Page 94 of Bottoms Up
I turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning every wrist, arm, ankle in view — nothing. It was just…gone.
Maybe it went home.
I waited until we were on the plane to text Kirsten.
It left me, in the airport. I have no idea if it went home or transferred to someone else. About to take off. Won’t be able to talk until we land.
We were wheels-up less than five minutes after boarding. The jet roared down the runway, lifted smoothly, and angled into the night. We had a copilot for this flight, so Heather stepped back to talk to us once we were leveled off.
“Thanks to this fancy schmancy barely-below-Mach-1 plane ya’ll rented for me to fly, we should land in Chattanooga an hour and twenty minutes before sunrise.”
We got off the stage at the festival a little later than expected, but we’d figured that was likely, so we were still good. Thankfully, there’d been a regional airport with a runway long enough for this jet only ten minutes away. It’s the three-hour time difference between Tennessee and California that caused problems, but we were good.
If something went wrong, we had a vampire bag and a battalion of werewolves who could lift Julian’s gigantic ass like furniture.
Hailey doesn’t die at sunrise, she just gets burned if she’s in the sun, so she could cover up and handle short distances, if it came to it. But it wouldn’t.
Davy asked Heather a couple of questions about the plane, and she invited him to come to the cockpit. Once they were gone, a tall, statuesque woman walked to us from the security area and motioned me to follow her back up front. The cabin was broken up into conversation areas, so the four band members and our significant others were all in kind of a square, facing each other.
A flight attendant was bringing food out when we walked away, but I followed her anyway.
You know what I like, I telepathed Julian.Get me something good.
Of course, mon trésor.
The tall woman motioned for me to sit in an empty chair near Atlas, so I sat.
“This is Ellania,” Atlas told me. “She’s been in contact with Mordecai, and at this time, they aren’t certain where the bracelet went. It didn’t go home.”
“So, is there anything for me to do? Am I free of it?”
No one said anything, and I told Atlas of the little possible-conversation I had with it. “I have no idea if it understood me or not.”
“It knew it wasn’t safe with you,” Ellania said. “You were around people smart enough to try to kill it. They didn’t succeed, but it was apparently scared into pretending to be dead until it thought it might have a chance of being seen again.”
“But no one will recognize it, right?” I asked. “Even if it went to someone famous and they wear it on stage, it’s just a bracelet, though it sized itself for my bicep, maybe to draw more attention to itself? The coin was unique and easily recognizable. It looks nothing like that, now.”
She shrugged. “We don’t know. It’s also possible the other magical items put in with it gave it powers it didn’t have before. Or, it might be weaker. The answer to your question before is that in all probability, your part in its tale is over. There’s a chance it will come back to you, but it’s rarely done that over the known history.”
“Rarely?”
“Twice, that we know of, it’s returned to a former owner. In both cases, centuries had passed and it returned to a powerful vampire. It’s never gone to a human that we’re aware of, until you, much less returned to one.”
I returned to my seat as the wait staff were bringing plates out. We had a full meal on the plane — salad, steak, baked potatoes, and everyone’s favorite beer. Julian had saved me some onion rings and cheese sticks from the appetizers, too.
I love my bandmates. My vampire. We’re a family in ways it’s impossible to explain, forged in music, art, fire, and blood.
We ate, laughed, swapped stories about worst gigs, worst dates, worst outfits while we rocketed across the continent. Hailey and I got into a debate about stage monitors versus in-ear systems. Davy curled up against Will after the main course and dozed like a cat.
I leaned back, watching the stars through the tiny window and thinking about my brother, at the show without telling me. Watching from the crowd. Sending me a selfie and a callback to the lyrics. Time to man up.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d grown up lately.
And maybe it’s not such a bad thing to want permanence. A house. A bed no one else had shared. A vampire mate. A family.
The landing was smooth, and the two pilots stayed on the plane to fly it back to wherever it’d been rented from. My understanding was that Marco had paid the difference between this plane and the one Heather would normally rent to fly us to California and back.
And that was one of the things that made me want Marco to turn me, the way he takes such good care of his people — but I also trusted Benji, so I needed to meet this Zander guy.
