“Kimberly and Raven?”
She nodded curtly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Raven has been awkward around me,” Helena said. “She’s never awkward.”
“Maybe she just wants to please you and she’s feeling shy about that.”
“No, that’s not it,” Helena shook her head. “It’s something else. I don’t know what, but I don’t like it.”
I tried not to laugh. Helena was the kind of woman who was hard to please. She knew exactly what she liked and how she liked it, so trying to convince her to try anything new ever had been an impossible task.
I looked at my computer and then I rubbed my eyes. I’d been staring at screens for far too long. You’d think that being a vampire would mean I could have unlimited computer time, but no. I was still very much like a little kid.
“You’re tracking the dealers,” Helena said, noticing the computer.
“Trying to.”
“What have you found?”
“Not much,” I admitted. There was a growing problem with people hunting vampires. It happened a few years ago, but after I cleaned up the Grove and got rid of all of our pests, the humans had mostly left us alone. Kimberly was one of the few hunters in the area who had still seemed like she had a bone to pick, but she’d only really been after me and a few select vamps who hurt people. The vampires she’d chosen to hunt were ones that I should have put down myself, but I liked watching her hunt, even from afar, and I liked knowing that she was having fun. I’d let a few vampires go in her area knowing that she’d find them and slay them.
Maybe it was my morbid way of giving her gifts, like a cat bringing its master a half-dead mouse.
"I don't like it," I told Helena. "Things are quieter than they should be."
"You think something's about to happen."
"I do," I told her.
"Well, figure it out," she said. "And fast. Who knows what the girls are going to do?"
"We could keep them locked up," I pointed out. "Then we won't have to worry about them."
Helena looked at me.
"You're testing me," she said.
"Perhaps."
"I don't like being tested."
"What's going on with you and Raven?" I hadn't planned on asking her such a personal question so soon. Possibly, I hadn't planned on ever asking it. There was something that she wasn't telling me, though, and I had a feeling it was something I really needed to know.
"Nothing that concerns you."
"Doesn't it?" I asked. "You just told me you think that our mates are plotting. I feel like that concerns me."
"I didn't say she was my mate."
"She is, though, isn't she?"
Helena looked at me, and for the first time since I'd known her, she looked...vulnerable. Scared. She looked a little nervous. Honestly, she seemed to suddenly freeze at the possibility that she could find someone to love her, or someone that she could love.
“I don’t want to talk with you about mates,” she said.
“Fine.”