“Mae, honey, I think you’re smothering her.” Jack tapped her on the shoulder.

“Oh, sorry!” Mae let go of me and took a step back, and I tried not to gasp for breath. “I keep forgetting how fragile you still are.”

Down the hall, I heard Milo’s clumsy footsteps, and Ezra reassured Milo that everything would be alright. When they walked into the entryway, Ezra had his arm on Milo’s back, and Milo looked pale.

“We can follow behind you if you want,” Ezra said. Jack was going with us, but Ezra and Mae had planned to stay at the house.

“No, I’ll be fine.” Milo sounded better than he looked, and I wondered if I should take them up on the offer.

“Are you sure?” Mae reached out and stroked his face, a gesture that I couldn’t do anymore. If I did, he’d be too tempted to rip open an artery.

“Come on. Everybody’s great. Let’s get this show on the road.” Jack sensed my discomfort, and he wanted to get this over with.

Reluctantly, Mae let us leave. I didn’t like how nervous she was about this, but there wasn’t very much about any of it that I did like.

When we went into the garage, I walked ahead of Milo and reached the Jetta first. I grabbed for the passenger side door, planning to sit shotgun as I always did, and Milo growled at me.

“Did you just growl at me?” I asked dubiously.

“I might have,” Milo admitted with anger in his eyes.

“Why would you growl at me?”

“Alice,” Jack said sharply. He stood on the other side of the car beside the driver’s side door, and he looked at me from over the top of it. “Get in the backseat.”

“Why?”

“Just do it,” Jack said firmly

“But that’s stupid!” I protested. “Just because Milo’s a vampire, he gets shotgun? That’s not fair. It doesn’t even make sense.”

“Just get in the back!” Milo snapped. I looked at him, and violence brewed in his eyes.

“This is bogus,” I grumbled but got in the backseat.

“This would be so much easier if you didn’t fight everything,” Jack said as he started the car.

“You really didn’t realize what you were getting into with her, did you?” Milo said.

I bit my tongue, but it wasn’t an easy feat. Who the hell did Milo think he was? I wanted to shout at him, but I couldn’t, because he would literally bite my head off if I did.

That was so unfair, too. He got away with being a random dick because he could kill me. Milo never would’ve talked to me like that before.

On the positive side, I didn’t feel so bad that I wouldn’t get to be around them as much anymore. In fact, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t even miss Milo at all. He’d probably growl at me if I touched the television remote or something.

I sulked through the car ride home. Jack had Dinosaur Jr. in the CD player, and that filled up the silence. Milo said a couple things that I couldn’t hear from the backseat, making me hate them all the more.

When we pulled up in front of the apartment building, I leapt out of the car. Jack grabbed my bags from the trunk, and he and Milo followed me inside.

We rode up the elevator in silence, and Milo tensed up. His jaw set, and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists. I looked over at Jack to see if he noticed, but he kept his expression blank.

“Are you okay?” I asked Milo quietly outside our apartment door.

“Yeah,” he nodded, but he definitely looked pale.

“Maybe we should do this another time,” I suggested. I really wanted to get this over with, but not that the expense of my mother or my brother, even if he really pissed me off.

“No. Let’s do this.” Milo pulled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door.

A light was on over the kitchen sink, but the rest of the apartment was dark. Milo still looked like Milo, but his drastic changes would be less noticeable in dim lighting.

A scratched Led Zeppelin record played softly in the living room, with Robert Plant crooning about when the levees break.

“Mom?” I said cautiously, following Milo inside.

“Oh, good, you’re finally here.” Mom burst out from her bedroom, a cigarette glowing in her hand, and her hair looked less frizzy than it usually did. Too-red lipstick stained her lips. “I don’t have much longer to wait.”

“You’re going somewhere?” I asked.

Milo deliberately moved into the shadows of the apartment, but I lingered in the light of the kitchen. Jack set my bag on the floor and hovered next to me, hoping to catch my mother’s attention.

She flitted about the living room, searching for something, so she hadn’t noticed him. The last time they met, Mom had swooned over him.

“Yes, yes, in a bit,” Mom waved me away and found what she’d been looking for – a tumbler of brandy. Taking a long drink, she turned back to look at us. She finally saw Jack and inhaled deeply. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had guests.”

“It’s good to see you, Miss Bonham,” Jack gave her a little half wave, and she placed her hand over her chest.

“You were at a vacation house, weren’t you?” Mom asked and sat down in a chair in the living room. Apparently, he made her too weak in the knees to stand anymore.

“Um, yeah,” Jack nodded, going along with the lie I had told her earlier.

“Did you do a lot of swimming?” Mom was undoubtedly picturing him in swim trunks, and I wanted to gag.