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  They retraced their steps back the way they had come. Every time Leesa thought of Rave’s throw, she grinned. She wondered if she’d ever stop being surprised by the things he could do. But then her thoughts turned more somber. She worried if Rave would one day grow tired of how normal she was. He had already told her that he’d never been attracted to a human—there was probably a good reason for that. So why should she think she could hold his attention for any real length of time?

  “What’s the matter, Leesa?” Rave asked. “You look so glum all of a sudden.”

  His question caught her by surprise. “Oh… I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”

  He stopped walking and turned to face her. “About?”

  Leesa stared out at the lake. “About us,” she admitted.

  “I don’t understand. Why does thinking about us make you sad? I always feel so good when I think about us.”

  “I usually do, too, Rave. Really, I do. But that throw of yours back there got me worrying.”

  Rave looked perplexed. “I don’t understand. Why did that make you worry?”

  “Oh, it’s just a girl thing, I guess. I started wondering if you were going to get tired of me one of these days. I’m so ordinary. So human. And you’re a volkaane.” She was afraid to meet his eyes, so she looked down at her feet instead.

  Rave put his hands on her shoulders. His wonderful warmth immediately flowed into her.

  “You are anything but ordinary, Leesa, believe me. You have managed to make a volkaane fall in love with you, and to make a vampire want you for his consort. No ordinary girl could have done either of those things.”

  Leesa looked up at him and smiled. “Well, there is that, I guess.”

  “And don’t forget,” Rave continued, “you’ve got some of that grafhym blood in you, too.”

  Leesa’s smile widened. Grafhym was the name given to one-fanged vampires, like the one who had bitten her mom while she was pregnant with Leesa. It was the taint of grafhym blood inside her that had prevented Stefan from turning her vampire, when she had agreed to his deal to save her brother.

  “Ha! That’s right. I’d forgotten about that. I guess I do have a bit of the supernatural in me after all.”

  Rave smiled back at her. “Yes, you do. And you know how much vampire blood turns me on.” He didn’t tell her he wasn’t certain the taint of grafhym blood in her veins was enough to explain the strength of the pull between them. It was enough that she understood nothing was ever going to change the way he felt toward her.

  3. AN UNEXPECTED CALL

  Leesa and Rave walked back up the entrance drive of Black Pond Park. Halfway up the hill, her phone buzzed. She didn’t know why, but a sense of impending trouble stole over her as she unzipped her small fanny pack and grabbed the cell. She automatically stepped away from Rave, taking no chances his energy would zap her phone. He grinned at her in understanding. Max just looked on curiously.

  The screen showed the call was from an unknown caller. Leesa breathed a bit easier. At least the call wasn’t from her mom or her brother. Still, she could not shake the feeling that this call meant trouble.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Is this Leesa Nyland?” asked an unfamiliar male voice on the other end.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “The Leesa Nyland who was born eighteen years ago in Springfield, New Jersey?”

  The alarm bells in Leesa’s head really started clanging now. What was this all about? Her fingers began twirling in hair, an unconscious habit she lapsed into when she was nervous.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” she said cautiously. “Who is this, please?”

  Leesa thought she heard a sigh of relief through the phone.

  “Leesa, you don’t know how glad I am to hear your voice. I’ve been trying to find you for quite some time. Where do you live now?”

  Leesa wasn’t sure she should answer that. The caller still had not identified himself. She glanced at Rave and saw he was watching her intently, a concerned look on his face. With his volkaane hearing, she knew he’d probably heard every word the guy had spoken.

  “Who is this?” she asked again, more forcefully this time.

  Never in a million years would she have guessed the words she heard next.

  “It’s your father, Leesa.”

  Leesa’s jaw dropped. Was it possible? Her father had abandoned her family when she was only seven years old. She had not heard from him or of him since. Her fingers danced more rapidly in her hair.

  “Dad?”

  There was a brief hesitation before the man answered. “No, not him, Leesa. This is your real father.”

  The phone slipped from Leesa’s suddenly lifeless fingers. Max barked once as Rave instinctively reached out to catch it. With his speed, he could have caught it easily, but at the last second he pulled his hand back. If he touched the phone, its circuits would be fried, so he let it crash to the pavement. At least there was a chance the phone would survive the fall. It banged onto the asphalt and bounced into a small puddle beside the drive.

  Leesa bent to pick up it up. She felt like she was moving in slow motion, as if the air had magically developed the viscosity of water. Finally, her fingers closed around the phone and she picked it up. A narrow crack zigzagged through the plastic casing. She wiped the phone on her sweatshirt and then held it to her ear. The cell phone was dead.

  Her knees began to feel weak and her head felt like it was spinning. She might have collapsed, but Rave had already enfolded her in his arms. She buried her head against his chest, unsure what to think or do. She barely felt Max rubbing his furry body against the back of her legs.

