you were at first. Maybe the six of you could leave town in a trail of blood. Then killing would be easy.”
“This should not concern the others,” he said emphatically. “This is a matter between me and Dr. Trudeau. And your Majesty, of course.”
“Is that why you came over tonight by yourself?”
“You only sent for me.”
“You're the only one whose name I can remember,” I admitted, and he laughed.
In the distance, I could hear barking and yowling and toenails clicking on sidewalk. I figured we had about two more minutes before all the neighborhood dogs descended. There was a reason I didn't like taking walks.
“Let's head back.”
“We only just—”
“Dude, trust me. You do not want to be here five minutes from now. We can talk more in the garden behind the mansion. Behind the fence.”
He obediently turned with me as I did a one-?eighty and started heading back up the sidewalk to the house. He was right; it was a little silly. We were barely out of the shadow of the mansion. I had barely talked to him about anything. Wait—had it been my idea to go for a walk? I tried to remember. No. He'd asked me.
“I have another question for you, Majesty.”
“Oh, great. My turn again. Except we're not playing a game.”
“About that,senorita , you are wrong. But here is my question: are you going to turn your friend into a vampire? Or wait for her to die and bury her and mourn her?”
“How do you evenknow about that?”
“You mean, before you asked me what it was like to make a vampire? I guessed. I know she is ill, and after seeing you and her in the same room, I could make some assumptions.”
The mansion loomed larger before us, the dark and forlorn branches of surrounding trees still waiting for rebirth. The baying of dogs was coming closer.
He broke the silence again. “You do not seem the type of lady to give up her friends so very easily.”
I chewed on that one for a moment. The thing about Alonzo was, even when he said something nice, it wasn't like he was sucking up. Maybe it was in the translation of his ideas from Spanish to English; but his well-? crafted words betrayed a certain attention for my well-?being. In fact, he made for a pleasant change from most vampires here in America, who either (a) ignored me or (b) tried to kill me.
“I only just found out my friend was sick,” I said finally. “I don't know what I'm going to do, yet.”
“I beg your pardon. But I believe you do.”
We stopped together at the iron gate on the west side of the house. It led to the brown and lifeless gardens behind the house. But neither of us reached for the latch. Instead, we watched each other for several seconds.Game indeed , I thought.
“Well,” I said finally, “you're assuming my friend will even go along with it.”
“She has a choice?”
“If she didn't, she wouldn't really be myfriend , would she?”
“Your uniqueness,” he offered, “is both blessing and a curse. Blessing, in that you are different from others, which I always see as a positive. A curse, in that you generate problems of your own making—problems that vampires like me do not trouble with.”
“For example?”
“I have never known a vampire to remain friends with a human—certainly not long enough to consider a careful plan to turn that friend.”
“Never? And you've been around, what? A hundred years? Two hundred? And in that time, you've never made a friend and then wanted to keep them around?” My situation with Jessica couldn't have been that out there… and neither could Sophie and Liam's.
“Not a living human,” he answered with arms stretched and palms up. “And when you generate two estimates of my age, you would do well to round to the higher one.” One of the hands lifted higher than the other.
I laughed.
“There's us,” he said, finally swinging open the gate and entering the garden, “and there are them. The two cannot mix. No good comes of this. Your situation—forgive my boldness, Your Majesty—I see your situation as the inevitable, and unfortunate, end result of your unreasonable attachment to your human friends. Someday, you will end up in the same place with your doctor friend. Each of these endings will devastate you, weaken you—and to no good purpose.”
“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
