Lies in Blood (Dark Secrets #4)(72)
Author: A.M. Hudson

“I can’t do that, Dad. We have a life here. We have friends and responsibilities.”

“But you have family here,” Vicki reasoned.

“I have family here, too,” I said softly. “David can’t leave, and it’d break his heart if I did.”

Vicki exhaled; I could see the loss of hope in her eyes. Neither her nor Dad knew what to say or what to do. And right on time, as if it were a bell to save me from further explanation, my phone grizzled, making a fuss, the caller ID swallowing Dad and Vicki’s faces.

“Is that David?” Vicki asked, clearly noticed my eyes light up.

“Yeah. I gotta go.” I held my finger over the button to accept the call. “I really need to take this.”

“Okay, call us back later, Ara, or we’ll worry,” Vicki said.

I nodded, offering my most reassuring smile. “I’m okay, you know.”

“We know, honey,” Dad said. “We’ll talk later.”

“Bye.” I ended their call and put David to my ear. “David!”

“Hey, sweetheart. You called?”

“Only like fifty-thousand times.”

“Oh, come on now, it wasn’t that many,” he said playfully. “It was more like—”

“Mom and Dad called,” I interrupted.

“Ah, good. And how are they?”

“I told them you have cancer.”

“Why?” he said slowly, dragging the word out.

“It kind of slipped out that you’re gonna die. And I had to make up some comprehensible explanation. I mean, they picked up on my extreme sadness anyway.”

The silence on the other end of the line lasted too long. “You’re sad?”

“Is that a joke?”

“No. I just thought, for the sake of appearances, you’d suck that up around your parents.”

“Suck it up? Suck it up! David, would you suck it up? Would you—”

“Okay. I’m sorry.” His voice got louder. “Just . . . don’t yell at me. I really don’t want to fight with you.”

I released my fury with a groan. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry, okay. I just . . . what’d they say?”

“They were devastated.”

“Really?”

“Yes! They love you, David. They want to do anything they can to help.”

He laughed. “Aw, I really wish we could tell them the truth. Actually, I kinda wish your dad was a vampire.”

“Why?”

“You know how he always has that way of solving problems—or making you feel like they can be solved?”

“Yeah.” I smiled.

“I bet he’d have some clever way we could fix this Drake contract.”

“Yeah, and I bet you’d actually listen to him.”

“As opposed to whom?” he asked.

“Me.”

“I do listen to you.”

“Huh! You so do not.”

“Okay, maybe my track record isn’t that great. But you gotta admit things have gotten better lately.”

“Yeah.” But they’d be better if he was actually here, with me.

“I thought about it, you know,” he said after a while.

“About what?”

“Turning him—your dad.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think we should discuss it. I think, even if he couldn’t find a way out of our situation, at least he’d be here to take care of you—for eternity.”

“I’m not a little girl, anymore, David. I don’t need an eternal dad,” I snapped, then calmed myself. “But, I mean, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to bury him one day.”

“Okay, well, we’ll discuss it further when I get home.”

I nodded. “I’m worried about his heart, though. He looks sick, you know. And he’s playing it cool, but—”

“He’ll be fine. If he gets worse, I’ll turn him myself.”

I smiled. “But you don’t know the secret of how to turn a human.”

“Don’t I?”

“Do you?”

“This is getting off topic.”

“It is? Because I don’t remember setting a topic for discussion,” I said playfully.

He cleared his throat. “How’s training?”

“Great. Now.”

“Why now?”

“Because Jason saved my head from exploding yesterday.”

“What? How?”

“Things got . . . bad.” I shivered at the memory. “Jason comes bursting in, grabs me and hauls me outside and, no joke, as soon as he puts my hands in the ground, like, forces them into the soil, the pain stops.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope. He said I need to ground my power, and added something about closed circuits, or whatever.”

“How did he come up with that?”

“He’s been thinking a lot about it. Guess he had an epiphany.”

“That’s . . . I gotta admit, I don’t know much about science, but that was pretty clever.”

“And that’s why I want him to have a lab, David. He can help me. You don’t know how much stress he’s taken off my shoulders by figuring out why I’m getting those headaches.”

“You were stressed about it?”

“Of course I was. How would you feel if you had to put yourself in that kind of pain every second day, and no one was going to help you…and no one cared? You all just told me to get over it, but he never stopped thinking about it—researching it.”

He took a really long breath and let it out right into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Fine. Okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“You can have the lab—”

“What?” I jumped up and out of my seat.

“But, it comes with a huge but.”

“I’m okay with a but.”

“I want a guard with you at all times when you’re together. Do you think you can handle that?”

“Yes. Oh, David, thank you. He’ll be so happy when I tell him. I wish you were here right now so I could kiss you.”

“I’m smiling just thinking about it.”

I smiled too.

“And…” he added.

“And?”

“I want full reports on everything he’s doing with you, and why.”

“Sure. Of course. I know he won’t have any problem with that.”

“All right then. Go see Walt and tell him to set up an account for Jason.”