Gypsy Rising (All The Pretty Monsters Book 5) Read online

  Glad he’s amused. Lovely.

  Briefly, Damien appears in the corner, grinning as well, before winking at me and disappearing from sight. It’s as though he also wanted me knowing he’s enjoying my mother clutching her heart as she says a bunch of things in a language I don’t understand, talking to herself, it seems.

  “The bloody Vampyre beta to the coldest monster in existence, aside from Idun? That’s who is with your father right now?!” Mom says in her loud, arguing-talk tone.

  “She’s actually quite good with him. She’s handling the store as well, because she’s a workaholic machine,” Leiza says with her eyes still lowered, all of them noticeably standing close to me and keeping me between her and them.

  Smart wolves.

  “I’ve only been missing for seven damn months, and you’ve only been in that town for four of them, Violet. Why are there wolves and vampires living in my house?” Mom snaps.

  “It’s my house, since you technically died and left it to me, and I’m keeping it as payment for all your lies and stuff,” I tell her, as Tiara scampers outside behind Emit, following him.

  “This is why I hid my money from you. I knew you wouldn’t give it back,” Mom grumbles as she narrows her eyes on me. “Why is Tom with Shera?”

  “Because Arion released him into my custody with the stipulations that he be kept under supervision,” I deadpan, carrying on as her eyes widen even more. “After Dad stabbed him through the heart with a stake.”

  She staggers back like she just got lightheaded, and I cut off the heat to my pots, annoyed with the consistency of the liquid.

  Mom’s mouth opens and closes a few times, and she finally walks over to a corner. Wordlessly, she lowers herself to a chair, shaking her head slowly.

  “I was just dead for seven months, right?” Mom quietly asks, as though she can’t fathom how things escalated so quickly in her absence.

  I glance at the paper Lemon is discreetly holding up, and I skim its contents quickly.

  Is that Marta Portocale?!!!! OMG! You really should have warned us!!!

  “H-how did he manage to put a stake through Arion’s heart?” Mom asks on a worried whisper, her eyes still slightly dazed.

  “I assume it’s because he’s a stocky construction worker, who has a lot of experience with driving stakes into things,” I point out. “Shera said humans need a certain amount of physical fitness to injure—”

  “Violet, you know damn well that’s not what I mean,” Mom bites out, her impatience and frustration building.

  “I’ll give you the specifics later. I have to focus on this right now,” I tell her as I go to toss out the useless batches. “Maybe I can find a recipe for one of you to follow, since you’re more normal than me and no recipe works the same for me as it does for others,” I tell the quiet omegas.

  “Or you could use some of the Gypsy Magic apple products we brought for you,” Leiza says, as Tiara comes back in with a couple of boxes in her arms, along with Emit, who is loaded down with them.

  “We’re good omegas,” Mary tacks on with a broad grin.

  “Yes, you are,” I murmur under my breath, as my own smile grows.

  Dusting off my hands, I round the counter, as Mom prattles on about how it’s impossible for life to have changed this much in her absence.

  “Maybe you’ve been the weighted shackle holding her back,” Damien chimes in, earning a little side-eye from me, since he’s now visible again.

  Mom doesn’t even acknowledge him, lost in her own headspace, as she rambles about how wolves and vampires don’t share a space with a Neopry monster in a Portocale gypsy’s house. Something about laughable blasphemy in there too.

  I tune her out so I can see what all they’ve brought. “We even carted over your new apple toothpaste. And we racked up a little more debt on Alpha’s card to clothe them all. We knew he wouldn’t mind,” Leiza says directly to me, as Emit’s head drops back, a sigh passing through his parted lips.

  “Just a little debt,” Mary says, pinching her fingers together as Lemon nods.

  Ingrid makes a series of taps under my feet, and Leiza stomps like she’s trying to silence her.

  I arch an eyebrow, and Leiza gives me a nervous little smile. “A little debt on your card, too, because we had some things we needed to buy you—”

  A loud series of taps under my feet get stomped out by Leiza again, while Tiara gives me a mischievous wink.

