Page 95 of Good Vampires Go to Heaven

Vikar remarked whenever he saw her now, “Regina’s got her snark back.” And he wasn’t the only one who teased her on the subject of her scowling countenance.

“I never lost it,” she shot back every time, and usually accompanied her retorts with a waggle of her fingers toward their male parts.

Unfortunately, no one took her curses seriously anymore. They just laughed. She blamed Zeb for that, too. He’d made her a laughingstock.

She never asked anyone about Zeb, but she overheard others talking about him. Apparently, he was confined to a tower room on the fourth floor of the castle, shunned.

Good. Better yet, he should be boiled in oil, or exiled to the remains of Horror Castle, or . . . or . . . something.

Zeb’s fate, like all the others of the vangels, awaited Michael’s final decision, which would be announced at the Final Reckoning to be held in two days.

And wasn’t that an ominous-sounding title for their meeting with Michael?

For that encounter, she would have to return to the Transylvania castle. Not everyone would, though. Not right away. They were being asked to come in shifts of fifty each. In the meantime, some were on Grand Key Island, or Harek’s small telecommunications island, or the ravaged plantation in Louisiana where Ivak had erected a sort of tent city, until the property’s ultimate fate could be determined.

She decided to go to Louisiana in the interim. Maybe she could charm a few snakes there, as a side offering of her witch business, or she could bring a few back to Transylvania to slip into Zeb’s room.

That was mean of her. She hated this slide down to the dark side of her personality. She wanted to be happy and content, like other people. She wanted to rejoice in the demise of the Lucipires. She wanted love, dammit! She wanted to be left alone. She wanted to be part of a family. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted! And wasn’t that what had gotten her into trouble in the first place?

“It’s that bad, huh?” Ivak’s wife, Gabrielle, asked, as she came up to the porch of one of the restored slave cabins where Regina was staying. Although Jasper’s minions had destroyed all of Ivak’s work in restoring the plantation mansion, appropriately named Heaven’s End, he’d left the slave cabins alone . . . all twenty of them. They were really quite charming little log cottages, if you managed to forget their original purpose.

Regina motioned for Gabrielle to sit on the other porch chair and offered her a glass of iced tea from the pitcher that sat on a small table between them.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Regina lied.

“Honey, you look like someone shot your dog, and your cat, and your parrot, all in one day. And, by the way, did you know your cat Thor has taken a shine to Zeb, and he keeps him company in his tower room all the time?”

No, Regina hadn’t known that. But it figured that even her cat would betray her. Regina hated that she was still wallowing in pity, and that it apparently showed.

“Don’t worry, though. Things will work out. They always do.”

Gabrielle was a lawyer who handled pretty much the most hopeless cases in the legal system, and she was married to the world’s most womanizing vangel, before they were married, of course. Now, he just had an eye for every female who passed by, or rather they had an eye for him, the handsome devil . . . uh, angel . . . uh, whatever. How Gabrielle managed to remain such an optimist was beyond Regina.

“Where’s your little one today?” Regina asked, instead.

“He’s with his daddy over at the prison.”

Regina arched her brows at that. Ivak was a chaplain at Angola Prison, of all things (for a Viking guilty of the sin of lust . . . enough said!), when he wasn’t off doing vangel stuff.

Gabrielle laughed at Regina’s astonishment. “There’s a concert there today, and Ivak figured Mikey might be an inspiration to some of the more redeemable inmates.”

“If you say so,” Regina said dubiously. Everyone knew that Angola contained some of the worst of the worst criminals, but then the vangels knew better than most that second chances do work.

“Zeb asks everyone about you,” Gabrielle said. “He must care. And he keeps sending you letters—”

“—that I return unopened.” There was nothing that Zeb could say now that would erase what he had done. When Gabrielle was about to continue on that subject, Regina put up a halting hand. “Please, no more on the subject. I’m trying my best to forget the cad.”

Gabrielle muttered something like, “How’s that working for you?” But then she surrendered and said, “I need to drive over to Tante Lulu’s place to get some okra. Dagmar is making a gumbo for dinner tonight.”

The two sisters, Dagmar and Inga, had turned out to be quite the cooks, even in the rustic makeshift kitchen in the burned-out shell of the old plantation house. The kitchen had been in a separate building and was made of brick. There was no way they could share a kitchen at the castle in Transylvania. Besides, Lizzie had Andrea’s help.

“There’s someone out on Bayou Black that I think you’d like to meet. Come with me.”

“What? Zeb isn’t here, is he?”

“Of course not. You know that Vikar considers him a prisoner of war, or some such thing.”

Regina didn’t want to see the louse in person, but still she felt oddly deflated that it wasn’t Zeb that Gabrielle referred to. “Who, then? Oh, no! You’re not becoming a matchmaker?”