I heard the woman’s voice through a haze. At first I wondered why Patrice was talking about Lucas, then realized it wasn’t Patrice speaking.

Startled, I sat upright. The events of the night before flooded my memory, dazing me, even as I blinked in the sudden light. Instead of waking up in my dorm room, I was lying in bed next to Lucas, who was pushing himself up and running one hand through his rumpled hair—and a woman in her forties was standing in the doorway of our motel room, staring at us.

Lucas swallowed hard, then grinned. “Hi, Mom.”

Chapter Eighteen

“OKAY, IT’S THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, SO I never thought you’d wait until you were married.” Lucas’s mother leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms across her chest. “But honestly, Lucas. You knew I was coming. Do you really have to throw it in my face?”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Lucas said. How could he be so calm? Instead of stammering out apologies and explanations like I would’ve done, he simply put one hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Bianca and I shared a room because we’re broke. We had to hock something even to get this. And nobody made you pick that lock either. So take it easy, all right?”

She shrugged. “You’re almost twenty. You make your own choices.”

“You’re twenty?” I muttered.

“Nineteen and change. Is it important?”

“I guess not.” Compared to everything else I’d learned about Lucas in the past day, what did it matter that he was three years older than me?

Lucas smoothly pushed himself out of bed. Just my luck: The first time I saw him wearing only boxer shorts, and I couldn’t even relax to enjoy the view. “Bianca, this is my mother, Kate Ross. Mom, this is the girl I’ve told you about, Bianca.”

She gave me a friendly nod. “Call me Kate.”

Now that I was awake enough to focus, I could see how strongly she resembled Lucas. She was tall—even taller than Lucas, maybe—with chin-length golden-brown hair only a shade lighter than his and the same dark green eyes. Like Lucas, her face was angular: square jawed and sharp chinned. She wore faded blue jeans and a maroon Henley shirt tight enough to outline the sculpted muscles in her arms. I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone who seemed less like a mom. I mean, what kind of mother found her son in bed with his teenage girlfriend and just smiled?

Then again, it beat having her flip out. I held up one hand in an awkward wave. “Hi there.”

“Hey yourself. You guys must’ve had a rough night. Let’s pour some coffee into you and figure out how to help Bianca.” Kate nodded toward the street. Lucas was already running his hands through his hair and grabbing his jeans, unembarrassed in front of his mother. I wanted to wrap myself in the bedspread or something, but that would have been even more humiliating; instead I bounded out of bed and into the bathroom in about two steps.

Once inside, I recovered a little of my dignity by getting dressed again. My clothes were now dry, if rumpled. I loosened the braid I’d slept in, and my hair fell down around my face in soft waves. Not much of a hairstyling trick, but that was what they’d relied on in the seventeenth century. With a pang, I remembered my mom showing me. “Let’s go.”

Lucas shot me a look as we went out the door, perhaps trying to evaluate how I was holding up. Kate might be fooled by my false bravado, but he knew me better than that. I lifted my chin proudly, so that he’d know I was determined to make the best of our increasingly odd situation.

Kate led us to a battered old pickup truck from the 1950s, one with faded aqua paint and headlights shaped like the engines of the starship Enterprise. The whole time we got in, she kept looking around us, scanning every single passerby. “Do you guys think you were followed? The teachers can’t look kindly on runaways.”

“They didn’t get as far as Riverton, not before we left,” I said hastily as I scooted into the center and Lucas got in beside me. “The running water stopped them.”

She froze that second, with one hand on the keys in the ignition. She stared at Lucas, not the usual upset-mom stare, the one that clearly says you’re two seconds from being grounded. This was harder—the way I imagined army leaders looked when they sent traitors to firing squads. “You told her?”

“Mom, you need to listen for a sec.” Lucas took a deep, steadying breath and held his hands out, as if he could actually hold her back. “Bianca knew the truth about Evernight already. I only explained Black Cross because I had to. It’s not like she didn’t realize vampires existed before. Okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. Your mistake might be understandable, but it’s still a mistake. You should know that by now.” She shoved her bangs back and studied me more intently than she had at first. Kate’s casual attitude had dissolved. “How did you find out about them?”

I thought she meant Black Cross at first. It took a second for me to understand that “them” meant “vampires” to her. Lucas hadn’t told her what I truly was—and I realized, as he shifted in his seat next to me, that he was hiding the truth for my protection. Undoubtedly he also hadn’t mentioned the fact that he now had some measure of vampiric power himself.

So I did what Lucas and I were apparently best at: I lied. “There were all kinds of clues. The fact that the school never served food for its students, so everyone ate in private—the dead squirrels all around—the way that so many people had attitudes and ideas that came from other centuries. It wasn’t that hard to figure it out.”