The blonde girl stood and walked forward as though hypnotized until her father caught her by the hand to stop her from actually touching Adriana. “Are you really a princess?” Julie’s voice was a bare whisper.
Adriana gave her a smile that was both kind and loving—just the sort of expression you want to see on a queen on her throne. She must practice to have it down that well. She touched the girl’s hair. “Yes, child. And I believe there’s a chance you are as well.”
Whoa. Come again? I bent forward until I caught Adriana’s eye. “Excuse me?”
Instead of answering me or responding to the shocked looks on the faces of father and daughter, Adriana turned to the old man in the corner, who’d stopped looking frightened but was, instead, staring at the interaction with interest. “Would you care to explain, Mr. Fulbright? There’s a reason you offered your land to the Murphy family, isn’t there? My siren blood can feel yours … and the children’s.”
There was silence all around the restaurant because … well, frankly, she’d managed to stun us all. Fulbright narrowed his eyes and let out a harrumphing sound. When he spoke it was with such a thick southern accent that I could barely make out the words: “So, you’ve found me out, heve you? A royal of the blood, come to finally look for us? Well, y’all are a thousand years too late and I ain’t hepping you. Go tell your mother I said the earth could just eat ya up. You and your bloodsucking cousin, too.”
Adriana’s eyes narrowed dangerously and so did the old man’s. Thin skin all around. Sheesh.
“Okay, hold it. Everybody’s talking in circles here and I’m getting lost.” Adriana opened her mouth to shush me, but I wasn’t going to shut up. I didn’t care that the situation needed to be handled “just right.” I wanted explanations and we didn’t have time for a song and dance.
I stepped away from them all to address the old man: “Look, I’m just a poor California bodyguard who discovered about a month ago I had siren blood.” I lifted my upper lip to show him the full fang view. “I got attacked by a vampire but didn’t die. After that, I discovered that my blood wasn’t only siren with a touch of vampire, but it’s also royal.” I held up my hands like a revival preacher, but my words were sarcastic: “Woo! Lucky me! But guess what? I don’t care. Whatever old score you feel you need to settle with the whole of the siren race, Mr. Fulbright, isn’t my fight. I only want to find out how to stop a demonic rift from eating up my hometown and the people I love. Because if we can’t close it, eventually it’ll be your hometown and the people you love that will disappear. My cousin believes you can help us. The only question is whether you will.”
Fulbright stared at me for a long time and then stood slowly. He was hunched by arthritis and leaned heavily on a plain wood cane. There was nothing fancy about him, from his faded jeans and beat-up boots to his stained straw hat. “Mr. Murphy, I believe you and I should discuss this matter … away from the wimmin folk.”
Wimmin folk? Excuse me? Maybe my face gave away my anger, because I felt Bruno’s hand on my arm. He squeezed like he used to when his mother would talk past me like I didn’t exist. It asked me to please let him handle it. He put the straps of the duffel bag in my hand. I narrowed my eyes and let him have the full force of my outrage. He shrugged.
Fulbright walked out the door and Mick followed after releasing his daughter’s hand. Bruno was the last and closed the door after him.
Molly’s eyes went to the floor and Beverly’s expression was outraged. Poor Julie bolted back to her mother, crawled into her lap, and buried her small face against her mother’s chest. I was betting Julie was picking up either thoughts or emotions from the “men folk” and didn’t much like them. Mick had said she had all the talent in the family.
I gave the others in the room a Pollyanna smile. Brilliant but empty. “Well, that went well.” I snorted. Molly offered a shy smile. Then I touched Adriana’s arm. “Was this the part of your vision where we got killed? Does he come back in here with a shotgun and mow down us wimmin folk?”
One corner of Adriana’s mouth curved up. “Actually, this is the scenario that went well. In the other scenario, I spoke first and he ran out of the restaurant screaming in fear and we never found the cave. I was hoping he’d manage to offend you. You can be quite … forceful when angered.”
“Gee. Thanks.” My smile was more a baring of teeth. Then I turned to the outraged redheaded girl who was stabbing her sandwich with a fork like she wished it was a certain elderly gentleman. She looked humiliated and hurt. “Beverly, I know you’ll still have to live here after we’re gone and will have to deal with people like him every day. You’ll be forced to ignore it for now to keep the peace. But please know most of the rest of the world takes offense at what that man just did. It’s not okay for people to treat you like you’re a second-class citizen just because of your gender.”
Laka finally spoke up from near the window, and there was fury and pride in her beautiful face with its strong African influence: “Or your race.”
