Blessed

by Cynthia Leitich Smith

  It had been worth a try.

  “He’ll be fine, though,” Clyde added. “Kieren’s the smartest fur-face I know.”

  It was nice that Clyde had stopped by. But why? After all, the last time I’d seen him, he’d called me “unholy” and “hussy” and threatened my neck with a battle-axe.

  I waited the Possum out, let the silence become uncomfortable.

  “Look,” Clyde began again, “here’s the deal: when I dropped Kieren off, I . . .”

  “You . . . ?” I prompted in a gentler tone. I couldn’t help feeling for the guy. Yesterday he’d missed the funeral of one of his two best friends. And he’d said good-bye to the other one only a few hours ago.

  The Possum continued, “I told Kieren that if there was anything I could do . . .”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “And he asked you to look out for me.”

  Clyde bristled. “Yeah, something like that.”

  Classic Kieren.

  The next day, in Sanguini’s dining room, Sergio shook hands in turn with two bearded, massive men who had to have been relatives of Detective Zaleski. Both were over six-six and three hundred pounds each, and their distinguishing features were all about hair — from the furry toes peeking out of their brown leather sandals to the manly tresses flowing down their wide backs. Joining them from the kitchen, I said, “My new bouncers, I presume?”

  Sergio had already sorted the most promising faxed and e-mailed applications into two piles, one for the chef position and one for the manager job. I could trust him to vet professional qualifications. My priority: whether the candidates had heartbeats. We would not be hiring any more murderous vampires on my watch. “How goes it?”

  With a flourish, Sergio deposited his own application for manager on the desk. “I don’t expect any special favors, lamb chop, but you know how much I love this place.”

  I couldn’t imagine a more qualified or better-fit candidate. Sergio had helped Uncle D with payroll, and he’d been Vaggio’s number two in the kitchen (and arch-nemesis at the poker table) for some thirty years. Especially after all the chaos, it might reassure the staff if one of their own took over.

  Then, in a flash, I remembered Sergio raving about Bradley’s chilled baby squirrels, which meant that in just a few weeks he’d join the legions of undead. God, what if I couldn’t save him, save any of them? I had a sudden, terrifying image of my old buddy Sergio, overcome with blood lust, draining his longtime partner Raúl.

  I fought rising panic. I’d stayed up past 3 A.M. the night before, trying to decipher a book with a bat etched into the cover, using an online French-English dictionary. But Kieren’s cheat sheet — assuming it was accurate — was still the only solid information I had to go on. Demonic infection, eternal damnation. So far, none of the news was good.

  For now, though, Sergio was still a human being, which, hell, was more than I could say, and he looked so hopeful. “I’ll have to run it by the Moraleses, but . . .” I reached over the desk to hug him. “You’ve got my vote.”

  Sergio brightened. “Want to grab a bite to celebrate? We could —”

  “I’d be happy to keep you company, but Miz Morales packed my lunch this morning.” I tried to lighten the moment. “We’re talking thinly sliced smoked white turkey with fresh Wisconsin cheddar, iceberg lettuce, German mustard, and olive-oil-infused mayo in a whole-grain tortilla.” I’d stashed the untouched wrap in the restaurant fridge.

  “Tell me about the side!” Sergio prompted, enjoying our familiar game.

  “Lightly salted sweet-potato chips,” I obliged.

  Menu was my first language.

  Once Sergio had packed it in for the day, I polished off the open bottle of blood wine and slipped the last one into my backpack, protecting it with a frozen cooling sleeve. Then I realized that Miz Morales, as a Wolf, could probably smell the blood-spiked alcohol, no matter where I tried to hide it in the house.

  Damn. I’d already blazed through two boxes of breath mints so no one would notice my “drinking” problem.

  When I opened the door to leave, Clyde was there, standing on the back step, poised as if to knock, with a teenage girl I only vaguely recognized. Her short, spiky blond hair had been streaked pink. A small silver hoop hooked her left eyebrow. She wore a ton of black eyeliner, no lipstick, a political T-shirt, and artfully torn black jeans. No big deal. About a quarter of the people at my school dressed that way.

  “Something I can do for you two?”

