sensation reminded me of the times my grandmother pulled a mug warmed from the dishwasher to give me milk and cookies before bed. “How did you end up as Klaud’s servant?”
Regret looked unnatural on a face should have been carved in marble. “Hubris.”
“Yours? Or others’?”
“Both. Demigod or not, I was the property of the man who owned my mother. He bet the emperor Nero that I was unbeatable. He knew nothing of vampires and at the time, neither did I.”
“Your servitude was the wager?”
“Yes. Until my death, or his.”
“But vampires are immortal.” Sugar and fat began to congeal in a heavy lump in my stomach. I set down the remains of the third doughnut uneaten.
“Which information would have been useful before I agreed to those terms. I felt fairly certain I would outlive him by an order of magnitude, in the worst case. In the best case, I would have won freedom. My own, and my mother’s. And a nice appointment for my master of course.”
“And Nero brought in a ringer, I’m guessing?”
“That he did.” Crixus snorted at the memory, apparently still chapped by it even now.
I pulled my knees up under my shirt. “Must have been one hell of a ringer to defeat a demigod. A vampire?”
“I have no idea what it was. Even to this day. It looked like a man, of course. Anyway, I lost, which is all that matters. I’ve been with Nero and Klaud ever since.”
“That’s a long damn time to be a servant. What’s to prevent you from just walking away?”
“It was a blood oath. Breaking a blood oath is a very risky business.”
“How so?” Before he could answer, my cell phone buzzed on the table. I glanced at the screen and felt my stomach do a death roll. Morrison. I thought about not answering, but then looked at the doughnut-laden table and felt a pang of guilt. “Not a peep,” I warned Crixus, tapping the screen to answer the call. “Hey there.”
“How the fuck did you do this?” Morrison’s voice bore the tightly coiled tension of a spring. Conversations that began with this tone typically did not end well for me.
I tried to keep my voice as neutral as possible. “Do what?”
“Your apartment. I stopped by this morning to chat with the landlord and check out the damage.”
“And?” I hoped the sound of the pulse rushing in my ears couldn’t be heard over the line.
Crixus watched my face as he selected another doughnut.
“And there wasn’t any.” James Morrison, master showman.
I blinked at Crixus.
“Completely clean. The whole damn place. Spotless. Windows replaced. Antique banister repaired.”
“Wow,” I said, twirling my hair as if he could see the implied innocence of the gesture. “That is so weird.”
“Weird?” Morrison barked. “No. It’s not weird. It’s fucking impossible.”
“Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked,” I suggested. “The strobe light did make it pretty hard to see anything.”
“Hanna, I know what I saw. I know what you saw. And, I’m pretty damn sure you either know who undid this, or have a pretty good idea.”
Many. None that I could share. A werewolf clean-up crew? Leprechaun luck? Unicorn magic? A satyr spell? “I was with you all last night. Remember? Whatever happened, I had nothing to do with it.”
His silence often held more danger than his words. In this quiet space, the engine of his mind processed information into assumptions and theories often too close to the truth to be comfortable.
“We are going to discuss this further, Hanna. And when we do, I am going to ask you some difficult questions. You might want to start thinking about how you’re going to answer them.”
A sweat bloomed between my palm and the mug handle I discovered I was crushing in a white-knuckled grip. “Okay.”
The line went dead. I dropped my phone and thumped my forehead on the table. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“Trouble?” Crixus asked.
“Always.”
“Cop catching on to your little secret?” Crixus grinned, a boyish dimple appearing in his smooth, tanned cheek.
“Little?” I raised my head from the table. “I don’t think what I have going on here qualifies as little by any explanation. For example, I’m sitting at James Morrison’s breakfast table with a Roman gladiator demigod, who has eaten six doughnuts to my two and a half. In the best case, he’ll think I ate nine doughnuts for breakfast. In the worst, he’ll add this to his list of questions to club me with at our next meeting. And that will be the easy one to explain away.”
“Which