Raoul murmured the appropriate wordage and the door cleared, automatically widening to admit the three of us at the same time. When we emerged, what hit me was the thought of how starkly my two bosses’ workplaces contrasted. Raoul worked out of his home, a penthouse currently overlooking the sparkling skyline of Caracas. Pete’s office looked like it had come straight out of a library basement.
Colonel John waited for us by a bank of large windows, his hands clasped behind his back as he observed the city below him. He took one look at Raoul and his mustache seemed to drop an extra inch. “Over there,” he ordered.
We lowered Raoul onto the soft white couch Colonel John had directed us to.
Clearing a place on a glass coffee table that Raoul had added to his decor since the last time I’d visited, Colonel John sat opposite him with his knee between Raoul’s booted legs. We watched him pull a long, well-maintained knife out of the sheath at his left side and split Raoul’s pants from thigh to hem. My Spirit Guide’s knee had swollen to three times its regular size. And the noise he made when Colonel John laid his hands on it made me turn away.
I strode to the sleek black bar, Óeekel where I poured myself something that smelled a lot like whiskey from a glass decanter and stubbornly ignored my reflection in the mirrored wall. “Do you want something?” I asked Vayl as he came up to the other side and sank onto one of the black cushioned bar stools.
When he didn’t answer I met his eyes. Same color as before, and not the one I was hoping to see. “Vayl—”
“Why could you not wait?”
“What?”
“Now his blood is in you when mine should have been first.”
I clutched my glass so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter in my hands. I wanted to yell at him that I’d had no choice. I considered throwing my booze in his face and screaming that drinking blood was grosser than sucking toes, neither of which could he expect me to do at any time during our relationship. Then I got this image of my big toe, painted bright red, suddenly developing a face and a hot Southern temper to match, screaming, “What the hell is wrong with mah bad self?” And I started to giggle.
His brows lowered so fast they would’ve crossed if it had been anatomically possible. “Oh, stop,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you. I never do. You should consider that. It’s not necessarily a good thing.” As his jaw began to tighten I went on. “If you’ll recall, you were first. In Miami. Your fangs? My neck? You seemed to think it was a big yummy moment.”
“That is . . . different.”
“Bullshit. And I haven’t forgotten the night you explained that you make it a point to sample your targets’ A-positive whenever possible, just to make sure they taste as guilty as the CIA led you to believe they were to start with. So, using your method of judgment, I should also be pissed that you’re the equivalent of a blood whore.”
“A what?” His voice went so deep it practically tolled. I wasn’t sure when he’d slid off the stool and come around to my side. Usually I noticed things like that. But his eyes had captivated me so completely I’d lost all awareness of my surroundings.
“It’s all in how you look at things, isn’t it?”
“You are mad.”
Once I’d have kicked him right in the teeth. Or done a quick hunt for the looney van. Now I laughed. “You’re jealous.”
“I am not.”
“Now you sound like Cole.”
“Are you actively trying to snap my control now, or is this just part of your overall charm?”
I sidled up to him. Whispered, “When I bite you, it’ll be because I want to make your toes curl and your hair stand on end. And you won’t need stitches afterward. You’ll need crutches.”
Finally. The black bled out of his eyes, replaced by that emerald green I’d grown to adore. I heard a sharp crack, looked down and realized the edge of the bar had buckled under the pressure of his grip.
“Aw, Vayl, just when Raoul was getting used to you.”
“It is your fault. Pushing me to within a hairsbreadth of explosion and then spinning me so quickly into desire it is all I can do to keep myself from taking you right here.”
I almost said, Taking me where? Like a ditz. Because the second I kicked in my eighteenth-century translator my mind went, Oh. Ahhhh! Blush. Giggle. Cool!
Vayl said, “I have never seen that expression on your face before. What does it mean, I wonder?”
“Um, probably something along the lines of, I can’t wait to get you alone.”
Crack. An entire triangle of the bar’s edge came loose in Vayl’s hand. He looked down at it like it had just deeply disappointed him. He shook his head and murmured, “Damn.” I snorted. He glared at me. “You are not helping.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“Aaaah!” Raoul’s cry of pain made my shoulder blades ache. And how did Vayl choose to distract him?
“Raoul, I just broke your bar.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It turned out that Raoul was so relieved for Colonel John to have put his knee back right that he didn’t mind much about the bar. “It came with the room,” he told us as we sat on the couch that met his at a forty-five-degree angle, staring at the bit Vayl had torn off as it balanced in the middle of the coffee table. “I’ve been thinking of replacing it.”
“With what?” I asked.
He laid his head back. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll lose all respect for me, and then how will I ever get you to believe anything I have to say?”
Before I could even begin to think of begging, Colonel John said, “Come now, Raoul. This hedging is paramount to torture. You must let us in on your secret now.”
Raoul raised his head. “I want a train set.” He waited. When we didn’t laugh he allowed a hint of excitement to enter his eyes as he said, “I could build one all along that wall. Two levels. With a working yard. And at least five engines running at once. I had one when I was”—he glanced at me—“well, you know.” Boy, did I. I wondered, had Colonel John brought him back from the dead long ago, to fight as an earthly Eldhayr like I was now? And then, how had he finally ended up here? A blast from some suicide bomber he just couldn’t come back from?
“Do it,” said Colonel John so decisively it sounded like an order.
“Really?” Raoul eyed the bar like it might attack him if he tried to dismantle it. “I don’t know. It seems kind of—”
“You do understand that is what makes us different from them.” As Colonel John waited for Raoul’s full attention he fished a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it from a roll of tobacco he pulled from his boot.
“What do you mean?” Raoul finally asked.
“The ability to play. Nothing we fight, be it demon, kloricht, slyein, or faorzig ever indulges in lighthearted amusement. Every single creature that calls itself our enemy has lost its power to laugh. To joke. To have fun. Which is why we must hold to it as if it were the most treasured part of our souls.” He looked at each of us, one by one. “Perhaps it is.” He lit the tobacco he’d packed with a match struck on the side of a battered red box.
Raoul jumped up, standing on one leg like a flamingo who thinks the water’s a tad too cold for both feet today. As he hopped toward the hall he said, “I have to get some paper. Where’s that pencil? It was just here! If I design it in a U-shape I should be able to—no, that won’t work. Or will it?”
“Raoul.”
He stopped, teetered so precariously I half rose from my seat before he finally caught hold of one of the white chairs that surrounded his dining room table. He turned around. “Yes, Colonel?”
“Are you forgetting something?” Colonel John squinted over the cloud of smoke he’d puffed up, which smelled sharp and yet sweet, an aching reminder of Gramps Lew.