  “Aimee’s here about the dishwasher job,” Clyde announced.

  Finally, some good news! I opened the door wider and slid my backpack to the floor. It had to be over ninety degrees outside. “Y’all thirsty?”

  As I grabbed glasses, Aimee trailed in after Clyde and hopped onto the kitchen island bar stool next to his. In a bored voice, she asked, “Is it true that you’re a vampire?”

  What? “I . . .”

  “I told her,” the Possum admitted, reaching into his back jeans pocket.

  “Clyde!” I banged the glasses onto the counter. Right then, I wanted to kill him, really wanted to kill him. Seize his throat and slam him into the ceiling. Poke out his beady eyes and sauté them in olive oil with chives.

  “Look,” the Possum began, holding up a palm-size wooden cross. “Kieren may think you’re hunky-dory, but if Aimee takes this job, she has a right to know the risks.”

  “Loosen up, both of you,” Aimee said. “I’m not afraid.”

  “I am,” I replied, rubbing my temples. “You should be, too.”

  I took my time, counting backward from fifty as I poured the water and set the glasses in front of the sophomores. The flash of fury had frightened me. I’d thought my mood swings had ended once my transformation was complete — apparently not.

  What’s more, though Clyde’s cross didn’t have a supernatural effect on me, his wielding it like that hurt my feelings. “I’m supposed to be home for Dr. Morales’s famous chicken tortilla soup in” — I made a show of checking my watch — “seventeen minutes.” I adopted an alpha stance that would’ve made Kieren proud. “So, tell me, Aimee, why risk your young life washing dishes for the undead?”

  I made eye contact with Clyde, and he fumbled the cross.

  Aimee snatched it away. “I need money. Between U.T. and St. Ed’s, nobody’s hiring high-school kids. And you know, there’s a lot less to live for with Travis gone.”

  She’d lost me with that last part.

  “Aimee and Travis had this sort of unspoken love,” the Possum explained. “You know, the kind where everybody else can’t understand why they don’t just get together.”

  I was familiar with the concept, but . . . “You and Travis?”

  Travis had been nobody’s idea of a heartthrob, and Aimee was seriously cute. But in fairness, the ’dillo had also been a total sweetheart. It made me think more of Aimee that she’d liked him. I hoped that he’d known. “You’re human, right?”

  “You got a problem with that?” she snapped.

  “Me? Hell, no. But it is unusual.” Typically, werepeople didn’t date or mate outside their own kind. Meara and Roberto were an exception, Kieren and I, an even bigger one, though we’d never technically dated.

  “Travis and I were paintball buddies,” Aimee announced as if that explained everything. “Besides, who’re you to talk? A vampire smitten with a Wolf.”

  “Is there anything you didn’t tell her?” I asked Clyde.

  He sipped his water. “Travis had already clued her in on the shifter scene.”

  “Just like that?”

  “What?” The Possum smirked. “You thought only your and Kieren’s forbidden, unspoken, mutual yearning had been special enough for him to confide his true self?”

  Actually, I had.

  “At least Aimee isn’t a damned and depraved hellion,” he muttered.

  Nice. “Just wait,” I began, suddenly resigned. “Once the baby-squirrel eaters turn toothy, everybody’ll be romancing the dead.” />
  Clyde and Aimee traded a look and exclaimed, “What baby-squirrel eaters?”

  Had I meant to say that out loud? Maybe. Maybe on some level I knew I couldn’t handle it all by myself, that I had to tell somebody. I pulled up a bar stool and started talking. Because of what I was, I hadn’t felt like I could trust anyone with the whole truth. But these two already knew so much, and despite their attitudes, neither had walked out yet.

  Once I finished the story, Clyde went crazy. “How could you let this happen? How could you have been so stupid? How —?”

  “Shut up!” Aimee yelled at him. “Everyone who tasted the squirrels?” she asked me in a softer voice. “Even a little bite?”

  I nodded, wondering who Aimee might’ve known who’d dined at Sanguini’s. Most parents hadn’t let their high-school-age kids come to the restaurant — too scary after Vaggio’s murder, too sexy what with all the leather and chains, lace and feathers.

  “What can we do to stop it?” she pressed.

