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“’At’s Arnie’s tour. Ain’t much, but he got a boat an’ he’s a dead eye if you run into any gators.”
“Well, that’s a promising pitch,” Holden said.
“Sounds great, thank you.” I slipped the pamphlet into my purse, next to my gun. “Have a great night.”
Grabbing Holden by the arm, I dragged him from the office, but not before he said, “Can’t keep her off me.”
In the room I found the phone had no dial tone.
“It’s like we’ve stumbled into the premise for a terrible horror movie,” I grumbled, slamming the handset down in frustration.
“Yeah, unsuspecting couple alone in a motel run into vampires and…oh wait. We’re the vampires.”
“Have you ever seen a horror movie? If you’re at a budget motel next to the swamp, it’s not vampires you need to worry about. It’s like…sludge creatures or inbred mutants.”
Holden flopped next to me on the sagging bed. The headboard had one of those Magic Fingers vibrating features, but I didn’t think the bed could handle anything so forceful without collapsing.
“I’ll take the mutants,” Holden said with a chuckle. “I bet their blood tastes great.”
“Freak. Give me your phone.” I held out my hand.
“Say please.”
“Please.”
He put his cell in my open palm, and I was relieved to see at least one of us had decent coverage. My phone had stopped beeping about service and had begun to laugh at me whenever I turned it on. It was crammed inside my purse so I didn’t yield to the urge to destroy it. Brand new and totally useless.
I dialed Grandmere’s number by heart and listened to the rings, hoping she wasn’t out doing some spring ritual. She tended to sleep irregular hours, a habit she’d picked up raising me, and even though I’d been gone for years, she still hadn’t gone back to sleeping through the night.
“’Allo?” Her Cajun accent sang through the line and gripped me like a long-distance hug.
“Grandmere, it’s me.”
“Mon chérie! Comment ça va? Ou et toi?”
“I’m good,” I replied in English. “And I’m in Louisiana.”
For a moment I thought the connection had dropped, then she spoke again, her accent thicker somehow. “You’re with the pack?”
“Callum asked Lucas and me to come down. He’s…hesitant to let us go through with the wedding.” For the next ten minutes I told her everything I had learned in the last week. About Ben and Eugenia, and while I skipped over the attempts on my life, she was still pretty wound up by the end of my story.
“Grandbabies!” she chirped.
Leave it to her to get only one thing out of the whole conversation…that she had more grandchildren.
“You might have mentioned sooner that your mother was a big-bad witch living in the swamps.”
“Oh, bébé, how was I to know? My mother, we was…wild. She was always running away. Even now, as an old woman, she still hides from me. She gave me my magic. I need nothing else from her.”
“But—”
“Non, no but. You and your mama are not best friends, oui? Why should you expect me to plait braids with mine while we make potions? Family, it is not always pretty, chérie, you know this.”
I had to give her that. “What’s her name, your mother.”
“Je ne sais pas.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
