Blessed (17 page)

“That’s your master plan?” the Possum replied. “Homework?”

“And what genius idea do you have?”

Clyde didn’t have an answer, not that I’d expected one. I saw no reason to explain that studying Stoker wasn’t the sum total of my working strategy. I’d been trying to feel out the Chicagoans, trying to gauge whether we could confide in them. It was hard, being subtle, what with time running out. But I wouldn’t repeat the mistake that I’d made with Bradley, not with so much and so many at stake.

That said, it seemed best to leave Clyde out of it. At least for the time being. The Possum’s interpersonal skills were even worse than mine.

During the commercial break, I asked, “Do you suppose that, wherever he is, Kieren’s following the ’Horns this season?”

Clyde shot me a look. He popped another cricket into his mouth, swallowing it whole. “You never talk about him.”

I shrugged, finishing off my Jell-O. “Neither do you.”

“I’m a guy. It’s different.”

What was it with people? Everyone wanted me to talk, share, bond — first Meghan, then Mrs. Levy, and now Clyde.

I snagged the remote from the table and lowered the volume. “What’s your point? You think I’m deficient because I haven’t gone catatonic?”

“Catatonic?” he shot back, fishing out another insect. “Try
panting.
Wasn’t that you trailing after that Zachary guy last night?”

Was
that
what this was about? “I do not pant.” I set my empty bowl on the coffee table. “For your information, Zachary’s in training. He needed my help.”

“Sure he did.”

I started to say that I followed all the new-hire waiters in case they got weeded, but it’s not like I owed some sophomore part-time dishwasher an explanation. “What do you know?” I replied. “You were in the kitchen all night.”

Clyde held up the jar, selecting his next victim. “I see things. When Zachary came in to drop off and pick up his orders, you were always right there, chirping at him.”

I could not believe he’d just said that! Maybe Clyde and I had never been close. Maybe Kieren had been our only real connection. But I’d thought we were starting to become friends. “You honestly think I don’t care that Kieren’s gone, that after spending our whole lives as friends, I’ve already moved on to some other guy?”

“Give ’im hell, baby!”

My fangs came down. “You think . . .” I narrowed my red eyes. “You think that inside I’m just singing, ‘La, la, la, Kieren who?’”

Clyde glanced at me, dropped his cricket, and scrambled off the couch. “Whoa!”

“You do, don’t you?” I went on, snatching the abandoned insect from the cushion as I stood to face him. “Well, you know what, you little weasel?”

I crushed the bug and felt its guts ooze between my fingers. “It’s all I can do to think about anything else. Kieren’s bedroom is now my bedroom and his bed is my bed and his parents are my parents and his little sister —”

“I get it, I get it!” Clyde raised his hands in surrender. “Relax.” He took a breath. “You stay here. I’ll go get you some more ungodly disturbing Jell-O.” He paused. “You might want to wash your hands first.”

I grimaced at the gooey guts on my palm, the tiny broken cricket leg lying off to one side. Poor cricket. Suddenly, I didn’t know why I’d gotten so upset.

I’d heard it again, though. The voice. Brad’s voice?

As quickly as my temper had flared, now I felt utterly deflated. “Yeah, okay.”

While the skittish Possum scooted out to refill my bowl in the main kitchen, I took his advice and washed up in the break-room sink.

“Better?” I asked once I looked and felt human again.

Clyde, who’d returned to perch on the edge of the couch, cautiously handed me my gelatin. “Better. You could probably play off the look as makeup, fake teeth, and colored contacts, like Bradley used to do. Nobody would think twice about Sanguini’s owner in a vampire getup.” He was on the verge of babbling. “But why go there if you don’t have to? I mean, unless it’s a marketing thing.”

I had another spoonful of Jell-O, determined to clamp down on my mood swings.

“You mentioned Meghan,” Clyde said. “How’s she doing?”

“She misses Kieren, of course. But it’s more than that. Meghan knows. I think she doesn’t know what she knows, but she knows she knows something.”