  “Well, I’ve been looking through Kieren’s books —”

  “Most of which you can’t read, for a cure that may not exist,” Clyde shot back. “That’s kick-ass, Quincie. Really. You rock.”

  I’d about had it with his sarcasm. “Do you have a better idea?”

  The Possum crossed his furry arms. “We go down every name in the reservation book, hit the Web, get their contact info, then call and ask if they ordered the chilled baby squirrels. We can say it’s a consumer satisfaction survey or something. That way we’ll have a working list of the infected.”

  “To do what with?” Aimee asked.

  I knew what Clyde was thinking before he said it.

  “At least we’ll know where to point the stakes.”

  Before I could add that he wasn’t totally out of line, Aimee pushed him off his bar stool. “It won’t come to that,” she insisted. “Don’t worry, Quincie. We’ll help you.”

  The following afternoon, it occurred to me to grab the burnt-orange sports bottle from the break-room cabinet and fill it with Bradley’s blood wine.

  My stash had held up better than expected, mostly because Mitch hadn’t stopped by since Wednesday. That worried me, but I’d seen no new reports of murders on the lakefront or anywhere else.

  “I’ve scheduled initial interviews,” Sergio announced. “But rushing like this —”

  “Xio’s a single mom. Jamal is putting himself through U.T. They live on —”

  “Tips.” Sergio smiled at me. “You know, your mother was the same way. She always took care of her staff first.”

  The highest praise. Embarrassed, I ducked my head and flipped through today’s applications. “We’ll be okay, though, right? I mean, we’ve got some solid candidates.”

  The office phone rang, and Sergio snagged it. “Sanguini’s.” He paused. “Sorry, he’s moved on.” After hanging up, the new manager responded to my quizzical look. “Another one,” he said, “asking for Bradley.”

  “Another one?”

  Thankful that I could sip chicken broth, I made it through dinner. Miz Morales dished about her latest wedding, to be performed in Klingon with full makeup and costumes at the Sheraton downtown. The groom was the son of a local tech millionaire, and the bride was one of Dr. Morales’s former engineering TAs.

  Meanwhile Meghan glowered at me, gripping her spoon like a weapon.

  After fielding cheers for clearing the table — a compulsion I’d picked up sometime between my first steps and mastering the alphabet, I headed upstairs to Kieren’s room.

  The books were gone. So was the map of the Western Hemisphere.

  Miz Morales knocked on the door. “Big change, isn’t it?”

  “What . . . ?” I’d almost asked: what did you do? “What happened?”

  “Surprise! Roberto and I packed up Kieren’s desk and books while you were at school. We’ll get to his closet early next week.” She strolled in. “This is your home now, Quincie. You need to make it your own space. I can help you decorate, if you want. We could start with new linens.”

  “Where did the books go?” I asked, turning in place. The house didn’t have an attic, and I doubted the Moraleses would dump such valuable old texts in the garage.

  “What do you think?” she went on. “Paint? Wallpaper? The house is so white — the walls, the carpeting. It’s starting to bother me.”

  I made an effort to sound casual. “The books?”

  And failed.

  “Sorry, Quincie,” she said. “I can’t say.”

  Sorry Kieren had to go away. Sorry his books had to go away. Sorry they’d just taken away the only slim hope I’d had to foil Brad’s mass-infection scheme.

  I volunteered to clean out Kieren’s closet, saying I might want to keep a T-shirt as a keepsake, and Miz Morales had been quick to agree.

  It felt wrong, sorting through his clothes. It’s not like he’d died. I wished I knew whether he’d already reached the pack, whether he’d managed to prove himself. I might’ve been biased, but I couldn’t imagine anyone being smarter than Kieren.

  I shucked shirts off their hangers, folding each and placing it in a growing stack on the water bed. Kieren had dress clothes, church clothes, but for the most part he’d kept his wardrobe simple. Jeans, shorts, and T-shirts, short-sleeved or sleeveless.

  He hated the heat. I wondered how much farther north he’d gone from Denton, whether he preferred the climate of his new home.

