Invincible Chronicles of Nick - By Sherrilyn Kenyon Page 0,6
the center island. The warm smell made his stomach cramp even more. “Oh, my God! We have pancakes and bacon!” It smelled so good, he was already salivating.
Rosa laughed at his eagerness. She had no idea how rare a meal like this was for him. “Don’t you want syrup?” she asked as he grabbed one of the pancakes and took a bite.
Nick swallowed the delicious-tasting food. “We have syrup, too?”
She pointed to the counter behind him, where a huge bottle of Log Cabin waited. Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.…
He grabbed it, popped the top, and proceeded to drown the plate.
His mom was much more sedate as she took her food. “Nick, don’t use so much syrup. You won’t be able to taste your food.”
That was the idea. “Ma, it’s real good syrup and it’s not watered down.” Something she did to make it last longer for them whenever they were lucky enough to get some.
Her face turned bright red.
Rosa patted her on her hand. “It’s okay, Mrs. Gautier. I understand what it’s like to have to struggle to feed my son. Miguel and I had many lean years before I come to work for Mr. Kyrian. You eat as much as you want. Mr. Kyrian’s policy is that no one goes hungry in his home.”
“Thank you.”
Rosa inclined her head, then moved a plate full of pancakes toward Nick. “But you go a little easy and leave some for your mother. Too many, and your stomach will hurt.”
“Yeah, but so worth the pain. These are delicious. Thank you so much for making them.”
She smiled as she handed him a napkin. “I’m glad you enjoy.”
“I more than enjoy. It’s like all the taste buds in my mouth are singing and dancing. I bet if you listen close, you can even hear them.”
And it got even better when she handed him a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Oh yeah, he was in heaven.
By the time his mom was finished eating, he’d plowed through most of the pancakes.
Shaking her head, his mom took him by his “uninjured” arm and pulled him away from his empty plate. “C’mon, boo. We need to get going.”
He licked the syrup off his fingers.
His mom screwed her face up in distaste. “Nick, you have a napkin. Please use it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to waste it. It’s good.”
She let out a sigh of exasperation as she met Rosa’s gaze. “I swear, Rosa, I have taught him better. It just hasn’t taken yet. Not from lack of effort on my part.”
She laughed. “I know. Believe me, my Miguel is the same way.”
Ignoring them, Nick took one last bite before he followed his mom out of the house and down the street to the station. They didn’t speak much as they made their way from the fancy, high-end Garden District, where Kyrian lived, to the other side of the French Quarter, where the bar and restaurant called Sanctuary stood at 688 Ursuline. Something that involved their getting off the streetcar at Jackson Brewery and hoofing it a few blocks over toward the Ursuline’s convent that had given the street its name. Sanctuary was only one block up the street from it and not that far away from his high school.
He’d been by the place more times than he could count. His mother said the crowd in there could be rough and she didn’t want him getting hurt, so he was technically banned from it. And that statement always made him wonder how his mom knew what the crowd was like, since she’d never been inside it either to his knowledge. However, he’d never asked her.
It fell into the category of “don’t ask, ’cause you’ll only get a stupid parent answer.” If all your friends jumped off a bridge … Because I said so. So long as you live under my roof … and so on.
Sanctuary aside, Nick had always loved coming to the Quarter as an escape from their run-down condo and neighborhood. There was something about it that soothed every Cajun root inside him—the history, the beauty, the mixture of cultures, smells, food, and people. No place else on earth like it. Not that he’d ever been anywhere else except Laurel or Jackson, Mississippi, whenever they’d had to evacuate for hurricanes—and then he’d seen only the parking lots of whatever store or mall where they’d made temporary camp in their rusted-out Yugo.
He paused as they came even to the Café Du Monde that sat at the edge