Page 1 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

T he raven fluttered down to land in the branches of the nearest hawthorn tree the moment I pulled my bike to a stop in my mother’s driveway. She always did.

“Hey asshole,” she called to me as I turned to set the helmet on the seat.

“Douchebag,” I answered in kind, smiling up at her. She knew my name was Flynn, but she’d never offered one in return, so for as long as I’d known her, we’d exchanged friendly insults instead.

I had known her since...well, I thought maybe she’d been the first animal who had spoken to me. The first one I remembered, at least. I didn’t know how long ravens usually lived, but that meant this one was at least thirty, since I’d been talking to animals for as long as I’d been talking.

Being raised completely separate from other people your age tends to make a person look for companions in odd places, and when I’d talked to them, the animals had talked back, so my fate as a weirdo had been sealed before I even learned to read.

Honestly, though, animals were usually better conversationalists than people.

They rarely lied.

“Got any food?” the raven asked, hopping from branch to branch to follow me as I walked toward the house.

I paused, checking my pockets, and came back with the remnants of a bag of peanuts. Were peanuts good for ravens? Unlikely, but honestly, I’d grown up feeding her ham and cake and...pretty much anything that had ever been on my plate, and she seemed to have done pretty well with it.

Shrugging, I held up the bag, then leaned over and dumped the nuts into the grass.

She leapt from the branch, spreading her wings wide and gliding down to where I’d dropped the food.

“Old lady not feeding you?” I asked her, motioning toward the house.

She made a wheezy little coughing sound that was her approximation of laughter. “I don’t ask the dead for offerings.”

Which was...well, people often said animals were stupid, or talked about how tiny their brains were, but that was always proven not quite right in my experience.

Most creatures weren’t as smart as my raven friend, but every single one I’d ever spoken to had recognized that my mother, leader of the vampire population of the greater Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area, was dead.

I had yet to run into a single human who recognized vampirism, let alone who saw it the moment they met her.

I looked over to where the last sliver of the sun sat, red and dramatic, atop the ocean on the horizon. “I suppose she doesn’t usually eat anything you’d be interested in getting your beak into anyway.”

The raven made a little choking noise, and for a moment I worried I’d amused her at a bad time and she might actually need medical intervention I wasn’t qualified to give, but she finished pecking down a peanut and then gave her little laugh again.

“Blood is certainly a very specific taste. A boring one. I’d miss cake too much to go making it my whole diet. ”

Cake. I was of the same opinion, but I suspected that made my raven friend and me rare, given all the romantic notions people had about vampires.

“Pizza,” I answered, and started again toward the door, since she’d pecked up most of the peanuts.

“Fresh bread.”

“Cherry pie.”

We went on that way, tossing out favorite foods until we got to the stairs leading up to my mother’s front door. I turned to nod at her. “Good seeing you. I’ll try to grab something from dinner for you. I know how you love Meg’s dinner rolls.”

She gave a wordless caw and flew off to the thicket of trees I thought she lived in, leaving me alone on my mother’s doorstep.

Ugh.

I supposed I had to actually go in. I’d been summoned , after all.

I’d woken in the morning to a voicemail from her assistant telling me I was “expected” for dinner at seven, because that was the way it worked with my mother.

She rarely made a lot of time for me, but when she did, it wasn’t optional.

It was compulsory, as though a dinner she couldn’t even eat at a time she didn’t want to be awake was something either of us wanted.

On the other hand, her cook, Meg, was entirely wasted on a whole house of vampires, so coming to visit sometimes was the least I could do, wasn’t it?

Before I could reach for the doorbell, the double front doors were thrown open to reveal my mother on the other side.

I leaned on my back foot, blinking at her for a moment, not sure why I was surprised, but surprised nonetheless.

Tonight, Mother looked like the vampy heroine in an old movie, in a long slinky black dress and bright red lipstick.

Fiona Knight always cut a striking figure, so I wasn’t surprised about that part, just the doors being thrown open.

It was a little funny, come to think of it. We had the same deep auburn hair and almost unnaturally green eyes. The same long lines, both of us tall and willowy sort of people. But on her, it looked gorgeous and put together and perfect, like a Hollywood ingenue just barely past her prime.

