Darla sighed and stood.
“I’ll wait for a while at Mama’s-” she began.
I pulled her back down. She giggled and kicked.
“Come back tomorrow,” I yelled, at the door. “I’m busy right now.”
“But-”
“I said come back tomorrow,” I yelled, putting some bellow into it. “No buts. No more knocking. Come. Back. Tomorrow.”
Silence.
Darla touched the Angel Malan I wore around my neck, the one she’d left for me, all those nights ago. I caught her searching my eyes, just for an instant, looking to see what might still be in there with me. I didn’t ask what she saw. I doubted the answer would please either of us.
Darla took my hand.
“It’s losing its grip, a little every day,” she said. How do women do that?
I just nodded. I wasn’t so sure. She didn’t see the things I dreamed of.
“Mama says you’ve already been through the worst.”
“Mama’s tea has been the most frightening part of the whole ordeal. I’m terrified she’s just feeding me her laundry water.”
Darla tweaked my nose.
“She spends hours brewing that…tea, Markhat, I was there when a package came all the way from that place she calls home-Pot Lock, something like that?”
“Pot Lockney. I hear they eat vampires whole there, dressed and snarling.”
Darla giggled. “Well, Mama is going to a lot of trouble and you, Mister Markhat, could be a little more appreciative.”
“Oh, I’m very appreciative of all my womenfolk. Why, I bought a middling expensive bottle of wine just for you this very day.”
Darla beamed. “I’m flattered. Does it have a cork, or do we twist something off the top?”
I sat Darla on the edge of my desk. She swung her long legs back and forth at the knees and watched expectantly as I rose, went to my bunkroom, and came back with a blood-red bottle of ten-year-old wine in my hand.
“Cork and a label,” I said. I offered Darla a pair of glasses-real glasses, not mugs, and clean.
She smiled.
I pulled corks and filled glasses. We resumed our preferred seating arrangement of my chair and my lap. I held my glass beneath my nose and made a show of sloshing it around in the glass and sniffing it.
“You have before you a slightly warm Rethmarch Red,” I said. “Bottled at the height of the summer in ninety-one, from grapes grown on the slopes of the famed Rethmarch Vineyard itself. I believe Madame will find it at once hearty and ethereal. Or is it fruity and redolent of oak? I can never keep my fancy wines straight.”
“You talk too much, Mister Markhat,” said Darla, making herself comfortable in my lap with an intriguing series of wiggles and twists. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with the sound of your own voice.”
“It’s a good voice. At once throaty and redolent of tenor.”
She interrupted me with a kiss.
And if anything-anyone-ever lays the huldra left inside me to rest, I think it shall be Darla.