  “And we needed things as well,” Leiza grudgingly tacks on. “We couldn’t come without proper footwear, now, could we?”

  “I’ll reimburse you for whatever they spent. They’re supposed to be my wards,” Emit says from some room he’s apparently disappeared into in the past five seconds.

  He hasn’t been still very much since I woke up, and Damien hasn’t been visible much. He’s currently invisible again.

  I feel like they’re semi-ignoring me because they’re mad, without wanting to be obvious about it, since that would be childish and all.

  “You brought your harem to live with my daughter?” Mom asks Emit like he’s finally crossed a line she can attack him for, now that she’s processed this fresh information a little belatedly.

  She stands so abruptly that her chair flips over.

  When a knife appears in her right hand from nowhere, Emit pops out of the room he was in, grinding his teeth as his muscles bunch.

  Seriously, if they break out into combat, I’m going to finally lose my cool.

  “It’s actually not at all what you’re thinking. I can assure you,” Emit says very tightly. “And I’m not discussing it farther than that.”

  “I’ll be damned if my daughter joins your omega har—”

  “I stole them from him by accident, and I feel bad enough about it. Can you not make it a deal right now?” I ask in interruption to my very embarrassing mother.

  “You stole them from him?” she asks like she’s confused. “I thought you were with—”

  “Do you remember that mother in the park who flung sacks of dog shit at a group of kids after one kid looked at her daughter wrong?” I ask her very seriously.

  “Of course I do. That woman was batshit crazy. Why are you—”

  “Because you’re more embarrassing than her right now. If you could stop, that’d be great,” I say over my shoulder, as I kneel in front of my lesser purchased items that are all in one box.

  “They’ve been under for a while,” Leiza says quietly to me, as Mom makes a frustrated noise at my back. “They’ll need a lot of everything, and it almost feels like you were making them supplies that had a comforting scent…like the good omega you are.”

  So…they know. About me. It’s apparently all out in the open now. Great. In a game of life and death, everyone wants to know when a new player is on the floor. It only makes sense the hardcore survivalists know what’s going on as it’s going on.

  At least they seem to be confirming my suspicions that I’m omega.

  “Not all of them will need comforting,” Damien says from right across from me, appearing abruptly, as he lifts a bottle of the shampoo. “And not all will appreciate the scent of this apple. The mummified Neoprys you didn’t get the chance to see are the ones who won’t thank you or even appreciate what you risked for them, Violet.”

  He slowly lowers the bottle back down.

  “They’ll spit in your face and kick you for being thoughtful. They’ll call you pathetic and punish you for being kind. The cold doesn’t soothe them; the fire does,” he goes on more seriously, his eyes flicking to my mother. “Fire and ice in one family has left them subject to the worst House to be a member of, unless you’re of the skin-walker variety. You’ll stay in the Simpleton ward when visiting. And I advise against your mother’s ploy to use you as a treaty token for her to make new allegiances with Nadine.”

  I exhale harshly, as Mom goes rigid, eyes narrowing on Damien.

  “It won’t work, deviant,” Mom says calmly, glaring at him. “You won�
��t tear down my daughter’s trust in me just because you toss in a few well-placed warnings about things I’ve already told her would come. War is on the horizon. We all feel it. I’ll be looking after mine. You worry about yourself, and only yourself, as you always do.”

  Leiza bristles at my side, and my eyes flick over the omegas they’ve forgotten are even here, as Lemon quietly hands me a full inventory list.

  This is the part where I keep my head down and let the alphas rev the engines on their pissing contest. Lemon’s clearly trying to guide me into my role or whatever.

  My eyes scan the sheet, even as my nervousness ratchets up.

  I really don’t want Mom and Damien breaking out into combat the way the guys do.

  “I’m worried, since you’ve left out quite a great deal of family history, Marta. About why Nadine hates you enough to have backed Idun, despite the monstrous acts performed on her favorite children,” Damien carries on.

