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He just reached over and appropriated the massive nacho I’d been absentmindedly building, swallowing the guac and meat and chees
e and refried beans and sour cream and salsa-laden pile all in one bite. And then said mildly, “’Cause you know who’ll be asking next.”
“The senate?”
Marco gave me an odd look. “In a way.”
Crap, crap, crap.
“I thought Mircea was in New York.” He was always in New York these days. Well, except for when he was in Vegas, or at his court in Washington State, or at one of half a dozen spots in between. I understood the need to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket in war time, so it made sense that the senate would spread out their power base. But this was getting ridiculous. I was surprised he didn’t have whiplash.
“He don’t need to be here to be here,” Marco said. “If you get my drift.”
“Yeah.” That was one of the perks of being a master vamp: what his family saw, Mircea saw. But, unlike everybody else around here, I didn’t have the ability to mind-speak, and I wasn’t planning on picking up my phone. In fact, I might just jerk it out of the wall. Mircea my friend/lover/protector/occasional-partner-in-crime would have been welcome. Mircea the senator . . . not so much. Not until I finished my current errand, anyway.
He might own a casino themed like hell, but I had a pretty good idea what his view on my visiting the real thing would be.
Marco sighed again and looked over my spread. “When did they get mole?”
“Last week,” I told him, and handed it over. I had plenty left.
We ate in companionable silence for a while. Marco was one of those guys who didn’t feel the need to talk all the time. I’d asked him about it once, and he’d said he spent years learning to block out the incessant chitchat from other family members that went on in his head. You’d think that vampire mental skills would be used only for important stuff, but apparently not. According to him, they gossiped all the time, and it almost drove him crazy before he learned how to filter. And now he didn’t appreciate the verbal kind taking its place.
That was okay. I liked the quiet, too. Especially when the alternative was a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.
Not that I wouldn’t have liked to try. Marco had big shoulders, and it would have been a relief to dump some of this on them. But it wouldn’t be fair, and anyway there was nothing he could do. Except tell Mircea what was going on, not because he was a fink, but because that was what vampire servants did. He’d basically just reminded me of that fact, since he was a decent guy. But I hadn’t needed the hint.
I knew I couldn’t tell anyone anything.
It was one of the hardest things about this job. And, I suspected, why a lot of Pythias developed reputations for being a little . . . odd. How could you not be when you knew things nobody else knew, things that nobody else could be allowed to know, and when you didn’t even have anybody you could vent to once in a while about the absurdity of visiting dead parents or stopping time or going to hell . . . ?
It was driving me crazy, and I’d only had the job a few months. How had Agnes done it? And for decades?
Of course, she hadn’t exactly been the poster child for normal. And that was despite having Jonas to help her. And while I doubted she’d told him everything, or even most things, I knew they’d talked. He wouldn’t have been able to train me otherwise.
And suddenly, stupidly, I felt a sharp stab of jealousy for a dead woman.
And okaaaay. That was enough for one day.
I scraped the last of the guac out of the little plastic cup. “I’m think I’m gonna turn in,” I told Marco. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
The dark head tilted inquiringly.
“Fred said there was something?” I prompted.
He grinned. “Oh yeah. I wanted to know what you did to those witches.”
“Why?” I asked warily.
“’Cause they just called asking for an appointment tomorrow.”
“Um.”
Dark eyes narrowed. “Is there a problem?”
“Better make it the day after. I’m . . . planning to sleep in.”
He still didn’t ask. “Get a bath,” he told me, tapping the side of his nose.
