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Now
“How about a movie?” Reese asked.
“There’s no TV here,” Silver told her, grunting as she carried one of the spare mattresses up the stairs. Sans-magic, this was a harder feat than she remembered.
The sun was starting to rise, driving away the dark while a certain coolness lingered in the air. Despite that, Silver was already breaking a sweat, but she didn’t want to use her powers for something as simple as manual labor.
Reese was now sitting on the desert ground, to keep the stairs clear as the other two went up and down, setting up camp outside the bunker. Since Silver was going to spend most of her time out here, whether it was to guard the place in Adam’s absence or to sleep, she figured they might as well get a campsite ready before he left.
“Cards?” Reese added hopefully.
“No deck.”
“Adam could buy one!”
“We barely have money for food and transportation.”
“And you’d have to wait till I’m back, anyway,” Adam pointed out, frowning as he tried to figure out how to assemble the foldable chairs.
Reese let out a puff of air and kicked some dirt around. “Well, what do you usually do for fun around here?”
“There are books if you want to read,” Silver suggested in a casual tone.
“Ooh, romance? Fantasy? Honestly, I’ll read anything except horror.”
“Self-help.”
Theresa’s shoulders dropped. “Why are you torturing me?”
Silver held back a smirk and shrugged as she laid a sleeping bag over the mattress. If she had known teasing the girl was so much fun, she would have started doing it a long time ago.
“I’m gonna die of boredom,” Reese groaned. “It’s not the leg that’ll kill me, it’s this.”
“Nice to see your injury didn’t affect your dramatic flair,” Silver muttered.
“How about we do something new every day? Like... we could try cloud watching!” She turned her gaze upward, where the slowly lightening sky was clear, save for one tiny white puff of a cloud. “Okay, maybe not. But we could stargaze later tonight. I bet the skies are way clearer out here than in the city. Oooh, or! One of you could teach me how to drive!”
Adam looked up in surprise. “You’ve never learned to drive?”
By now, he was done with the first chair, so he briefly stepped away to help Reese onto it before he went back for the rest.
“My mom wanted to teach me,” Reese was saying, “but Mama didn’t let her. She hates cars, thinks they’re evil contraptions.”
“Sensible woman,” Silver muttered under her breath.
Adam threw her a glance, but her comment was too low for Reese to hear. “I get it. Technically, I don’t have a permit. I was too young to get one when I was recruited.”
Silver had to stop for a second and look at him.
Adam never talked about his past, least of all his family. She had spent a year with him at the estate but only recently found out tidbits about him, and a lot of it was because she had head-dived into his memories.
She knew he’d lost his parents, his sister, and a still-nameless friend because of the supernatural community. His sister had apparently died following circumstances of abuse, and Adam outright said it was because of vamphyrs and their spawn. Silver could only surmise that they must have been recruited together and she’d died at the estate.
There was also someone named Pru, who was accidentally killed by a fledgling Robert during a feeding-gone-wrong. She was the last loved one Adam lost. After her death, he had vowed never to care about anyone again at the estate. At least, until Silver came along.
But that was different.
And also, irrelevant.
Anyway, that was the extent of Silver’s knowledge about Adam’s past. She never asked for more because she knew how painful it was to remember things like that. Yet, there he was, voluntarily opening up to Reese. He must have forgotten how relentless the girl could be when her curiosity got the better of her. Like a dog with a bone.
“How have you been driving this whole time?” Reese asked.
“I know how to drive, I’m just not legally allowed to,” he said as he clicked the last piece of the chair into place. “My dad started teaching me and my sister when she was old enough to get her license, but I didn’t really get the chance to drive until a few years ago.”
His sister must have been older, Silver surmised.
She shook her head, concentrating as she pulled the phone out of her pocket. The device hummed with energy as soon as Silver switched it on, calling to her magic. But just like earlier, it wasn’t hard to resist the pull.
“In any case, it’s not a good idea, teaching you to drive, Reese.”
“Why not?” the latter asked.
“Several reasons,” Silver replied, bending down to place the phone on the desert ground. “You can’t drive with that leg; it’s not safe to keep the car near the bunker; we can’t waste money on gas; we can’t leave Shauna alone and go for a drive; and Adam needs the car for today anyway. Need I go on?”
“Fine, I’m sorry I asked,” the girl grumbled, putting her head down so her blonde hair shielded part of her face.
Standing back up, Silver dusted her knees and tapped into her magic.
“Hey, how does your mom get around?” Adam chimed in. “The one who hates cars?”
“She takes her bike everywhere,” Reese told him. “Or her old van, if she has to get someplace far. That’s the only time she’ll voluntarily drive. Mama’s a bit of a free spirit.”
Silver stopped herself from snorting in amusement. Like mother, like daughter.
“Were you adopted?” Adam wondered.