The Possum clicked off the TV. “What?”

“The cub knows that I’m not the girl I used to be.”

At sunset, Sanguini’s rose again. The waitstaff arrived, chatty, upbeat, and, as usual, looking decadent. Jamal had the shape of a bat shaved into his hair. Mercedes and Simone had braided black-glitter-sprayed faux orchids into theirs.

Even better, Sergio had called in Fat Lorenzo’s veteran server (and Jamal’s cousin) Jamie, so we were no longer understaffed.

The first guests through the front door looked fresh off the
Rocky Horror
stage. Other themed parties of two or more included dark faeries, shuffling zombies, and one that I seated myself: a collection of self-proclaimed literary types — an Edgar Allan Poe, a Mary Shelley, a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a pair of ladies calling themselves the Brontë sisters.

“No Bram Stoker?” I asked the community college English teachers.

“Too obvious,” Poe explained, gesturing as a tall, bearded, red-haired Stoker walked by, formally dressed for the late 1800s.

Our staff had maintained the vampire theme. But I liked that the guests felt free to interpret the world of Sanguini’s.

“Excuse me, miss,” called a woman at the next table. “Who’s the urban cowboy?”

Tonight Zachary had gone with a shiny navy-blue cowboy shirt over black jeans and black boots that reminded me of Kieren’s. “He’s our new waiter.”

“Is he going to ride a mechanical bull?” asked her friend.

We didn’t have a mechanical bull. “Not tonight.”

The first woman replied, “He can ride me anytime.”

I pasted on my most professional smile and excused myself.

Coming up on midnight, I found Chef Frederick Sanguini in the break room, standing in front of the new full-length mirror, fussing with his bleached hair. He’d added a red gerbera daisy to his lapel. “For irony,” he’d claimed.

From behind him, I appreciated the sharpness of Freddy’s reflection. It was challenging, trying to make sure no one spotted my own fuzzy image, but we’d had to make some accommodations for the staff, given our emphasis on costuming.

Moving away from the mirror, Freddy raised his white wine. “Hello, my dear.”

“You don’t drink red?” I asked, reassured by the thought. Bradley had almost always had a glass of what I now knew was blood wine perched between his long fingers.

Freddy made a face. “I’m happy to do it for the toast, but the tannins give me a headache.” He took a sip, set down his glass, and removed his wire-frame glasses. “I probably shouldn’t be saying that to a teenager, bad role-modeling and all.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “When it comes to drinking, I’m a lost cause.”

“That’s not what I hear.” Returning to the mirror, he put in his right contact lens, blinking rapidly. “Nora said you’d given up alcohol, voluntarily sworn off human blood.”

I raised a finger to silence him and then checked behind the doors to the kitchen and hallway to make sure no one was listening. “What do you know about it?”

With both red contacts in place, Freddy adjusted his black silk jacket. “I know it’s a good sign.” He glanced at the wall clock — two minutes till — and relaxed his stance. “You’ve already heard that Nora, Zachary, and I have all lived and worked, to varying degrees, within eternal high society.”

I’d known that the other two had been employed by a vampire. I figured out that there must’ve been a hell of a lot more bloodsuckers in the world (or at least in this neighborhood) than the general public realized. But I’d had no idea that there was enough of an undead
society
to distinguish between high and low.

“We’ve been open about that,” Freddy added, spinning to check himself out in the glass one last time. He frowned. “Do you think the red silk shirt is too much? I don’t look like the Joker, do I?”

“The red brings out your eyes,” I said. Bradley could never have pulled off that outfit — too shiny for his height or something.

Freddy seemed to consider my opinion, nodded, and then moved to lean against the back of the sofa, careful not to wrinkle his clothes. “We’re not sure how much you’re ready to hear, but we won’t lie to you. We want you to trust us, and we understand that, after everything you’ve suffered, that’s going to be hard. Just know that you can come to us if you have any questions or fears about what you’ve become or what happens next.”

