Chapter 5

S everal hours later, it becomes clear we have to stop. Callahan, in the very back row, spies a deer running toward the tree line a few hundred yards from the road—Caleb has to use his Alpha compulsion to keep Callahan from shifting right there in the van and jumping out the back.

Callahan growls, half-feral, before regaining control. Sharon, sitting in the second row between Saige and me, looks shaken.

"We need to stop for food," Caleb announces. "Maeve, you and Caspian don't need food the way we do. If we go much longer, we'll all be acting like Cal."

"Um, there's a little town not far from here," Sharon says. "I came through this way on a road trip with my ex. There are a couple diners and a gas station. I dunno what it'll be like now, of course."

"How far?" Caleb asks.

Sharon shrugs. "Few more miles, maybe? It was two, three years ago, now."

Philemon, in the third row with Colin and Nico, clears his throat. "I, um…I have a few protein bars. I'd be willing to share them, should anyone…" Callahan leans over the seat, his chest rattling in warning. "Oh, oh, yes, um…here, please, take it." He fishes a bar from his bag and shoves it at Callahan, who rips it open with his teeth and devours it in three bites.

"Appreciate it," Callahan rumbles between bites.

Sharon giggles. "You're not you when you're hungry."

"I'd kill for a Snickers, right now," Callahan says.

"You and your sweet tooth," Saige says, laughing. "It's a wonder you don't have cavities."

"I'm a shifter. Don't get cavities." Callahan is grinning, now. "If I did, I wouldn't have any teeth, I don't think."

"Can you imagine a shifter with a mouthful of crowns?" Colin says, cackling. "Or…or dentures?"

Callahan's laugh is unexpected, a deep, genuine belly laugh. "A wolf trots up to you with dentures in? Oh god, that would be a great prank."

"Connor would have been the first to do it," Caleb says.

The van goes quiet, then.

Sharon looks at me, confused. I lean close and whisper. "Pack-mate. He died recently."

"Oh," she whispers back. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Thank you," Caleb says, responding to her whisper.

Sharon starts. "You heard that?"

"I'm a wolf. I can hear your heart beating in your chest. I can smell the last thing you ate—chocolate." He grins at her.

She frowns. "They say animals can smell fear. Is that true?"

"Oh, absolutely," Saige says. "Fear, anger, arousal, any strong emotion, hormones, pheromones, stuff like that, we can smell it."

"We can also smell lies," Callahan says. "Not a hundred percent of the time, but nearly."

"Okay, that's bullshit. You cannot," Sharon says, twisting in her seat to look at him.

She's short, an inch or so taller than Saige, with a beautiful, bouffant natural afro, delicate, fine features, dark, lovely skin, and a curvy build. She's wearing khaki shorts, hiking boots, a close-fitting red V-neck accentuating her ample chest, and a black raincoat tied around her waist. A long fixed-blade hunting knife is sheathed at her right hip.

I think of The Walking Dead for some reason. She seems like she could be a character from that show—a badass survivor.

Callahan rumbles. "It's true. Two truths and a lie. You and me, let's go."

Sharon eyes him for a minute or two. "My father is a licensed auto mechanic," she says. "I've never owned a television. In the third grade, I accidentally ate rabbit poop because I thought it was chocolate."

Callahan answers immediately. "Lie, truth, truth."

Sharon gapes. "Lucky guesses."

"Try again."

She considers a moment. "I rode an elephant in Thailand. My mother is a congresswoman. I can't whistle."

Once again, Callahan answers without hesitation. "True, true, lie."

Sharon blinks. "Starting to think maybe you're tellin' the truth. "

"Your mom is a congresswoman?" Saige asks.

Sharon nods. "Georgia State House of Representatives." She sighs. "Least, she was, before all this mess. I don't know where she is now. We had a falling out a few years ago about my brother and we ain't spoken since. I tried callin' her about a hundred times over the last few weeks but never got through."

"Yeah, cell phone towers were one of the first things to stop working, for some reason. It's weird. Cellular data still works here and there but phone calls don't." Colin holds up his phone as he speaks. "No one really knows why. Sorry to hear about the falling out with your mom."