“Oh no, Mama’s my birth mother,” Reese explained, all too happy to talk about her family. “She and Mom fell in love when I was a baby. They got married as soon as it was legal.”
He nodded, and though he didn’t ask, Reese kept talking. She must have had this conversation countless times before, with people much nosier than Adam.
“My dad’s always been in the picture, too,” she said, smiling tenderly. “I was an accident baby, so he and Mama were never together in that sense. But he lives close to our house, and he’s great friends with my moms. We’re super close.”
Silver watched Theresa closely, taking note of the glow around her. Auras often varied in brightness whenever the person was feeling intense emotions. It was interesting to watch Reese’s glow brighten when she talked about things and people she was passionate about. But then it dimmed as a twinge of sadness crossed over her face.
Reese really hated lying to her parents. It was obvious how much she missed them, given the way her aura dimmed as she talked about them.
“Not to interrupt,” Silver said, intending to do just that, “but can we test my theory now?”
Reese cleared her throat and nodded.
“What am I supposed to do, exactly?” Adam asked, glancing uncertainly at the cell phone.
“Get close to it,” Silver told him, gesturing. “Put your hand out, but don’t touch it. I’ll tell you if you should keep going or not.”
“How does this help?” Reese asked.
Silver had thought it was obvious, but she didn’t mind explaining it. “We’re testing the limits of how close he can get to an electronic device before his aura affects it. That’s when someone could trace his location if the thing is connected to Wi-Fi.”
“How can you tell?”
She gestured to her pearl-colored eyes. “I’ll see his signature flaring up.”
“Should I shift?” Adam asked.
Reese’s eyes widened with a gasp.
“Maybe later,” Silver allowed. “For now, this is more important.”
Her own aura reacted more easily to electricity when she was tapping into her magic—or physically touching electronic devices. Her theory was that Adam’s aura would do the same, which meant he’d be easier to detect in hybrid form. Also, unlike her, he couldn’t cloak his signature. Another reason why it would be safer for him to stay in human form during his solo mission.
“When you’re ready,” Silver told him, “just get closer to the phone and wait for my signal.”
Taking a deep breath, he braced himself before he started advancing. Silver shuffled her position a little so that both Adam and the phone were within her direct line of sight, allowing her to watch for any sort of change in either. When there was none, she gestured for Adam to keep going.
It wasn’t until his hand was hovering a foot above the phone that something happened.
“Stop,” Silver called out, and Adam froze. “Don’t move. Stay right there.”
Both he and Reese held their breaths as Silver studied the purple in his aura. The glow around his hand wasn’t exactly brighter than the rest of his body, but it expanded out of him a little more than usual. There was a trickle of purple seeping from his hand toward the phone, though not close enough to touch.
Silver waited a moment to see if staying would make the glow retract back toward his body. It didn’t.
“A little more, slowly,” she instructed.
Inch by inch, Adam’s fingers came closer and closer. The purple of his aura seeping toward the phone grew longer each time, in a direct line toward the device, until—
“Stop!”
The glow had suddenly spilled like liquid, wrapping around the device as though it were an extension of Adam himself.
“Pull back just a tiny bit?”
He lifted his hand up less than half an inch, and the glow from his hand no longer connected with the one in the phone. The device was still wrapped in the purple signature, but it dimmed after a while before going out completely.
“That’s the limit, right there,” Silver declared. “Let’s do it again. See if you can figure out the distance on your own this time.”
They experimented in different ways, like having Adam close in at various speeds, fully touch the phone, linger for longer, etc. The result was the same no matter how they went about it; Adam’s signature always reacted when it was less than a foot away from the phone. And no matter how long he lingered or how quickly he pulled away, a bit of his aura always stayed with the phone for a little over a minute.
“As long as you stay that far away from anything electronic, you’ll be fine,” Silver concluded. “All that’s left now is figuring out what you’re going to say at the police station.”
“Compared to this,” he said, gesturing to the phone, “making up a story is a piece of cake.”
“You could say you’re a reporter writing about family murders,” Reese suggested.
Adam nodded seriously. “Maybe, yeah. I’ll figure something out.”
“Whatever it is,” Silver added, “make sure to get all the supplies we need first and leave the report for last, but do it all before sundown. Worst case scenario, Master Drake tracks you down in five minutes. He can’t send vampires after you until nightfall, but he might send a different squad, so you’ll have to get out quickly and make sure you don’t leave a trail for them to follow.”
“I know. Trust me; I got this.”
She did trust him, surprisingly more than she’d expected. It brought her immense relief to know that she could count on him out there, that someone had her back. And she had no doubt that he could do what she was asking and come back safely.
But then, her relief turned to apprehension. With Adam leaving, she could no longer put off the other pressing thing she needed to do.
“Now can we do the test when he’s in hybrid form?” Reese asked, her eyes glinting.
“Not today,” Silver sighed.
There was a very pissed-off bloodsucker she needed to talk to.
