Chapter 6 – Family Dinner

Laz

Hallowell gets both hands on my chest and shoves, and for somebody who looks like he lives on gas station coffee, he’s a lot stronger than he has any right to be.

I stumble backwards, getting my balance back just in time to watch him slam through the fire door. Then an alarm’s going off right over my head, loud enough to make my fangs hurt.

Wonderful. Now I’m standing in a pitch-black hallway with glass all over my suit, next to a screaming door, which doesn’t exactly scream innocence in light of recent events.

I wasn’t waiting here to make a suggestion to Hallowell, whatever I told him. I wanted to say the thing about Fang & Sons to his face, somewhere quiet enough that his heartbeat was the only one I could hear, so I could listen to what it did.

A heart trips when somebody’s lying. I busted half the pledge class sneaking uninvited guests into the house that way, and I’ve caught Per more times than I want to count.

Hallowell’s heart tripped, all right. Then it sped up and kept going. Every bulb on the floor blew, and now he’s taken off like I’m the one who did something wrong.

The thing is, guilty people run. So does a warlock who just blew out all the surrounding lights in front of the guy he supposedly hates most on this campus.

I’ve been trying to decide which reason made his heart skip for a good ten seconds, which is about nine longer than I usually spend deciding anything about anybody.

And the whole time, his neck was about an inch from my mouth. I didn’t bite him. I’m not going to pretend it was easy, though, not in my own head.

His pulse was racing right there under his intricate tattoo, and for about a second I wanted to find out if the Strip’s right about what a warlock tastes like more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

I’m just hungry.

I can’t stay here. Campus security’s probably already on the stairs, and I’m not explaining any of this to another guy with a clipboard. I’m also late for dinner with my father, who treats lateness the way most people treat arson.

There’s glass in my cuffs. My tailor would have a stroke if he knew.

* * *

The family eats in the private room behind our booth at The Vein, which means I walk past Per’s empty chair on my way to sit across from Per’s other empty chair. They still set him a place in here.

My father’s at the head of the table, asking the waitress about her daughter’s recital. He knows the kid’s name, what song she’s dancing to and that she’s nervous about the turn at the end. I played lacrosse all through school, and he still thinks it’s the one with the horses.

He waits until the waitress is gone before he looks at me. His eyes home in on a sliver of glass on my sleeve that I missed, and his nostrils flare.

“You smell like a warlock,” he says, the way other fathers would mention you’ve got dogshit on your shoe.

“It’s a board with a warlock seat, Father. They let him sit with the rest of us.”

“The Hallowell boy.” He keeps looking at me. “And your eyes are black. Eat before you sit at my table, Lazarus. You’re starting to look like your brother.”

It’s the worst thing anybody’s said to me all week, and I spent tonight with Hallowell.

Per’s eyes haven’t been green since spring, so apparently my father has noticed. He’s just decided it isn’t worth interrupting dinner over.

I don’t say the word Sugar. In this family, saying it out loud gets you shipped off somewhere with nice gardens and no phones, and Per would never forgive me for that.

“Sit next to the boy if you have to,” my father says. “Just don’t make the mistake of trusting him. His mother lived in our house for years. We trusted her with the wards, with you boys, with everything.”

His tone grows frostier than usual as he continues.

“Then somebody paid her more. She dropped every one of the wards and walked out the front door with her coat on and her car keys in her hand before they’d even finished coming down.”

“I know, Father. I was there.”

He’s told it at every holiday since I was fourteen, and he’s never once said her first name. It’s always “the Hallowell woman,” like saying it might stain the tablecloth.

The noise is what I remember most. The house was so loud I couldn’t hear myself screaming. She was in the front hall in her socks, yelling for somebody to get the boys upstairs, and Teddy was on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with his eyes open.

He was sixteen. He used to let me win at Mario Kart, because I threw the controller when I lost, and he thought watching me act like I’d won fairly was hilarious. I’ve spent years trying to picture his face any other way than how it looked on that floor, and I can’t.

That’s the woman who raised Hallowell. My cousin’s dead, and her son’s prints are all over a kid who was selling Sugar on our campus. I don’t have to work very hard to pick a side in this matter.

“Gordon had the minutes to me before you were out of the building,” my father says.

He doesn’t need me on that board for my opinions. He needs the name Kron on the attendance sheet.

“The Bell boy was selling his own blood.” He takes a sip. “Warlocks always do, sooner or later, when the money runs out.”

He’s said some version of that my whole life, over a lot of dinners, and usually I tune it out. Tonight I think about what a bartender at Fang & Sons could possibly take home in a week, and I don’t argue with him, not even in my head.

Not only do they pay well below minimum wage, the kind of trash that drinks there isn’t prone to tipping either.

“That board wants a warlock to hang this on,” he says. “It already has one sitting at the end of the table. Let it have him.”

“You want me to point them in Hallowell’s direction? I’m not sure he did it.”

“I want you to sit quietly and let them do it themselves. A Kron defending a Hallowell is the one story out of that room I’d have to pay to make go away.”

“I have no intention of defending him. But if they throw him off the board, I lose the best seat in the house for watching him.”

“And why would you need to watch him?”

His nostrils move again, and I lock my face into a mask of stone. There’s an honest answer to that question, and it involves a dark hallway and how close I came to finding out what Hallowell’s neck tastes like. My father’s getting the other one.

“If he’s selling on our campus, somebody’s buying from him. I’d like to know who before the police do.”

“That’s what Gordon is for.”

Gordon’s for making things disappear, and I’m not interested in that. I want whoever’s been selling to my brother found, and if that turns out to be Hallowell, the board can have whatever’s left of him when I’m done.

My father finishes his drink and walks out without saying goodnight to me. He rarely bothers with pleasantries when they’re not aimed at strangers.

I stay where I am, across from Per’s empty plate, and call him.

It rings out to voicemail. “It’s Per. If you dare to call me Peregrine, I’m blocking your number. Leave a message at your peril.”

He recorded that when he still thought he was the funniest person alive, and back then he was right. I’d give him my Bugatti La Voiture Noire to hear him say it to my face, and then I’d yell at him for an hour.

I call again and hang up before the beep. If I leave a message, I’ve got to say something, and I don’t know what yet.

The third time, I leave one. “It’s me. Call me back, please. I’m not mad. I just need to know where you are.”

On the fourth try, it picks up. There’s music on the other end, all bass, and somebody breathing right on top of the phone.

“Per. Where the fuck are you?”

“He’s asleep,” says a man who isn’t my brother. “Stop calling, Lazarus.”