Until I got here, I hadn’t known that gorgeous could be a smell.
“It’s late,” Michael said curtly, striding up to the main doors with Jeannie almost in lockstep beside him. Sinclair was also abreast of them. (How did he do that, just fall into step right beside the biggest and strongest like he belonged there?)
So I tried to stop gaping and trotted after Jessica, who was trotting herself to keep up. I’d unhooked BabyJon’s car seat and carried it with us, though it suddenly felt like it was full of several gold bars as I hurried and sniffed and looked around and kept my grip hard enough so that the seat didn’t bang against my shins. Good Lord, I was really getting out of shape if a simple walk to a house . . . castle. . . . taxed my attention, not to mention my balance.
“And we have a lot to talk about.”
Eh? Oh, right. Michael was talking. I should absolutely be listening.
“Gee, ya think?” Jessica whispered to me. “And here I thought we were here for the lobster.”
I smothered a laugh, knowing that even if Antonia and Garrett weren’t dead this was no time to get the giggles. We had a pretty scary itinerary and never mind the seafood jokes (though I wondered if I could eat clam chowder). Maybe it seemed weird for a vampire to fret or be stressed—this vampire, at least—but despite how it always looks in books and movies, whole weeks—months—could pass by without any life-?or-?death bullshit.
Not last week, though. I thought the early part of the week had bitten the big one, what with the Fiends going all, you know, fiendish, solving the murders, avoiding my own murder (something I was starting to get good at just from sheer repetition, and wasn’t that the opposite of amusing), and being a helpless witness to a murder/suicide in my foyer. Okay, technically Jessica’s foyer.
So Antonia was dead, Garrett had killed himself, but the fun wasn’t over yet, which is why I was standing in front of the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Mississippi River.
Yeah, I figured we’d all earned about six years off—shoot, I was still a newlywed, I had a pile of thank-?you notes yet to write—but the joke was on me, as it so often is, and all the tears and terror and bullets meant for me had only brought us to Wednesday. Now it was the weekend, and Sinclair and I had a fresh set of problems.
First and foremost, how big a mess was this? How much blame would fall on my friends and me, how much did we deserve . . . or need to dodge? Most important, what were the werewolves cloistered here going to do about it? About us? And how could I explain Antonia’s former-?Fiend boyfriend to werewolves, without going too far and screwing over my own people?
Had Antonia ever even told her Pack she’d been sleeping with a vampire? I should have known the answer to that. But Antonia had always made it clear that her phone calls with Michael were Pack business, and we all tried to respect her privacy.
Only to the werewolves, it would probably look like negligence, or carelessness.
I had never wanted a drink so badly in my life.
We followed Michael up red brick stairs and into a vestibule the size of a ballroom. I stared . . .
Sure, why not? You’ve been gaping like a tourist instead of an invited head of state. Which is just fine, because you’ll never fool a real leader.
... while trying not to look like I was doing so. This place made our mansion on Summit Avenue—one of the prettiest, grandest, richest streets in the Midwest—look like a one-?bedroom apartment in the warehouse district. Michael’s castle . . .
Yep, now there’s a real leader, so quit fakin’, bacon.
... was lit up in a blaze of lights (mostly from the overhead chandeliers) and what little furniture I could see was mahogany. The place smelled like old wood and cedar, floor wax and furniture. It was the most impressive dwelling I’d ever seen, and I’d only seen a tenth of a fraction of it.
We climbed a grandly sweeping flight of stairs (Marble floors! Marble floors! Werewolves must not ever slip, or maybe they just hated vacuuming.), followed the Wyndhams down a wide hallway carpeted in red (not the red you might think, an orangey red, a dark pink—no, this was red red, a deep, rich, true red), and were soon in a room twice as big as my kitchen that was clearly Michael’s office.
He probably filled out paperwork, or clipped coupons, or downloaded songs from iTunes when he wasn’t ruling the world from behind the ginormous desk almost directly across from us. And excuse me, had I described the grand piano-?sized, reddish brown, beautifully appointed, gleaming chunk of wood as a desk?
More fool me. The President of the U.S. sat behind a desk. Elementary school teachers sat behind desks. Prison wardens. Librarians. DMV employees. Desk sergeants. (Thus the name!) Reporters. Loan officers.
Those were desks. This thing was a wooden monument to Michael’s status.
There were a few comfortable chairs scattered about, all dark wood with plush seats. Floor-?to-?ceiling bookshelves lined two of the walls; the other walls had windows and pictures and such. One framed portrait caught my eye—obviously old, but the people were familiar to me somehow, which was impossible.
I stepped closer and stared harder. No, I didn’t know them. The man had lush dark hair and the woman had brown eyes—no, not brown, more golden than brown, more like—
More like Michael’s.
Of course! The mater and pater of the Pack. Damn. Bet they’d known some good stories.
(Can you hear them, Elizabeth?)
I stifled a yelp of surprise and darted a look in Sinclair’s direction. It was handy to be able to read your husband’s mind, but that didn’t mean I thought it was natural, normal, or not nerve-?wracking. The fact that our telepathy tended to show only during extreme stress or excitement (making love, being murdered, trying to figure out if vampires have to pay property tax) told me something about Sinclair’s state of mind.
My tall dark darling might come across as calm and reasonable, even a little bored, and yet he was worried enough (about me? the whole group? both?) to pop his question right into my head, where I heard it as easily as if he was using a megaphone.
(Elizabeth. Can you hear them?)
Oh, right, you’re probably expecting an answer. I nodded. Sure I could. And I knew what Sinclair was getting at. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and the castle seemed almost deserted, but it wasn’t. Not even close to deserted. We could hear them walking around and, even worse, standing still. I was—don’t ask me how—sure they were listening to us. Believe me, I know how it sounds: We could hear them listening to us? Give me a break.
Except we absolutely could. And that was the scariest thing of all, knowing the castle was full of monsters who really would eat you, just like an ogre in a fairy tale.
My, Grandma, what big ears you have.
My worry for Jessica increased by a factor of about eight hundred . . . she had nothing in the way of enhanced paranormal senses, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t picking up on the tension. Boy oh boy, I hoped we’d be able to make friends with the ogres. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to think, much less articulate.
Chapter 8
“Drinks?” Jeannie asked, playing bartender. I was eyeing her hair with not a little admiration. Unlike mine, which at best could be coaxed to be wavy (I’d had a highlight touch-?up and deep-?conditioning treatment the week before I’d died; I might be a slavering ghoul of the undead, but I would never have graying split ends), hers was shoulder length, surfer blond, and curly . . . the kind that frizzed out in July, the kind that was a mass of soft spiral curls tonight. The rest of her was unexceptional.
Okay, that came out wrong . . . Jeannie Wyndham was a beautiful woman, admirably slim after two kids, casually dressed in jeans, loafers (Payless; ah, well, nobody’s perfect), a soft blue chambray shirt, and a tan wool blazer.
When I described her as unexceptional, I meant in comparison to my surroundings: Michael’s wife was the queen of everything I was staring at; it was all half hers. But you’d never know it to look at her; she had the brisk, understated demeanor of an experienced nurse.
Except for the eyes, of course; she had the flat and calculating gaze of a sniper. I wondered where her gun