I’d been braced for a sermon, not whatever that had been. Again, I was tempted to confide what Bradley had done to the baby-squirrel eaters. But reassuring words or not, this was still the first real conversation that Freddy and I had ever had.

I moved to skim the newspaper spread open on the coffee table. Ads for three-bedroom rental houses had been circled. I remembered Nora, looking for the same, and what Miz Morales had said about leasing my home.

“You’re all planning to live together?” I asked Freddy. I’d been trying to figure out the Chicagoans’ relationships. Not that age was everything, but Zachary looked like he was in his early twenties, Freddy about twice Zachary’s age, and Nora could’ve been my grandmother.

“For a while,” the pretend chef replied. “We’ve been through a lot together. Nora and I feel that especially Zachary needs our support, a sense of belonging in this world.”

I took a seat at the nearby six-top and began folding crimson napkins into the shape of bats. “He mentioned something about an ex-girlfriend.”

Freddy examined his manicured fingernails. He’d had extensions applied but kept accidentally breaking them off. “Not ex, not exactly. I’ll have to let him field that one.”

Just then, Sergio peeked in from the hallway. “Showtime!”

“We’ll finish this later,” Freddy said with a jaunty salute on his way out.

Reaching for another red napkin, I remembered Zachary explaining that the three of them were in the business of saving souls. Now I was less sure about what he’d meant, but I knew mine was in jeopardy — not to mention Mitch’s — and then there would come the next wave: Aimee, Sergio, Yani, Mercedes, the mayor, and hundreds more.

I wondered, though, whether the new hires could use some saving, too.

Mostly to placate Clyde, I’d suggested to Sergio that Simone should follow Zachary tonight. But she begged off, saying she’d already lost so much in tips from when we’d had to close. Then Sergio had pointed out that most of the servers probably felt the same way, and that he’d rather not put anyone on the spot. So it had been up to me again.

This time I’d given the new hire more space so he could get into the flow without having to make small talk with me. But I had noticed that, as friendly and upbeat as he acted with his own tables, Zachary kept scowling as he made his way around Sanguini’s for order drop-offs and pickups at the kitchen and bar.

At half past midnight, I stopped him, coming out of the men’s restroom. “What’s with you? Half the time I glance your way, it’s like you’re sucking a lemon.”

“How can you do it?” he countered. “Glamorize the demonic, after what happened to you? Joke around about people becoming predators or prey?”

Apparently, Zachary was the self-righteous zealot of the group. I’d braced myself for something like this, but it still stung.

Maybe he had a point. But the vampire theme hadn’t been my idea in the first place, and now I had enough to worry about without being lectured.

“You said you wanted to help,” I began, “and I could use some help right now. But if you’ve changed your mind, fine.
Adiós.
The door’s that way.”

As I brushed past him, Zachary called, “Quincie! I — I didn’t think it would get to me like . . . We’ll talk later, okay? I’ll explain what I can.”

After close, I had the key in the ignition of The Banana when I happened to glance up and notice the masculine figure standing on Sanguini’s roof. My mind went first to Bradley, as it too often did. Then the moonlight broke through the cloud cover and I realized it was Zachary, standing against the heavens. What was he doing up there?

I jumped out of the convertible, and after scanning the parking lot and alley for witnesses, set my hands, fingers spread, against the one-story brick building. Hadn’t Kieren’s notes on vampiric powers mentioned something about climbing ability? And Jonathan Harker had reported Dracula wall-crawling in a lizardlike fashion.

A second of concentration was enough to unleash my clawlike nails, and reaching upward with my left, I could somehow easily support my body.

Fascinated, I rose in a blur, swinging onto the roof.

“Intoxicating.”
That voice again.

“Having fun?” Zachary asked, his arms crossed.

Behind me, the neighborhood was dark, shadowed by large trees. Looking ahead, the neon and headlights created a commercial kaleidoscope. “Are you?”

“I . . .” He yawned. “You should be careful about that, tapping into the demonic magic. Letting it loose.”