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“No. So I guess we can still assume that it happened at Zelda’s later in the night.”
“Perhaps you meant it as a flirtation.”
“Hey!” He smiled at her. “How do you know it was my idea? Maybe it was your way of keeping me close at hand until you could get all your questions about ‘The List’ answered.”
It was clear what he thought of her job. It should have bothered her more than it actually did. But he sounded more teasing than anything else, and she had to admit that was something she appreciated about Johnny. He didn’t seem prone to hysterics either, and he definitely took the approach that life was meant for laughing. Lizette found that a refreshing change from the ancient and dusty vampires in the VA who clung to brooding traditions. To them, shopping for a new coffin was a hot night on the town. Johnny didn’t even have a coffin. She knew because it wasn’t on the list.
“I highly doubt that I would resort to handcuffs. Then again, I can’t say I behaved the way I normally would have last night.” She stared down into her glass. “I have compromised this case, you know. I will have to return to Paris and have it reassigned. It wouldn’t be ethical for me to be the one investigating your identity when I have . . . when we . . .” Lizette forced herself to say it. “When we have been sexually intimate.”
“At least you can verify my penis size. I’m sure the VA knows that, too.”
She wanted to be offended, but it was probably true. Lizette laughed. “I would if I could remember.”
“Want to check now?” Johnny put his hand on the button of his jeans, clearly joking.
“No!” She said the first thing that came to mind, a joke she normally would have kept to herself. But she let it out. “I don’t have a ruler on me, so what good would that do? Though I suppose I could gauge it with my mouth.”
Johnny choked on his blood, actually spraying some across the banisters of the balcony. “Holy crap. I cannot believe you just said that.”
She had her moments. “I can have a sense of humor as well, Johnny. If your name is really Johnny.”
He gave her an eye roll. “Well, how else can we verify that I’m Johnny Malone? There has to be a way. I don’t want you to get in trouble because my friends throw weddings with seriously spiked punch. I can answer any question you have, because I am me, you know.”
She did believe him actually. He was too well-known by the other vampires, too aware of everything in the apartment, too casually comfortable. Unless he was an astonishing con artist, he was in fact, Johnny Malone. “What is your birthday?”
“That’s easy. Born April 17, 1899 in Cork to Mary and John Malone. My sister Stella was born two years later, followed by three girls, one born each year. Molly, Maggie, and Maeve. My mom had an M thing going there for some reason. She and my three little sisters all died in the influenza outbreak of 1918, and my father buried his grief in the bottle. A few years later Stella and I came to America, and fell in with the mob in Chicago after I proved a dab hand with me fists.” He turned up his slight accent until it was thickly Irish, his fists in front of him. He gave her a mock jab with a grin. “It kept us from starving. Until it also got us caught in the line of a machine gun. Woke up a vampire, thank God. I wasn’t ready to go out yet, you know what I mean?”
She nodded. “I do.” She had seen an extraordinary amount of death. It had made her even more fearful of dying.
“When were you born?”
It wasn’t relevant to his case, of course, and she never shared her personal details with anyone outside of the inner council, but he had been so open, and she was feeling oddly melancholy, so she told him the truth. “I was born in 1770 in Lyons, France, though my family spent most of the year outside of Paris at the court of Versailles with the royal family. My parents were murdered during the Terror and I was a witness to it. I myself was scheduled for decapitation at the guillotine, but the blade was dull and did not complete the execution. However, I was tossed in the pile of bodies and well on my way to death, though I have no memory of it. But I awoke as I am today, a vampire by the name of Jean-Baptiste having saved me.”
“Jesus. That’s horrible.”
“Yes.” Lizette drained her glass. “But no more horrible than your history. You lost your family as well.”
“I did.” Johnny leaned forward, his palm on his knee, the hand connected to hers dangling by her side. “Stella and I never knew who turned us. We just woke up frightened and undead. Was Jean-Baptiste a good mentor?”
“Yes.” Her throat felt a little tight, as it always did when she thought of him. “We spent a century together.”
“As friends or as something more?”
“More. Much more.” He had not been the most affectionate of men, but he had been loyal, steady. He had taken care of her. Which seemed ironic now that she had become so independent in the hundred years since his death. She no longer needed that from a man. But she did miss the companionship.
“I can tell by the look on your face you either broke up or he died. I’m sorry.” His fingers enclosed around hers on their mutually dangling hands.
“Thank you. Yes, he died.” Though she wasn’t going to talk about it. Lizette looked over at Johnny, studying the straight line of his jaw. There was something that bothered her if he was telling the truth and he was Johnny. “Why did you fake your death?”
The look he gave her was sheepish and uncomfortable, but she just waited and he finally spoke. “Well, this girl I was dating, she got pregnant.”
“And you were clearly not the father.”
“Exactly. And the thing was, it was like I’ve known for a long time I couldn’t have children, but in that moment it hit me like a ton of bricks. I will never be a father. I’ll never pass any of myself on down to a miniature human. I’ll never get to hold a baby or teach a son how to play ball or grow old while my kids and grandkids sit around a huge dinner table. It all hit me, hard, in a way it hasn’t in decades, that this is it, you know. Just me, and everyone except my few vampire friends will all die, and I won’t. I guess I wanted to see what it would feel like to die.” He finished his drink. “That sounds really damn stupid now.”
But Lizette understood. It had taken her years to accept the fact that she would never be a mother. She squeezed his hand. “Mortality is a strange paradox for vampires. Sometimes we crave death, yet we fear it even more than mortals because it is not inevitable. Vampire death shocks us in a way human death does not any longer.”
