The wait was short, but when Rinaldo arrived he wasn’t driving a Blue Bird cab but a black four-door sedan. He saw me, shoved open the front passenger door, and shook his head when I squelched inside. I was soaked and trembling and gratefully wrapped myself in the oversized towel he tossed at me. I took the cup of hot coffee and sipped while he idled at the curb. I’m not a coffee drinker, but there was plenty of sugar and cream in the travel cup too. “This is good.”
“Why some big-ass famous vampire killer and assistant to de devil out in de storm in you underwear?” Rinaldo asked in his Frenchy accent.
I wasn’t wearing any underwear and my clothes were sticking to me like a second skin, my real skin showing through, though Rinaldo turned his head away, politely, which was nice. I no longer had huge vampire-hunter/vampire-employee secrets from Rinaldo. But he didn’t know everything.
“I’ll answer that if you tell me why you’re not picking me up in a Blue Bird car.”
Rinaldo made a snorting sound, very Frenchy, a sound I’d heard in cafés and restaurants among the locals. “Traditional cabbies, we losing money against Uber cabs. Closed down. I now self-employed Uber driver too. I make more money. I pick my calls. Dat part I like. But I hafta pay my own taxes, I do, and I hate me some math.” He shrugged. “You turn.”
Rinaldo stood about five feet seven and had been a little paunchy at one eighty, but he had lost weight, was dressed nicer than when he was a cabbie, wearing ironed khakis and a golf shirt. He had also stopped trying to cover up hisbald spot with a comb-over. He looked good. “You smell better. You gave up smoking.”
Ruefully Rinaldo said, “Ha-ha. You funny, you is. My little one, she crawl up in my lap and she say, ‘Daddy, when you get sick like Mrs. Marillett, I gone get a oxygen tank for you. ’Cause I love you!’” Rinaldo shot me a look. “I ain’t had me cigarette in two months. Hardest two months a’ my life. But can taste food now again. Dat a good part. You answer my question now.”
“I was chasing vamps. I ended up without my coat, no shoes, and wet to the skin.”
“Dat ain’t no answer. You want burgers or chicken?”
I pointed to a small Cajun eatery and bar on a corner. The painted sign said EBO’SNO. 2FANCY. “See if they got boudin balls? Get me a few pounds?” Rinaldo slowed and parked as I fished out two twenties from my gobag.
“You ever gone tell me you secrets? I thought we become friends of a sort.”
I studied Rinaldo’s earnest face. He needed a shave. Renewed rain beat against the windows. A sudden gust of wind rocked the sturdy car. I was glad to be out of the rain. And I was out because of Rinaldo. He had been there for me when I needed him. I had never done anything for him except tip well. Yet he knew only what the general public did, nothing confirmed by my own words and my own trust. “You’re right. We are friends. I’m not human. These are the clothes I wear when I’m tracking a vamp.”
“Goo’ enough. Dat a start.” Rinaldo opened an umbrella and jogged through the storm to Ebo’s, leaving the sedan and the heater on so I’d stay warm. It felt odd having a... a new friend. I hadn’t had many—none if I was honest—in my life until earth witch Molly Everhart and I became pals, and I was grown by then. This felt... itchy.
Rinaldo jogged back through the rain, a huge paper bag under an arm. The car door closed on the storm once again and he handed the bag to me, offering with his other hand the second twenty and change. “Keep it,” I said. I unfolded the bag and held it out to him. “Want one?”
Rinaldo, who had no idea how hard it was to give the first boudin ball away and not chow down on it myself, tooka ball and a handful of coarse napkins. “Jist dey one. I watching my girlish figure, donchu know.”
In companionable silence, Rinaldo and I ate and made the ride back to Yellowrock Securities while wiping grease off our faces and hands and licking our fingers. There was nothing like the food in this city. Not even back home in Asheville.
• • •
I sat on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, surprised that it was only near midnight, that dawn hadn’t found the world yet. I had agreed to be fed vamp blood by Dacy Mooney simply because I was more tired than I thought I would be, even after eating a steak and fries, and I needed to be in fighting form. With a master vamp nearby to feed me, I was taking the cheater’s way out because the night wasn’t over. I had too much to do. Too much to think about. So I drank the blood of the heir of Clan Shaddock while she told me why she was in town, visiting from Asheville. She was checking on Shaddock’s scion, Amy Lynn Brown, which was no surprise. Amy was the miracle vamp whose blood brought new vamps from the devoveo—the madness that freshly turned vamps experience for ten years or so after rising—in record time. It was expected that the European vamps would want Amy for their very own slave, and no one was giving her up. Amy could easily be the cause of a World Vamp War.
I listened with half an ear, drank maybe a half cup of Dacy’s revitalizing blood, and made littleummmnoises in the appropriate conversational places. I watched as Dacy fed Eli again and carried my hunky partner up the stairs to his room, Alex sprinting along to make sure the blond Tennessean didn’t try anything inappropriate with his blood-drunk brother. I watched as Tex and then Wrassler fed Edmund again, and the Onorio twins, Brandon and Brian, helped my primo—my primo, for good and real, now—into bed in his nook under the stairs where we kept our weapons.
Brandon—or maybe it was Brian; I didn’t look for the mole that differentiated them—said, “He’s living in a Harry Potter room. Long fall for a master of his own clan.”
The other twin said, “No windows. There is no room with no windows but this one.”
“Still. Long fall.”
“Indeed.” The conversation ended. There was no doubt that they had intended me to hear it. They had nothing to say to me as they closed up the shelving unit that secured the daytime sleeping place of my primo. I had nothing to say to them either, remembering Edmund’s memory of the dying slave in the blizzard. Silently, I watched as they all left the house.
Moments later, Alex stood in the opening to the foyer, shoes on his feet, real pants—the kind that covered his legs to his ankles—and plaid shirt over his T-shirt. “Since my blood-drunk brother is healed and sleeping off the treatment, I plan to go out. Okay with you?”
I looked at Alex blankly. I could count on two fingers the times he had left the house to “go out” since he and Eli moved in. And then I remembered and quoted back to him. “‘Game con in town. Small one,’ but you got friends who’ll be there. Go. Have fun.”
“Right. Call me if you need me.” He waggled his cell at me. Undoubtedly his other electronics were in the gobag slung over his shoulders. “You’ll watch Eli?” he asked unnecessarily.
“Of course,” I said, also unnecessarily, but polite.
And then I was alone but for the sleepers.
I sat now on the sofa, with an afghan wrapped around me, wishing there were a fireplace in the room, and wondering which walls originally had one. The house was built when fire, probably coal fire, had heated every room. There would have been fireplaces in each, but we had none and now that I thought about it, there were brick-built chimneys on the roof. Maybe I should invest in finding the original fireplace locations, tear into the walls, and have them rebuilt. They would make the place feel more warm and cozy in winter.
Or... Maybe I should run home. To the mountains. Not that I’d be any safer there.
