Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(76)
I wasn’t using to being the wallflower, and it kinda pissed me off.
Still, I forced a smile as I went to the register. “Hi,” I said, in my best professional welcome voice. “Can I help you?”
“I’ll take this,” Oliver said, and nudged me out of the way. He was smiling, which normally would be a bad sign, but this one went all the way to his eyes, and all of a sudden he didn’t look like a vampire who would kick your ass, ra-a-a-ar; he looked like . . . a guy. Just a guy, kind of handsome in a sharp sort of way, although too old for me for sure.
The girl smiled back at him, and wow. I mean, it knocked me back a step, and I was (a) not male and (b) not any kind of interested. “Oliver,” she said, and even her voice was cute and small and sweet, with some kind of lilting accent that made her sound exotic and mysterious. Well, for Morganville, Texas, but then, we find people from Dallas exotic and mysterious. “My dear friend, I haven’t seen you in dark ages.”
“Gloriana,” he said. “I feared the worst, you know. It’s cruel to keep us in suspense. Where were you?”
She shrugged and fiddled with the zippers on her jacket, looking coy as she shot him a look from beneath full, probably natural lashes. “After the last great war, I lost track of you, and the rest of our family,” she said. “Those I found were—not healthy. I managed to avoid contracting the disease, but I didn’t dare take the risk, so I stayed away.”
“Where?”
“Oh, you know. Here and there. Europe, Australia was quite nice; I migrated here when they were still traveling by ocean liner. Since then, I’ve been drifting. I was recently in Los Angeles, where I ran into Bobby Sansome—you remember him?—and he told me almost everyone who was anyone was here, in Morganville. He also said that he’d come here to get the cure. I thought perhaps it was safe.”
“It’s safe,” Oliver said. “But you’ll need to present yourself to the Founder. There are rules of behavior in this town, accords you’ll have to sign in order to stay. Understand?”
“Of course.” Her charming smile got even wider. “Oliver, my sweet, do you really doubt that I know the rules of hospitality and good behavior? I haven’t survived this long by preying indiscriminately on the livestock. . . . Oh.” Her sparkling eyes flicked to me, inviting me to share the joke. “Not including you, naturally. I meant no offense.”
“No?” I raised my eyebrows, and let her know the sweet face didn’t impress me. “That ’tude will get you in trouble around here.”
Gloriana gave me an honestly puzzled look, then turned to Oliver. “What does she mean?”
“She means that humans have status here.” He didn’t look particularly happy about it, but then, that’s Oliver for you. “You can’t expect civility from them. And, unfortunately, you can’t punish them for failing to provide it.”
I snorted. “Bite me, fanger.”
“See?”
Gloriana looked honestly taken aback for a few seconds, and then smiled in what I could only call utter delight. Despite my best intentions, I got a traitorous little impulse to grin back. “Really? But this is wonderful!”
“It is?” Oliver’s turn to look bemused, as if she’d suddenly started rattling on in a language he didn’t recognize.
“Of course! You know I’ve never been terribly conventional, cuz. I’d be delighted to converse with humans again on an equal basis. Most of them are terribly dull, of course, but this one looks bright enough.” Her green eyes swept over me, giving me the female X-ray of appraisal. “And certainly not afraid of controversy.”
“This one is named Eve,” I said. “And don’t check my teeth like I’m your livestock. I bite back.”
Gloriana laughed, an honest, full laugh, and I felt a shudder go through Oliver’s body next to me. I couldn’t tell what had brought that on—not fear, surely; the old dude didn’t fear anybody that I could tell. “Eve,” she said. “I’d like something to drink. Something hot and salty, perhaps in an O negative if you have it.”
Ugh, but okay, I served vamps from time to time. I summoned up the professional smile again. “Sure thing. Coming right up.”
It was only as I was warming up the blood out of the refrigerator that it occurred to me that she’d named my own blood type.
Hmmmm.
Coincidence. Probably.
? ? ?
Gloriana’s visit to the coffee shop was eye-opening, to say the least. I put her blood in an opaque coffee cup, with a lid, and she and Oliver went to sit down together, presumably to jaw about old times, and I mean old times. She wasn’t standoffish, the way some of the other vampires were—she said hello to people as they passed, gave them the same sweet smile, shook hands with a few.
I was pulling espresso shots for a mocha when my boyfriend came in the vampire entrance and got in the ordering line. I waved, and he winked at me. Michael is a total hottie, always has been: tall, blond, built, and shy, for the most part. He’s always been focused more on music than on the people around him, and from what he’d told me about how he’d come to get dead, that had been a real mistake. So he was trying to do a little better about connecting with people, as well as guitar riffs. He’s always been my friend, but these days, he’s a whole lot more than that.