  Emit scrubs a hand over his face, darting a worried glance to me, as I turn around.

  Mom’s jaw trembles, and I glare over at Damien.

  “I got the gist,” I tell him very seriously as he opens his mouth to say something really cruel, not having an ounce of compassion for the woman, who has apparently made his life pure hell in a different way than Idun.

  “Mom told me I had a brother who died. She told me he was cruel to be so young, and that he’d gotten that way because of her dismissive eye. I’ve heard the guilty tale more times than I can count, as she took far more blame than she deserved,” I go on, causing Mom to glare at me like I’ve committed some sin, mostly because she seems mortified that I’m sharing this so freely.

  But Damien’s eyes lose the menace immediately, as some realization sweeps over him.

  Marta Portocale may be his enemy, but she’s been the mother who has protected and loved me for my entire life.

  None of the top-tier alphas are very perfect, and they’ve all been cruel at some point, including him.

  I see a flicker of regret, but it’s gone before I can be certain, as he looks over at a vacant spot on the wall.

  “Given the story, and how severely the Portocale Council hated all of you before this even escalated, I’ve stitched things together. It’s the only way to get answers, since no one here wants to come out and say the whole truth all at once. It’s given in small, confusing, somewhat convoluted fragments, leaving me to search through the wreckage of information for the important pieces.”

  I give Damien a pointed look, but he continues staring at the spot on the wall as though it has all of his attention.

  “Bobo killed four children after they nearly stoned him to death for a laugh. Four Portocale first-borns from four different branches of the thick Portocale tree make up the immortal Portocale Council. That most likely means those children who tortured Bobo…belonged to the four Portocale Council members. They may have done awful things, but those kids still had parents who loved them and were vicious enough to go after vengeance. Am I right? Or did I overcomplicate it?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest, genuinely too tired to even have emotions on the matter.

  “That’s the gist,” Damien concedes, lips thinning, as he exhales his own tired breath.

  “She told me the good about him too, but she didn’t shield me from the truth to that degree. She told me she was older than she looked, but it’s not like I did any math or tried to find plot-holes in her stories. A lot of things make sense now, because she always planned on telling me everything one day. Just not until she had to.”

  I lift a case, hand it off to Tiara, and gesture for her to load it. She’s happy to escape the room. I now can tell that my mother is still hiding things, because I’ve found a lot of those plot-holes since I had a reason to start looking for them. However, I keep that to myself.

  “So yes, I do trust her. Just like I trust her to stop talking when I ask it, because she told me to never let her be cruel to people when I’m around,” I go on, lifting the next box to pass it along. “Because she had to be cold to endure the life she’d lived, but that she never wanted me—”

  “Violet, I’d greatly appreciate it if some things stayed between us,” Mom cuts in, eyes sharp and somewhat lethal.

  “That’s the problem,” I say as I hand off the next box, “everyone wants to yell, scream, argue, take inexcusable shots, and bitch about the past. No one wants to just talk. Even now, everyone wants to remain defensive. All of you just want to hold on to the very thing that’s made you miserable all these years, and at this point, you’re just piling onto the fact no one is seeking resolution.”

  The girls hurry out like they’re relieved to finally be able to exit without being told to go.

  “You can spend your time doing whatever you want. I’m not an alpha and have no say in these matters, nor do I have the pressing, world-ending responsibilities you guys have. I’m not judging, because that seems like a lot to put on anyone’s shoulders. However, don’t pull me into your fights or try to manipulate whose side I’m on. I’m going alone to—”

  “You won’t go alone,” Emit says sharply, eyes cutting to me like it’s an order.

  He’s never really ordered me to do anything before…besides turn over.

  I blink a few times, almost caught off guard by it, and admittedly get a little distracted in a very ill-timed sort of way Anna would be proud of…

  Clearing my throat and remembering now’s not the time to let my troublesome vagina get her way, I bring my attention back to the three argumentative alphas in the room.

  “I’ll stick to the Simpleton side of the home. You said the skin walkers wouldn’t even be up yet because it takes time to rehydrate them,” I remind him.

