I wished I could believe that.
“Shiarra.” The force behind her voice made me cringe. “If you start listening to nothing but death metal and wearing all black, we can’t be friends anymore. ”
That drew a choking laugh out of me. It took me a few moments to regain my composure enough to answer her, and killed most of the melancholy mood in its tracks. “I’m sor—”
“Enough! You’ve already apologized plenty of times. Let’s move on. As long as we’re here, we’ve got a job to do. I’m not going to go zombie hunting with you if you’re just going to mope around the whole time listening to angry girl music and dripping with mascara. Are you with me or what?”
My laughter this time was far less strained. Sara soon joined in, the two of us giggling like madwomen until my ribs and diaphragm ached too much to keep it up. She rubbed under her eyes with her palms, still snorting like she did when she really lost it.
Her eyes were a little red when she glanced at me, her lopsided grin telling me she had needed that emotional release almost as badly as I had. She was usually better at hiding her inner turmoil than I was, but she had to be hurting if her usually cool and collected facade was cracking. She no longer had a mom or dad to turn to for comfort. All she had was her sister.
Well, there was also Arnold, but both of them were three thousand miles away. She’d have to make do with me.
I slid my arm over her shoulder and held her, the occasional hitch in my breathing betraying my suppressed laughter. Though I knew I should have been more solemn in that moment, Sara had done me the favor of pulling me out of my funk. It would be only fair for me to reciprocate.
“You know,” I said, as conversationally and with as straight a face as I could muster, “I’ll bet, when you get back, the sex with Arnold is going to be fantastic. ”
Sara nearly choked, covering her mouth with a hand as she looked at me. This time the tears really were from mirth; I could see the curve of her lips between her fingers, and she was trying her best to smother her laughter. I gave her an innocent look, widening my eyes and batting my lashes. That earned me a halfhearted punch in the shoulder, which got me laughing, too.
Giggling between words, she gave me a mock glare. “Damn it, now all I’m going to be able to think about until we go back is hopping in the sack with him. Man, you have no idea how great it is with a mage.”
“Once you go magic, you never go back?”
She snorted again and shoved me as I waggled my brows. “Something like that. Though you’re one to talk. Finally knocked boots with the vampire, huh?”
The heat in my cheeks was sudden and intense. Sara’s exaggerated leer didn’t help. I coughed into a hand, avoiding answering her.
“Yeah, yeah. You can dish it—”
“—but I can’t take it. I know.”
Smiling, she rose and stretched, closing her eyes as she got on tiptoe and arched her back. Guess I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit sore after being cooped up in the plane on the way here. When she was done, she patted my knee and then headed for the door. She paused there, hand on the knob. “Get some sleep. We’ll meet with Clyde tomorrow, start working this case, and stay busy so we don’t have to worry about what’s going on at home. Sound good?”
I nodded, rubbing the back of my neck. With a flash of pearly teeth, she was gone, her own door soon clicking shut quietly behind her. I rose to shut my own door and start getting ready for bed.
My family might be a mess, my business in the toilet, my love life a shambles, and my neck on the line with the cops, White Hats, werewolves, and who knew what else—but I had a job to do. We wouldn’t forget our friends, our families, our commitments, or our enemies, but we would be safe, and far enough away that the people hunting us would most likely lose interest or forget about us given enough time. Arnold would protect the rest of our friends and family. Royce would fix the mess and make it safe for us to return. I hoped.
On the bright side, I no longer felt the pressure of outside forces pushing me around. Even though I wasn’t thrilled about hunting zombies, Sara was here, and the two of us could solve this case together. We’d make Clyde pay through the nose for our services, which should put us on track to salvaging H&W Investigations, and it would most likely keep us busy enough to forget all the worries we’d left behind in New York.
For now, that would have to be enough.
Chapter 9
Though Sara and I both woke up long before the sun went down, nobody came to give us any idea what we were expected to do. In the late morning, while the two of us stumbled around the kitchen in search of breakfast, a lady with skin tanned dark from hours in the sun and dark, silky hair swept up in a neat chignon, had bustled in and introduced herself as Florencia, the resident cook. We were supposed to ring her on one of the internal phone lines if we were hungry.
I wasn’t totally comfortable with the luxury of having a cook at our beck and call, but Sara had been very gracious, thanking her and asking for what I assumed by the sound was a Spanish dish. The foreign words rolled off her tongue as she conversed with the cook, leaving me feeling foolish for taking French in high school. When Florencia turned to me, I gave Sara a helpless look. She laughed and told the cook—in English, making me feel doubly foolish—to give me an omelet and a pot of coffee, thanked her again, and then led me to the kitchen table.
Outside of a restaurant, I had never had such fantastic food. Florencia explained as she cooked that she had gone to culinary school and intended to open her own restaurant, but that working for Clyde had given her the opportunity to earn the capital she needed to finance the venture.
“Three more years of this,” she said, flipping the omelet in the skillet with the kind of practiced ease I had only seen in movies and TV shows, “and I should have enough to start Mama Flora’s. I have my eye on an old restaurant near the pier. If the market holds steady, I’ll have everything I need, and Mr. Seabreeze has promised to help with the negotiations and decorating.”
Sara and I congratulated her, though we both raised our eyebrows at her blithe mention of Clyde’s promise. Though he was clearly the type to showboat, if he kept his word and was truly so good to his faithful employees, perhaps he wasn’t quite the mercenary we had assumed.
Royce had proven to me that not all vampires were evil, mindless beasts, and that they were capable of being compassionate. We hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know Clyde, so considering he had been backed into a figurative corner due to this zombie infestation, it was possible we had thus far only seen his worst side. Granted, I was pissed about the cell phones being confiscated, but not entirely surprised.
At first, Royce had also been a bit of a manipulative dick, which was part of why it had taken me so long to see that he wasn’t such a bad guy. I imagined it might be the same with Clyde. We were nothing special to the vampire. Just another couple of “dumb humans”—only good for food or entertainment, if that much. He didn’t respect us yet, so he saw no reason to treat us as anything other than pawns. Now that I had played the Other games of dominance and grandstanding for a few rounds, I was confident I could find a way to show him that Sara and I had teeth.
Close to noon, we were munching on some snacks while we hung out in the den with the big screen. As we were trying to get into daytime TV, someone showed up with a depressingly thin file folder containing the information Clyde was willing to give us about the zombies, and an envelope delightfully thick with cash.
After storing the envelope in one of Sara’s bags, we opened the file on the sprawling kitchen table to see what was inside and spread everything out. There wasn’t much. A list of missing and dead vampires, a few blurry pictures, and a couple of handwritten notes describing what surviving human servants had seen. Though it took some doing to figure out what the shaky scrawl spelled out, we had a rough picture of the situation before long.