Mirror: Book One of the Valkanas Clan by Noelle Ryan

list sitting on the kitchen table, and I dropped it in my bag, vowing to finish it later.
    Several minutes and one awkwardly silent car ride later, we were back at Damian and Valerie’s. The awkwardness probably would have bothered me more if I hadn’t been so relieved to discover the sunglasses truly could block the migraines. I would incur as many tickets from the fashion police as I had to if it kept those nasty spikes out of my head. Grateful for the reprieve, I smiled at Tom—he looked surprised for a moment and then smiled back, his shoulders noticeably relaxing. Then he hopped out of the car and almost bounced up the steps with my stuff, walking in without knocking, and I realized that my gratitude probably looked a lot like a yes to his dinner invite.
    I followed him with somewhat less alacrity than he’d shown, arriving in time to hear him asking Valerie where she wanted him to put my stuff.
    “I hope you don’t mind, Valerie,” I called out, “but I brought Beckett with me. I just don’t feel safe leaving him at my place while there are vampires hunting me.”
    “Of course not dear,” Valerie said, emerging from around the corner. “He’s as welcome as you are. Is that him there?” She peered into Beckett’s carrier, cooing softly. “Aren’t you just a handsome little fella ?” She straightened. “He can stay with you in the guest room; it’s up the stairs and to the left. It’s best if he’s confined to that one room so we don’t have to worry about him getting out; Sam and Luis can be a bit careless with the door at times.”
    “Thanks.” I paused. “May I ask you a question, Valerie?”
    “Yes?”
    “Why does Damian call Samuel and Thomas by their full names when neither you nor anyone else does?”
    Valerie smiled. “Older vampires, especially those who spend less time with humans, find it harder to adapt to the informalities of modern speech. Damian is over five hundred years old and he hasn’t spent as much time with humans since your great-grandmother died, so he is more formal than the rest of us. Though I’m almost as old as he is, I spend far more time with humans, so I’m not nearly as formal.”
    “I see,” I said, though my mind was spinning with this new information. I was sharing a house with people who could measure their collective experience in millennia rather than decades? My god, I must seem like a child to them.
    “How old is Tom?” I asked, suddenly slightly queasy at the thought of having kissed someone who might be centuries older than me.
    “He’s the youngest—Damian turned him in the fifties or sixties, I believe.” She smiled at me. “But you should really ask Tom about that, not me.”
    Slightly relieved, I went to find my room and give Beckett a chance to stretch his legs. When I turned left at the top of the stairs, I saw an open door that lead into a beautiful pastel yellow room with gauzy white curtains (backed, I noticed, by a very solid set of white blackout panels) and a queen sized platform bed made of pale wood. It couldn’t have been more to my taste if I had designed it myself. I noticed Tom through an open door on the other side of the room, setting up the litterbox .
    “You don’t have to do that,” I said, setting the carrier down and rushing over to help. “ Litterboxes aren’t pleasant even when it’s your own cat’s , much less someone else’s”
    “I don’t mind,” he said, smiling up at me. “Besides, I’m finished now.”
    It was then I noticed that the room we were standing in was a bathroom three times the size of my own. A tub large enough for two sat in one corner, with jets spaced around its sides, and a shower with multiple showerheads at various heights stood in the other corner. Between them was a simple-but-large sink, counter and mirror set-up that I found myself instantly envious of.
    “Good lord, do you think they’d let me move in permanently?” I whispered, only half joking. Tom