Free Autumn Whispers (An Otherworld Novel) by Yasmine Galenorn Page B

be like if we were to find them—with all the long-lost love and family embracing that you see in one of those Lifetime victim-of-the-week movies. But life doesn’t always work like that. Yes, Father and I are mending our fences, but there’s a long way to go before I can fully trust him again. If ever. And how will he feel about this? About us meeting Mother’s relatives?”
    I bit my lower lip, chewing on it until I punctured a hole with one of my nonretractable fangs. Another by-product of being a half-breed werecat. “Does he have to know?”
    “Of course he has to know. We can’t just
not
tell him. Can we?” She looked over at me, the question hanging between us.
    “What if we don’t tell him until we meet them? Then we’ll know if we should even bother. If they don’t want anything to do with us, we can keep quiet about it. If they want a relationship, then we deal with that when it comes.” It made sense to me. But there was another question we needed to answer first. “My concern is . . . do we want to do this? Do we want to even go there?”
    Camille braked sharply as she was pulling out of the spot. She eased the car back next to the curb, disappointing a driver who had been waiting for the spot. He honked, but drove past.
    “You think maybe we shouldn’t? I thought you’d be beating down the door.” She put the car in Park and turned to me.
    I shrugged, not knowing quite how to phrase my thoughts. “I thought I would be too, but now that we’re facing this as an actual possibility, the prospects of this ending well . . . let’s just say I’m not feeling the rosy scenarios I envisioned all these years. I just don’t want us to have any regrets.”
    She pressed her lips together for a moment, staring at the steering wheel. Then, quietly, she put her hand on mine. “Part of me wants to say fuck it. We don’t need them. But we know that Mother never knew she had half brothers and sisters. She never knew we had cousins. She didn’t even know her mother was alive. Don’t we owe it to her memory to find out what we can? To forge a link with her past, if it’s meant to be?”
    It made sense when she put it that way. “I suppose. We still have to tell Menolly. She’ll no doubt have an opinion on all of this.”
    Camille shuddered. “I’m not sure if I want to hear her opinion, but you’re right. Okay, so what next?”
    “What say we drive by the Farantino Building, take a look at it, then go wait for Menolly to come home. We can’t very well call . . . what are their names?”
    “Hester and Daniel.”
    “We can’t very well call them this late, can we?” I glanced at the clock. It was going on eleven o’clock already, and even though our bedtime was usually well after midnight, that didn’t mean everybody else stayed up as late.
    With a silent nod, Camille pulled back out of the parking space, and we were off.
    • • •
    The streets were empty as we eased into another parking space, this time across from the Farantino Building. Brick, it was six stories high from the looks of it. For some reason, I’d expected a skyscraper, tall with chrome and glass, but that wouldn’t make sense if it had been built over a hundred years ago.
    The building held a brooding old-world charm, almost gothic in nature. The brick was weathered and in some places had eroded away. A ledge between the fifth and sixth stories sported a circle of gargoyles guarding the building. I gazed at the line of stone statues, wondering if any others besides Astralis and Mithra had been actual Cryptos. Were any of them up there now, watching our car, silently perched there in constant observation?
    The thought made me vaguely angry. What we’d been taught about gargoyles didn’t jibe with the reality. I wondered why our father had never seemed concerned. He had to have known about the treatment of the granticular gargoyles, considering he was privy to government intelligence. And he’d always been so antislavery.