Chapter 11 Evangeline

Chapter 11 Evangeline
Dale
He hadn't said her name out loud in eleven years.
Evangeline.
It sat in his mouth like something sacred and ruined at once and he had to look at the floor for a moment before he could keep going because Scarlett was sitting across from him with her mother's eyes and her mother's stillness and it was the most painful thing he'd ever had to look at directly.
"She came to Ashveil first," he said. "Before me. She grew up knowing what she was, her mother's side was old vampire blood, one of the original families. She'd been in Ashveil her whole life, more or less. It's a sanctuary town. Has been for centuries. Both kinds, living alongside each other." He paused. "I came through passing. I wasn't pack, not a full member, I was a lone wolf, young and stupid and looking for somewhere to be." He almost smiled at that. Almost. "She found me, more like. That was Evie. She found things before they knew they needed finding."
Scarlett hadn't moved. He could feel her listening with her whole body the way she'd done since she was small, this particular quality of attention she had that he'd never known what to do with.
He kept going.
"The bond hit us both the same day. She thought it was funny, this vampire-blooded girl bonded to a scruffy lone wolf who didn't even have a pack to his name." This time the almost-smile made it further. "She had enough laugh for both of us. Could fill a room with it. You never heard a sound like." He stopped. Pressed his mouth into a line.
"Keep going," Scarlett said quietly.
He did.
"We had three years. Good ones. She knew Aldric Blackthorn would find out eventually, she was old nobility, she had obligations he felt entitled to, and a hybrid child was going to be, " he looked at his hands, "it was going to complicate things, is what she said. She had a gift for understatement." He exhaled slowly. "She was six months along with you when he sent people the first time. Just to talk, they said. Just to discuss the situation. She sent them back with a message I won't repeat in present company."
Despite everything, Scarlett made a sound that was almost a laugh. He looked up at her.
"That sounds right," she said softly.
"Yeah." He looked back at his hands. "It does."

Scarlett
She watched her father's face as he talked and saw something she'd never seen there before.
Not the man who reached for bottles and said cutting things and looked at her like she was a reminder of something he couldn't survive remembering. This was someone else. Someone earlier. A younger version of Dale Voss who had loved something completely and had it unmade.
"The second time Aldric sent people," Dale said, "it wasn't to talk."
The room went very quiet.
"You were three months old. Evie had planned for it she always planned, she was better at it than me, she had contingencies for her contingencies." His voice had gone flat in the way voices went flat when they were carrying too much to modulate properly. "She'd arranged for you to be moved. Friends of hers, people she trusted, a pack two states over. The plan was she'd follow within the week once she'd, once she'd dealt with the situation."
"She didn't follow," Scarlett said.
"No." The word came out like something had been scraped clean of everything around it. "She didn't follow."
Scarlett sat with that for a moment. Feeling the shape of it. Her mother, alone in Ashveil, buying time for a baby she'd just sent away, facing down the Vampire King's people.
"They took her," she said.
"They took her." Dale nodded, once, like the motion cost him. "I came back, I'd been the one to move you, she made me go, she said she'd be right behind us, I came back and there was nothing. No sign of a fight, no word, nothing. Like she'd just, " He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth briefly. "Like she'd never been there at all."
"But she had been," Scarlett said quietly.
"She had been," he agreed. "Eleven years I've been looking. Quietly, carefully, the way she would have wanted, no noise, nothing to draw attention back to you." He looked up then, properly, meeting her eyes for what felt like the first time in years. "I moved us so much because I was following leads. And because every time we stayed somewhere too long I got scared. Scared they'd find you the way they found her."
Scarlett looked at her father.
The man who had spent nineteen years drinking himself numb and saying cutting things and keeping her at arm's length. The man she'd built careful walls around because walls were safer than wanting something from him that he seemed constitutionally incapable of giving.
She understood now what she hadn't before.
He hadn't been punishing her for looking like her mother.
He'd been terrified that looking at her meant losing her too.
That didn't make the nineteen years okay. It didn't make the things he'd said unhappen or the flinching stop or the hours she'd spent on the floor of her room talking herself back down from something that should never have needed talking down from. She wasn't going to pretend it did.
But it made him human in a way she hadn't been able to access before.
"Why Ashveil," she said. "Why now."
Dale reached into the pocket of his shirt and took out something small and set it on the coffee table between them.
A folded piece of paper. Old, the creases soft with handling.
"It came three weeks ago," he said. "No return address. Evie's handwriting."
Scarlett stared at it.
"I haven't opened it," Dale said. "I couldn't—" He stopped. "I thought maybe you should be the one."
Scarlett reached out slowly and picked it up.
Her mother's handwriting on the outside. One word.
Scarlett.
Her hands weren't entirely steady as she unfolded it. Inside, in the same hand as the photograph, in the same careful letters:
Ashveil knows what you are. So does he. Come home, little one. I've been waiting.
The room was completely silent.
"She's alive," Scarlett said.
Dale's voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper.
"She's alive."
Scarlett sat with her father in the quiet living room for a long time after that. Not talking much. Not needing to. Something had shifted between them, not fixed, nowhere near fixed, nineteen years wasn't undone in an evening, but cracked open enough to let a little air in.
At ten thirty there was a quiet knock at the front door.
She already knew who it was.
She opened it to find Caden on the porch, hands in his jacket pockets, expression carefully neutral in the way that meant he'd been worried for hours and was trying not to show it.
"You didn't call," he said.
"I know. I was," She looked at him. This boy who had known what she was before she did and handled it badly and apologised for it honestly and stood outside her house in the dark because he needed to be closer. "It's been a lot of a night."
"Yeah." His eyes moved over her face, reading it the way he did. "Are you okay?"
She thought about it properly rather than giving the automatic answer.
"No," she said. "But I think I'm going to be."
He nodded slowly. Then he held out his hand, palm up, an offering rather than a demand.
She looked at it for a moment.
Then she put her hand in his and sat down on the porch step and let him sit beside her in the dark and told him everything.