In the Dark by Melody Taylor Page A

while
the sobs wound down, leaving me hiccuping and wet-faced. Sebastian
kept his arms around me the whole time, silent. Once I stopped, he
let me go and stood up. I wished he hadn’t. I didn’t ask
him to come back.
    “Better?”
he asked.
    I snuffed and
took stock. The hurt had gone, but so had everything else. I felt
numb. “Kind of.”
    He nodded. “Wash
your face. I’ll get you another shirt. We need to go back to
your home tonight.”
    Too wrung out to
question, I stood and did what he said. With the blood washed off my
face and wearing yet another button up, I dragged my feet back out to
the living room.
    “Why are
we going back to my house?” Even my voice sounded tired.
    “To see if
anyone touched anything or searched after we left. Either one of the
two could have gone back later on.”
    I followed him
to the elevator, arms folded across my chest. “To see if
anything they touched might tell us who they are, or what they want?”
    “Yes.
There were no reports on the local news broadcast of your home being
broken into. That means your house is still most likely unexamined,
other than what the two women might have done.”
    “I wanna
get my cat,” I said. It got me a flat look that I couldn’t
read, but he didn’t say no. The elevator opened to let us on
and whooshed shut behind us.

I AN
    W e
went past the house. He had to know the place after last night, but
he went right by. I opened my mouth to say something, then realized:
we didn’t know if one of those women had come back to wait in
the house for us. Pulling into the driveway where they could see us
would be dumb. Sebastian had parked a few blocks away last night, so
neither one should know his car; cruising past and parking further
down was probably safe. Not to mention smarter. That’s what he
did.
    “Do you
want me to come with you or wait here?” I asked as he killed
the engine.
    “I’ll
need you in the house. I won’t know if anything is out of
place.” He stared at a screen on the dash. It looked like a
video of the back window.
    I turned around.
The car had no back window. I turned to the screen in the dash again.
It showed what a mirror would have shown if there was a window. So he
was watching my house. For one second, I wondered what a car like
this would cost . . . then decided I didn’t want to know.
    Out of
curiosity, I cleared my throat while Sebastian glared at the screen.
His eyes flicked to me, then back at the dash. He could definitely
hear again. And I’d just gotten used to his deafness. Or at
least, I’d learned to wait to yell at him until he faced me. He
still hadn’t said anything to me about last night . . .
probably didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t sure I
wanted to, either. We’d sort of made up earlier. Sort of. Maybe
that would have to be good enough.
    “We can
heal deafness?” I asked.
    “If it is
sustained after the change, yes. A vampire who was deaf as a human
will remain deaf.”
    He glared at the
house a few more minutes, then opened his door. “Quiet,”
he said, as if I needed to be told. I nodded and threw in a suffering
look for good measure. Sebastian ignored me.
    We got out and
stayed low, slinking towards my house through the neighbor’s
yards, keeping close to walls, fences, bushes. I started breathing
halfway there. At least it wasn’t raining. When we got up close
to my house, Sebastian made a “wait here” gesture by
putting his hand in my face. I stuck my tongue out, which seemed to
confuse him, but I stayed put.
    He snuck up on
the house like a cat stalking a bird: one careful, hidden inch at a
time. It must have taken him ten minutes to cross my backyard. I
stayed as still as I could the whole time, positive that flicking my
eyes would give me away.
    What if one of
them was here? What if she had seen the car after all and expected
us? What if she was creeping up behind me right now while Sebastian
checked out an empty house?
    I tried not to
look behind me, tried to tell