Yellowrock Clan? I opened my mouth to stop this, but he swiveled his body, the knee on the ground at my feet grinding in the grass. “And I swear fealty to the Everharts and Truebloods, for as long as Jane Yellowrock is yours and you are hers, one clan, placing my own well-being beneath your own, and with the promise that I shall protect your children and your children’s children unto the laying down of my own undeath.” He turned back to me. “You no longer must protect me, my mistress. My blood is yours to spill.”
“Holy crap in a bucket,” I said.
Primly he said, “The correct response is ‘I accept your fealty. In return I offer you a place at my side, to share my life and my holding, and the promise of a true-death most glorious.’”
“Good by me,” Eli said, his equanimity dropping into place like a veil over his real emotions. “Say it, Jane. Because if you don’t, then I will for you. As your second and your brother according to the Tsalagi, I have the right to go to war with you.” When I stared at him and then around at the group in my tiny yard, he said, “Say it,” in a tone of command.
Something weird and heated flared up in me, something unexpected. Something that felt like a healing when I hadn’t known I was sick or broken. It roared through my body and out my mouth. “Fine,” I shouted. “I accept! You still sleep in the weapons room with a werewolf!”
“Agreed,” Edmund said. “Accept my service.”
I repeated the words “I accept your fealty,” and a strange frisson of trepidation crawled beneath my skin and through my bones, accepting Edmund’s service in the vampiric way. Fealty. Dang it.
“So witnessed?” Ed asked.
“So witnessed,” Eli and Evan said together.
“Coolio!” Angie said from behind her father’s knees. “So witnessed!”
“Coweoo. Sho eness,” EJ said.
“What just happened?” I asked, fighting tears that made no sense at all.
“You just adopted a vampire and werewolf,” Eli said, “to go along with your brothers and your witches.”
“We need a bigger house,” Alex said.
From the house came the words “You are my dark knight, Vampire Edmund. I will take care of you too.” It was Angie’s voice. At the words, something shifted inside me. Something dark and light, heated and icy. My world shifted on its always precarious axis.
“Angie?” I asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Evan said.
CHAPTER 11
Everything’s Better with Bacon
I wasn’t sure what happened in the next few moments. Other than the witch adults and the vampire all agreeing that Angie was too young to make or sign contracts, and that until she was eighteen, she couldn’t swear to anyone. Which seemed like a good compromise to me, but left Angie mutinous again. The entire household was in the living room: the witches, the children, the humans, the vampire, the werewolf, and the grindylow, whom I hadn’t seen appear but was making itself at home with the nonfamiliar cat, all three beasts curled on the rug in front of the couch. The children were on the couch only feet away, again watching the improbable Disney movie with dreadful gender role models but great hair. And the witches were chatting with the vampire.
My world was . . . not falling apart. Was becoming something I had never been able to conceive. Never would have believed.
“You need to put on some makeup, babe. We’re expected at vamp central and you look like death warmed over. And not in a vampy-undead-pseudo-sexy way. More like in the Walking Dead way.”
“Dear God, yes,” Edmund said. “Shall I work on your hair?”
“I saw in the mirror,” I said. “No. I can do my own hair.” Not sure how all this had happened, I walked away from the gathering to my room to change clothes. And do my hair. And put on makeup. To go to vamp central and do . . . do whatever it was I did there.
* * *
I was dressed in black, natch, when I smelled Molly at my door. “It’s open,” I said when she didn’t knock. She entered and closed the door behind her, standing with the door at her back, her hands on the knob. “You look awful,” she said. “Are you sure you should go out?”
“No, I’m not sure. But I have a job.” I sat on the bed and rebraided my hair, fingers working on their own.
“Big bad vamp hunter and vamp Enforcer,” Molly said. “A contradiction in every way.”
“What’s up, Mol?”
Molly made a sound that was part exasperation and part uncertainty. “I have a concern. About the conclave. And you.”
“Okay.” I twisted my braided hair up in a tight bun, just in case I had to fight someone again at HQ. I shoved silver stakes into the bun.
“Evan and I took a ride out to the vampire cemetery today.”
My eyebrows went up and an unanticipated shiver of panic went down my spine. The vamp cemetery was where I was struck by lightning during a witch working. I still had the occasional nightmare about that. “Okay. Why?”
“You were struck by lightning during a working. It’s never happened before to anyone I know. Evan and I think it wasn’t an accident. That it wasn’t a fluke. That the storm was attracted to the power on the ground, and that someone used that to direct an attack against you.”
She waited for me to speak, so I gave her a shrug and went to the bathroom. She was right. I still looked awful. I pawed through my meager makeup, which I kept in a tackle box, and removed some concealer and powder and seven tubes of scarlet lipstick. “Okay. And?” I started dabbing the concealer onto the rings beneath my eyes. I wasn’t good at putting on makeup, but anything would have made me less corpselike.