  “I’ll come with you. I’ve barely argued all day, and you’re not cross with me right now,” Emit states.

  “Why are you cross with me if I’m not allowed to be cross with you for dating my sworn enemies?” Mom asks like she’s hurt, and then she gags.

  She mocks a gag every time she mentions us.

  There are so many ways I’d love to answer that question right now.

  Put a pin in it.

  Talk about family drama…

  “They’re not going to want to see the ones who put them under while they’re trying to get reacquainted with a much different world inside a Van Helsing’s home. A Van Helsing who everyone seems to think not even I should have to meet. I know this is difficult for all of you, since the only person who makes you feel weak is Idun, but for one second, be them. Think about them. They’re the only innocent ones in this mess, and I know that’s true, because it’s the only thing you’ve all agreed on.”

  I lift the last box, glancing over at Emit, as Mom clears her throat.

  “Give them one day where they don’t have to deal with you. Give me one day to help them get the gist of what’s going on in the world today, before the alpha-arguing sets in all around them, with everyone else dictating what they do. Since all the scary and important Neoprys are taking time to heal, give the forgotten an ounce of freedom while it lasts.”

  When no one makes a move to immediately argue, I take my opening while I have it.

  “I’ll keep the omegas with me,” I assure them as I turn to go.

  “They’ll just run if there’s trouble,” Emit says like he’s working hard to hold back.

  I glance over my shoulder to see that the muscles in his shoulders, biceps and forearms are all tensing, as his jaw tics. The full moon isn’t that close, is it? No. No. It really shouldn’t be affecting his temperament as much as it is right now.

  “They’ll run and find you like their instinct demands. If there’s trouble, I’ll attract it whether I’m here or there. It’s just my nature. Don’t worry so much, or you’ll never be able to adjust to the new normal that’s starting right now.”

  Leaving the false bravado behind me, I hurry out to the awaiting, unique van the omegas apparently rented. Tiara adds my box to the back, and then we all pi
le in. I take the driver’s seat.

  “I feel ridiculously stupid for unloading the van now, and then immediately loading it right back up,” Lemon comments. “It really does make us look stupid when we do things like that in front of Damien. I prefer him to think of us as cunning she-wolves. He respects the cunning. I’m fucking cunning. I am.”

  She sniffs the air, and presumably strikes a ‘cunning’ pose. It looks more like an unpracticed, amateurish ‘fierce’ pose that would make the perfect backdrop for a ‘caption this’ meme.

  “Everyone does something that makes them want to palm their face from time to time,” I tell her, trying not to smile when she deflates.

  “Marta’s going to think we’re nothing more than Alpha’s ex-harem and try to force us out,” she adds on a sad sigh.

  “You’re not being forced out,” I assure her.

  A relaxing sound of seatbelts click in a wave, without anyone needing to be asked, and Tiara cuts up the music.

  Just as I start driving, I see Ingrid pop up and climb over the back row to sit alone, relaxing like she’s happy to stretch out, and I smile.

  “Stop!” half of them shout at once, as I stomp on the brake.

  “What?” I ask, looking around at absolutely nothing but our van on the road.

  “Wrong side of the road,” they all say in unison.

  I feel my cheeks burning as I swap lanes. Guess this is my face-palming moment.

  “Why does everyone else has to drive on the other side of the road?” I grumble, weirdly embarrassed.

  “How very obnoxiously American of you,” Ingrid chimes from the back with a singsong voice.

  “You hide under floors and behind walls. You don’t really have room to mock me,” I grumble, only feeling her grin at my back.

  I roll the window down, letting in the cold, when Tiara starts sweating, since purebloods run warmer. Makes sense that I run colder, if I’m gauging myself off her.

  Wolves are hot-blooded. Neoprys and Portocales are cold-blooded.

  I’m just starting to relax, while they all discuss their trip over here, when my eyes narrow on a quickly approaching glass ball aimed right at the windshield.