Free When Temptation Burns: A Shadow Keepers Novel (Shadow Keepers 6) by J.K. Beck Page B

Why?”
    “Said you weren’t answering your phone. Sounded a little hyper, but considering how your cousin usually acts, I wasn’t too concerned. Everything okay with you two?”
    “Of course,” she said, but worry crept into her voice. “I had to turn my phone off in the prison. I forgot all about it.” She pulled it out and looked at the display. He’d called, but he hadn’t left a message.
    Though she was six years older, she and Kevin had been as close as siblings growing up. That alone would have been enough to cause her concern on his behalf, but add in the fact that he was the one who had introduced her to the Dark Warriors—and that he’d recently told her that two of his college buddies had promised to show him something that would blow his mind—and she was definitely feeling anxious.
    “Girl trouble?” Andrew asked, almost hopefully.
    “That would be a good thing?”
    “At least one of the kids in this family would be dating,” he said, pointedly.
    “I could say the same for you,” she said archly. “Half the women in the congregation have their eye on you.”
    “And I have my eye on the flock.”
    “You should date, Daddy. I worry.”
    “As do I. And not about Kevin.”
    “I’m looking. I’m just extraordinarily picky. The manI end up with has a lot to live up to. A girl idolizes her dad, you know.”
    “Now you’re just trying to flatter me.”
    “Is it working?”
    “It is,” he said, then laughed. He waved his hand toward the door. “Go on, now. Have fun at the Center. And let me know what’s up with your cousin.”
    “Night, Daddy.” She hurried toward the door, wishing she hadn’t missed Kevin’s calls. And hoping that it really was something as simple as a college romance gone bad.

    When she’d first found the Pacific Teen Center, CeeCee Jane Gantz had thought it was pretty lame. And she sure as hell didn’t think it had anything to offer her.
    Maybe if she’d found it a few months earlier, back when she was still human; a sixteen-year-old runaway trying to stay alive in Los Angeles. Maybe then it would have been cool.
    But she didn’t have to worry about that staying alive thing anymore. And she wasn’t alone anymore, either. She had Luke and Sara, the two vampires who’d adopted her. And she had her mentor Sergius whenever she needed to talk to someone. And she even had Sergius’s wife, Alexis, when she wanted to hit the malls and do some shopping.
    She wasn’t alone.
    Except sometimes she still felt lonely.
    In a couple of hundred years, she’d only look sixteen. But right now, she still really
was
sixteen. And nobody she was hanging out with was even close to her age.Alexis and Sara each beat her by more than a decade. And Sergius and Luke had a couple of millennia on her. They didn’t listen to Lady Gaga, they had no clue who the Band Perry was, and not a single one of them wanted to see any of the Star Wars films rereleased in 3-D.
    It was on one of those lonely days that she’d finally wandered into the Center.
    She knew it was run by some church group, and CeeCee was a long way from religious. But the place didn’t flaunt it. Instead, it was all about the snacks and the air hockey, the library corner and the television room. The adults who volunteered there mostly stayed out of the kids’ way, and so the place had the vibe of a giant living room. Or the common area of a frat house.
    Most of the kids who came were at risk—meaning they were dancing around gangland stuff or girls who’d gotten pregnant or the freako kids who didn’t quite fit in. CeeCee was part of that latter group.
    At first, she didn’t talk much. Just hung out and read books. Maybe played some hoops in the lot behind the building. After all, it wasn’t like she was going to plunk down next to someone and start oversharing about how she drank blood and was going to live forever.
    But still …
    For some reason, she kept coming back. If she wanted to go all psychoanalytical on