Sharon sighs and shrugs. "My brother came out and she went through the roof. Kicked him out of the house, deleted him off her phone, changed the locks, got rid of any photo in the house with him in it." A shake of her head. "I told her he's my brother, I love him, and I will not go along with that mess. If she wants to disown her boy for being gay, she can damn well disown me, too. And she did."

"Bullshit," Callahan mumbles. "That is some grade-A pussy-ass bullshit."

"Any parent who will not accept their child's differences is no parent at all," Nico murmurs in a low, quiet, angry rumble. It turns out to be his only contribution to the entire conversation—he's a man of few words, it seems.

Sharon smiles at him. "I'm glad you agree, big man."

Callahan seems uncomfortable, for some reason—the way she's looking at him, smiling at him? I don't know. It's cute, though. "You're telling the truth, by the way. Just in case you were thinking the whole story was another two-truths-and-a-lie thing."

Sharon laughs. "Nah, two for two is proof enough for me." She looks at Philemon. "So what's your story, morning glory?"

Philemon hesitates. "I, um…"

I laugh. "You can tell her. The days of hiding and lying about the truth of who you are, are over. We're all just people in this van."

Philemon nods. His brownish-blond hair is cut in a classic side part, neatly combed. He's dropped the glamour mask, so his features are sharp, angular, and handsome in a geeky sort of way. "Well, um. My father sired me on his mate's handmaiden. It was 1680, I believe. She survived breastfeeding, believe it or not. She lived to see me take my first step, I'm told. I don't remember her, obviously."

Sharon holds up both hands. "Hold up, hold up, hold up." She points an accusatory finger at him. "You're tryna tell me you were born in the year of our Lord One thousand six hundred and eighty? As in, you're…" She frowns, thinking. "Math ain't my strong suit. Three-hundred and forty-five years old?"

Philemon gives her a quizzical expression. "Well, yes? That's what immortal means."

Sharon throws her hands up. "Well excuse me! Ya'll are the first I've met in person. Hearing the word immortal is one thing, but hearing someone claim to be older than this whole damn country is a whole other ball of wax, my geriatric friend."

Philemon frowns. "Um, by fae standards, I'm barely into adulthood. What you might consider early thirties, in mortal terms."

Sharon pinches the bridge of her nose. "You do look about thirty-five, don't you?" She scans the car. "So, you're all hundreds of years old?"

Colin raises his hand. "I was born after the Treaty—I'm only one-ninety."

Sharon's eyes widen. "Well ain't you just a baby! Only one hundred and ninety!" She shakes her head, hair bouncing. "How do I know y'all are tellin' the truth?"

Saige laughs. "You don't. It's not something we can prove. I mean, I could tell you what San Francisco was like during the gold rush years—I was there. But then, I could just be making that up."

"Well? What was it like? What were you doing?" Sharon turns to face her, expression eager and interested.

"It was wild, dirty, smelly, chaotic, violent, and amazing. You met all sorts of people from all over. Everyone came to San Francisco thinking they'd hit it big in the gold fields, but most didn't. It was a lot like people going to Vegas thinking they'll change their fortunes at the slot machines. A lot of men died broke and starving. There were a lot of diseases because most people didn't bathe or wash their hands, and you lived crammed in cheek-by-jowl, in the cities at least." Saige's eyes take on a faraway look. "Folks fighting over a few grams of gold flakes. Someone would ride into town dragging some poor horse thief along behind them, string 'em up, and hang 'em without so much as a how do you do." She glances at Caleb, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror.

"Your story to tell, Saige," he mutters. "Don't look at me."

Saige ducks her head and fidgets with her fingers, picking at her nails. "I was a prostitute, actually. My father was a mountain man—he felt the war coming and headed west into the wilderness. The man who sired me was just some mountain man who came by my mom's cabin one winter. She made him leave before the frenzy could take over. Or, so she always claimed. We lived alone in a cabin in the middle of the forest most of my life. This was in what's now Ohio, I guess. Back then it wasn't even a territory."

