Covet (Clann)

lips shut. The less I said about the Clann around this council member, the better.
    It only took half a minute to drive back across the railroad tracks and park in the driveway. But Gowin didn’t seem ready to get out. Maybe the heated cab of the truck felt like a relief to his cold blood, too.
    “How exactly did you get to be on the council?” Belatedly I realized how rude that was. “Sorry. I mean—”
    He waved off the apology. “When a seat becomes available, the current council members tend to choose those they know and trust to fill it. Usually older vamps they personally sired.”
    “You said Lil—I mean, she who must not be named—was the oldest, and Caravass was the second oldest. What about all the other vamps she sired?”
    Gowin’s smile faded fast. “God killed them.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “Nope. It’s believed that she was Adam’s first wife, and when she got sick of his attitude, she ran off and started hanging out with demons instead. The story has it that she then became something of a demoness herself, or the very first vampire. I guess God could have handled that, until she decided to give in to that mothering urge and started making more like herself. That’s when God put the proverbial hand down and began killing off one hundred of her children, or fledglings, a day. Of course, he probably had to just to keep the vamps from wiping out the entire human population back then. Rumor has it she went on kind of a tear and was turning out the vamps faster than the humans could procreate.”
    “So he killed all of them but Caravass?”
    “Well, not completely. A good number of them got caught by human vigilantes over the years. That whole Spanish Inquisition took out hundreds all on its own, and the witch trials didn’t help much, either.”
    I frowned. “Why didn’t they just fight back and escape?”
    “Between you and me, I think the old ones got tired of living and let themselves be taken. Maybe they were worried about their souls if they did themselves in, so they let the humans take their lives for them. Depression is a problem once you get older. At least, it was. Now that technology is advancing so rapidly, life has kind of gotten interesting again.”
    After a few seconds of silence, I was about to reach for my door handle when he said, “You know, I really am sorry you and the Coleman boy were forced apart. Not everyone on the council felt that was necessary. But we were overruled.”
    I froze. “Overruled?”
    “By Caravass. The vote was divided, and in those rare cases the council leader can break the tie if he chooses.”
    So one vote had tipped it all the wrong way.
    My throat tightened hard enough to choke me. I had to clear it before I could reply. “Well, it was probably the right vote anyways. I am a danger to him. If I’d remembered the whole draining through a kiss thing, I never would have dated him in the first place. Besides, you guys weren’t the only ones who made me promise to break up with him. So even if y’all had voted differently, the breakup was still inevitable.”
    Propping an elbow on the edge of the door, Gowin rubbed a hand over his chin. “Yeah, your dad told me what the Clann did to your grandma in the woods. It’s a sad part of any war. Innocents always get hurt in the process, no matter how hard everyone tries to protect them. But that doesn’t make it any easier on the ones who face that loss.” He rested a hand on mine on the seat between us, and our skin was the same temperature. It threw me off balance again. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. I heard she was a great woman.”
    I stared ahead at the windshield, now covered in drops of pinesap and dead bugs. “Thanks.” It came out hoarse. I cleared my throat and had to blink fast a couple of times as my eyes began to sting.
    “Your dad was impressed with her magical skills. Apparently she was the only witch to ever come up with a spell that could dampen the bloodlust without hurting or weakening us, even around the Clann.”
    “It was how my mom and dad could stay together for so long.”
    I glanced at him. He stared at me, going completely still like my dad did sometimes.
    A quiet note of warning sounded somewhere in the back of my mind. “Too bad she didn’t write the spell down anywhere or teach me or my mom how to do it.”
    “She didn’t teach your mother, either?”
    “No. Nanna said she had to turn to the old ways and they required too much sacrifice to