Page 48 of Inked & Bloodbound

She sends a message back.Cassini, where are you?

It’s working.I will come to you. Just tell me where to go.

She gives me the address of her stepdad’s place, and the location hits me like a physical blow. It’s just under two hours away, and I can already see the first hints of dawn creeping across the eastern horizon. If I leave now and drive flat out, I might make it with minutes to spare. If I hit traffic, road construction, or even a slow truck on the interstate, I’ll be nothing but ash before I reach her.

It’s suicide. Pure, reckless suicide.

I’m coming.I soothe.

No, please don’t. It’s almost dawn?—

I’m coming.I slam the trunk shut and slide behind the wheel.

4:47 a.m. Sunrise in Austin is at 6:23, which gives me maybe ninety minutes of full darkness. San Antonio is seventy-eight miles of interstate and city streets, and my car can do it in under two hours if I don’t let up on the accelerator.

The smart play is to wait. Find somewhere underground, sleep through the day, and see her tomorrow night. That’s what a reasonable man would do.

But as I fire up the engine, the truth hits me.

I stopped being reasonable the moment I first heard her voice in my head.

The speedometer climbs past eighty, then ninety, then higher. In the rearview mirror, the sky continues its slow blush toward dawn, and I press the accelerator harder.

I’m coming.

16

LILY

Ihaven’t slept. How could I?

My mother was a medium, and it drove her so insane that she had to numb the pain of her gift just to survive. She did that so well that it killed her anyway. If she couldn’t make it, then how the fuck am I expected to get through this?

It’s one of many tough pills I’ve had to swallow in the last twenty-four hours. The convenient story I’ve told myself for over two decades is an incomplete one. I had some of the pieces, but not everything I needed to paint a full picture. My dear mother made a living hustling and stealing from dead people: vampires.

The thought is too large, too barbed at the edges to comprehend. It’s like I can’t fit the whole thing in my brain; the shape is wrong. It moves through my chest like a violent, spiked thing with sharp edges that refuses to settle.

When I came looking for answers, this isn’t what I expected to find.

Cassini is on his way here, and while I’m grateful for that, I’m still not sure why I called him. But since he’s come into my life, things have been better. Worse, too, but I’ve never felt so alive. Why I reached through The Veil to find him, I don’t know, but only hewould understand this. Only he would have the answers to the questions pinging around in my head like a pinball.

I gnaw on the corner of my nail, pulling at a tiny sliver of dead skin between my teeth and causing it to bleed a little. My old bedroom window faces east, and I’ve been stationed here for hours watching the horizon. The sky is already starting to blush at the edges. Dawn is coming, and he’s still not here.

Cassini. Please be okay. Please tell me you’re okay.

I take a long drag on the stale Marlborough light and lean my head out of the bedroom window to blow the smoke into the last dregs of the night. When a small cloud comes floating back in, I hurriedly flap my hands to shoo it away. I haven’t smoked since I was a teenager, and even then, I was casual at best, only ever stealing puffs from boyfriends or taking them from Pat’s jacket to share with friends. I guess at some point I stashed a half-smoked pack in the back of my closet, along with a cute little cat lighter.

Smoking this ancient cigarette doesn’t soothe me in the way it should, but it’s reassuring. It feels like the kind of thing you’re supposed to do when you get a big piece of news—a way to reconcile a reckoning that turns your reality upside down and forces you to rebuild your worldview from scratch.

I stub the butt on the sill and try reaching Cassini again. I text a “please let me know you’re okay?” message and when there’s no response, I call out to him in my mind, but there’s nothing. Just the crackle of radio silence across the psychic void that somehow connects us. Either he’s not accepting incomings, or he’s concentrating too hard on driving to respond.

Or he’s already gone.

The thought makes my stomach drop. What if he didn’t make it? What if I’m sitting here waiting for someone who’s already nothing but ash scattered across some arid Texas highway? What if he’s dead—more dead—and it’s all my fault?

I get up and start pacing, chewing the inside of my cheek as I march back and forth in front of the window, occasionally pausing and straining to listen at the faintest hint of a noise that could be acar. But there’s nothing but the soft cooing of a mourning dove drifting through the breeze.

Cassini. I need you to be okay. I can’t do this without you.