Page 1 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
CHAPTER 1
The raven fluttered down to land in the branches of the nearest hawthorn tree the moment I pulled my bike to a stop in my mother’s driveway. She always did.
“Hey asshole,” she called to me as I turned to set the helmet on the seat.
“Douchebag,” I answered in kind, smiling up at her. She knew my name was Flynn, but she’d never offered one in return, so for as long as I’d known her, we’d exchanged friendly insults instead.
I had known her since...well, I thought maybe she’d been the first animal who had spoken to me. The first one I remembered, at least. I didn’t know how long ravens usually lived, but that meant this one was at least thirty, since I’d been talking to animals for as long as I’d been talking.
Being raised completely separate from other people your age tends to make a person look for companions in odd places, and when I’d talked to them, the animals had talked back, so my fate as a weirdo had been sealed before I even learned to read.
Honestly, though, animals were usually better conversationalists than people.
They rarely lied.
“Got any food?” the raven asked, hopping from branch to branch to follow me as I walked toward the house.
I paused, checking my pockets, and came back with the remnants of a bag of peanuts. Were peanuts good for ravens? Unlikely, but honestly, I’d grown up feeding her ham and cake and...pretty much anything that had ever been on my plate, and she seemed to have done pretty well with it.
Shrugging, I held up the bag, then leaned over and dumped the nuts into the grass.
She leapt from the branch, spreading her wings wide and gliding down to where I’d dropped the food.
“Old lady not feeding you?” I asked her, motioning toward the house.
She made a wheezy little coughing sound that was her approximation of laughter. “I don’t ask the dead for offerings.”
Which was...well, people often said animals were stupid, or talked about how tiny their brains were, but that was always proven not quite right in my experience. Most creatures weren’t as smart as my raven friend, but every single one I’d ever spoken to had recognized that my mother, leader of the vampire population of the greater Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area, was dead.
I had yet to run into a single human who recognized vampirism, let alone who saw it the moment they met her.
I looked over to where the last sliver of the sun sat, red and dramatic, atop the ocean on the horizon. “I suppose she doesn’t usually eat anything you’d be interested in getting your beak into anyway.”
The raven made a little choking noise, and for a moment I worried I’d amused her at a bad time and she might actually need medical intervention I wasn’t qualified to give, but she finished pecking down a peanut and then gave her little laughagain. “Blood is certainly a very specific taste. A boring one. I’d miss cake too much to go making it my whole diet.”
Cake. I was of the same opinion, but I suspected that made my raven friend and me rare, given all the romantic notions people had about vampires.
“Pizza,” I answered, and started again toward the door, since she’d pecked up most of the peanuts.
“Fresh bread.”
“Cherry pie.”
We went on that way, tossing out favorite foods until we got to the stairs leading up to my mother’s front door. I turned to nod at her. “Good seeing you. I’ll try to grab something from dinner for you. I know how you love Meg’s dinner rolls.”
She gave a wordless caw and flew off to the thicket of trees I thought she lived in, leaving me alone on my mother’s doorstep.
Ugh.
I supposed I had to actually go in. I’d beensummoned, after all. I’d woken in the morning to a voicemail from her assistant telling me I was “expected” for dinner at seven, because that was the way it worked with my mother. She rarely made a lot of time for me, but when she did, it wasn’t optional. It was compulsory, as though a dinner she couldn’t even eat at a time she didn’t want to be awake was something either of us wanted.
On the other hand, her cook, Meg, was entirely wasted on a whole house of vampires, so coming to visit sometimes was the least I could do, wasn’t it?
Before I could reach for the doorbell, the double front doors were thrown open to reveal my mother on the other side. I leaned on my back foot, blinking at her for a moment, not sure why I was surprised, but surprised nonetheless. Tonight, Mother looked like the vampy heroine in an old movie, in a long slinky black dress and bright red lipstick.
Fiona Knight always cut a striking figure, so I wasn’t surprised about that part, just the doors being thrown open.
It was a little funny, come to think of it. We had the same deep auburn hair and almost unnaturally green eyes. The same long lines, both of us tall and willowy sort of people. But on her, it looked gorgeous and put together and perfect, like a Hollywood ingenue just barely past her prime.
