The waitress beamed at him approvingly, took his menu, and smiled down at Alaric. “And you?”
“Coffee,” Alaric said, handing her back the menu. It was as heavy, he suspected, as the Onion Brick. “Black.”
The waitress lost her smile. “Coming right up,” she said, and disappeared.
“Tell me one more time,” Alaric said, leaning his elbows against the sticky tabletop. “Who is Yalena?”
Meena glared at him. It was clear he wasn’t her favorite person. “She’s a girl I met on the subway,” she said. “She’s new to this country. I gave her my number and told her to call if she got into trouble, because I could tell her boyfriend was going to try to kill her.”
“Unlike with us,” Jon said bitterly, gesturing to himself and Alaric. “When Meena gets one of her visions about her boyfriend trying to kill someone, she just invites him in and sleeps with him and lets him bite her on the neck.”
Now Meena was glaring at her brother. “Lucien is only going to kill you in self-defense. If you don’t try to kill him, then he won’t have a problem with you and so won’t-”
“I want to go back to talking about the girl on the subway,” Alaric interrupted, placing a thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. “I’m tired of hearing about how wonderful Lucien is. Also the two of you fighting all the time is giving me a migraine.”
Spending the night on the couch hadn’t helped, either.
Nor had the fact that he’d missed decapitating Lucien Antonescu so nearly. If Holtzman ever found out about that, he’d never hear the end of it back in the office.
“Oh,” Jon said with a snort. “Us fighting? What about you two? You two sound like an old married couple when you start in with each other.”
Alaric opened one eye and eyed the younger man. “I have my sword with me, you know. I am perfectly willing to use it here at Shenanigans. I highly doubt anyone would notice, in fact.”
The brother closed his mouth and picked up the glossy cocktail menu that sat at the end of the table with the ketchup bottle and other condiments, clearly sulking. He was upset, Alaric knew, because he wanted to be a member of the Palatine, and the slightest hint of criticism from Alaric marred his dream of future employment.
Alaric knew that sooner or later he was going to have to tell the brother that his dream was never going to happen in this lifetime. Primarily because it took years of training to achieve, and Jon was too old to start that training.
But also because Alaric found Jon, like his sister, annoying.
But in entirely different ways, of course. Alaric was not, for instance, sexually attracted to the brother, as he was to the sister. A fact about which he kept berating himself. How could he be attracted to a woman who was sleeping with the master of eternal darkness? She wasn’t even that attractive! She kept her hair too short for his taste, and her front teeth were a little crooked.
Plus, she had an irritating habit of jiggling her foot. She was doing it now, under the table. He could feel her shoe brushing his leg. The contact was far too intimate, considering how she’d spent the evening-making love with Dracula’s son under his very nose.
Meena went on as if her brother had never interrupted. “He-Gerald, the boyfriend-took away her passport and was holding her captive, making her…” She looked down and coughed. “Service other men. Yalena got away somehow and called me because mine was the only number she had. She’s going to meet me here. Though what she’ll do when she sees you two, I don’t know.” Meena glared at both her brother and Alaric darkly. “She doesn’t exactly trust men right now.”
“Well, I don’t exactly trust you, either,” Alaric said, still rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Especially now.”
“Oh, right,” Meena replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Because it’s so likely this is all just a ruse so I can run off with my vampire lover. Or tip him off about where to find you. Like I couldn’t have done that last night, when you were watching movies in the room next door. We’ll see how much you still think that when she comes in here, all beat up, terrified and alone.”
Alaric dropped his hand and opened both eyes to stare at her. “You act like you’ve done this before.”
Meena shrugged. “It’s not totally uncommon. Unfortunately.”
“I don’t understand,” the brother burst out. “Is my sister a vampire now or not?”
Both Alaric and Meena turned to look at him in astonishment.
“Well,” Jon said, “it’s the elephant in the room. She got bit again. Is she or isn’t she? Do we have to stake her?”
“Oh, that’s very nice, Jon,” Meena said, still sarcastic. “Just talk about staking me in the middle of Shenanigans.”
“I already told you.” Alaric’s headache was not improving. “He has to bite her three times, and then she needs to drink his blood to become a vampire. This is only the second time he’s bitten her. Did you drink his blood, Meena?”
“No!” she cried, looking horrified. He felt her foot stop jiggling and come to rest against his leg. He didn’t think she knew his leg was his leg and not part of the table.
He ought, he knew, to move his leg away.
And yet, he didn’t. He didn’t know why he didn’t. This was the most disturbing thing of all.
All right. He did know why.
This was the most disturbing thing of all.
He ought to get out of this assignment as soon as possible. Possibly Holtzman was right, and he did need psychological counseling.
“And I’m not going to, either,” she insisted. “I happen to enjoy things like sunshine and dining at Shenanigans. Even if it is owned by Consumer Dynamics Inc., which means it’ll probably be showing up on an episode of Insatiable soon, considering the way things are going,” she added darkly. “And would I really be sitting here in broad daylight if I were a vampire?” She looked up at the ceiling. “I cannot believe I’m actually having this conversation. In a Shenanigans.”
The waitress appeared and slammed Alaric’s and Meena’s beverages down in front of them. For Jon she had a gracious smile.
“Your Taco Torpedoes and Spicy Potato Stax will be ready soon, sir,” she said.
“Thank you,” Jon said, smiling back at her.
At the table beside theirs, a man wearing a black leather jacket and a pair of pleated khaki pants chuckled as the cell phone at his belt suddenly squawked with static and a child’s voice was broadcast, loudly enough to be heard over the entire second floor of the restaurant: “Daddy? Are you there?”
Khaki Pants smirked and pressed a button on the side of the cell phone/walkie-talkie device and shouted, “I’m here, munchkin! I’m in Times Square!” while the woman across the table from him-who had a pair of extremely large fake breasts on prominent display in a too-small crocheted shirt beneath her mink jacket-slurped a frozen daiquiri and typed into her own cell phone with a set of long, French-tipped nails.
Alaric threw the man a warning look. Khaki Pants pretended not to notice it.
This would soon become his misfortune, Alaric decided.
“There she is,” Meena said, her foot going still again and her spine straightening like a pool cue.
Alaric turned in his seat to see a girl slinking into a chair at a table for two in one darkened corner of the restaurant, far from where the sunlight streamed through the plate-glass windows looking out over Times Square.
The girl wore a pair of enormous sunglasses, even though they were indoors, which might have been suspicious in and of itself…
If it weren’t for the ugly purple bruise he could see creeping out from beneath the lower frame of one side of the sunglasses, indicating she was suffering from a fresh, tender-looking black eye. She wore a gray hoodie pulled up over her head, with tufts of not very attractively cut blond hair sticking out from beneath it here and there.