"Sorry, but when are you talking about?"

"Oh, um, late seventeen hundreds. I was born in 1780. Makes me a young adult." She lets out a breath. "Anyway. I left home when I was twenty or so. Went east, spent time in the cities—hated it, and went back west. Spent as much time as a wolf as a woman. I didn't even know packs were a thing. Mom was…well, today, she'd probably be diagnosed with clinical depression and agoraphobia or something. She hated people, hated crowds. Wouldn't get out of bed for days at a time. So, she didn't really teach me much about who and what I was. Being a one was just what I knew."

She's quiet for a few moments, thinking.

"Ended up in San Francisco in the early thirties. I'd…I was…" She swallows hard, starts over. "I was a virgin when I arrived in San Francisco. I'd just wandered around alone, hunting when I needed to eat, only occasionally venturing around people. I was more than half-feral if I'm honest. So then, when I decided to see what Frisco was like…it was overwhelming. Not at all like the cities back east. I was a kid when I went east—by mortal standards, not just ours."

I reach across Sharon and take Saige's hand. "Saige…you don't have to talk about it."

She smiles at me. "I'm not ashamed. It was something I chose. Most people just don't understand—mortal or immortal." She shrugs. "It's hard to make sense of a decision like that."

"You don't have to justify it. It's no one's business but yours."

She flips a hand. "Short version is, I went what you might call boy crazy. I liked the mortals. I wasn't in a frenzy, it was just…sort of like when a mortal raised in a super controlling conservative Christian home moves out and starts discovering her sexuality. Well, I was a virgin, had no experience around humans basically, let alone men, much less yet mortal men. And back then, you couldn't just sleep around. There was no hookup culture like there is now. Things were… very different. I obviously had no intention of marrying in the mortal tradition, or even courting, nor did I have or want a mate. I just wanted sex. So, I scoped out all the brothels in the city, picked the one I liked best, and worked there. I only did it for…a year, maybe? Not even. It got old. The men were smelly and rough and the pay wasn't great. Once I'd had enough, I left San Francisco and headed north, which is where I ran into Caleb. I didn't have a pack and I wasn't interested in a pack with the usual sexual politics."

Sharon clears her throat. "You may have to elaborate because I'm not sure I understand what you mean about pack sexual politics."

Saige laughs. "That's not exactly a quick answer, but I'll try. Basically, what you need to know is that immortals in general are less fertile. We don't conceive easily. Relevant to you, as a mortal, is that we cannot conceive with someone from our own race—our own kind of immortal, I mean. I can have a shifter mate, even a bonded mate, and we can get it on all we want and we'll never, ever conceive. You've heard us mention The Treaty, well, the super, super, super short version is that what you know as the Revolutionary War was a much more complex event. It was about immortals. See, up until now, the only way for immortals to reproduce is with a mortal."

Sharon frowns. "How does that end up in a war?"

"Because when a mortal woman conceives an immortal male's child, the process of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding is fatal to the mother," Saige answers. "There are no exceptions. Vampire children tend to kill their mother the fastest due to their blood needs, and mothers of shifters tend to live the longest, but no mortal mother has ever lived past the first year of their child's life."

Sharon doesn't answer. "Damn. Really?"

Saige nods. "Really. Obviously, mortals don't tend to like this. Never mind that a lot of mortal women have chosen of their own volition to have a child with an immortal, even knowing that it will kill them. There's no magic involved, no compulsion, nothing."

"And what about a mortal man puttin' a baby in an immortal woman?" Sharon asks. "Does he die, too?"

"Very often, yes," Saige answers. "Not as uniformly as a mortal mother. With a mortal mother, she dies because immortal children have vastly different biological needs, coming from our different physiological makeup—the magic that lets us shift or do glamourwork or drink blood. Those needs are just too much demand on the mortal body, and she can't support it. Even now, with modern medicine, I'm not sure a mortal woman would survive. Maybe through a late-term C- section? Maybe ? With a mortal male and an immortal female, it's different. When an immortal female conceives, she goes into a frenzy. It's uncertain, scientifically, if the frenzy comes before the conception or after, but the understanding is that the frenzy is meant to ensure she conceives."

