Chapter Forty-One: Father in Law

Evan

“I’m coming Helaine,” I whispered as I made my way down the porch steps. “I promise I’ll find you.”

It was a promise I intended to keep. Valek didn’t strike me as one to keep a low profile—there’d probably be a trail of corpses once I got close enough to whatever den of horrors she was calling home these days.

Only . . . I didn’t have a clue where to start looking, and there wasn’t time for me to go chasing my tail without any direction trying to find her.

Whatever was happening to Helaine after she used her powers, it was obviously some kind of transformation. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I did finally catch up with her.

But she was out there somewhere. I could feel it in what remained of my soul that she was still alive, but with her in Valek’s custody it was impossible to say for certain what to expect.

What I didn’t expect was for Frank’s door to open behind me, creaking in protest when he followed me outside. “Kid,” he called after me, a desperate edge to his voice that was difficult to discern. “Wait.”

“You do realize that I’m older than you are, right?” I sneered at him over my shoulder, giving him a nice view of my fangs for good measure. “I was turned in the eighties.”

Seeming to ignore my comment, he fixed me with a serious stare, the cold blue of his eyes not shying away from the burning red of mine. “Do you really believe that Helaine can stop the apocalypse? That she can resist Satan’s influence?”

“She resisted yours,” I spat, breaking the eye contact to walk around the el camino, putting distance between us.

“Answer me honestly,” he demanded, stalking after me to grab me by the arm. “Whatever you think of me, you have to know the weight of what Helaine is, and what it means for that monster to have taken her.”

“I can’t answer you honestly, because the truth is that I don’t know what’s going to happen.” With a sigh, I grabbed Frank’s hand, throwing his arm off of me. “But if there’s going to be any hope for Helaine, I have to get to her.”

If she asked me to, I’d sow such rampant destruction for her that the streets would run red with blood, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Helaine never wanted any of this, and there wasn’t any way in hell that I could let Valek make her believe she didn’t have a choice.

Valek took enough from me, I couldn’t let her hurt Helaine too.

“I’m coming with you,” Frank insisted as I dropped into the driver’s seat, but I didn’t even bother to look up at him.

“No you’re not.”

But the stubborn bastard grabbed the door as I was pulling it shut. It would’ve been easy to smash his fingers in it, but the el camino was old, and I didn’t want to go slamming the doors.

“Whatever you think of me, I raised Helaine,” he pleaded, making my lip curl into an annoyed sneer. “Blood or no, she’s still my daughter.”

“You lost any right you had to say that when you fired that crossbow at her,” I spat, shoving the key in the ignition and firing up the engine.

It didn’t matter if the door was open or not, I’d drag the fucker along until he couldn’t hold on anymore if he tried to keep me from leaving without him.

“Helaine wanted me alive,” he shouted over the el camino’s purr, stopping me from putting my foot on the gas. “Whatever happened, she still cares about me.”

“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t come with me.”

“Look, you’re a vampire,” he stated the obvious, before pointing up at the sky. “In just a few short hours, the sun will be rising over the horizon. Do you think you’ll have found Helaine and brought her home before then? You need someone to drive when the sun is up.”

Even as my boot hovered over the gas pedal, I couldn’t drive away. Whether I liked it or not, the bastard was right.

This was supposed to be a fast trip, the kind we could knock out in a night, maybe two if we took our time—the hotel sitting at the halfway point made that an easy call for me, since it should have been a safe place.

But this trip had been anything but what it was supposed to be. If things had gone according to plan, Frank Fairgrieve would have been the worst monster we had to face.

I thought it was bad when my bloodlust got out of control, and when the slayers attacked it shouldn’t have been possible for things to get worse, but Valek’s uninvited interruption was something we never could’ve planned for.

I hadn’t seen her since the night she turned me, not even when I was the Lilith cult’s dark errand boy.

And now that she’d taken Helaine, this situation had gotten so out of hand that there was no way I’d be able to save her on my own.

“Get in the car.”

As much as it pained me to admit, I needed Frank Fairgrieve.

He nodded, releasing his grip on my door and crossing in front of the el camino before slipping into the passenger seat.

“I take it you have some idea where that monster may have taken her?”

“I don’t even know where to start looking,” I confessed, gripping the steering wheel and gritting my teeth so hard that they ached. “But I can feel her—I’ll know it when we’re close.”

“I can do you one better.” He knocked on the dashboard, his lip turning up into a sly grin. “There’s an old K-o-T cache not too far from here that should have old gear we can use to track the supernatural.”

“No go,” I grunted. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m letting you take me to a Knights of Testament base.”

“Not a base, just an old cache,” he swore, raising his hands in supplication. “I’ve kept an eye out for any K-o-T activity in the area over the years in case I needed to move Helaine, but it looks like they abandoned this one.”

“Looks like,” I scoffed.

“It’s the best chance we’ve got if we want to find Helaine before Valek makes a monster out of her.”

My eyes narrowed on him, searching his face for any sign of deceit, but his eyes were unreadable. Still, he was a man who would kill his own daughter if he thought he had to. “I’ll drive us there, but I don’t trust you.”

“The feeling is mutual, bloodsucker,” he hissed, as though that was even an insult at this point. “But neither of us have any hope of finding her on our own.”

Stabbing a finger toward his face, I stared him down. “If you try anything that would hurt Helaine, I’ll take great pleasure in tearing you limb from limb.”

“It’d break Helaine’s heart,” he mused, pulling a half-crushed pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lighting one up.

He wasn’t wrong.

Even after Frank tried to kill her with that holy crossbow bolt, she still picked a fight with Valek to save him. The last thing Helaine would want would be for me to kill her dad when she wasn’t around to stop me.

But I’d break her heart over and over if it was the only way to keep her safe.

“There’s a first time for everything,” I huffed, keeping my eyes ahead as I started the el camino down Frank’s long driveway.

“You really care about her, don’t you?” He had the audacity to sound almost amused, raising a brow at me. I didn’t dignify that with a response—I didn’t need to. “Never thought I’d meet a bloodsucker with a heart.”