“Well, we could stay at mine a while. Order some of that noxious hot curry you like.”
I smirked back at him. “That sounds like half a good time.”
“Half?” His voice was oh-so-casual as he asked what was definitely not a real question.
“You know what I’d rather do with the rest of my night instead of—as well as eating some fabulous curry?”
He swallowed a laugh, covering his mouth as his shoulders shook, but then he wiped his face clean of—most—emotion and looked at me ever so seriously. “What would you like to do?”
The bell over the door tinkled and I almost threw the three-hole punch sitting on my desk at it.
It only got worse when we turned to see who it was, and found Carmen Aguilar standing in the doorway looking like Mimi from La Boheme—bedraggled and miserable, clearly having been crying, and possibly about to die of tuberculosis.
Well, probably not that one, since I didn’t think even tuberculosis could kill vampires.
CHAPTER 18
Without a word, I stood and went to one of the chairs between my desk and Davin’s, turned it toward Carmen, and motioned to it.
I’d seen Carmen act the tragic ingenue, and this wasn’t that. This was real tears. I was pretty sure there was even snot involved, and Carmen would never allow that if she wasn’t in dire straits.
She slunk over to the chair and dropped into it, oddly graceless for the lovely woman.
“You...you have to understand,” she explained through tears, dabbing at her face as Davin handed her tissues. “I wouldn’t have even come, but my Esteban...he’s everything.”
Esteban. I knew that Carmen lived with another vampire named Esteban, but also, that he largely kept out of politics...or anything, really. Mostly, he was a name on a list in Mother’s office.
I thought maybe I’d seen him at an odd opera or art opening, but he had followed Carmen around and stayed quiet each time. He’d been a little older-looking than her, maybe in his forties, with his dark brown hair liberally sprinkled with salt and pepper, in that distinguished way most guys could only aspire to.
Was he her...husband? Lover? Clearly, he was something important to her, but she’d hardly even introduced him to people other than a small wave and his name.
“I know he’s a hundred and twenty, but he’ll always be my baby.”
Ah. No. Not a lover. A son.
Actually, that made everything make sense. It was a lot like my mother had always acted, bringing me along to everything, but not wanting me to actually socialize with vampires, because they were dangerous.
It was strange, how it made me sympathize with both Carmen and him. Carmen was like my mother, and had gone about it in a questionable way, but only wanted to protect her son. Esteban? Well, I’d been there, the overprotected son who always felt like he was on the outskirts of his own community.
And Esteban was actually a vampire, so even worse for him. At least my mother had kind of been protecting me from people who might see me as a meal.
Though in retrospect, I was more of a danger to them than they were to me, particularly now that I knew what I was.
“So something has happened to...to your son?” Davin asked, taking one of the other seats between the desks and moving it across from her, watching her in earnest. Davin had always been so good with her. With all the people we met who weren’t automatically disdainful of him, actually, so I didn’t know why he thought he needed me.
She sniffled for a moment, wiping her eyes with the tissue and nodding. “I would handle it myself, but”—her eyes flashed, and even though she didn’t make me terribly nervous, I was glad I wasn’t the person she was considering handling—“I need help. I know what I can do and what I cannot.”
I leaned against my desk, reaching back to pet Twist, who was watching Carmen with interest. I wondered if she washoping for a chance to do violence to whoever had hurt Carmen’s son. She’d never seemed to have any grudge against Carmen herself.
“What’s happened?” I asked. That seemed like it would get the most information that we could actually use.
“A man took him,” she said, turning to meet my eye. “He took him from the garden, right next to the house. And then he turned up on my doorstep, the arrogant pendejo.” She launched into a string of angry Spanish that I actually recognized a few words of, which was a bad sign, since the only Spanish I’d ever learned was a handful of curse words.
Davin reached out and took her hand, squeezing and meeting her eye. “He kidnapped your son, and he’s demanded something?”
“He wanted me to bring you to him,” she told Davin, but at the end, looked over at me. “To pretend that he was a friend of mine and bring you to meet with him, as though he wanted you to work for him.” She waved around the office. “Some sort of security something.”
I rolled my lips together to keep from laughing, because if Carmen had come to me to bring me to talk to her “friend” about “some sort of security something,” I’d have been instantly suspicious that something wasn’t right.