"I'm sorry…frenzy?" Sharon says.

"Sexual frenzy. Just what it sounds like. She wants sex, needs sex, can't get enough sex. It's not just a want or need, though—it's way worse than that. She has no control, mentally or physically."

"So, you're saying she'll just fuck the poor man to death?"

Saige laughs with a nod and a shrug. "More or less. What actually ends up killing him is not the sex but the drain. Mana, prana, or blood."

"What now?"

"Elements of magic," Saige answers. "Shifters use mana to shift, fae use prana to create glamours, what you'd think of as magic spells, and vampires, obviously, need blood to be human." She gestures at Caspian. "See how he's pale and his skin looks kinda hard? He needs blood. Eventually, he'll be totally white and his skin will be hard as stone until he gets blood."

"I'm always human," Caspian says, sounding a bit perturbed. "I'm just unblooded."

"Right," Saige says, wincing. "Sorry." She looks at Sharon. "Interracial dynamics are still touchy."

"Wait, y'all don't even get along with each other? And you want us to get along with you ?"

Callahan snorts. "Exactly." He waves at the window. "Thus, all that. It's a big damn mess, and it's been a long fuckin' time coming, too."

Sharon looks at me, then. "I thought all this was your fault?" She holds up her cell phone. "I had data connection for a bit, a while back, and I looked you up, and people sayin' this whole big mess is your fault."

"It's not," Caleb snaps. "What she did was the tipping point, sending things that were already boiling over the edge."

I lean forward and touch his arm. "It's okay, Caleb. It's a fair question."

Sharon eyes Caleb somewhat fearfully. "Sorry, I don't mean to insult anyone, I just—"

I put my hand over hers. "No, no. Not at all. He's just protective. I did set it off, but like Caleb said, it was going to happen one way or another. Immortals were, and still are, on the verge of extinction."

"Wait, I missed something. Y'all are going extinct? How?" Sharon looks to Saige for the answer.

"Well, that's what I didn't finish explaining. The war—we know it as The Mortals' War, and you know it as the Revolutionary War, was about reproduction. It was mortals hating us for killing their women. It was about a lot more than that, but that was the heart of it. We lost and signed The Treaty, which states that we cannot reproduce with mortals."

"But if the only way you can have kids is with mortals…" Sharon says, understanding dawning in her eyes.

"Exactly. It was signed in 1784. For 240 years, it has been illegal for us to have children. Immortal men don't just go around raping and knocking up women willy-nilly, as a rule. They get into relationships. They fall in love. Things happen. Contraception doesn't work on us, either. And then suddenly she's pregnant and you can do nothing but watch her die."

"My mate Alistair went through that," I say.

Sharon looks at me. "Hol'up. You've got him, and him…both your mates." She points at Caleb, driving, and Caspian in the front passenger seat. "How many other mates you got?" She pauses. "And what's a mate, anyway? Like a husband?"

"I have five mates. Caleb, Caspian, Alistair, Phineas, and Stirling. Caleb is a shifter, the others are all vampires and form a coven."

"I thought that was witches."

"A common misconception," Philemon answers. "The notion of a coven of witches came from fae women forming groups—and they did call them covens, but it was a kind of joke, needling the vampires. They weren't witches, they were just…knitting circles, more or less. Pre-modern versions of a book club. They would get together and share glamours and prana manipulation techniques, and complain about their mates, children, and chores. And obviously, vampires have formed covens for most of human history, and the two got conflated."

"I didn't know that, Philemon," I say. "Thank you for sharing that."

He smiles. "My mother was in one. I was young enough that they let me sit in with them, until I was too old, at least."

"So a vampire coven is like a family," Caspian says. "A chosen family. It can be all men, all women, or a mixture. It can be three people or fifty. You become a coven and you share a bond. I can talk to my coven mentally from anywhere in the world."

