I put the bags of food onto the desk, pul ed out bacon-laced burgers for me and Lindsey, and took a seat beside her on the floor.
"So," I said, folding down the burger's paper wrapping.
"Blood rationing?"
Luc and Malik growled simultaneously.
"The man is a stone-cold idiot," Luc said, taking an impressive bite of his triple-layer burger.
"Unfortunately," Malik said, moving his chess piece and sitting back in his chair, "he is an idiot with the ful authority of the GP."
"Which means we have to wait until he royal y screws the pooch before we can act," Luc said, hunched over the board again. "Al due respect, Liege, the guy is a douche."
"I have no official position with respect to his douchery,"
Malik said, pul ing a box of fries out of the bag, applying a prodigious amount of ketchup, and digging in. I appreciated that Malik, unlike Ethan, didn't need to be schooled on Chicago's best and greasiest cuisine. He knew the difference between a red hot and a hot beef, had a favorite pizza joint, and had been known to take a late-night trip with Aaliyah to a roadside dinerme adside outside Milwaukee to get Wisconsin's "best cheese curds."
More power to them.
"But we wil al ow him to hang himself with his own rope,"
Malik added. "And in the meantime, we wil monitor the vampires and intervene when the time is appropriate."
The tone was al Master vampire, something Malik had gotten better at using over the last few weeks. I took the hint, dropped the subject and dug into my burger while Luc used a fry to point to various chess pieces he was again deciding between.
"Deliberative, isn't he?" I whispered to Lindsey.
She smiled too knowingly for comfort. "You have no idea how deliberative he can be. How . . . thorough." She leaned toward me, nibbling on a bit of bacon from her burger.
"Have I ever waxed poetic about the glory that is the fuzzy-chested vampire wearing nothing but cowboy boots?"
Midbite, I squeezed my eyes closed, but it was too late to block the image of Luc wearing nothing but his birthday suit and sassy, red boots. "That's my former boss you're talking about," I whispered. "And I'm trying to eat."
"You're thinking about him naked, aren't you?"
"Unfortunately."
She patted my arm. "And to think—I was actual y hesitant about dating him. Oh, and speaking of which. Chaps.
Enough said."
"Enough most definitely said." Lindsey was becoming my new, in-House Mal ory, complete with conquest details.
Sigh.
"In that case, I'l leave you to your imagination. But I strongly recommend the therapeutic application of fuzzy-chested vampire to grief. It works miracles."
"I am sincerely glad to hear that. But if you keep talking, I wil poke your eyes out with a toothpick." I shoved a handful of napkins in her general direction. "Shut up and eat your burger.
Sometimes a girl had to lay down the law.
CHAPTER TWO
BITTERSWEET DREAMS
I stood on a high plain in my modern-style black leather—
my long hair whipping in the chil ing wind that rol ed past, swirling the mist that curled at my feet.