Unbroken Vows Page 11

  Once she’d been left alone in the DePauw Inn — after their uncomfortable lunch concluded, Caleb had taken her back to the family home briefly so she could pack a few things for an overnight stay — Rosemary tried once again to will herself away from this place, to send herself back to California and the safety of Will’s arms. But it seemed that Caleb had been right about her powers being blocked, because she couldn’t do a damn thing. No, she was definitely stuck in Greencastle until the paternity test results arrived.

  Whether they’d let her leave after that still remained an open question. Of course, the easiest solution would be that the test revealed Gerald wasn’t her father at all, but she had an uneasy feeling that they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble if they weren’t pretty damn sure what the results would be. No, this was all being done for her benefit, to prove that what they’d told her about her past was nothing more than the truth.

  Well, she could tell herself that was the reality of the situation, but until she knew what the test said, she was only borrowing trouble and paying it back with interest. She sat on the bed and turned on the TV, scrolling past inane talk shows and repeats of sitcoms now ten years out of date, wishing desperately to find something that might occupy her. However, nothing caught her interest, and she wondered if part of their scheme was to drive her half-mad with boredom as she sat there and waited to hear the news that could change her life irrevocably.

  To be fair — as much as she hated having to extend that consideration to the part-demon contingent here in Greencastle — it was partly her own fault that she was sitting in a hotel room and staring at the TV. As lunch was winding down, Caleb had suggested they go to a movie to fill up some time this afternoon, but she’d refused. Being around him made her uncomfortable, because she could tell he was hoping she’d realize that maybe the two of them were more compatible than she wanted to admit.

  Fat chance.

  Scowling, she got out her phone and went to the messaging app. Although she hadn’t heard a peep out of the thing all afternoon, she still hoped that maybe a text had come in and she’d missed it, that maybe Will had responded to her, even though she knew doing so probably wasn’t a very wise idea. Just because it didn’t seem as if anyone had tried to snoop through her things didn’t mean they hadn’t. Sending that one message had been a big enough risk, but engaging in an actual conversation would have definitely invited unwanted attention.

  At least she could tell her text had been delivered, that it hadn’t disappeared into the ether. She hoped she hadn’t been too oblique and that Will had been able to decipher the subtext of her message. What he would do with that information, she honestly didn’t know. It wouldn’t be safe for him to come here by himself, that was for sure. Possibly, he would have reached out to her family, but Rosemary wasn’t sure how much they could do, either. Their psychic gifts were formidable, but clairvoyance wasn’t exactly an offensive skill — you couldn’t use it to bust into a place and rescue someone, after all.

  Holding back a sigh, she reached for the remote and channel-surfed a bit more, hoping she’d find something to distract herself. In a few hours — well, okay, more like four or five hours — she could find a local restaurant that delivered, eat dinner, and go to sleep.

  And then when she woke up, she’d find out whether or not she really was Gerald Gates’ daughter.

  Ugh.

  One of the Indianapolis stations was playing the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Not exactly her first choice, but diverting enough that she hoped she could focus on the antics on-screen and not think about how much she wanted Will’s arms around her. Actually, she would have settled for simply hearing his voice. The urge to pick up her phone and call him was almost physically overwhelming, but she fought it back and told herself to be Zen about the situation. Just wait and let the minutes pass, let time flow on, shortening the distance between now and the moment when everything in her world could change.

  She was almost successful. Or at least, she achieved a measure of patience and detachment, enough for her to sit on the bed and watch the whole damn movie, along with the local newscast that followed. In a way, it was sort of fascinating to see news from such a different part of the country, to realize that not everything was as fast-paced and intense as life in Southern California sometimes seemed to be.

  A little before six o’clock, someone knocked on her door. Since it was far too late in the day for housekeeping to be coming by — and since only a few people even knew she was staying there — Rosemary had a pretty good idea who was out there in the hallway. For a moment or two, she considered ignoring the knock. However, since he could probably pop right into her hotel room without waiting for her to answer the door, she realized there wasn’t much point in delaying the inevitable.

  She got off the bed and opened the door. Caleb stood outside, looking much the same as he had when they’d parted earlier that afternoon, although now he wore a leather jacket over his jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. He grinned down at her and said, “Bored out of your mind yet?”

  “No,” she lied, and his smile only broadened.

  “Liar.”

  “Did you drive all the way over here just to insult me?”

  “No,” he replied. “Anyway, I wanted to know if you’d changed your mind about homecoming.”

  Rosemary knew she should tell him that no, of course she hadn’t changed her mind. After all, she’d just survived what had been one of the dullest afternoons of her life. What was a few more hours? But then she wondered if she was making a mistake by sequestering herself like this. Maybe it would be smarter to get out and about, to get a better measure of her enemy by watching him interact with the locals. If nothing else, doing so would help her gain more understanding of how Caleb and the rest of the demon descendants had managed to fit in so well here. She knew what it was like to try to hide essential truths about yourself from the people in your school and your community — she’d done much the same thing about her own psychic abilities, with varying levels of success. What Caleb and the other part-demons had been hiding was an order of magnitude larger, though. They’d had to hide the very essence of their beings, whereas she’d never thought she was anything except a normal girl with some very abnormal talents.