Sharon's eyes bug out. "Y'all are blowing my damn mind." She rubs her face with both hands. "And I still want to know about pack sexual politics. But we keep gettin' off track."

Saige laughs. "It's a lot to take in. Immortals don't view sex the same way you mortals do. We're more…open about it, even more so than Europeans compared to Americans. But it's…" she looks at me. "You might be better off answering that than me."

I consider the question. "It's weird, honestly. I wasn't, like, promiscuous as a mortal teenager. I had a few…not boyfriends—we moved around too much to get too deep into feelings. But I had sex, and I liked it. But I never even thought about multiple partners or any of that. I liked sex, and that was about the end of it. And then it turns out I'm immortal, and everything changed. I mated with Caspian and felt attracted to the others. Now, that's not usual, but there are rules. Nothing worth getting into, but suffice it to say that actual penetrative sex is generally reserved for mates. When a vampire is feeding from a host—a mortal, usually—it's a sexual thing. But it's limited to foreplay—most vampires don't even want to have actual sex with a host, it's just that the act of drinking blood is an intimate, physical, and erotic thing—and sexually pleasurable."

"For the vampire, you mean."

"No, for the mortal. I'd recommend trying it. Not with my mate, of course, because we're exclusive—me and my mates. Caspian and I don't feed from mortals. Caspian feeds from me, and I feed from Caleb."

She stares at me. "If I let a vampire drink my blood, I'll get off?"

I nod. "You will. It will feel like nothing you've ever experienced before. But do be careful—you might not go back to boring old mortals." I say this with a wink.

"So, pack politics," Saige says. "Most packs are mixed gender, like ours." She sighs. "We have another female, but she's…not with us. For personal reasons." She shakes her head. "Anyway. Most packs do have sex with each other, but it's complicated. See, shifters especially produce more males than females for unknown reasons. Most packs only have one or two women, so the sexual politics can get complicated, keeping everyone happy. It's not…it's hard to explain because that's not how our pack works. But usually, a pack forms a very complex multi-directional marriage, you might say. It's unique to shifters. Fae tend to form more traditional single-mate relationships. Vampires too, but that's complicated by feeding habits."

Sharon shakes her head. "My brain is spinning. So…if I fall in love with some immortal, and we bang, I'll die?"

"Only if you get pregnant. And the conception rates are about the same, I think, so you have the same chances as with a mortal male."

"And condoms, birth control, none of that works?"

"Nope," Saige says. "Condoms, maybe, for a while, but they tend to fail. Immortals cannot take birth control—it doesn't work. It may as well be a sugar pill. And in mortal women, birth control just… doesn't work either—immortal semen just…overpowers it or something. It's not very well understood because it's hard to study."

Sharon just nods. "Good to know." She stares at nothing for a while and then shakes her head. "It's absolutely wild that I never knew any of this. That no mortal knew any of this till a few weeks ago."

"Well, it was less of a mystery before the Treaty. We weren't forced into hiding then," Callahan says. "People knew we were out there, that we existed, and some of the details of how we function and what we are, but mortals have always been afraid of us. That was most of human history. It's just the last couple hundred years that things have been like this. Older immortals remember the old ways, how it was before. But we younger ones were born too close to the Treaty to know the difference."

Caleb pulls the van off the two-lane highway, following a sign for a local cafe. A few minutes later, we reach a junction. On one corner, a gas station. On another, a small cafe—a few cars are parked at it, mostly beat up old pickups. At a third corner, a small local history museum. The last corner is a general store advertising cold beer, pizza, liquor, and the like.

Caleb parks at the cafe, and we all pile out.

It's a tiny place with a black-and-white tiled floor, Formica counters, cracked vinyl booths along the front wall with a window at each, and a bar opposite. A handful of locals are at the bar, eating burgers and sipping coffee. The proprietor leans over the counter from the other side, a pot of coffee in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

He hears the little bell over the door ding as we enter. "Come on in, y'all," he says, without looking at us—he's examining something a man across from him drew on a napkin, grinning.

