Next to me, Griffin shrugged. “I wasn’t going to, but we’re bumming her out. It’s her birthday. We need to make a big fuss.”
A knock sounded on the door, and everyone turned to see a woman standing there. She didn’t look much older than us. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Beautiful but gaunt, in an unhealthy way. Big dark circles under her eyes. “Sorry to disturb. I’ve been sent to let you know you aren’t going to school tomorrow. Well, Maci is, but the rest of you are to stay home and study the texts. There will be a test tomorrow afternoon. If you don’t all ace the test, Maci gets bit.”
I sat forward. “What?”
She winced. “I’m sorry to deliver this message. I was sent. Don’t blame the messenger.” For just a second, she made eye contact with me. “Bye.”
Having said that, she turned and fled. For those few seconds, when we’d looked at each other, I noticed she’d had kind eyes. I turned my attention to Rowan. “What is her name?”
“I don’t know. I’ll admit, once I was old enough to get what was happening around here, I stopped learning them. They come, then they’re gone. It was heart-wrenching to make friends with older adult figures, then have them either die, become vampires, or just…fade into shells of themselves. I don’t keep track of their names anymore. Maybe that makes me callous.”
I sighed. “Maybe it means you’re protecting yourself.”
“We’ll learn the stuff,” Ace whispered. “No one is biting you because we fucked up. Besides, tomorrow is your birthday. No biting on your birthday.”
There really wasn’t much else to say. Tanner went back to strumming on his guitar. It wasn’t a song I recognized, but his voice was nice. Low, tempting to listen to, and I was drawn into the picture he sang about. Sunny days, cool weather, long drives with a pretty girl.
Ace put his head on my shoulder. “We’re going to have dinner. I’ve promised it to you. Tomorrow is your birthday, so we’ll all do something together, but after that? Dinner, you and me, okay?”
“I’d really like that.” The whole image was appealing. All the birthday fun and then the dinner. I loved the idea.
He lifted his head and jumped to his feet. “I have a surprise. I went by Wanda’s earlier today, and I took something. Well, I borrowed it.”
I gaped at him. “Ace, do you have a little bit of a kleptomania problem?”
“We all do bad things.” He shrugged. “Let’s blame the dying and vampire thing, if we want to. Or maybe I’m just a bad guy. No, I plan on putting it back. I don’t steal, even if I sort of want to.” He shrugged again. “Don’t judge lest you be judged. Or whatever they say.” He held up a box. “I got the board game that we didn’t get to play the other night.”
I sat up straight. “Oh, fun!”
“See?” He rolled his eyes at Caesar, who hadn’t, as far as I could tell, done anything to deserve the eye roll.
Caesar eventually grinned, and it looked like all was forgiven. They’d been doing this a long time—hanging out together—so much so, they were family. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, they’d taken me in, to the point that I was now their weak spot and something their fathers could use against them.
Frowning, I took a deep breath.
“Uh-oh,” Tanner said, putting away the guitar. “She doesn’t look like she wants to play.”
“I do. My frown was about another thought. Don’t worry about it. Yes, let’s play.” I smiled at Tanner and then Ace. They were always watching me, always trying to read me, and I was doing the same to them. I wasn’t used to hiding my inner monologue from my facial expressions, since no one had ever noticed me.
Ace opened the box and pulled out a whole bunch of cards. Some of them were characters, attributes on others, and others showed weapons. He quickly mixed them up and started distributing them. In short bursts, he explained the game. We each got a character and two random other cards that gave us an attribute and a weapon. Then we had to challenge the person next to us to see if our cards would beat their cards.
They’d all played the game before, so I assumed I’d catch on as we went. It didn’t take long. Rowan and Griffin started first. It was lively and sort of ridiculous. Would a brick monster beat a man made all of needles? Did it matter that one could turn invisible? That one had a giant hand?
I watched them as they went back and forth. Eventually, we all had to vote on which one of them won. This time, it was Rowan. The invisibility just trumped everything else. Griffin threw his hands in the air. “Sonot true. Big giant hand—I grab you, and I don’t care if you’re invisible, I hold you there and you don’t move.”
Tanner put his head on my shoulder like Ace had earlier. If this was a thing, I really didn’t mind it at all. “Griffin doesn’t lose well. It’s one of the reasons we don’t play with him.”
“Bullshit. You just know I win most of the time.” Griffin winked at me, our earlier conversation rushing back to me immediately. He wanted to leave a mark. Winning did that, at least in his mind.
But he actually looked amused and not pissed because he hadn’t won. We went on, and when it was finally my turn, I lost easily to Ace. I just had terrible cards. A big giant cookie was never going to beat his swordsman. Still, it was fun. Eventually, we redealt and went again. The time passed easily.
“Why did we stop doing this?” Rowan asked all of them, looking around. “Why did we decide to just not do this anymore?”
“I think,” Caesar spoke up for the first time that night outside of the game, “things just got heavy.”
“I don’t want heavy for the next week.” Rowan sighed. “I want as little heavy as we can make. As I told Maci, we’re going to have fun. Go out with it.”
Tanner laughed. “Sounds like a plan.”