“Okay.” I didn’t like lying, but I could live with it for the next two and a half days of my life. “Some weather, huh?” I said, purposely making light of the silence between us.
“I’ve seen worse.” He angled his rearview mirror to look at me in it. “Want to tell me about things yet?”
“Heh.” I sank back into the bucket seat. “I guess.”
I told him the story from when I’d met Anna, through the tribunal coming up.
“Wait—what?” We were already on residential streets, and he pulled over to look at me. “You’re going to a trial where you might die in two days and you’re going out to dinner with me?”
“A girl’s gotta eat,” I said with a fake laugh.
“That’s not funny, Edie.”
“I know.” I stared out the passenger window. “The truth is, I don’t know what else to do.”
“We can start by going to find out what happened to those girls, tonight, after dinner. Once all the vamps are out.”
I sighed and turned back toward him. “I can’t. I’ve got to go back to work.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not.” We were in a nice neighborhood here, with nice trees and houses, where people never had to worry what went bump in the night—or their kids tying off and shooting up. “I’ve got to go in.”
“Edie—if we don’t find that vampire—”
“Her name’s Anna,” I said as Ti continued to stare at me. “And my lawyer’s looking too,” I continued, trying to sound more hopeful about that than I actually felt.
“Your vampire lawyer?”
“Yeah.”
Ti closed his eyes at my foolishness. But as long as Jake was on the junk, or trying to be, I couldn’t quit working, cold turkey. If his immunity to drugs were to vanish, I knew my brother would go on the bender to end all benders and wind up in the morgue. So I was trapped. “I’m sorry, Ti. I can’t take time off. I just can’t.”
“Edie, they don’t own you.” He put his hand on my knee. “I know it feels like that—”
“I have my reasons, okay?” I put my gloved hand on top of his.
“Well, I’ll still go out and check on things.” His voice was stern. I inhaled to protest, and then realized, how much trouble could a zombie really get into?
I squeezed his hand. “I appreciate it.”
He took his hand back, restarted the car, and we went on our way.
Mrs. Madigan’s name was Rita. I looked her up and down with my wonky left eye while she stirred at the stove, but I didn’t get any strange glowing nimbus from her. And I met Jenny—a twelve-year-old girl with two glorious red pigtails; Jimmie—a six-year-old who had black hair and a cheerful disposition; and Jack—a prepubescent fourteen-year-old whose voice had a tendency to crack. They all were introduced to me very solemnly by their father, and I pretended not to know any of them from any time before.
Rita was an excellent conversationalist, and entertained us by talking about her time in the customer service mines of the DMV where she’d once worked as a teller. Apparently Madigan had been late with a registration payment once, made her laugh, and the rest was history. Madigan and Ti told stories about their time on the firefighting brigades—that was how they’d known one another, from back in the day, and the children were endlessly polite when they weren’t blurting out “Dad, tell that story about the cat on the roof that was on fire again!” for my benefit.
It was strange being there, eating dinner with them. They knew that I knew, and I knew that they knew, and there we all were, a zombie, an assortment of werewolves and/or weredogs, and me, a nurse who was getting used to dealing with vampires. I was struck by how completely normal it felt to be with them, for all of our differences. And seeing Ti interact with Madigan made some strange and unused part of my heart start to swell. I blinked one eye and looked down at myself just in case.
“All right, kids—clear the table. Edie’s got to get to work,” Rita said to general complaints.
“Can’t you stay?” Jenny asked. I’d braided her pigtails after yellow cake and chocolate ice cream, while she’d sat in my lap.
“I wish I could, but I can’t. If we don’t leave soon, I’ll be late for work.”
“Plates now, kids,” Rita said.
Jenny slid off my lap and made a face, but took her dishes into the kitchen. I dutifully grabbed my plate and went in line to follow her. “When will you visit us next, Uncle Ti?” I heard Jimmie ask behind me.
“Thanks again,” I told Rita in the kitchen, as I dropped off my dinner plate at the sink.
“He leaves town a lot,” Rita murmured under her breath. “Make him stick around, okay? Don’t blow it.”
I nodded. I didn’t intend to blow anything. At least, perhaps, not like that.
No one wanted to go to work that night less than I did. Each of the children gave me hugs before letting me go out of the door. Feeling sorry for myself consumed half my thoughts as I walked to Ti’s car. Not knowing what to say occupied the other half. He opened my door for me, and I sat down.
“So, how long have you been alive?” I asked, as soon as he was belted in next to me.
He chuckled as the car started. “I’m older than you.”
“That’s not saying much.” I was twenty-five. High school, then the local college’s accelerated nursing program, courtesy of a deep desire to get the hell out of Dodge and a willingness to incur student loans. “How much older?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” he said, pulling us out of Madigan’s drive.
“You forgot?”
“I’m missing half my soul. It makes me a little forgetful now and then.”
Silence reigned for half a block. Some conversationalist I was. “Are all zombies like you?”
“Like me, how?”
“Difficult conversationalists and ruggedly handsome.”
He turned to look at me at the next stop. “Most people don’t get past the scars.”
“Don’t they ever go away?”
He shrugged. “They would if I ever gave them long enough to heal.”
“Well, I like them,” I said.
“Why?” he surprised me by asking.
I inhaled to buy myself time to think. “Most people look normal on the outside, but they’re messed up on the inside. Maybe you’re messed up on the outside, but on the inside, you’re good.”
A supremely awkward, at least for me, silence passed between us. “Sooo, I like them,” I said, winding up. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a kinky fascination with them or anything.” Wow.
Ti nodded and kept looking out at the road. “Yeah, I do.”
We turned onto the highway and his attention to his driving saved me from myself.
“So what are you going to do after you drop me off?” I asked as we took the exit that would lead to County. I thought about the city as I’d seen it with the Shadows, like a map of a circulatory system sketched out, with the County Hospital as its living, beating heart.
“I’m going to go to Seventeenth and ask about the girls those vampires were interested in. If they picked them up, or took them to another location.” He shook his head behind the wheel, at me or the situation, I didn’t know. “Someone has to help you.”
“I’m not some sort of princess trapped in a castle. If that’s what you think, then I don’t want your help.” I didn’t mind help but I sure as hell didn’t want pity.
I saw his hands tighten slightly around the steering wheel, and his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“I choose to disagree with you,” he said, after a long pause. His reflection looked at me again. “On all points.”
Suddenly my badge under my shirt felt sharper than it had, and the seat belt felt too tight, and the car, which’d been just fine before, felt ten degrees too warm. I fidgeted in my seat and sighed. “It just feels weird,
