Chapter 399
“Are you really coming over for lunch?” Lucy asked. “That would be great.”
“Yeah, why not?” I replied. She’d pressed floor five with her IAC, but I hadn’t hit the button for four yet. I pulled out my phone to text my mom that I’d be home a little later than previously planned. She did not have an IAC. “Do you even have food?”
The doors opened and we popped out into the hallway. “Yeah, of course I do. I just order it online, and it shows up in my refrigerator and cabinets.”
I looked at her like she was crazy. “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, it’s a new service the grocery downstairs added a few weeks ago. It’s pretty cool. You should tell your mom.”
“The only time my mom ever leaves campus is to go to the store,” I replied, following Lucy into her apartment. It was always tidy, which didn’t fit with the Lucy I knew either. “Do you have a maid service, too?”
She dropped her gym bag by the door. “Sure do. But she only comes once a week.”
“Dang. Brandon and Elliott need to get on that.” My boyfriend and his dad tend to live a little bit more like pigs than humans, not that they’re either.
“I’m pretty sure what you’re seeing is after the maid has cleaned their place up,” Lucy replied, pulling the refrigerator door open.
“I don’t know. It smells worse in their apartment than it does in the locker room most days.”
I surveyed what she had over her shoulder, and we decided on a frozen entrée that she could heat up quickly. I let Lucy handle that. Since she’s been on her own, her domestic skills have really picked up. My mom does basically everything for me except for making my protein shake in the morning, so I’m lucky if I can even figure out how to get water to boil.
It wasn’t long before Brandon, Dax, and Tara made their way over, too, and the five of us sat around Lucy’s living room chatting while we ate pasta and chicken, though Dax and Brandon had already eaten, thank goodness. There wouldn’t have been enough for all five of us.
“How was Shane today?” Lucy asked between bites. “Roar said we weren’t switching off because he had some protocol he wanted to follow with you guys.”
Tara made a noise. “He was a jerk as usual,” she replied, stabbing a piece of chicken with her fork. “You’re lucky you’re not in the Advanced Class. I swear, I need to go back to Beginners.”
Rather than a girls group and a boys group, since the recruiting class was so small now, the trainers had split the trainees into advanced and beginner groups. I agreed that Tara probably shouldn’t be in Advanced yet, even though she’d been doing this months longer than Lucy and had had her second round of Transformation serum. She still struggled a lot. Dax, on the other hand, should’ve probably been promoted out of training already. He still had two more observations before his release, but he didn’t need them. There weren’t a lot of hunts these days, what with the Vampire population so much smaller than before our recent raids. So he was sort of stuck.
“How frustrated are you about not being finished?” Brandon asked him, reading my mind. My boyfriend and I tend to think similarly, one of the many reasons we make such a good couple.
“Beyond frustrated,” Dax admitted, leaning back against Lucy’s beige sofa. “Aaron says as soon as he has a hunt he can take me on, he’ll let me know, but there just hasn’t been anything close by.”
“He doesn’t even have a timeline, though,” Tara added. She helped herself to the rest of the food Lucy and I weren’t going to eat even though she’d already had one bowl full. “He said it might be fall.”
“Crazy,” I said, standing to go put my bowl in the dishwasher. “Anyone need anything while I’m up?”
“Grab me another soda, please?” Dax called.
“Uh, only if you say it right,” I chided. This was a debate we’d been having for months.
“I will not call it that!” he shouted back. “Pop is the sound a Vampire’s head makes when your bullet hits it just right.”
I laughed. “Okay, with an explanation like that, I will get you a carbonated beverage.” I grabbed a can of Coke out of the fridge and brought it to him before I realized my phone was ringing. It was on silent so I hadn’t noticed it, but when I pulled it out, I had four missed calls from my mom.
I took a deep breath and stepped back into the kitchen. “Hello?”
“Cassidy! Where are you? I’ve been calling your phone for hours.”
I glanced down, pretty sure that wasn’t true. It was only 1:30, so I hadn’t even been at Lucy’s an hour yet. “I’m at Lucy’s. I sent you a text.”
“No, you didn’t. I need to know where you are all the time, young lady.”
“Mom, I did. I sent it on the elevator ride up here. Check again.”
“Don’t you take that attitude with me! You know very well that after that last stunt you pulled you are not to go anywhere without my permission. So if I didn’t text you back that it was okay, you did not have permission to go there. I need you home right now.”
Frustrated, I growled at her, “I’m above your head and twenty yards to the right!”
“Now, Cassidy! Right now!”
I hung up my phone and slammed it back into my pocket. I hadn’t noticed Brandon beside me but was glad when he wrapped his arms around me. “Maybe it didn’t go through because you sent it on the elevator?” he offered.
I hadn’t even checked to see if it sent, but I wanted to blame my mom because she is not exactly technologically savvy. “Maybe.” I was just so frustrated. Thoughts of what Juan Diego had mentioned earlier, the room down the hall, entered my mind, and I couldn’t help but wish I was as independent as my friends. Brandon let me go, and I stalked back through the living room.
“Sorry, Cass,” Lucy said, her voice soft with concern. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”
“No, it’s okay. I should’ve known better than to think I would get away with sending a text rather than speaking to her.” I shook my head. Sometimes, I was able to come up to one of my friends’ places after training with only a text, but most days I stopped by first, did some math, ate lunch, and then came up. I headed for the door.
“Maybe we’ll see you later?” Tara called, optimistically.
“Yeah right,” I replied. “She’ll lock me in my room for the next week over this.” I sighed and tried not to be so negative, but the idea of walking into my apartment and listening to my mom yell for an hour was not appealing at all.
Brandon walked with me to the elevator and gave me another hug. “Let me know how it goes.” He was sympathetic, and I appreciated that, but he’d gone from an abusive mother who didn’t care to a dad who understood he was an adult, so he’d never dealt with this particular problem before—not that I was willing to trade him on the first one, despite the fact that his mom, Amanda, had really gotten her act together recently.
I took a deep breath and signaled the elevator to transport me down a floor where I was certain Liz Findley would be waiting to chew off my head.
