about 'the next hit' and how it was all too easy. One of them wanted to try to find me, but the other two said something about blood trees and how they needed to go somewhere safe for a while first."
"Blood trees?" Emily said.
"Blood memories," Savannah said. "He probably just heard them wrong."
"What did they look like?" I asked him.
"One of them was short with light hair, pale skin, red lips and teeth, and white eyes like yours. He was kind of blurry around the edges, like he had some kind of spell on him that was trying to hide him but it wasn't strong enough or something. The other guy I recognized. He's Mr. Williams."
I froze. "Are you sure, Mac?"
Mac slowly nodded. "He came back later to pick me up from the police station after I found my parents and called 911 for help and the police took me there. I didn't want to go with him, but he grabbed my wrist and then...and then..." He frowned. "And then I woke up here with you guys. Right?"
Whoa. That must have been one heck of a memory confusion spell Mr. Williams had put on Mac's watch to make him lose whole months of time.
"How could it have lasted this long without wearing out?" I asked, focusing on the memory confusion charm because the thought of Mr. Williams teaming up with a vampire was just too much for my mind to accept.
"The foster parents," Savannah whispered. "They must be reenergizing it to keep it going. Which means..."
"They're in on it," Emily finished for her. "Or at least partially."
"Mac, let me make sure I understand," I said, forcing myself to speak human slow as the second rush of adrenaline made me feel like I was trapped inside a slow motion movie. "Are you saying Mr. Williams and a vampire murdered your parents? And then Mr. Williams took you from the police station afterward and you don't remember anything that's happened since?"
He nodded, his frown returning. "Why? Has it been a long time? What month is it?"
Emily waved an impatient hand at him. "Relax. We'll get you caught up later. We don't have time for that now." She sighed and turned to me. "Well, this explains how Mr. Williams knew where to hit the vampire council headquarters. Gowin must have told him its location."
"But why would Gowin team up with him?" Savannah said. "I read Gowin's mind that last night in the Circle. He didn't need Mr. Williams to tell him where the descendants were. He found that information himself when he broke into the Keepers' records on the Clann genealogy. And once he was filled up on Clann blood and learned how to do simple Clann spells, he would have been able to attack descendants without help."
"Unless he needed help for the first hit," Emily said. "Weren't the Griffins the first victims?"
I nodded. "So Mr. Williams helped him get close enough to kill them, and he took it from there."
"But why would Mr. Williams help him?" Savannah asked, pinpointing the part I was having the most trouble understanding. "And why would Gowin tell him where the council headquarters were when that would endanger Gowin, too?"
Gowin's half of the equation was easy to figure out. "Gowin had to trade something for Mr. Williams's help," I thought out loud. "Maybe he figured Mr. Williams could take out the council if Gowin couldn't manage to do it on his own at the Circle."
"And Mr. Williams teamed up with Gowin to help get rid of Dad, and he was supposed to kill you, too," Emily said. "He thought that would clear his path to becoming Clann leader. But he forgot about the rule allowing Mom to take over in Tristan's place."
"But Mr. Williams hates our kind," I said. "He'd never voluntarily speak to a vampire, much less help a vamp kill his own people."
"Not unless it was the only strategy he could come up with to become Clann leader," Emily said. "Think about it. How else would he be able to take out both you and Dad? Neither of you trusted him enough to let him get close enough somewhere alone to do it himself. He had to have help from a totally unexpected angle. Maybe he even figured he'd kill Gowin once Gowin was no longer useful to him."
"But to murder fellow descendants..." I murmured.
"Tristan, ask him if his parents were anti-vamp," Savannah asked, her voice soft.
I repeated the question for Mac.
"No. And that was the worst part of it. Seeing their necks ripped out like that after they spent years supporting your father's peace treaty with the vampires... They believed peace was safer for everyone in the Clann than another war."
Savannah's and my eyes met as the final piece clicked into place. Mr. Williams saw the chance to temporarily cross enemy lines and make an alliance that helped him not only remove what he believed to be all competition to Clann leadership, but to also take out a few vamp sympathizers in the process. And then he'd suppressed his only surviving victim's memory, killed my mother and framed Savannah and me for her death to help cover his tracks and ensure the vote for him as Clann leader. He'd probably been banking on the fact that his reputation as a vamp hater would clear him of any suspicion in helping Gowin behind the scenes to take out his own people.
If not for that one mental slip around Emily, he might have gotten away with it.
Outside the apartment, car doors slammed. Savannah disappeared. A second later she whispered in the living room, "Two people are headed toward the stairs."
"Mac, you are freed of my hold," I muttered, putting some willpower into it to end all my spells on him.
"What are you doing?" Emily protested. "Are you crazy? What happened to making him forget we were ever here?"
"We can't leave him here, Em. He's just as much a victim in all of this as we are."
Mac blinked. His eyes widened as he sucked in a sharp breath of air.
I stepped back and held up my hands palms-out. "We're not here to hurt you, I swear. All we want is to help. Do you remember what happened to your parents?"
His eyes narrowed. "Yeah. Yeah, I do." He cursed under his breath.
"We'll leave right now. You can pretend you never saw us," I said even as my ears picked up the sound of footsteps thudding along the cement balcony toward us. "Or you can come with us, tell everyone in the Clann what you saw and help us take him down and make him pay for what he did to both our parents. Your choice."
"Tristan," Savannah hissed, her voice barely a sound at all as she reappeared in the bedroom doorway.
Silence on the balcony as the descendants discovered the broken door. Needles of pain ramped up over my skin in warning as they gathered power.
"Time's up. Decide." I looked at the girls and jerked my head at the window. "Back exit?"
Emily f linched but followed Savannah over to the window, where Savannah put her hands on the edges of the screen and looked to me for a sign.
