Page 108 of Road Trip with a Vampire

“Before we move on tothe next item on the agenda,” Becky began. “Zelda. What’s wrong?”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. We were in the middle of our first all-partners meeting since I’d returned from Indiana, but I hadn’t been able to focus on anything either of my partners had been saying. Was it that obvious?

“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied. “Why?”

“You’ve been a million miles away all afternoon,” Becky said.

“Not just this afternoon,” Lindsay interjected. “You’ve been mentally in outer space ever since getting home two weeks ago.”

Lindsay wasn’t wrong. But I couldn’t face discussing the reasons for it with my friends. “That’s not true,” I said.

Lindsay fixed me with her patentedstop bullshitting mestare. “Okay then. Fine. What have we been talking about the past half an hour?”

I looked down at my notepad. I normally took a lot of notes during these weekly team meetings, mostly because my memory wasn’t as great as it had been a few hundred years ago. Today, though, my notepad was completely blank, save for some doodles that looked distressingly like the inside of that Blossomtown warehouse.

Damnit.

“We’ve been talking about…” I floundered for something to say. “The…goat yoga event?” Seemed like as good an answer as any and reasonably likely to be true.

Becky rolled her eyes. “I knew you weren’t paying attention.”

Crap.“We weren’t talking about the goat yoga event?” I asked weakly.

“The final details for the event have already been sorted,”Becky said. “Which you wouldknowif you’d been checking your email.”

Double crap. Chastened, I set my pen down. “You got me,” I admitted. “My attention must have wandered for a few minutes. Help me out—whathavewe been talking about?”

Becky and Lindsay exchanged a look. “We’ve been discussing replacing our roof,” Lindsay said.

“Oh,” I said, brightening. “That’s great.” Our building’s current roof had been installed several years before we’d moved in. At a minimum, it was badly in need of patching. If we replaced it, we wouldn’t have to worry about it leaking anymore.

The way it had leaked the night before I’d met Peter, when I’d been trying to get rid of all those ruined leotards.

Peter.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. And I’d been doing so well, too, going a solid five minutes without thinking about what had happened.

“Do we have a roofer in mind?” I asked, forcing myself back into the present.

Becky arched an eyebrow “That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past fifteen minutes.”

“To recap,” Lindsay said, smirking at me. “No one’s quoted us a price we can swing yet, so we need to keep looking. But we have to find someone fast. The rainy season starts in earnest soon.”

“Seriously, Zelda,” Becky said. “What’s wrong? You haven’t been yourself at all since coming home.”

How did I handle this? My friends were clearly too observant to believe my lies that nothing was wrong. But I couldn’t tell them the truth. Immortals lived among humans, true—but it was a precarious hiding-in-plain-sight situation for all of us. I couldn’ttell them I was a witch. I couldn’t tell them that Peter, the hot guy I’d left to go traveling with, was a vampire with amnesia who had only been out here in the first place because he had been hired by a vigilante group to come and neutralize the threat they thought I was.

I also couldn’t tell them I had developed feelings for him despite my better judgment. That part, though, was mostly because I wouldn’t be able to bear my friends’ sympathy.

“The trip…kind of sucked,” I said. True enough. “It wasn’t as fun or as restful as I’d hoped it would be. I guess I’m still recuperating.” Also true.

“Did anything specific happen that you want to talk about?” Becky asked gently. When I didn’t reply, she pressed. “Maybe something to do with Peter?”

“Why would you think that?” I asked too loudly and way too defensively.

Calm down, I reminded myself.They’re only trying to help.

“You’ve never been this out of sorts since we’ve known you,” she said. “You’ve also never traveled alone with a man since we’ve known you. Just putting two and two together here.”