Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(25)

“Not a thing,” I said, “if he was a farmer. He’d been in a car and a restaurant, not a field.”

“Nell,” T. Laine said.

“What? You think she’s gonna bite me?”

“Speaking of biting, why did you let Ming of Glass go?” Crowley asked smoothly. It was a cop question, slid in when not expected, hoping to get a reaction.

“Because she wasn’t in the restaurant when the firing started. She drove up later. She waited around for a while in case you needed to talk to her, but then she left. I’ve got her number if you need to talk to her.” I held up my cell.

“You have the Master of the—” She stopped. “You have the number of Ming of Glass in your personal cell phone database?”

“Her security guard, actually.” Whose name I didn’t know. Calling her Yummy would be embarrassing, but the SSSAIC didn’t ask for it. “I wouldn’t call in the daytime. That’s like poking a sleeping lion with a stick.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” Crowley stood and gathered her belongings, her face expressionless, her emotions indecipherable. “Include that information in your report,” she said to me. To the others, she said, “You are all dismissed. I expect reports in my e-mail by ten a.m.”

We all filed out of the room and into the cleanup.

There were three wounded and one dead, not counting the officer, lots of rounds fired, and no one had seen anything. I scanned the files being put together by JoJo and recognized none of the victims’ names. Worse, with the exception of the presence of the senator and the expected presence of Ming of Glass, Jo could find nothing that tied any of the dead or wounded to each other or to the people at the Holloways’ party. The worry about assassination or domestic—or paranormal—terrorism was still a very real possibility.

? ? ?

Near dawn, JoJo said into my earpiece, “Nell, I got a vamp calling, saying she needs her taxi driver at University of Tennessee Medical Center. She asked for Maggot.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. But I slid off my chair and jogged to my truck. I gave her my ETA and once again appreciated the superheater in the old Chevy.

? ? ?

Yummy opened the passenger door, looked over the interior, and said, “You have got to be kidding.”

“Nope. You could call an Uber.”

Her face scrunched in distaste; she slid in and closed the door. “Hell, Maggot. Can’t you afford a new car? Doesn’t PsyLED provide you a car? Does it have a radio?” She punched the buttons and twisted the knobs.

“Probably. Eventually. And yes. But it stopped working last week. Buckle up.” I slid her a sideways glance and pulled into the light five a.m. traffic as she complied. “No working radio. We’ll have to talk,” I said.

“About maggots?”

I laughed. “About life. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m sure you have a dossier on me. Read it.”

“My time’s valuable.” I let my words glide into church-speak. “You’uns ain’t important enough to me to read it.”

Yummy burst out laughing and twisted around in the seat so her legs were splayed, one knee angled at me. “I like you, Nell.”

“Hmmm.”

“You’re not gonna say you like me?”

“My mama taught me to be polite and to not lie. Those two things aren’t always mutually agreeable.”

Yummy laughed again and dropped her head against the back window with a soft thud. Her very pale blond hair swung and fell still. “I was born the first time in 1932 in a little town in South Louisiana. I was turned in 1953 by a vamp named Grégoire, who said he loved me and that we should be together forever. He looked fifteen but in the sack he was truly immortal.” Yummy glanced my way. “He could do things with his mouth . . .”

Yummy was testing the waters, seeing how far she could go. I had learned quickly that no reaction was the best reaction when dealing with paranormal creatures, especially the predatory kind. I didn’t react, just eased through a green light and up behind an early school bus.

Yummy went on. “Sadly, when I woke up dead in 1960—early by Mithran standards—Grégoire had moved on emotionally and sexually and was sleeping with young men and the Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier, a former and once-again lover. In the intervening years my brothers went to war and never came back, my father died of a heart attack working in a paper mill, and Mama remarried and moved away.” Yummy’s accent had changed as she spoke, taking on a twang I didn’t really recognize, maybe Frenchy Southern. An accent that was biscuits and gravy with hot sauce and alligator sausage or something. It was slightly like Rick’s when he was tired or angry, but softer, more melodious. She went on, now sounding a little sad, and I had to wonder if she knew she was giving so much away, or if she just needed to talk and didn’t care what she exposed about herself. “Instead of being head-over-heels in love, I was part of the Clan Arceneau blood family. But I was alone, a blood-sucker of little consequence, living with fangheads I didn’t much like and what amounted to human slaves. I was a small fish in a large fishbowl full of predators, all with bigger teeth than I had.”

She looked my way again and I pretended to be wholly focused on the street and the lights ahead. “I wasn’t interested in group sex, in making new slaves, or in helping to run a vamp’s household. So I learned to fight and went to war, as much as women were allowed to in Uncle Sam’s army back then. When I got back, I took on all comers until I killed one of Grégoire’s favorites and he sent me to Ming of Glass. I’ve been here ever since.”