“Work here in Motham PD. Maybe I’ll become the boss myself.”
“And if I choose to stay here and take the reins back from Saul?” He glanced at her under his lashes. “What then?”
“Then I will take the job when you retire, sir.”
He smiled. “You might wait a very long time.”
“Knowing that I have necromancy in my lineage and that necromancers live for many years, I am willing to accept the challenge.”
He couldn’t stop his smile spreading. The idea that she might stay on here, that they might enjoy another meal together when all this was over, and maybe another after that…
He found himself wishing this damn case would disappear, just like the suspects. Just leave him to be alone with Clare. Let the world go fuck itself. As long as he had her…
“Tell me about your childhood,” he prompted, trying to keep the longing out of his voice. Truth was, he wanted to know everything about her.
“Honestly, my life was boringly normal,”
“Other than talking with the dead?”
“That was normal for me. At least now I know why I was happy playing in the graveyard. And miserable at school.”
“Because of the bullying?”
A shadow fell over her face.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”
“No, it’s fine… My parents sent me to a High Tween private girls’ school. I got a scholarship, but it was a bad decision to take it up. I wasn’t society, I wasn’t wealthy. And my parents were common undertakers.” She hesitated. “The other girls loathed me from the moment I set foot on St Hilary’s grounds. That’s how I became friends with Natalie, because she was also from an ordinary family. Anyone who wasn’t somebody, who wasn’t connected to the Jordaks or the Council of Towns or the elite people who lived near Tween Park could just forget about fitting in.”
He was silent, forcing himself to eat while the injustice of it roiled in his gut. He could feel his protectiveness toward her rising up again, as if she was his beloved.
He paused. There was that word again,beloved. Reserved for a vampire’s mate. If he let his mind dwell on that possibility, how would he drink her blood tonight without taking it one step further?
“It’s ironic that humans revile vampires when there is a cruelty in some of your own that would equal or even surpass the worst of our kind.”
“That is very true,” she agreed. “I have never been so cruelly treated as I was by those girls.”
“What did they do to you?” Oliver asked quietly.
She hesitated. “They called me a zombie. Drew skulls on my locker, left little dolls filled with voodoo pins on my desk, and one time they… they…”
“They what…?”
“They…” He saw her jaw working. “They invited me to a Halloween party and took me down into the basement, where they’d set up a coffin. They told me everyone was taking turns to see how long they could lie in there with the lid down. They made me feel special, said I’d be better at it than any of them. When they’d all had their turn for a few seconds each, it was mine. They left me there, locked in that coffin for the rest of the night, while they partied upstairs. When they finally let me out, they said if I ever told anyone, they’d say I was crazy.”
“You never reported them?”
“I—I was too scared. After that I kept to myself, until Natalie came to the school. They started to bully her, so we became friends. We helped each other through those rough years.”
“And yet, she broke off the friendship?”
She gave a helpless little shrug. “Yes. Seems I am jinxed when it comes to people caring about me.”
“You really believe that?”
“I’m a detective, I go on the evidence.”
Softly, he responded, “The evidence can sometimes be deceptive.”
