• • •
The front room was full of casually dressed humans, reading, speaking into their cells, thumbs flying as they sent texts. Two guys were stretched out on the rug on their stomachs, a spirited game of checkers between them. Not the dignified game of chess enjoyed by most older vamps, but gauche American games. Beer bottles were everywhere. The first two rows of a pyramid of beer cans had been built at the base of a window.
Deon shouted from the kitchen, his island enunciation like honey and whiskey, “Titus, honey, come and get you’self a corn dog. We got us three kind of mustard to Dip. It. In!” Deon demonstrated dipping a corn dog into a small container of Grey Poupon and biting off the end. It was a decidedly sexual act, Deon at his most amazing, putting on a show, the kind he had performed at Katie’s Ladies when he chose to participate in the evening entertainment. Chewing, he pranced out from behind the Carrara marble–topped island while waving the emperor and his peeps over. The chef was dressed in feathers, spangles, and rhinestones from head to toe, an outfit that looked like the love child of Bollywood and Brazilian Rio Carnival.
I thought Titus—the homophobe that history had never gotten right—might stumble.
In Rome, sexuality and sexual expression had been far more open and varied than in modern times, but Titus had never participated, more pope than playboy. Judging from his expression, the emperor was still a straight, conservative man.
“Grab your corn dog and beer and come on up, hoss.” Tex stood at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, Brutebeside him. The white werewolf was staring at Titus, panting, salivating, as if he might want a little taste. “We got us some fightin’ to do.”
Deon held out a carnival treat on a stick. Daring Titus.
Titus reached to accept the corn dog and Taviano stepped between them. Deon smacked the dog down onto a paper plate on the island and put both hands to his hips. “Sugar, if I wanted to poison the kink-ly sort, I’d do it in Earl Grey tea, not in a corn dog. That would be downright sacrilegious.” Deon picked up the paper plate and slapped it against Taviano’s chest. “Now you take that food and you eat it.” Ziggy slid a hand around the stunned primo to whack a bottle of beer into Titus’s hands.
Titus’s secundo leaned in and whispered something in that foreign, Italian, Frenchy talk to the king, then led him up the stairs. Deon grinned evilly. He’d been having fun. From behind me Ziggy said, “Honey, if I’d known you were going to play I’d have put on Queen Bitch and helped. That looked like fun.”
“It was,” Deon said, “what that old dude deserved.”
Titus’s shoulders went back and he stepped up the stairs, straight toward the lens of a camera and into the view of the world. Leo, with a faintly pleased smile on his face, followed. Katie winked at me as they passed. Winked. At me.
Point two to Leo. And to Shakespeare. Leo’s opening salvo had been stolen from Petruchio, his own Kate by his side. I grinned suddenly, showing a lot of teeth. I couldn’t have been prouder. This was the stolen theme fromTaming of the Shrew. Ro and Brenda, wearing jeans and sweatshirts, followed Katie and Leo. And then the rest of the NOLA retinue.
This little show was surely my fault from way back when. Go, me.
CHAPTER 17
Stuck His Nose into My Crotch
We were standing on the third floor, the windows open to the cool night breeze, the corroded fans turning overhead. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and vamp, a weird mixture of herbs and blood and sex, poorly hidden beneath the wonderful aroma of food.
On the table set aside for heavy hors d’oeuvres were more corn dogs; a slow cooker full of beanie weenies with Louisiana hot sauce; pigs in a blanket; and three plates of deviled eggs, each a bit different, and one made with that green horseradish-like stuff they use in sushi. There were two kinds of slaw, one made with ginger and soy, and lots of fixin’s, including pickled okra, pickled beet, pickled pickles, and corn on the cob. Buns. And a massive, monstrous bowl of boudin, big enough to bathe in, sitting atop a platter of crackers. On the platter beside it there was a whole barbecued pig and at least ten bottles of various kinds of hot sauce, from all over the South, including two featuring the Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world, created by PuckerButt, in South Carolina. I picked up the bottles to seeI DARE YOU STUPITandREAPERRACHASAUCE. It might have been my imagination, but my hands tingled from the peppers, even through the glass. If the table didn’t catch on fire from the sauces, it might die from the weight of the food. Pretty sure I heard it groaning as I stepped away.
The bar had been set up near the back of the room. There were five huge buckets full of ice and beer bottles, the aluminum leaking condensation onto newspapers placed on the floor. No colas. No water. No juice. No fancy wines.
On a table beside the bar was a churn of homemade ice cream, double chocolate brownies, and the fixings for s’mores to take outside to the fire pit, which was blowing on the wind and smoking up the joint. To my right, I heard the werewolf pack leader/commentator describing the food as “regular ol’ American picnic in the moonlight.” Champ had a way with words.
“Deon,” I muttered, “you are a-mazing. A Wonder-Chef. You need your own cape.”
“Only if I can get a magic wand too,” Deon said from behind me. “Oh, wait.” He put a finger to his lips. “I have a magic wand.” He gamboled away, his buttocks bouncing.
“I may have to stab out my eyes,” Eli whispered.
I gestured with my head to the emperor. He was eating a corn dog. On international paid TV. On his plate was a wasabi deviled egg. And a mound of boudin. A squirt of hot sauce was curled atop it. I had a moment to wonder if that was the PuckerButt sauce and if the fanghead king would go up in flames if he ate some. I could wish.
Vamps didn’t eat human food often. I had a feeling Titus wasn’t prepared for modern spices, and that Deon had prepared for that lack of familiarity with as much care as he had prepared his costume and attitude to irritate a homophobe. Titus scraped a mess of boudin onto a cracker and took a bite. There was a funny sound, a sort of an inhale/groan/gasp.
A dozen of the king’s humans surrounded him, hiding him from view. Leo saw it and slipped to the side, giving someone a tiny finger wave, his index finger lifting and falling. A warning. My eyes followed the MOC for amoment as he stepped behind the dessert table and picked up something. The tips of his swords appeared below the table, one on each side, mostly out of sight. The film crew stepped back.
The EV emperor’s humans were all traditionally gorgeous. The males all wore tuxedoes; the women were dressed in conservative black dresses, hems to the floor. Yeah. Titus was still hung up on sexual expression, lifestyles, and activities. Leo knew Titus’s sexual proclivities. Of course he did. And Leo, with Deon, had set all this up, maybe months ago, as part of whatever other strategies he had percolating in his multilevel, long-view, three-D-chess-game-of-politics, devious mind.
A wave scent of humanish blood washed through the room and out on the salty wind. The magic in the fighting chamber changed. Leo, weapons still out of sight, began to slowly vamp out. Katie, in her sundress, appeared at Leo’s side, her bastard sword in a two-hand grip. Edmund appeared beside me, close enough for me to hear the soft pop of displaced air. Gee stepped to my other side. I could smell Eli somewhere close but didn’t turn to look.
His humans backed away from Titus, then the vamps, forming groups, females and males. The emperor stood there, cold and unamused, his mouth burned red at the corners where he had bitten into the PuckerButt sauce and it had scalded him. He was armed with two swords, just like Leo. “You parley with your ruler without respect,” he said in stilted English. At the words, all his vamps drew their blades.
I tried to figure out why, and realized Titus was using treaty-making wording, not Sangre Duello terminology.
Brandon—wearing a tux, unlike the rest of us—stepped forward. Calmly he said, “There has been no parley called. Parley was made null and void when the scions of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Emporer of the European Mithrans, came ashore, on the territory of Leo Pellissier, without legal writ from the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, in violation of immigration laws of the United States of America.Said scions acted without proper honor and outside of the Vampira Carta in leading attack on the scions and humans of New Orleans.”
