Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Evan grinned and picked up the backpack again. “Excellent. Then I have questions about the book. I hope you don’t mind I looked through it. I didn’t get far because the words disappeared the minute Fen looked over my shoulder.”
“The words disappeared?” Jamie asked.
Nate’s eyes went wide. “I thought we needed that book. Should we be panicking?”
I waved off the fear. “Nah. She’s just shy and she doesn’t like men.”
“That book is rude,” Fen declared.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Evan and I would be the only ones who could read the sucker. I’d worried about taking the queen’s baby girl with us, but I now realized I totally needed her. “They’ll come back. It can take a while though.”
“Maybe it’ll go faster if we do some feminine things around her,” Evan suggested.
“I don’t think doing mani pedis is going to help anything,” Casey said with a sigh.
“I was thinking more along the lines of kicking the guys’ asses. She might appreciate that,” Evan offered. “I could use a sparring session. I don’t get to work off my sexual tension in wolf form.”
I liked the way that girl thought.
Both of my brothers put a single finger to their noses and said in harmony, “Not it.”
Casey frowned. “Well, I’m not it.”
“Spoilsports.” Evan pulled the backpack into her hands and settled it on her back. “Come along, book. We’ll follow Kelsey around and watch her baddassery and solve a crime while the boys play with microscopes and run around the woods. We have to find a murderer.”
Yep. Woman’s work.
Chapter Six
“So the book doesn’t like men. You know you have a lot of men on your team,” Evan pointed out as we walked down the hallway toward the apartment that was our first destination.
“Huh. I guess I never thought about it. I work with a bunch of vamps. They’re pretty much all dudes.” Vampirism was a gene that almost exclusively affected the Y chromosome. As with all things “gender,” it’s complicated, so there were a couple of female vamps out there, but I hadn’t met them. “It was pretty much the academics and Liv.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I had a friend go bad once,” Evan said. “She got bitten by this bug that infects a part of your brain that affects moral choices, and she tried to murder me. But not before she slept with Lee. Everyone sleeps with Lee.”
“There’s a bug that takes away your morality?”
“It was another plane. Great baked goods, shitty insects,” Evan replied. “I was fourteen, and she was the only friend I’d had in a long time. It hurt to lose her.”
“Did you have to kill her?”
“No. Trent did it for me.” Evan’s boots barely made a sound despite the fact that we were walking on hardwood floors. “He was a good foster dad, you know. You should be proud to be his wife.”
“I am.” More and more every second. “I’m glad he took care of you.”
“He took care of us and never let us forget who our parents were,” Evan said. “He would tell us stories every night. He even told us about Fen’s granddad, your real dad. I sometimes think those were his favorite stories. I know Lee loved them.”
Probably because they were about him, about the him he’d been before. When my real father, Lee Owens, had died, he’d chosen to come back to earth and been reborn as Rhys’s twin. “That doesn’t surprise me. My dad had some adventures. How do you feel about Lee being a latent vampire?”
Evan sighed. “I’m relieved that when he dies he’ll get another shot. You don’t understand how much we all worry about Lee. He’s a reckless asshole. I can’t tell you how many times I thought he would die. Fen can run wild, but he has the power to back it up. Fen often had to run into danger because Lee got mouthy with some crazy, powerful creature who was about to take his head off. And I was the only girl. So I was the only sane one.”
I could totally understand her position. “I’m sorry. You should have had a woman to help guide you. I know Sarah Day would have helped you if she could. I would have had I been here.”
“Well, I wish you had because Trent trying to explain menstruation to me was all kinds of confusing,” Evan admitted. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to die or not. He said a lot of stuff about transformation, so I was worried I might turn into something, and not something good since he’d told the boys they should be careful around me during that time.”
I snorted. “He grew up in a weird wolf cult. I don’t think he got a lot of education on biology. I’m certain he never thought he would be raising a girl on his own.”