"I'll help," Mac said, rolling across his bed and jumping up to stand with us. When I held out a hand, though, he hesitated. "No offense, but if you're planning on carrying me, could she do it instead?" He smiled shyly at Savannah, his cheeks turning pink.
Jealousy, quick and pointless, f looded me.
"Sure," Savannah said with a smile. "Wrap an arm around my waist like this." She put her arm around him and he followed suit.
Whatever it takes to get him on our side, she thought, throwing a meaningful glare over the kid's head at me.
Sure. Within reason. I grabbed my sister and nodded at Savannah to push out the screen. Then Emily stepped on my foot and I jumped with the other out the window and down two stories to the cement below, making my free leg absorb all of the impact from both our bodies.
"The baby okay?" I muttered while Savannah brought Mac through the window and down to the ground beside us.
Emily frowned, touched her stomach with one hand and the small of her back with the other. "I think so. But I must have landed wrong, because my back is killing me. I'll be okay, though."
"Hold your breath. This is going to be fast."
"Mac, hold your breath, okay?" Savannah warned.
Shouting overhead, then blue orbs erupted from the window in our direction. I fired one back with my free hand to create some cover fire while Savannah took off in a vamp blur with the kid.
"Mr. Colbert, we're headed back fast. Meet us there," I said for the benefit of our listeners on the other end of the cell phone call, which a quick glance showed was still connected.
With one last energy orb fired over my shoulder at the descendants leaning out the second-story window, I vamp blurred up the side street then down Front Street, taking the bridge a second later and arriving at the trailer a second after that.
Savannah's parents were there seconds later, Ms. Evans joining in on the gasps of the other two humans even as Mr. Colbert jumped into the truck and got us back on the road.
When the humans had caught their breaths again and everyone had settled down around the dinette table, I looked at Emily and said, "Where to next?"
Her mouth thinned into a tight line. "Now we call every descendant on that list and see how fast they can get to the Circle for a little Clann hearing."
"We-I mean, they-have those?" I said.
"Sure. Dad talked about them once or twice. The Clann can hold emergency meetings, or hearings, to decide how to punish a descendant for breaking Clann law. The morning Ms. Evans died was an informal one." Her tone drifted off as she gave Savannah a sympathetic grimace.
"So we just hide out with Mac until all the descendants can travel to the Circle?" Savannah frowned. "I don't like it. It'll take too long for everyone to get there, maybe even days. In the meantime, Mac's foster parents will have already warned Mr. Williams that we have him. We'll lose the element of surprise."
Emily blew out a long sigh. "Well, how else are we supposed to get a lot of descendant witnesses there to hear Mac's story? We have no idea who's on Mr. Williams's side, so we've got to get as many descendants as possible to hear him all at once before Mr. Williams can have him silenced again."
"What about doing it online?" Mac suggested, speaking for the first time since we'd reached the trailer.
We all looked at him in surprise. His cheeks turned bright red, making the zits on his cheeks appear purple in contrast.
"Good idea," Savannah said. "We could record him telling his story then send it to all the descendants. Then we could keep him safely hidden and Mr. Williams couldn't do anything to stop us from spreading the word."
"Yeah, but video doesn't let anyone read his mind and verify he's telling the truth," Emily said.
"I thought you said memory can be faked," I said.
"Yeah, if you're good like me. Mac's fourteen-"
"Fifteen in two months," Mac said.
"Whatever. He's not that good." Emily waved a hand in the air as if scrubbing a dry-erase board clean. "We need at least some witnesses in person to hear Mac."
"What if we do both?" Savannah said. "We could gather a bunch of witnesses and record both his story and their verifying that he's telling the truth."
"Better yet, what if we do it live?" Emily muttered, her fingers drumming the table. "When Mom had to take over leading the Clann, I talked her into trying out some twentyfirst-century technology. Namely, online conferencing tools, which I set up on her laptop."
"We don't have her lap-" I started to stay.
"No, but I can set up any laptop with the same program," Emily said. "All I do is set it up, call all the descendants ahead of time and tell them to watch their email boxes for some huge breaking Clann news of an emergency type, then when we start the meeting I'll send out an email blast to invite them all to join the online conference so they can watch everything live."
"I'll get mine." Ms. Evans jumped up and hurried into her bedroom, bracing her hands along the pantry door then the wall opposite it, followed by the bathroom door to keep from falling as the trailer swayed on the road.
Emily winced and rubbed at the small of her back again.
"Hey, sis, are you all right?" That was the third or fourth time I'd seen her reacting to back pain.
She froze, her eyes going wide, then her whole body sort of melted into relaxation again. "You know, I think I just might be having false labor pains."
All I heard was "labor pains." "The baby's coming? Now?"
She quickly shook her head, her blond curls bouncing wildly around her face. "No, I said false labor pains. I read about them. They're pretty common. It's too soon to be real labor, and besides, my water hasn't broken. Don't worry about it, the books all said they'd go away. Let's stay focused on getting this conference call set up."
Ms. Evans returned a few seconds later with her laptop and set it on the dinette table.
"So has anyone decided where I should be driving us to?" Mr. Colbert's voice said from my pocket.
I'd forgotten about the still-open line of communication.
Grabbing the phone, I held it up and said, "Yeah. Looks like we're headed back to Jacksonville."
Ms. Evans sank down onto the dinette bench, propped her elbows on the table, and dropped her head into her hands. "Oh, good Lord, not again."
I looked at Emily. "Tell everyone who is close enough to Jacksonville to go to the Circle for an emergency meeting. Then call Mr. Williams last and tell him we'll meet him there in a couple of hours. Tell him we're tired of running and ready to turn ourselves in. But tell him we'll only show up if he's there in person. We won't answer to anyone but the Clann leader himself."