And then his eyes flick to us, narrowing. They land on Caspian. "He sick?"

"No." Caspian lifts his chin. "I'm not sick."

"Then what's wrong with you? You don't look right." He scans all of us. "Somethin' off about all'a you."

"We just want something to eat," Sharon says. "Our money's green, same as anyone else's."

I touch her shoulder. "It's not your responsibility to defend us."

She shakes her head. "I been refused service because of the color of my skin, Maeve. I know how it feels. I know where this is going." She shakes her head again. "Feels like the same damn thing to me, and I don't like it."

The proprietor's eyes narrow to slits, and he straightens, wedging his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and crossing his arms over his chest. "Y'all are them…whaddya call it. Freaks. Immortals. Them weird, magicky fuckers from the news."

"I'm a vampire," Caspian says. "They're shifters." He gestures at the pack and then at me. "She's a vaer—fae and vampire."

"Well, I ain't' servin' no damn bloodsuckers."

Caspian growls. "I have no interest in your blood. Trust me. I wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole. I'll drink coffee and mind my own business. Talk to my… friends. Pay good money. They just need to eat."

Smoke skirls in his eyes. "Y'all can get the fuck out. Ain't servin' you. Keep your money."

I step forward. "We're no threat to you or anyone. We're passing through and we just want some food. You don't need to be like this."

"I'll be however the fuck I wanna be, bitch. Take your ass outta my restaurant 'fore I call the sherriff."

Caleb and Caspian both snarl viciously, and he takes a step back, paling.

I catch their arms. "Stop, stop, stop. Not helping. I've been called worse as a mortal." I sigh. "Let's just find somewhere else."

One of the patrons speaks up, then—an overweight, balding man in denim overalls. "Try Brutus's place, down the road about half a mile." He jerks his thumb north, indicating a county road heading away from the highway we've been following. "He's a weird, freaky fucker, lives way out in the sticks with a bunch'a folks. Might be one'a your kind. Least, he'll prolly serve you."

"Thank you, sir," I say. "I appreciate the information. Have a nice day." I nod to the proprietor. "You too."

He just snorts smoke out of his nostrils.

Outside, Sharon groans in anger. "That shit makes me so mad. It ain't right."

"It's a part of life," I say. "Something I imagine you have far more experience with than us. Or me, at least."

She nods. "Yeah, maybe. Ignorance is ignorance, though, no matter what it's about. But I guess it just goes to show bigotry ain't just about skin color or who you're bangin'."

We pile back in the van and head north in the indicated direction. The van is quiet.

"I should have stayed in the van," Caspian says after a moment. "You'd have gotten served without me."

"Fuck that shit," Callahan grumbles, his voice tense and pissed off. "That's exactly why we're doing what we're doing." He lifts his chin at Sharon. "Once upon a time, that dumbfuck redneck would've refused her service. Fuck, he still might have. But overall, this country's made progress, right? Progress like that didn't come from people staying in the goddamn van, Caspian."

Caspian sighs. "But I don't even need food."

"That ain't the point, sugar," Sharon says, reaching over the back of the bench to pat his knee. "You oughta been able to walk in and sit with your friends while they ate."

"Can I play devil's advocate for just one second?" Colin says. "There is a slight difference between racism based on skin and what we're dealing with now. Sharon is just the same as any other mortal. No more dangerous or different than anyone else. But to mortals, Caspian is , conceivably, dangerous. They don't know he won't go flying into bloodlust and kill everyone. And the problem is that it is a possible scenario. Perhaps not likely, but possible . They don't know anything about us, so their fear does have some amount of merit."

I tip my head back with a rough sigh. "You present an unfortunate truth, Colin. So not only do we have to combat the human fear of otherness , but we also have to fight the very rational fear of us because we are, in fact, dangerous to mortals."

"We can't present it like we're just a different sort of human," Channing says. "It's more complicated than that."

"It will be a long, uphill battle for acceptance and inclusion." I rub my face. "I think the best first step is the one we're taking right now: stopping it from becoming another all-out war."