“I’ll call you right after I dial 911.”

Cathleen reeled back around. “Fallon!”

“Mom, I’m just kidding. Geez, you guys really need to do this more than once a month,” Fallon said, giggling. “And since Dad said your reservation is for seven, and it’s already six-thirty, you need to get the heck out of here. Now go. Have a good time, and stop worrying that the world is going to come to an end while you’re gone.”

The three exchanged playful squints, and Fallon waited until her parents climbed into their Uber before she shut the door. She stepped back into the living room, spending a few seconds deciding if dinner or studying would come first before Fallon made her way to the kitchen. Sliding two pieces of cheese pizza onto a paper plate, she grabbed a soda and returned to the living room. Thankful her siblings were safely and quietly tucked away in their rooms, Fallon stretched out across the sofa and enjoyed her dinner.

***

If Bennett wasn’t sitting down, she would have fallen down. “Jesus Christ. You killed yourself?”

“Yep,” Ruby said, bobbing her head. “I’d come too far to turn back, and since Diego was asleep and would remain that way for several years, everyone assumed he had wanted me turned. I went from kitchen help to a member of his coven in one night, and because they all knew I was one of his favorites, they showed me the ropes. They taught me how to feed and how to steal, how to use a sword and a dagger, and of course, how to plan any traveling so as always to avoid sunlight.”

“When did you discover you were a daywalker?”

“Um…let’s see. Diego turned me in 1540, and it was the summer of 1722. So almost two hundred years.”

“Why so long? I would have thought the rumors about daywalkers would have reached you before then.”

“You’re assuming I was in a coven, and I wasn’t,” Ruby said, glimpsing at Bennett. “As soon as Diego began his rest, Concepcion left Spain to fuck her way across Europe. That left me in a hacienda full of vampires more than willing to teach me, so there was no reason for me to leave. When Diego woke up in 1555, I stayed for three more years, hoping to get more information out of him, and once I felt the well had run dry, I killed him and moved on.”

“You killed Diego? But why?”

“Diego was the one who turned Napoleon. As far as I was concerned, he was as responsible for my family’s murder as Napoleon, and I wanted him to pay for it.”

“From what Max told me, you didn’t just make him pay. You butchered him.”