  Reaching for a much-faded Ice Bats shirt that had fallen on the carpet, I noticed a couple of two-liter plastic jugs marked HOLY WATER that had been tucked into a corner of the closet behind a baseball bat, tennis racket, and fencing foil.

  How long had Uncle Davidson been a vampire? How long after his transformation had we lived under the same roof? I’d never guessed that he was a danger to me. I wonder if even he realized that or if, after the initial bout of blood lust, Uncle D had convinced himself that he was no longer a threat. That he could exist, passing as human, without potentially murdering the people he cared about. Just as I was doing.

  The jugs looked so innocuous on the floor of the closet, not far from my red cowboy boots. I touched Kieren’s crucifix beneath my shirt. I had the Moraleses to consider, my employees, my neighbors and classmates.

  A moment later, I slipped into the upstairs bathroom and began rummaging through the medicine cabinet. I spied a nearly empty four-inch-tall bottle of cherry cough syrup and an expired tube of concealer about the size of my forefinger. I rinsed them out until the tap water ran clear. Then I took both to the closet to fill with holy water.

  Now I’d always have a handy means of self-destruction.

  Once I’d replaced Kieren’s clothes with mine, I texted Aimee and Clyde, asking that they hit the public library the next day and look for anything they could find on the undead, demonic magic, or related transformations (it was worth a try).

  In the meantime, I’d see what I could find on the Web, and then we’d meet on Sunday afternoon to compare notes.

  I logged on to Kieren’s PC, keyed in the password (Brazos), checked his bookmarks, and zeroed in on the shopping folder. When I clicked MAGICAL TOOLS, the screen seemed to shimmer. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t the computer.

  I closed my eyes and, opening them again, saw spots. I tried once more, and this time, seemingly projected images filled my mind.

  I stood in the entryway of Bradley’s two-and-a-half-story Arts-and-Crafts house.

  He was there, laughing on the landing, impeccably dressed in his gray toasting suit and toying with the antique bowie knife that used to hang above his fireplace. “Weapons and witchcraft . . .” He lifted a shiny black dress shoe to the stair rail and leaped neatly down to the foyer. “Baby, who do you think you’re trying to bump off?”

  Before I could reply, Brad pointed the blade at my mouth. “Go ahead. You know you want to.”

  Just like that, at his whim, I did. I couldn’t resist. I felt the way he wanted me to. Tempted.
Tantalized.

  Moving closer, I leaned in to kiss the sharp knife point and tasted blood.

  Still seated at Kieren’s desk, I realized that my fangs had pierced my lower lip. I wiped it and stared down at the red smear on my finger, trying to make sense of the dream. Or had it been a delusion? I could’ve sworn that I hadn’t fallen asleep.

  “Why don’t you cry?” Meghan demanded from the booster seat behind me. “Don’t you miss him?”

  Driving the Moraleses’ Chevy through the Hill Country, I tilted the air conditioner vent upward, hoping to cool off my little passenger. “Brazos?”

  Brazos had been all love and loyalty, playful in his blue bandana. If Bradley had committed no other crime, I still would’ve hated him for poisoning Kieren’s dog.

  I peered at Meghan via the rearview mirror. “Of course I miss him, and I know you do, too. But your parents found a breeder who has two German shepherd puppies for you to pick from. Don’t you want a new puppy?”

  “No.”

  I itched to turn the car around. I had answers to find, and with every passing hour good people like Sergio were more at risk. Besides, my dead heart seemed to clench whenever I spotted a beige SUV like Brad’s (who knew there were so damned many of them?). But when Miz Morales had asked if I’d take Meghan to pick up the new dog, I couldn’t refuse. Roberto had an engineering journal to edit, and given tonight’s full moon, Meara had been reluctant to leave the house.

  What I was doing mattered, not only to Meghan’s morale but also to her family’s safety. By tonight, any sightings of a Wolf on the Morales property could be explained away by a harmless family pet.

  I also had a theory that — even though Wolves supposedly didn’t feel the full moon’s pull until adolescence — its influence was making the cub a bit mouthier than usual, and the last thing we needed back home was Meghan testing her mama’s patience.

  Besides, Aimee and Clyde had been researching vampirism at the public library since the doors first opened this morning. Maybe their luck would be better than mine.