“Or your … disability.” Adriana’s voice was as strong as I’d ever heard it. “Let no person tell you you cannot do something. You are siren. And you are human. Be proud of both.”
Molly was shaking her head. “I’ve done our whole family tree—right back to the Magna Carta. I’m sorry, ladies, but we don’t have any siren blood in our family. I know it. Both of our families came from Ireland and England.”
That didn’t matter. Blood spoke to blood, and our words had sunk home with Beverly. Her face was intense, thoughtful, and just a little bit offended by Fulbright’s words and her mother’s response. I didn’t want to get involved in a battle between mother and daughter, so I nodded, grabbed a chair, and sat down. “Atlantis was supposedly due south of England before it was destroyed.”
It took a moment to sink in, but when it did Molly’s face turned stark white. “But why has nobody ever known until now? Surely someone would have said something, put a clue in the records.”
A door jingled and Bruno stepped in the door, speaking as he walked toward us. “Because it came down the paternal line, just like Celia’s.”
Mick followed right on Bruno’s heels. “You said it yourself just a few weeks ago, Mol—how the girls were such a blessing because there’d never been a single girl born on my side of the family that didn’t die in infancy, for as far back as you could find.”
It all made sense now. I took in the scattering of pimples on Beverly’s face and the near-constant tugging at the side of her shirt like she was wearing her first bra. The girl had hit puberty. “Beverly’s gotten old enough that it made Mr. Fulbright notice. I’ll bet he saw you in a store or something and realized you had the blood.”
Adriana looked behind Mick. Her voice wasn’t quite panicked, but her concern was clear: “Where is Mr. Fulbright?”
Bruno tipped his head toward the door. “Let’s go outside and talk.” His eyes flicked past me to the children. Ah. Not for the ears of kids. I hadn’t really liked that about adults when I was a kid. But now I understood the reasoning.
Mick pointed toward the girls. “You two finish up your dinner. Your mom needs to get you back to school. We’ll have to write a late slip as it is.” He walked out of the diner and I watched through the sheer lace curtain as he sprinted across the narrow street ahead of a slow-moving semi filled with bawling cattle.
Molly lifted Julie off her lap and set her in the chair where there was a plate with a sandwich still untouched. “Go on. You heard your father. Finish up.” Molly tipped her head toward Okalani—who admittedly looked younger than her fifteen years. “Would you like something, too, while everyone talks? I have turkey and roast beef or I could make a hamburger on the grill.”
Okalani turned her face toward her mother, asking with her eyes. Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if she was hungry. I was constantly ravenous at her age. Laka nodded and Okalani looked back at Molly. “I’d love a hamburger if it’s not too much trouble.”
Then she moved forward into the room and offered her hand toward the other girls. “Hi, I’m Okalani.”
Beverly smiled. “That’s an awesome name. Is it Hawaiian?”
Okalani shook her head and reached for a french fry from a big plate in the center of the table. “Siren. Mom and I live on Serenity Isle.”
Bruno was holding the door for me. As I went out, I set the duffel down on the floor next to the door. I was tired of carrying it. I’d just have to remember to pick it up again before we went … wherever we were going. “Okay, so what’s up with the men folk that us little wimmen couldn’t hear?” I whispered to Bruno in an exaggerated southern accent as I walked past him, and he let out a snort that matched the twinkle in his brown eyes.
God, I missed the laughter in those eyes. I used to stare at them for hours when he didn’t know I was watching.
He put an arm around me and pulled me against him until my head was on his shoulder and we were walking down the sidewalk toward where the others were waiting. “You actually impressed Nathan Fulbright. Said you reminded him of his deceased wife. You have spunk.”
It was my turn to snort. “Yeah, but note the ‘deceased’ part. He kill her for talking out of turn?”
Bruno kissed my temple. “They were married for fifty-two years. Mick said she just died last spring.” Everybody was on a first-name basis already? Apparently there’d been a lot of male bonding out here in a really short time.
But wow. Fifty-two years. That was just impressive. My first thought was, How sweet. My second thought was, Oh, that poor woman. “So did impressing him help us or hurt?”
We’d reached Mick and Fulbright, who were now sitting in a pretty gazebo on the expansive lawn surrounding an old stone courthouse. Adriana took a seat next to Mick. “It helped us. A lot.” Bruno kept his arm tight around my shoulder. It probably looked loosely draped, but there was a tension in it that I hadn’t expected. Bruno nodded to Fulbright. “Okay, what have you already told them, Nathan?”