I accepted it and cleaned away the evidence of bloody vampire tears. “Thanks. Mom’s buried here in St. Louis. Well, her ashes are, I mean. I’m pretty sure that’s where he’d want to be, too.”
“All right,” Guthrie said. “There will be paperwork to fill out at the hospital. The three of us can head over there in a few hours when the administrative offices open. In the meantime, I’ll run a couple of searches and see if I can track down any information on an attorney’s office, or documents on file with the state.”
I swallowed the thickness in my throat, oddly relieved to have things to do—stuff that would keep me busy instead of thinking.
“I think I know which bank he was using in Chicago.” I glanced up at Rans, standing quietly beside me. “Rans, are you—” Somehow, continuing with the words ‘all right’ seemed ridiculous. I tried a different tack. “Is there... any reason we can’t stick around here for a few days while I tie up loose ends?”
He brushed gentle fingers over my cheekbone. “Of course there isn’t, love. The only thing hanging over our heads at the moment is Nigellus and his scheming. But as far as I’m concerned, he can cool his heels until we’re good and ready to deal with him.”
“Okay,” I said, gradually taking on board the idea that we might be... safe. It was surprisingly hard to wrap my brain around the concept.
Guthrie nodded. “Okay, then,” he echoed, with finality. “Zorah, you look like you could use way more rest than you got. Rans—you just look like shit. Go drink my annoying downstairs neighbor’s blood before you fall over.”
Rans snorted softly.
Warm fondness swirled through the sea of grief locked inside my chest, easing it momentarily. “What about you?” I asked.
Guthrie quirked an eyebrow at me. “I’ve still got over eight hundred emails in my inbox, and last time I checked, ‘because I got turned into a vampire and dragged into a supernatural war’ isn’t a valid excuse for failing to sign paperwork and file earnings reports.”
The warmth grew. “Well if it’s not, it totally should be,” I told him. “Come and get me when it’s time to... uh... go to the hospital. Until then, I think maybe I will try to sleep some more.”
Rans gave my hand a final squeeze. “Save me some space on the bed. I’ll be along as soon as I’ve dealt with Guthrie’s irritating tenant in 7B.”
* * *
The day of my father’s funeral dawned chilly and gray. Somehow, Rans had, in fact, managed to convince all of the relevant people at the hospital that what looked like a fatal gunshot wound and quacked like a fatal gunshot wound was actually a myocardial infarction resulting from long-term arteriosclerosis.
I’d had to look that up.
With Guthrie’s help, I’d jumped through all of the legal hoops necessary to claim Dad’s body and begin the probate process. It was going to be a particular mess because there was a missing persons report on him. He’d been kidnapped to Dhuinne months ago, and taken from there to Hell soon afterward. Neither of those things were particularly helpful when it came to the disposition of his assets, such as they were.
Needless to say, I still wasn’t doing well when it came to processing the whole thing. For some strange reason, there was a real shortage of therapists qualified to counsel vampire-succubus hybrids regarding their emotionally distant relatives who’d unexpectedly sacrificed their lives via the medium of demon soul-exchange.
But today, I had the man I loved standing at my right shoulder, and my grandfather standing at my left. I might stumble, but with them at my side, I had no fear of falling.
The funeral was as depressing and awful as I’d feared. Attendance was sparse—a handful of people from the nebulous time before my mother’s murder, along with a few coworkers and acquaintances who’d flown or driven down from Chicago. The graveside service was non-denominational, but still had enough religious-speak involved to make me uncomfortable. I’d been to Hell, and I had no reason to think there was a Heaven.
I really wanted to be able to attach some deep, emotional significance to the burial of Dad’s urn vault in the plot with Mom’s, but... they were just ashes. So I watched, dry-eyed and distant, my hands tangled in Rans’ and Guthrie’s cool grips. When the official was done talking about what a great guy Dad had been, and how much he’d be missed, I dropped a clump of wet earth in the hole.
My palms itched with the desire to be elsewhere as people I barely knew or didn’t know at all told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss. It was only when I glanced up and saw a huge black cat seated at the base of a tree some distance away, tail curled fastidiously around its paws, that fresh grief pierced my cocoon of numbness, and I gasped.
Rans followed my gaze, and stiffened.
Guthrie looked up as well, frowning. “Hey, that’s not—”
“It is,” Rans interrupted.
The small group of other mourners had mostly wandered off, congregating in little clusters to chat, and tut over how young Dad had been to die of a heart attack. I walked toward the cat, aware that the other two were following a couple of steps behind.
“You came,” I said, halting in front of the animal.
The cat-sidhe blinked huge green eyes up at me.
“I... tried to save him,” I said, my voice growing unsteady. “I wanted to save him. But he... didn’t want to be saved.” A tear escaped, behind the protective barrier of my sunglasses. I wiped it away before it could leave a telltale rusty track down my cheek. “I’m sorry.”
It felt strange to be offering an ‘I’m sorry’ to someone else when it was my own father who’d died—especially when that someone was