  The man on the other end of the call was named Dominic, though he could not remember the last time anyone had called him that. He stared at the now silent phone in his hand and cursed himself. He should have been less abrupt with his message, should have told her to prepare herself for some shocking news, and to please listen to what he had to say. Instead, he’d been so excited he had bulled ahead with no finesse and taken her by complete surprise, telling her the man she thought was her father was not really her dad, and that he, Dominic, was her real father. That was true in some ways, in others it was not. She would have difficulty understanding even if he was standing right in front of her trying to explain it—how could he have expected her to comprehend it through an unexpected phone call? He hadn’t even gotten the chance to tell her his name. He had heard a noise before the connection was broken. He didn’t know if Leesa had simply hung up on him, or if something had happened to her.

  He slammed the phone down into its cradle, and then looked quickly around to see if anyone had noticed his outburst. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention. Dominic was tall and slender, with dark hair speckled with gray that hung fashionably over the collar of a black polo shirt. His neatly trimmed goatee was slightly lighter in color than his hair and came to a sharp point beneath his chin. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties, but he was far older than that. Far, far older.

  He stood in the lobby of the Springfield Public Library, in front of a bank of three pay phones. It was getting more and more difficult to find working public phones these days, but Dominic had no choice. To say he was “off the grid” would have been putting it far too mildly. He had never been on the grid in the first place. He had no permanent residence, owned no phone and no car, had never possessed a credit card or bank account, or even a driver’s license. He had no social security number and paid no taxes. As far as the ordinary world was concerned, Dominic did not exist.

  His enemies knew he existed, though, and they were undoubtedly searching for him with as much diligence as he was searching for Leesa. Those enemies were deadly, and they would never quit. So Dominic needed to remain invisible, even though it compounded the difficulty in finding Leesa. At some point, he might need to risk his anonymity, but not yet. No, not yet.

  He was certain his foes had no idea Leesa even existed, and he was going to
do all he could to keep it that way. That was why he had disappeared before she was born, and why he stayed far away all these years, resisting the impulse even to check up on her. Staying away completely was the only way he knew to insure her safety, and her safety was more important than anyone could know. She hadn’t needed him to be around—not then.

  She was going to need him now, though. He had to find her. He had been searching for almost a year, starting a few months before her eighteenth birthday. Things were going to start happening to her—puzzling, frightening things—that she would not understand. That she could not understand. Indeed, they may already have started happening. He needed to explain those things to her, and train her how to control them. Especially with the rise of Destiratu.

  Destiratu forming at the same time Leesa turned eighteen was something he could never have expected, could never have planned for. The magical phenomenon was so rare the chance of the two events happening at the same time had never occurred to him. He was not sure exactly how Destiratu might interact with Leesa’s coming of age, but it was another thing he would have to deal with.

  He had not expected finding her to be so difficult. The bond between them should have allowed him to sense her location within a hundred miles, but for some reason, he could not. He wondered if Destiratu had anything to with it, or if it was something else entirely. There was no way for him to know. He had spent months systematically crisscrossing the country, stopping every hundred miles or so and casting his senses outward, seeking her unique vibration, the one that should have resonated with his own, but had felt nothing. He had grown worried something might have happened to her, some stupid random accident perhaps, and maybe she was dead. At least now he knew she was alive. That was something, at least. Now all he had to do was find her.

  But something was preventing his magic from connecting to her. Maybe he needed to be closer than he thought. There was just one problem—how do you get closer to someone when you have no idea where they are?

  He inserted another bunch of coins into the phone and dialed her number again, holding his breath while it rang.

  Please pick up, he implored silently. Please, please pick up.

  The phone rang twice, and then went to a recorded message: “The number you are trying to reach is presently unavailable. Please try again later.”

  This time, he controlled his frustration and dropped the phone into its cradle more gently. He would do as the voice instructed and try again later, but not from here. Waiting was not in his nature, and there was precious little time to waste. He needed to be on the move, seeking Leesa and avoiding his enemies. The area code for her cell phone was from San Diego. He knew people often kept the same cell number when they moved, so there was no guarantee she still lived in San Diego, but it was all he had to go on. He hurried from the library and boarded a bus that would take him to the train station.

  Dominic had no way of knowing he was heading almost three thousand miles in the wrong direction.

  4. QUESTIONS

  Leesa lingered in Rave’s embrace for several minutes, her mind a whirling kaleidoscope of unanswered questions and unfinished thoughts. With all she had gone through the past three months, she thought nothing could ever surprise her like this. When you’ve discovered your mom had truly been bitten by a one-fanged vampire, and that your boyfriend is a supernatural vampire hunter, and a guy at school who liked you is a real-life vampire, it’s hard to believe anything could shock you to this degree. But this one simple phone call had knocked her for a loop, for sure.

  The man’s message just could not be true—it challenged everything she had believed about her childhood. How could the man she had called Dad until she was seven years old not be her father? It did not make sense.

  Finally, she eased back from Rave’s embrace. Max backed away and looked up at them, his eyes wide and seemingly sympathetic, as if he understood what was going on in her head. Rave’s brown eyes were also filled with sympathy and understanding.

