had hair, not as much as Maha, but enough to hit the small of her back. And, like a lot of Egyptian women’s hair, it was thick, dark, curly and beautiful.
“Yeah, interesting,” I said, and pulled him off to what passed for a bar.
The rooftops were open to the stars, although there were numerous wooden pergolas with diaphanous draperies scattered around, as well as some big, square boards that looked like massive T.V.s or small movie screens. They were neither; there were no wires or cables around the bottoms and I didn’t see any projectors. But something was being shown on them nonetheless.
“What the—” I stopped to stare at one on the next roof over, which was big enough to be perfectly visible from here.
“Oh, yes. I forgot to mention,” Louis-Cesare said, handing me a glass of non-alcoholic punch.
“You forgot to mention what?”
He shrugged. “This is a celebration. They wanted to show people what they had to celebrate.”
He drank his own punch, and then frowned at the glass.
“Yes, but—” I stared at the big board some more. It was currently showing me in all of my crispy-fried glory: clothes blackened and half missing, skin burnt, hair—what was left of it—a complete disaster, and mouth open as I thundered across the room on a bright red motorcycle, yelling obscenities at an ancient god.
It was as embarrassing as all hell, and it wasn’t the only one. Similar boards were scattered around the rooftops as far as I could see, playing the greatest hits from the day’s event. We were all there: Louis-Cesare, climbing up a massive cobra’s body with a sword on his back; Hassani, doing his Gandalf routine at the top of the stairs; the vamp squad, carving their way through zombies like they did it every day; and me, trying to shoot a god.
I put my weak-ass punch down and started to look around for a way out of here, but Louis-Cesare knew me. “Not a chance,” he said.
And the next second, he’d pulled me into his arms, taken a running leap, and—
“Hey! Some notice next time!” I said breathlessly, as we landed on another roof maybe twenty feet away, but so lightly that Louis-Cesare didn’t even spill his drink.
He just laughed and kept going, jumping from rooftop to rooftop all along the block that Hassani owned. In the process, we dodged a trio of dwarves with musical instruments, a line of well-dressed conga dancers, and then almost collided with some more dancers in orange and red fluttery outfits, who streamed across our path without warning. I looked back to see their bodies painting a glittery rainbow across the darkness for a moment before we landed—
In an all-out bash. This one had party horns and confetti cannons, and dancing boys as well as girls. One of the latter came up and tried to dance with us, despite the fact that Louis-Cesare hadn’t put me down yet. He was pretty impressive, with a bare chest glistening with sweaty muscles, dark brown eyes with long, thick lashes, and a blindingly white smile.
His dance moves weren’t bad, either.
“You know, I’m starting to see what you mean about art,” I told Louis-Cesare, who grimaced and jumped to another roof.
And almost landed in the middle of a troop of six male dancers, who were doing an amazing tanoura. The Egyptian folk dance had also been performed at the reception given on our arrival, but that one had been staid and solemn by comparison. These guys were really going for it, with multicolored skirts flinging out like whirling dervishes’, and including a huge top skirt that they brought up their bodies and over their heads, manipulating it like a great umbrella to mirror the movements of the skirts below.
And because they were vampires, they were spinning so fast that the sound of their clothes snapping and their feet scraping across the concrete rooftop made almost as much noise as the musicians. They streamed around us, the throbbing beat and flowing colors sweeping us up into the madness for a heady second, and confusing my already spinning head. Then they were gone, whirling off to another part of the roof, leaving Louis-Cesare and I looking at each other, breathless and laughing.
Until I spied the food.
Vampires don’t technically need to eat, and the younger ones don’t even have working taste buds, meaning that their parties often times don’t include food. At best, I’d been hoping for a lackluster buffet with some wilted lettuce and maybe a few pasta