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This one was smarter. This one didn’t come in. This one just looked at me, all crossed arms and big-brotherly disapproval, although whether at my appearance, at my eating in bed, or at my scaring poor Fred, I didn’t know.
“Is it safe to come in?” he asked, after a minute.
“Are you going to eat my food?”
Marco lifted a bushy black eyebrow. “Is that from the heartburn shack downstairs?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s sacred, I assure you.”
“Then you can come in,” I said, as if I had a choice. Marco went wherever he damned well pleased.
At the moment, he was pleased to occupy one of the delicate little princess chairs the designer had chosen to grace my bedroom. They always looked like they were going to crack under the strain, but somehow they never did.
“You were gone a long time,” he finally said.
“I fell asleep.”
“In a pine grove?” He picked something out of my hair.
Damn it, I thought I’d got them all.
“That was after I woke up.”
He looked at me. I looked back. And then I ate another nacho.
He sighed. “You’ve been acting weird all week.”
“I thought I always act weird, according to you.”
“Weirder, then.” He contemplated my scratched, dirty, and habanero-splattered self. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
And suddenly, there was. There really, really was. I didn’t know if he was doing the vampire thing and manipulating my emotions, but I doubted it. Marco didn’t usually go in for that kind of stuff. It’s why we’d developed a sort of bond over the weeks we’d both been trapped here.
I knew that Marco didn’t like babysitting any more than I liked being babysat. But it was his job to guard me and my job to be guarded, at least in the current everybody-wants-to-kill-me era. And we both did our jobs. It was to Marco’s credit that he did his with a little bit of grace, and made this place as welcoming for me as any gilded cage stuffed full of vampires could be.
Maybe that’s why I had a sudden, insane urge to spill my guts. I wanted to tell him exactly what I’d been doing. I’d wanted to tell somebody all week. The pressure, the fear, the gnawing, gut-churning anxiety, had all been building until I’d started to feel like I wanted to scream.
And look how that had turned out, I thought grimly.
“No,” I said, and chewed chocolate-covered chicken.
“You sure?” he asked, and looked pointedly at my T-shirt.
And crap. I didn’t know what other weird smells the filthy thing held after mopping up half the forest, but it didn’t matter. Vamps aren’t herbivores. They aren’t designed to differentiate between types of florae, even whacked out, god-induced florae. They’re designed to find prey. Like the guy I’d just been rolling around a forest with.
I loaded up a nacho, and didn’t answer.
Marco had never asked me where Pritkin was. But some of the other guys had hinted around, and some smart aleck had left a copy of one of the more scandalous rags on the kitchen counter. The one with a grainy pic of Pritkin and me making out on the boss’ front lawn.
It had been taken at what was supposed to be my coronation, after the Spartoi attacked me. We’d fought, and I’d won, a fact that continued to amaze me. But winning didn’t ensure survival, and I almost hadn’t. The picture had been of Pritkin donating the energy to me that I needed to live, basically giving me the incubus version of mouth to mouth. Only it hadn’t looked that way.
And the fact that I’d been butt-naked at the time hadn’t helped.
Maybe Marco thought the same as some of the others, that Pritkin was lying low to stay out of Mircea’s way. I didn’t know because we’d never talked about it. And we’d never talked about it because he’d never asked.
He didn’t this time, either.