  “You heard all that, of course?” she asked.

  Rave nodded. “Yeah, I did.”

  She looked down at the broken phone she still held in her hand and cursed herself for dropping it. Its memory held the number the man had called from, but the cell was useless. Now that she had recovered a bit, she wanted to call him back, to question him, to find out why he would make such a ridiculous claim, but she could not. He might even be trying to call her again right now. What would he think when he received no answer? What would he do next? She had no way of knowing.

  “I don’t know how or why, but I felt like it was trouble as soon as my phone rang,” she said. “But I never expected anything like this. Not in a million years. How could he claim to be my father? That’s ridiculous. My father lived with us until I was seven. What could this guy want?”

  Rave shook his head. “I do not know. I wish I could help, but I don’t even know who my father is. It’s not the volkaane way.”

  Leesa remembered Rave telling her about a volkaane mating ritual, when each female paired up with a male during a special festival held only every few decades. Any children that resulted were raised communally, not by their parents. Rave’s mentor Balin was the closest thing he had to a father. Leesa had met the old volkaane several times and liked him a lot.

  “I know,” Leesa said. “But I’m still glad you were here when it happened.”

  “Do you think there is any chance it could be true?”

  Leesa thought for a moment. “A chance? I guess there’s always a chance. Maybe I was adopted—not all parents tell their adopted kids about it. Maybe mine didn’t tell me.” She did not really believe that, though.

  “No, I do not think so,” Rave said. “If that were true, how would you explain the taint of grafhym in your blood?”

  Leesa had forgotten about that. Rave was right—her mom had to be her real mother. The chances of some other woman being bitten by a one-fang and giving a child up for adoption were too small to even be considered.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I guess that leaves only two possibilities. Either my mom had an affair, or the guy on the phone is lying.” She shook her head. “I just can’t see my mom having an affair, but I guess all kids probably think that about their moms. Who knows what she might have been like before the grafhym bit her? I’ve only known her as the timid, reclusive woman who kept insisting she was bitten by a one-fanged vampire.”

  “A story that turned out to be true, of course.” Rave took Leesa’s hands in his. “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how I could possibly ask my mom about this, not after everything she’s been through.” Leesa shook her head and sighed. She was growing up fast, but this was not something she could imagine doing, not unless this thing turned out to be way more important than it seemed right now. The call had been troubling, sure, but it wasn’t worth risking her mom’s all too recent recovery.

  “What would I do, anyhow?” she said, more to herself than to Rave. “Say ‘by the way, Mom, did you sleep with someone besides Dad before you got pregnant with me?’ No way I could do that.”

  A sudden thought hit her like a punch to the stomach. Could that be the reason her father found it so easy to leave his family, because his wife had cheated on him and he knew he wasn’t Leesa’s real father? Heck, maybe he wasn’t Bradley’s father, either. She would have to ask the caller about that, too, if she ever spoke to him again.

  “If the guy on the phone was lying,” Rave said, “that means he wants something from you.”

  Leesa had already considered that. But what could he want? That had been one of the thousand or so questions whirling around inside her head a few minutes ago.

  “Yeah, but what? I don’t have anything anybody would want.” She thought about all the motives that drove people in stories she had read. “It’s not like I have any old manuscripts or magical jewelry lying around. I’m just an ordinary kid.”

  Rave smiled. “We
have already established you are far from ordinary, remember? Maybe it’s not about something you own, but something about you.”

  Leesa had not considered that. “What could he want from me? My grafhym blood? Do you think he needs to keep a vampire away or something?”

  “I doubt that. The guy sounded like he’s been looking for you for awhile. If he wants something from you, I do not think it has anything to do with the grafhym.”

  “What, then? The grafhym blood is the only thing special about me.”

  Rave wasn’t too certain about that, but he had nothing specific or concrete to offer, so he remained silent about it. “I do not know,” was all he said.

  Leesa’s head was beginning to hurt. There was just not enough to go on. She certainly wasn’t going to risk upsetting her mother or Bradley by talking to them about it. They had both been through more than enough.

  The guy on the phone had asked where she lived, which meant he had no idea where she was. She decided to try to keep it that way. When she got a new phone, she would get a new number as well. It wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience—only about a dozen people had her number anyhow. And now there would be one less.

  “Well, I’m not going to worry about it any longer. He doesn’t know where I live, and that’s how I like it.” Leesa looped her arms around Rave’s elbow and grinned. “And if he does find me, I’ve got a big strong boyfriend to protect me.”

  Max barked, once. His big brown eyes were looking up at her.

  Leesa smiled. “Okay, a big strong boyfriend and a really smart dog to protect me as well.”

  Rave kissed her forehead. Of course he would protect her, with his life if need be, but what about when he wasn’t around? He wished they knew more about the caller and what he wanted. But they didn’t, and there was nothing he could do about it.