kisses we’d shared, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been the one who had to bend to him. Sitting down, he couldn’t even go up on tiptoes like I did most of the time. I put one hand on the side of his face to steady me as I touched my lips to his, because even now sometimes just a kiss could leave me unsteady. It was a light kiss by our standard “hello,” but we had company, and business company at that. One thing I had learned over the last few weeks was that everything about a big wedding had some sort of business attached to it.
Irene’s thin, long-fingered hands were clasped in front of her, where she usually held them, unless she was touching something. It was as if she held on to herself to keep her from touching everything. She was shorter than me, barely five feet tall, with hair as black as ours, but coarser and intermingled with gray. Her face was thin and angular, her body bird-thin, not in the way that models who diet forever are, but as if there had just never been enough food. Her skin was brown both in color and from the sun, and her eyes were the black that both Jean-Claude’s blue and my own brown promised, but never quite delivered.
“My master has given me an impossibly long life, and I can say with long observation that it is rare for a couple to still be so taken with each other.”
Jean-Claude smiled at her, his arm pulling me down into his lap. I might have protested, but first I wanted to be as close to him as possible, and second there was nothing wrong with what we were doing. It was just a little far for modern American affection outside a club or party atmosphere. “We are searching for the perfect wedding bands; surely that is early enough, Irene.”
“But you have been dating for six years, isn’t it, my lord?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Something like that,” I said. It had been more off-again, on-again than most of the vampire community seemed to think, and definitely more than the human media did. I’d been a legal vampire executioner when Jean-Claude and I first met, and he’d been a vampire, so romance hadn’t been the first thought on either of our minds. I’d believed that all vampires were just walking corpses, and that killing them had been ridding the world of monsters. Then I’d met a few vampires who seemed nicer than the people I was dealing with, and I began to wonder just who the monsters were. Dominga Salvador had been one of the human beings who helped convince me that evil could have a heartbeat. Now, we had someone who was doing the most evil thing the Señora had imagined. She was dead, I knew that, I’d killed her, but if the animator talking offscreen had been female I might have wondered if someone had raised her from the grave and gotten some secrets. Of course, since I’d technically murdered her, self-defense or not, her zombie should have tried to come after me first. Murder victims crawl from the grave with only one thing on their minds—vengeance. They will tear through anyone in their way in an attempt to hunt down and kill their murderer. It was the reason you couldn’t just raise the victim of a homicide and ask them who killed them. It had been tried and the death count was always higher than just the one murder they’d been trying to solve.
Jean-Claude stroked his hand down my arm. “You are suddenly very somber, ma petite.”
“Sorry, work was . . . hard today.”
I felt his energy stroke at the side of my thoughts, almost the way his hand had touched my arm. I tightened my shielding down just a little more, and he didn’t press. The images from the zombie videos were not what I wanted to share with him as we talked about wedding rings. I was pretty sure it would be a mood killer.
“I do not understand why you do a job that steals the light from your face, Anita,” Irene said.
I looked at her, and there must have been something in the look, because she gave a small bow. “I meant no offense.”
“As long as you weren’t going to join the vampires who think I should give up my job once I marry Jean-Claude, no offense taken.”
Irene rose from her bow laughing. “I would never say