Chapter 3
Her mother was calling her down to dinner. Evie rolled off the bed, putting one heavy foot in front of the other. She was so tired. She knew she probably looked like a train wreck but she no longer cared. It had been weeks since she’d looked in a mirror. She had covered the one in her room with a scarf, and stood with her back to the basin every time she brushed her teeth to avoid having to see her reflection in the bathroom cabinet.
She forced herself down the stairs, wary at what admonishments her mother might be dishing up alongside dinner. But when she made it into the kitchen she saw her mother had regained her calm.
‘Joe’s coming over later,’ her mum said, bustling about the table, pouring Evie a glass of juice.
Evie raised her eyes. Her mum was keeping her own gaze firmly fixed on the tabletop. She’d started humming. Evie smiled quietly to herself as she watched the blush creep up her mother’s neck. There was one thing to be glad of at least. Evie’s old boss, Joe, was a good man and her mum deserved someone in her life who made her happy, seeing how Evie was failing monumentally on that score.
‘You know, Joe said he’s holding your job for you,’ her mother told her, sitting down at the table.
Evie picked up her fork and started toying with the food on her plate.
‘What do you want me to tell him?’ her mother asked.
When Evie didn’t answer she hurried on. ‘Well, maybe you could tell him yourself, later. I think it might be a good idea, you know. The diner was always a good job. Much better than that silly boutique. I told you it wouldn’t last a month and I was right.’
Evie placed her fork down carefully by the side of her plate.
‘I mean, what was that man thinking? Designer dresses in a place like Riverview? Those price tags! And they’re all still sitting in there, hanging on the rails. I had a look through the window the other day. He just cleared off out of town without so much as a day’s notice. What was his name again? Victor. Here one day, gone the next. If you ask me, there was always something very suspicious about him.’ She lowered her voice, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all a front for some kind of money-laundering operation.’
Evie looked down at the tabletop, her fingers digging sharply into her thighs. She knew her mother was angling, trying to get her to talk. The co-incidence of Victor disappearing from town on the exact same night that Evie had run off with Lucas had had the whole town buzzing with the scandal, rumours flying around like migrating birds. To her credit, her mother hadn’t mentioned a word of it to her face, but Evie’s hearing was good – better than good, it was supersonic these days – and she’d overheard people talking at school as well as on the street. There were some pretty good stories going around. According to a woman she’d overheard in the drugstore, Evie (referred to only as that Tremain girl) had stolen all the cash from the boutique and then gone on the run with the good-looking boy who worked on Janet Del Rey’s ranch.
She’d also heard Kaitlyn Rivers whispering to someone in the cafeteria line at school, saying that she (referred to this time as that skank) and Victor had been having an affair and that Lucas had walked in on them, so they’d done away with him and buried his body in the woods. Unfortunately Evie had only managed to fuel that last rumour by slamming Kaitlyn against the wall and daring her to say it one more time to her face.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Huh?’ Evie looked up, startled.
Her mother shook her head in exasperation. ‘I was asking about Joe’s offer to give you your old job back. I don’t want you to feel like you need to work. Now Mrs Lewington’s back lodging with us and the insurance company have finally paid out we’re doing fine, and this year is your senior year. But it might be good for you – you know, to be out there, meeting people, seeing your friends again …’
‘I don’t know,’ Evie mumbled into her potatoes.
Her mother frowned, then decided to drop it. She got up from the table and walked to the fridge. ‘Oh, I bumped into Jocelyn today by the way,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘She was asking about you.’
Evie paused with a forkful of peas halfway to her mouth. ‘Really?’ she asked, wondering what on earth Jocelyn was still doing in town. There was no reason for her to still be in Riverview. Evie didn’t need protection anymore. She was trained. She had her full Hunter powers now that she’d killed her first unhuman. Not that any of that mattered because there weren’t any more monsters to kill. But beyond all that, she thought she’d made it pretty damn clear to Jocelyn just how much she disliked her. Jocelyn had lied to her all along – she had known that Victor had murdered her biological parents and had said nothing. And rather than protecting Evie as she had sworn to do, she had let Victor use her.
Evie stood up suddenly, pushing her plate aside. She needed to get out, breathe fresh air. Being scrutinised all the time, like she was a bug on a Petri dish, was more than she could bear.
‘Where are you going?’ her mother asked, looking up at her in surprise.
‘For a walk,’ Evie mumbled, heading for the back door.
‘But you’ve hardly touched your dinner,’ her mother said to her back.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Evie answered.
Her mother called something after her but Evie didn’t hear it, or rather she chose not to. She promised herself that when this was all over she would find a way to apologise for everything, but until then she just couldn’t find the words.
She opened the door and walked out onto the veranda, feeling the instant relief that being outside and away from people brought her.
The orchard was growing murky, the trees dissolving into darkness and shadows. The moon was a pixelated blur sliding in and out of black clouds. She sniffed the air and waited for her senses to kick in and adjust to the onslaught of new sounds and smells. Her heartbeat slowed as soon as she’d verified there were no other creatures besides Lobo lurking out there in the dark. There were no more monsters, she reminded herself. She didn’t need to be constantly scanning her surroundings trying to sense unhumans.
She crunched through the leaves in the orchard, hearing Lobo howling behind her as she stretched the distance between them. She missed it, though, she realised as she reached the road. She missed feeling him. That sense of heightened awareness whenever an unhuman was around was something she had never thought she would miss. Not that she wanted to be surrounded ever again by Thirsters and Mixen and Scorpio, just that she associated the feeling unhumans evoked – the sweaty palms, racing heart and whoosh of adrenaline – with Lucas. Being half Shadow Warrior he’d managed to confuse her senses so that the danger signs, which should have kept her alive, had become synonymous in her mind with him and with safety. And, yes, that had almost killed her. But now she missed it. She missed Lucas more than she thought it possible to miss anyone, so much that she thought she might die from it. And not in any melodramatic way, but because sometimes she actually couldn’t breathe; sometimes she woke up choking down air, dots dancing in front of her eyes, as if her lungs had decided of their own accord to shut down while she slept.
Of course, that could also be to do with the number of sleeping pills she was popping.
She broke through into the tree line on the other side of the road and started jogging. She didn’t understand. She would never understand why fate had brought her down the path it had. Why it had so entwined her path with Lucas’s, only to wrench them apart just at the point they’d reached their destination.
But maybe that was why. They had reached the destination. Maybe the point was the journey.
Either way it wasn’t fair.
She swore at herself. As if she hadn’t learnt that lesson about life already.