  Of course, the past few days had taught her she was anything but a normal girl. Even if it turned out that Gerald Gates wasn’t her father, she still had that whole half-angel thing to deal with…assuming what her not-dead-after-all father had told her was the truth.

  “Maybe,” she said, then looked down at herself. She was still wearing the wool pencil skirt — now a little rumpled from her lying on the bed for the past few hours — and slim-fitting sweater that had been “borrowed” from his mother’s closet. “I don’t think I’m exactly dressed for smoking under the bleachers or standing around a bonfire, though.”

  His dark eyes glinted with laughter. “No, but here’s a peace offering.” He held up one hand, from which dangled a reusable grocery store shopping bag. “Jeans and boots and a jacket. The sweater you have on should still work.”

  “Your mother actually owns jeans?” Rosemary asked in surprise. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine the immaculate Mrs. Lockwood deigning to wear something so plebeian.

  “God, no. I got these at a local shop. I hope they’ll fit — I told the salesgirl the sizes of some of my mother’s stuff, and we sort of guessed from there. Same with the boots.”

  It sounded as though he’d gone to a good deal of trouble for something that wasn’t exactly a sure bet — she could have refused to answer the door, or shot him down the minute he reintroduced the topic of homecoming — but she supposed he’d decided it was worth the risk.

  “All right,” she said, taking the bag from him. “You can wait out in the hall while I change.”

  For a second, he looked as if he wanted to argue, but then he shrugged and said, “Okay. Because loitering in a hotel hallway doesn’t look inconspicuous or anything.”


  “I’m sure you’ll think of an explanation if anyone asks,” she said sweetly, then closed the door before he could reply.

  It felt damn good to get out of that pencil skirt and the tights she wore under it — she’d long since taken off the high-heeled boots, since she wasn’t used to wearing heels and they made her feet hurt — and into the jeans Caleb had bought her. They actually fit pretty well, except for being shade too long. That wasn’t a big problem, since the boots he’d provided added just enough lift to keep the pant hems from dragging on the floor. And the jacket was much cuter than she’d expected, a pretty dark teal wool coat cut to fall only to her hips. It was the sort of thing she might have picked out for herself, although she doubted she would’ve needed anything that warm back in Southern California.

  Well, Caleb’s not doing any of this to be nice, she warned herself as she hung her borrowed skirt up in the closet. I don’t know why he’s doing it, exactly, but he’s got to have an ulterior motive. He always does.

  After grabbing her purse and reminding herself to stay on her toes, she went back to the door and headed out into the hallway. Caleb was leaning against the wall opposite her door, looking at something on his phone. However, he shoved the cell phone into his jacket pocket as soon as he saw her emerge from her hotel room.

  “Better?” he asked, taking in her new outfit.

  “Yes,” Rosemary replied, then forced herself to add, “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He paused for a second, as if he wanted to say something else, then went on, “Let’s go.”

  She followed him down the hallway to the stairwell and out to the parking lot. Waiting there was a big shiny red Dodge truck, much nicer than the beat-up Nissan Frontier he’d been driving back in California while pretending to be a poor working stiff, same as anybody else.

  “Yeah, I figured I couldn’t exactly plead poverty while driving this,” he said, as if picking up on what she’d been thinking just a moment earlier.

  “Probably not,” she agreed. For a moment, she paused, fingers resting against the door handle. Was there any chance she could make a break for it now? Caleb was walking around to the driver’s side and might be caught off guard.

  And the boots he’d gotten for her had nice low heels, barely half an inch. Rosemary guessed she could run pretty fast in those.

  Not fast enough, though. He had a good ten inches on her in height…and hadn’t he been the quarterback on his high school football team? Most likely, he’d catch up to her without breaking a sweat.

  These thoughts passed through her mind in a flash, quickly enough that Caleb probably hadn’t even noticed her hesitation. She pulled in a breath, then tugged on the truck’s door handle.

  For better or worse, she was committed to this thing…no matter what happened.

  Chapter 9

  Rosemary had never attended her own high school’s homecoming game; she hadn’t been lying when she told Caleb that she didn’t give a shit about football. But she had to admit there was something just the teeniest bit exciting about the glare of the lights overhead and the energy emanating from the packed stands. Greencastle was such a small town; it felt as if almost its entire population must have turned out to watch the game.

  And it also felt as if the entire population of the town knew who Caleb Lockwood was, and was watching her with speculative eyes, trying to figure out how she fit into the whole equation.

  They’d first gone and gotten some pizza — really good pizza, actually, much better than she’d been expecting — and then drove over to the high school. Even before they left the parking lot, they met up with two guys who were around Caleb’s age, maybe a little younger.

  “Sean Cooper and Kevin Bell,” he said, then added, “Part of the Greencastle contingent.”

