It had been hard enough, coming back. Seeing the place he’d called home for the tail end of his childhood abandoned and destroyed made it worse. And with Dahlia here. It was like betraying Nate before he actually betrayed him.
It’s not betrayal, he thought angrily, feeling the sudden need to wipe tears from his eyes. He blinked them back. It wasn’t betrayal. He had Jacob’s word. All he had to do was deliver Nate, just to talk. No harm would come to him. And then Ziggy got his freedom, and everything could go back the way it was.
Only now, he’d be a vampire. It would make Nate’s schedule easier to deal with.
“This place looked a lot better the last time I was here,” Dahlia sniffed, arranging the cushions on the couch and sitting. “You know, when I tried to kill your dad?”
“Right. I remember.” He squeezed his hands into fists. He wanted to kill her, had been wanting to for a while now. He pushed the rage down. It made him a monster, and he’d been Jacob’s pet monster for way too long. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What? Don’t you want to sit and reminisce? Go through your old things?” She paused to glance dramatically around the room. “Oh, gee…I don’t see much left.”
She wasn’t as good at hurting him as she thought she was, but there was no arguing with her. “Shut up, let’s get out of here.”
“No, I’m curious. I wonder how long it took for him to move her in here, once you were gone.” She giggled. “So, tell me, are you real jealous of her? You don’t honestly expect me to believe you never had a little crush on dear old daddy.”
He had his hand around her throat before she could move. She might have magic, but magic didn’t work so well when your head was snapped off your neck, and he was definitely stronger. “If you ever fucking say that again, I’ll kill you.” He tossed her across the room, easy as throwing a doll. There were advantages to having a powerful sire. Advantages he wished to God he didn’t have to know about.
Dahlia gagged and wiped blood from her lips as she stood. “Jacob would never let you. You might be the favorite, but I’ve got the power. He needs me.”
“That’s great, Dahlia. He won’t let me kill you because you’re a tool he can use. You must be real proud. Why won’t he let you kill me?” That would get her. Jacob had barely spoken to her beyond giving orders since he’d given up on that stupid potion of hers. And she hated him for it. “Get your fat ass up. We’re leaving.”
She picked her way through the rubble of ruined books and furniture. “Fine. There’s nothing here I’d want to keep anyway. Slut-tastic only wore ‘sensible’ clothes.”
“Nice, Dahlia.” He opened the door for her and resisted the urge to kick her down the stairs.
The car was waiting for them, the driver leaning against the door. It struck Ziggy for the first time how many human servants he interacted with every day, and how he never knew their names. Heck, he didn’t even really look at them or wonder how the hell they started working for vampires.
“Are you going to open my door, or are you going to just stand there and stare at the man meat?” Dahlia pushed Ziggy aside and grabbed the handle of the door. “You gross me right out sometimes, you know.”
I won’t kill her. I won’t kill her. He repeated the mantra all the way to the highway, leaning his forehead against the cold glass. Grand Rapids seemed empty and alien. It was just knowing that Nate wasn’t there. He’d left. Even after the message he’d had Max relay to him. “I’m coming home. Wait for me. I’ll be there in five days.” How much clearer did he have to be? He knew Max wasn’t the kind of guy to forget something that important. He would have at least mentioned, “Hey, by the way, your dead son isn’t that dead.” So, knowing Ziggy was alive, knowing what Jacob was like, why hadn’t Nate waited for him?
Dahlia babbled on and on about something stupid. The girl’s mouth never stopped running. When she was in his presence, it was usually “you’re a fag this,” and “you’re a homo that.” He could tune that out pretty easily. He’d even been able to shut her up for days at a time when he’d first started pointing out that he’d slept with Cyrus, making Dahlia’s first vampire lover a “homo,” too. Whenever she was around Jacob, though, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. It was a perk to being crazy, Ziggy figured. It was easy to be different things to different people when there really were different people living in your head.
It was a trick he needed to learn. Especially around Jacob.
The car pulled off the South Beltline, onto 37, and took a right at the spot where it became a plain old two-lane road. They passed by some small houses, ranch style with aboveground swimming pools and swing sets in the yards. People lived there. Kids lived there. So close to evil, oblivious to its presence. He suppressed a shudder to think of those people and what would happen to them if Jacob got some sadistic whim to toy with them.
He would, eventually. He always had some fun new “game.” “Come, play a game with me, favorite son,” he would purr, and the game would always be something to make Ziggy feel dirty and used.
Jacob liked to watch.
“What the hell, you’re not even listening to me.” Dahlia puffed air between her pursed lips. “I swear, you’re about the most boring person on the planet.”
He snorted, leaning his head against the window. “What side of the conversation were you on?”
Dahlia mumbled something unintelligible. If it had sounded like a spell, he would have been more worried. Jacob had laid down some strict rules about her spell casting, but, as Dahlia often liked to point out in these situations, Jacob wasn’t there.
They pulled onto a dirt road, lined with cattails and other weeds that warned drivers not to stray from the path if they didn’t want their car to be forever known as the swamp buggy.
The new digs Jacob had moved them into weren’t as nice as the mansion. But since they’d been infiltrated once, it could happen again, and Jacob was nothing if not paranoid. They pulled off the road onto a little covered bridge that creaked as though it was seriously considering dumping the car into the swamp. It was dark as hell, and that was probably a good thing. He really didn’t want to see what condition the wood was in, because he’d have to cross it again sometime. The rumbling of the wheels on the boards stopped and they emerged onto a rutted dirt two-track that wound through the swamp. The house, a sagging farmhouse done up in plantation style, gleamed bone white in the moonlight. Two willow trees drooped in front of it, like the tattered edges of a corpse’s Sunday suit.
“I hate this place,” Dahlia said, and for a moment he felt some solidarity with her, until she followed up with, “It’s so far from the mall.”
“Yeah, that’s the feature it’s really lacking.”
The car pulled up in front of the broken porch, and Ziggy didn’t wait for the chauffeur to open his door. He slipped out and thumped up the steps, his boots ringing hollow on the rotted wood.
“Where are you going?” Dahlia stood by the car, a chubby hand on her round hip.
“Uh, inside. The opposite of outside, where the mosquitoes are.” He slapped at one that had taken an interest in his neck—he wasn’t sure if drinking his blood would make a mosquito a vampire, since they already kind of were—to illustrate his point. “I’ve got to tell Jacob what’s going on and get permission to take some of them out with me.”
“I want to come, too,” she said petulantly. “It’s not like you can control them the way I can.”
Oh, hell no. “No, no way. You’re not going along on this one.”
Dahlia’s eyes narrowed unpleasantly in her chubby face. “Well, we’ll just see what Jacob has to say about that.”
Ziggy had a pretty