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out my cell phone, and I was surprised to
find that I had a signal (subconsciously I guess I had been
thinking that Finland was in the stone ages).
    Crossing my fingers, I sat down on the bed and hoped
Jack’d be awake. This had been the longest we’d gone without
talking to each other since I’d turned, and it felt very strange.
Like the chemicals in my body were off-balance without him.
    “Hello?” Jack sounded frantic when he answered the
phone. “Alice? Are you okay? Is everything okay?”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Irrational tears welled up in
my eyes. It was stupid how much I missed him. “We just got to the
hotel. I was calling to let you know that we got in alright.”
    “Good. Good.” He was genuinely relieved but didn’t
relax. “How was your flight?”
    “I slept through most of it,” I said. “This is my
first time being out of the Midwest, though, and it sucks. I was in
New York City, and I didn’t see any of it. I barely got a glimpse
of Helsinki when we were coming in.”
    “You’re in Finland ?” Jack yelled, and I realized
that I might’ve said too much. “That’s where Peter’s in trouble
with vampires?”
    “Um…” I shifted on the bed, thinking of a line to
feed him.
    “They’re not really vampires, are they? It’s lycan.”
He sighed when I didn’t say anything, and he held the phone away
from his mouth. “Mae! Mae!”
    “Why are you yelling at Mae?”
    “Because. If she knew that’s what you guys were
doing-”
    “What?” I interrupted him. “What would she do?”
    He grumbled something under his breath but didn’t
have a follow-up for that. Even if Mae had known about it before we
left, she would’ve tried just as hard to talk Ezra out of it. Ezra
hadn’t told anybody where we were going for that reason. He had
made up his mind, and he didn’t want to waste time fighting about
it.
    “I should get on a plane right now,” Jack said.
    “Don’t be silly. Ezra wouldn’t let anything happen to
me. I’m just here to try to talk Peter into coming back, not to
fight any stupid vampires,” I said.
    “Peter doesn’t need to come back,” he
muttered.
    “Have you been to Finland?” I quickly changed the
subject. I couldn’t make him feel good about me being here, but
maybe I could distract him enough where he worried a little
less.
    “Yeah, once, a few years back,” he said disdainfully.
“We went skiing, and it was terrible. I broke a snowboard and
rolled down the hill. It wasn’t that fun. Finland’s not that great.
You should just come home.”
    “Jack.” I smiled when I pictured him tumbling down a
hill, but it faded when he went back to trying to convince me to
leave. “You’re wasting this call. My phone’s going to die, and I
don’t have a charger. Do you really wanna spend this time arguing
with me, when you know you’re not going to change my mind?”
    “Yeah, I kind of do,” he replied. “Besides, I’m sure
Ezra has a charger that’ll work there, and you can use that.”
    A few weeks ago, Jack bought me an iPhone. It was the
exact same phone that both Ezra and Jack had, so if Ezra had a
charger, it worked on mine.
    “Ezra speaks Finnish,” I said, keeping the subject
away from Peter or coming home. “It’s pretty fancy, although I
can’t understand a word of it.”
    “Ezra is fluent in like every
language known to man, even the dead ones. He thought he was so
cool when he watched The Passion of the
Christ without subtitles because can he
speak Aramaic, but I’m pretty sure that’s the only time that’ll ever come in
handy.” Jack lightened up, just a tad, and it made me
smile.
    “Can you speak any other languages?” I asked.
    “Spanish and German,” he informed me with pride. “I
learned Spanish in high school, and German in college, so I’m not
fluent in either. But I can ask if you speak English in both
languages, and I think that’s the only thing I really need to
know.”
    “Yeah, that sounds helpful,” I