  Which she assumed meant they were quarter-demons, same as he was. She wouldn’t have known otherwise; it wasn’t as though she got a little twinge every time she met one of them. If she’d actually been fortunate enough to possess such a talent, then Caleb wouldn’t have been able to fool her so spectacularly back in California.

  “Nice to meet you,” Rosemary said after Caleb had made his introductions, although she wasn’t sure whether it really was nice or not. All right, she supposed it was useful to know the faces of two more of this generation. Like Caleb, they were tall and good-looking in a sort of all-American kind of way, and probably the last people you’d ever think had the blood of demons flowing in their veins, Sean with blond hair and Kevin mid-brown, almost the same shade as Rosemary’s hair. Otherwise, though, he didn’t look at all like her, and she realized he couldn’t be her half-brother, since he wasn’t young enough. She didn’t know how much younger this hypothetical half-brother was, but since he hadn’t been born when Gerald Gates put on an assumed face and slipped into her mother’s bed, she figured the guy had to be at least a year younger than she, maybe more.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” they replied, sounding pleasant enough, although she noticed the significant glances they cast in Caleb’s direction, the way they seemed to nod to themselves, as if noting something special about her. Maybe they could detect demon blood in a way she couldn’t.

  After that, though, they bumped into more people who obviously had been in their year at high school, people who she could tell were just ordinary humans, a lot of them married couples, several of whom were pushing strollers or had small children with them. Rosemary blinked at them in surprise, even as she realized it wasn’t that strange for a bunch of twenty-eight or twenty-nine-year-olds to have kids. Just because she’d delayed that part of her life didn’t mean everyone else was doing the same thing.

  However, she also couldn’t help noticing how popular Caleb obviously had been and still was, the way people came up to him and said hi, and clapped him on the back and told him they were glad he’d bailed on California and come back to Greencastle where he belonged. Rosemary was introduced to most of them, but their names and faces started to blur after a bit, so she settled for smiling and saying it was very nice to meet everyone. At length, though, they made it up to the stands, with Sean and Kevin flanking them, and then a few more men came to sit on either side of the quarter-demons, guys she guessed were also part of the “Greencastle contingent,” although Caleb didn’t bother to make any introductions to these late arrivals.

  Still, she had a feeling they’d come to help keep watch over her. Their presence definitely drove home the fact that she wasn’t going anywhere without their permission, no matter how easygoing Caleb tried to act.

  “It looks like the whole tribe is here,” she said in a murmur to him in between plays. “So, when do I get to meet my supposed half-brother?”

  “He didn’t come,” Caleb replied, looking slightly irritated. “He’s not that into football.”

  That revelation made her raise an eyebrow. “Seriously? Maybe we really are related.”

  In response, Caleb only shook his head. “You’ll find out for sure tomorrow, won’t you?”

  His response effectively dampened the slight amusement she’d been feeling. Frowning, she crossed her arms and directed her attention toward the field, although she really didn’t understand what was going on, except that the play kept getting stopped at the strangest intervals, halting the clock on the scoreboard and making her realize that it was going to take hours to get through the game at the rate they were going.

  Maybe Caleb had invited her along as a way of subtly torturing her. She didn’t see how this was any better than sitting in her hotel room and channel surfing. Well, except for confirming firsthand that the current generation of Greencastle demons was tall and athletic and that even one of them was more than a match for her physically, let alone six. And that wasn’t even taking into account their fathers, who had to be in their fifties or early sixties but were also probably in decent physical shape, if Daniel Lockwood and Gerald Gates were accurate representatives of the rest of the group.

  The thought did nothing to improve her mo
od. Because it was a high school game, obviously no alcohol was being “officially” served — although she had her suspicions about the contents of some of the sports bottles people were carrying — but at one point Sean went down to the refreshment stand and brought back bottled water for everyone.

  “Thanks,” she said, knowing she needed to act polite even if every part of her being was wishing violently to be someplace else. While being around lots of people gave her a spurious sense of safety, the crush on either side also prevented her from saying what she was really thinking.

  The Greencastle team ended up winning — “we pretty much always win,” according to Caleb — and Rosemary dutifully followed him down from the bleachers and toward the parking lot. She still couldn’t quite see the point of this whole exercise, although it began to be a bit more clear when Sean asked, “After-party at your place?”

  “Of course,” Caleb replied with a grin. “See you there.”

  By that point, the two of them had reached his Dodge pickup. Rosemary shot him an accusatory stare as Sean and Kevin headed off toward their own vehicles, then said, “You didn’t say anything to me about a party.”

  “Nope,” Caleb said. “Because if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to pry you out of that hotel room. Besides, it’s harmless — just a few of us getting together at my place. No biggie.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked, hands planted on her hips, irritation flaring. “No Satanic invocations? No drawing spell circles on the floor?”

  “After what I spent to get those floors refinished?” he scoffed, looking more amused by her insinuation than anything else. “Not likely. Come on — we need to get going or people will show up before we even have a chance to arrive.”