“I don't see it that way at all.” I felt a little defensive, but also grateful to this vampire. Which was amazing in and of itself. But Alonzo was giving me the first chance I had really had to organize my thoughts. A rare and wonderful thing, in my case.
“How do you see it, my queen?”
My thoughts assembled rapidly as I said the words, and I felt more secure in my opinion with each new idea. “I gain strength from my friends, not weakness. My 'situation' with Jessica is not the 'end result' of anything. It's a step in our journey together. Maybe she dies, maybe she lives. But she is an essential part of me, either way. What am I without these friends?”
“Faster, stronger, generally superior,” he suggested.
“Superior,” I muttered. “I'm afraid I don't like that word very much. Especially when vampires use it.”
“Oh dear.” He gave a knowing smile as he walked beside me on the dead garden path. The baying of the dogs faltered in the distance. “No wonder you had a problem with the former regime.”
Chapter 17
We slipped into the back entrance of the house and just sort of stood around for a moment in the mudroom. I wanted to go to the kitchen and hang out with Jessica for a while—give her a chance to maybe tell me how the doctor's appointments were going. How everything was going. The thing about Jess—you couldn't force information out of her. She'd tell you or she wouldn't. I planned to make the atmosphere as welcoming as I could.
Anyway, I was pretty much done with Alonzo. I'm sure he was done with me. And Sinclair wasn't the “hey, let's go play golf in the dark” kind of guy. In fact, I had never seen Sinclair with one man friend. In further fact, as far as I knew, Tina was his only friend.
Anyway, Sinclair was done with Alonzo. Tina probably wasn't even there—she was tracking Jon down for us.
So it was that part of the party where you want your friends to leave, and they want to leave, but it was too early to look at your watches.
“It's getting late,” Alonzo said, stealing another glance at his big silver watch.Thank God ! Normally that weird tic of his made me wonder if a bomb was set to go off somewhere. But this time I welcomed it. “And unlike some, I must feed before dawn. With your permission, Majesty… ?”
“Of course. Um, try not to kill your food.” I tried to say it as a joke, but it probably sounded like an order. Enough—I was too emotionally exhausted to try to explain. Let him figure it out. “Thanks for coming over.”
“The pleasure was mine.” He smiled at me, showing me how very pleased he was. “I was waiting and waiting for the phone to ring. And now, I will go back and wait some more.”
“Hmmmph.” I was 98 percent sure he was fucking with me, but he had enough slipperiness in his tone that just made it quicker to repeat, as I did, “Thanks for coming over.”
He went. I listened for Sinclair but he didn't pop out from a hidden shadow the way he usually did. Nobody was pulling up in the drive. Tina was standing unobtrusively in the short hall to the kitchen, ready to spring forward with a cup of tea. Guess she'd quit looking for Jen for the night.
I slung my coat into the mudroom closet, kicked off my boots, and made for the kitchen.
Sinclair was there, sitting with Marc and Jessica and reading Sun Tzu'sThe Art of War . His sleeves were rolled up. His feet were bare. He looked as comfy as ever.
Not that I wanted him breathing down my neck, but…
“Shouldn't you be, uh, waiting breathlessly to hear about my walk with Alonzo? Did he swear allegiance? Did he bone me at the intersection of Dale Avenue?”
“Oh.” He turned a page. “About the first, Alonzo is gradually falling under your spell.”
“My spell?”
He looked at me innocently. “Why, dear, your natural charm. No doubt you had it before you were a vampire queen; but it's all the stronger now. No one of any intelligence can resist you for long.”
See, there it was again, just like Alonzo—the 98 percent certainty that this guy was just fucking with me. I just waved a hand and let him continue.
“I only have to wait a few more days, and then he will be yours and, by association, ours. As for the latter, if you wanted to use your walk to, ah, show carnal interest, there is nothing I can do about it. And if you bit him, or allowed him to bite you—”
“Fat goddamned chance.”
“Yes, well.” He shrugged. “I was not especially worried.”
“Okay, there's got to be something between total disinterest and hanging all over me. This”—I gestured—“isn't it. But anyway, even though you seem, uh, not too worried about it, I'll tell you how the walk went.”
“The walk with the guy who's going to fall in love with you?” Marc asked.
“He'snot going to fall in love with me. Besides, I think he's—I mean, if he was going to fall in love with anybody—which he's not—look, can we stay on track, please?”
Just then I saw Marc slip Jessica something small and white—it looked like a business card—and whisper to her. I cut myself off. “What was that? Are you telling secrets? What did you tell her?Share with the class ! Are you getting sicker? You're not getting sicker, are you?”
I couldn't smellanything different about her. Of course, I didn't go out of my way to smell my girlfriends, so I didn't exactly have a baseline for comparison purposes. But still. You'd think I could tell something.
“Take a pill,” Marc said. “I'll give you one. I was giving her the business card of a guy I want her to see. He's a really good doc—my dad saw him.”
And is still alive, right ? I was embarrassed to ask. I knew Marc's dad was sick, but surely I would have heard if he'd died. Somebody would have told me, right? We share with the class!
“How's your dad?”
“He's really good.” Weirdly, Marc said this in an almost glum tone. “They got him in this new place, he likes it a lot. It's a real house, not a hospital or anything. He's one of a couple guys who lives there, and the nurse who owns the place keeps an eye on them, you know, makes sure they get their meds and see their docs, but she's not, you know, taking care of them in an obvious way. If he wants to retreat to his own space and watch a baseball game, he can. Or he can eat in the dining room if he wants company. It's a pretty good compromise.”
“That's great.” I said this with total sincerity. And it was, beyond obvious reasons: so, so great to hear good news for a change. “You should bring him by to—”
“Meet all my cool new vampire friends?” Jessica smothered a snicker as he continued. “Honey, he had a huge problem with my lifestyle when I was just gay. Now I'm gay and living with vampires.”
“Well, it's not like you're sleeping with any of us.” I shrugged.
“Hmm.” His eyes searched the hallway behind me. “So, what's Alonzo's story? Did he go home? Is he sticking around? I just thought—”
“Alonzo's not an option, Marc. Honestly.”
“Yeah, well. You never know. You know how it is. You're new in town, you don't know the good bars, you—”
“Go out and kill a waitress for the fun of it?”
“Still working through that?” Jessica asked.
“Well, no matter how we deal with it among vampires, I'm sure Marc can agree that murder is a really great reason not to date a guy, doy!”
“Oh, I dunno. That whole 'falling for the dark side' thing worked out kind of good for you,” Marc said, his gaze sliding to Sinclair for a moment.