“Dude, that’s so messed up. You drink blood?”
Ambrose gave him an irritated grimace. “Is that all you got out of what I just said?”
“No, but that’s so disturbing. How can you drink someone’s blood?” Nick shivered in revulsion. “Gah, I can’t believe I’d ever be that gross.”
“Son, you’ll do a lot more than that before all is said and done.”
Nick made gagging noises.
Ambrose cursed. His expression said he was imagining Nick’s neck in his hands and Nick’s eyes bulging as he choked the life out of him. “I can’t believe my fate is in your hands.”
Now that was just rude and it thoroughly riled him. “Yeah, well, from what you just said, it’s not like you did any better yourself. I can’t believe your ugly butt is what I have to look forward to becoming. Talk about a letdown. You know, I had plans. I was going to be a lawyer. Do some good in the world. Not become,” he gestured at Ambrose, “some self-absorbed dickweed.”
His expression turned even colder. “If I were self-absorbed, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s easy for you to judge me. You haven’t been betrayed.… Yet.”
“Not true. I was shot by my best friends.”
“Alan, Tyree, and crew … that wasn’t betrayal, kid. Deep inside you knew who and what they were. What you were in for when you threw in with them. What to expect. You can’t fault a snake for biting you when it’s the very nature of the beast to do so.”
Ambrose narrowed his gaze on him. “No, Nick. I’m talking real betrayal. The kind you don’t see coming. The kind that tackles you to the ground and kicks your teeth in, and forever ruins your life. The kind that stays with you for decades after it’s over. By the time you graduate, you’ll consider what Alan did to you a favor. It got you off the street at a time when you were headed in the wrong direction, and it made your mother’s dreams come true.”
His mother.
A bad feeling went through Nick as everything came together in his mind. As another realization groin kicked him. While Ambrose looked tired, he wasn’t that old. Probably not even as old as his friend Mark, and definitely not as old as his mother, who was only twenty-eight.
In less than ten years, I’ll become a Dark-Hunter.…
There was only one thing he could think of that would make him do something so drastic in that amount of time.
“Mom dies, doesn’t she? That’s why you became a Dark-Hunter, isn’t it?”
In that instant, Ambrose’s eyes changed from blue to the same black color as Kyrian’s. The wind blew his long coat out from his legs and swept his hair back from his face. A double bow and arrow—the mark of a Dark-Hunter—appeared on his cheek and his fangs flashed in the fading daylight.
Dark-Hunters die in sunlight.
But not Ambrose …
How could he be outside and on the street when he shouldn’t be able to? How was he able to hide his Dark-Hunter traits?
The wind sent a chill down Nick’s spine that he felt all the way to his soul.
“Because of you,” Ambrose sneered that word, “and your stupidity, your mother, Bubba, Mark, and … others close to you die horribly. That is the landscape we’re trying to repaint. And if you fail them this time, it’s over. For all of us.”
CHAPTER 1
If banging your head against a brick wall burned a hundred and fifty calories an hour as they said it did, then Nick should be emaciated. ’Cause he’d been banging it so hard these last two days that he should have a concussion by now.
“Mom, please…”
“I said no and I meant it. You’re too young to date.”
Fifteen? Really? Since when was fifteen too young to date? If he didn’t know better, he’d swear she was from the Dark Ages. Heck, for that matter, Kyrian was more open-minded and he really was from the Stone Age, or Iron Age, or one of those boring ages that they tried to force feed him in school.
That man had actually dated in a chariot.…
Nick had to stop himself from rolling his eyes—that was like throwing gas on a roaring fire while wearing kerosene soaked clothing when his mom was in this mood.
I’m old enough to death match demons and zombies, stop the apocalypse, deal with Death on a daily basis, and hold down two jobs, but I can’t meet my girl for a movie.…
Yeah, that made all the sense in the world.
He sighed irritably. “I’m a year older than you were when you had me.”
She narrowed those beady little blue eyes at him and lifted her chin to glare up at him. He still wasn’t used to looking down at his mom, who barely reached mid-chest on him these days.
The fact that someone so incredibly tiny could cow him with nothing more than an arched brow didn’t sit well with him. But regardless of arguments and differences of opinion, he loved his mother and wouldn’t do anything to hurt her or her feelings.
Which was how she cowed him with a single glance.…
I’m such a wimp.
“Precisely my point, Nicky. You see what kind of trouble you could get into? Are you ready to be a father at fifteen? No, I don’t think you are. You can’t even remember to take out the trash without me reminding you three times a day. Which, for your information, is the amount of times a day a child demands food.”
It wasn’t that he needed reminding so much as the fact that he hated doing it and kept hoping she’d forget about it.
Better not mention that. It’d get him into more trouble. So he went in to attack her first argument. “Technically, if I got a girl pregnant right now, I’d be sixteen when the baby was born.”
Pulling her blonde hair back into a ponytail, she glared at him. “Not funny, Nick. How dare you make a joke about this. I am not amused.”
“Well, personally, I think you’ve done a great job with me, Ma. And that was with no help whatsoever. I don’t know why you’re complaining.”
She put her hands on her hips and glared furiously. “And you’re trying to distract me with flattery. It won’t work. You can’t date until you drive, and that’s that.”
There was another sore topic for him. “I keep begging you to teach me.”
“Not in my brand spanking new car. It’s the only new car I’ve ever owned and it’s the only one we have. If you wreck it, we won’t have a way to evacuate during hurricane season.”
Nick growled low in his throat. He had more than enough money in savings to buy a car, but because of his age, he couldn’t sign for one, and his mother refused. That money’s for college, not a car you don’t need. There ain’t no place you need to go that your feet or a streetcar can’t carry you to.
Ugh! His mother frustrated him on so many levels.
He gave her a sullen pout. “So basically, I’ll never learn to drive, and therefore will never date.”
She smiled proudly before she turned around to get her shoes from her bedroom. “Now you got the picture, Boo.”
He mocked her words. Until she snapped around to face him as if she knew what he was doing.
Nick gave her his most charming grin. “C’mon, Ma. Everyone else in my class is dating. Even Madaug.”
“And if—”
“Everyone jumped off the Pontchartrain would you join them?” he asked in falsetto before she had a chance.