On me? Well, I’d tried to comb down the part of my hair that had been sticking up in the back when I woke up that morning, but I wasn’t sure how much luck I’d had.

My jeans had holes in the knees, not from artful distressing pre-purchase, but from years of wear.

I had on a clean shirt, but it was a T-shirt I’d gotten in high school, so it was starting to get holes along the collar.

The tan leather motorcycle jacket definitely wasn’t helping, but damn it all, I drove a motorcycle.

It was a sensible choice. Even if Mother’s usual argument against it was more about the color than the style.

Apparently black was the only color leather jackets were allowed to be.

Mother, too, noticed the fact that my fashion sense didn’t live up to her standards, because she always did. She looked me over, her lips pursing in dissatisfaction. “Is that a shirt for...some kind of children’s breakfast cereal?”

Technically, it was not. It was a sexual innuendo about redheaded men being.

..well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell my mother that.

Most people didn’t want to tell their Boomer or Gen X parents about sexual innuendos they thought would scandalize them.

My mother? I had no idea how old she was, but “she’s from a different time” had never been more valid than it was with her.

Given her collection of ridiculously expensive and historically fascinating objects, I suspected she was by far the oldest vampire in the city.

Like, Roman Empire old. Not that we discussed it.

Whenever anyone asked about her age in my presence, she always laughed and said “a lady never tells,” but in that sharp way that actually said “shut the fuck up and stop asking questions you don’t want the answers to. ”

Anyway, all that to say that I smiled at her and pretended innocence. “What can I say? They’re magically delicious.”

She scrunched up her nose as though maybe she got the joke after all, shaking her head and sighing. “I suppose it will have to do.”

And that?

That was concerning.

My mother often, if not quite always, disapproved of what I wore. What I drove. What I ate. Basically every aspect of my life. But that comment implied there was something else happening. Something my clothes were required to “do.”

“If you’d told me to dress up?—”

“You would have told me you couldn’t make it,” she finished for me, and I winced, because she wasn’t exactly wrong.

I did own a button down shirt or two, but like...what was the point of being an adult, and being in charge of your own life, if you had to keep fulfilling other people’s ridiculous expectations?

I didn’t own a tuxedo, didn’t eat lima beans, and slept at night when I was tired, not during the day when my mother’s people expected it of me. I was maybe the only person in the world who was a morning person out of a sense of rebellion.

The important part was that I wasn’t going to change myself to make my mother happy. It wouldn’t work anyway. Growing up with Fiona Knight, I’d learned the one magical truth that had made my whole adulthood easier: it was impossible to truly please my mother, so I shouldn’t even try.

I shrugged and followed her into the house, through the great hall and into the dining room, where there was a guy already sitting at the table.

He turned and stood as we walked in, and the dude was.

..well, he was fucking hot. That was no surprise if he was someone from her work, because vampires were almost always hot.

Not only did vamps tend to choose the most attractive partners among humans to turn, but something about the change somehow brought out everyone’s most attractive features, even if they hadn’t been great beauties beforehand.

With this guy, I suspected the change hadn’t had to work too hard. He had dark hair, almost black, that fell around his face in long strands. Stubble that looked like some combination of artistic and “screw it, I don’t feel like shaving today.” The blackest eyes I’d ever seen.

Black eyes. That was weird. Instantly, part of me wanted to get closer, to get a better look at?—

No way.

No fucking way.

I whipped around to look at my mother, and she was closing the dining room doors behind us. It gave me a great view of the back of her dress, which dipped down almost far enough to show that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Which was definitely a thing a guy wanted to know about his mom.

As she turned back to face us, she gave me a pained smile that said, very strongly, “shut up and don’t make a scene.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’m putting off a date for this, you know.”

She lifted a single perfect red brow at me, but didn’t call my bluff. “That’s lovely, dear. You’ll have to invite them over for dinner sometime if it works out. Lady or gentleman?”

And I couldn’t really answer that question, because the whole thing was a lie. So I went for my personal default. “Guy.”