“I love you,” he whispered, then bent to take my lips in a sweet, tender kiss. I kissed him back with all I had, hoping to erase the kiss with Vasilios. I wanted to forget his weird obsession with me and just focus on Peter.
“Love you, too,” I breathed when we finally broke apart for air.
“Well, this is an interesting development,” Rita said, and we turned around to find everyone staring at us, my parents included. I wanted to crawl inside my own skin and die of mortification. Dad’s expression was stoic, while my mother wore the ghost of a smile on her lips. I certainly knew which parent would be the easier one to win over when it came to accepting my relationship with Peter.
I didn’t know what to say, and seemingly Peter didn’t either because he stood holding my hand in silence. Thankfully, the awkward moment was interrupted when the doors to the dining room creaked open. My good friend Nic, the real Nic, and his parents emerged, looking dazed and confused.
“Might I ask what you’re all doing in our house?” Mr Baumann questioned.
18.
“Wait, so who’s the guy we arrested in the forest?” Mum asked on the drive home from the Baumann house.
After a short reunion with Nic, and after we explained everything that had happened to them, we left the Baumanns to their privacy and headed out. Peter and I shared one more heated kiss (thankfully while my parents were busy talking to the Baumanns), and he said he’d catch up with me tomorrow. I hated the idea of him going back to the library on his own, but it wasn’t like my parents would agree to him sleeping over in my room.
“His name is Sven,” I told her. “He came from Oreylia, too. He’s part demon, part vampire, which explains how Mr Williams was killed. Supposedly, he let himself be caught to take the heat off Vasilios, who was going to help him escape later on.”
We’d dropped Rita off at her house, so it was just my parents and me in the car.
“About Peter,” Mum went on. “He seems like a very nice boy.”
“He is a nice boy.”
“He better be a nice boy,” Dad added, hands tightening on the steering wheel as he muttered something under his breath in Romanian, his mother tongue.
“She’s eighteen years old, Ethan,” Mum chided. “She was bound to start bringing a boyfriend home sooner or later.”
“How about later?” Dad replied. I reached forward and squeezed his shoulder.
“Thanks for being so laid-back about this,” I teased, and Mum chuckled.
Dad gave a noncommittal grunt. “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. At least until he fucks up, then I’ll deal with him in a fitting manner.”
Mum swiped him on the arm. “Don’t swear in front of our daughter.”
“When he messes up, then,” Dad corrected himself.
I sat back, glad that he at least wasn’t forbidding me from seeing him. I decided to take it as a win. A few minutes later, we arrived at our house. Dad stayed in the car, telling us he had to go to the Hawthorn Council and let them know the true demon warlock had finally been apprehended.
Mum gave me a long hug as we stood at the bottom of the stairs, and I sensed her relief that I hadn’t been hurt tonight. I’d managed to avoid telling anyone the real reason Vasilios had marked me. I hoped it was something that didn’t need to be brought up. They all presumed he’d done it as a way of punishing my parents and not because he spotted me through a window and fell head over heels into a weird obsession. He thought we were kindred, but aside from our mixed heritage, we had absolutely nothing in common.
I headed to my room and took a shower. While I washed, my mind wandered to the boy I thought was Nic. He’d been a friend to me, but it wasn’t real, and I felt sad to have lost the person he was pretending to be, even though I would be getting my real friend back.
I wondered what might happen to Vasilios now. Likely, he’d be sent to the Prison of Thorns. I wasn’t worried about him, though. He’d brought it all upon himself.
I stepped out of the shower and dried off, then threw on a silk robe. On instinct, I reached out with my mind to talk to Peter, then remembered we no longer had our connection.
My heart sank.
It was going to be a while before I got used to the silence.
I walked into my room, wrapped up in my thoughts, when I stopped short. Peter was sitting on my bed, and my heart did a little somersault at the sight of him. He turned, his eyes heating when he saw me. His hair was wet, and I suspected he teleported to the showers at St. Bastian’s after he left me outside the Baumann house.