Invision - Sherrilyn Kenyon Page 0,28
for him. “Do I need to send Mark out for soup or something?”
“No, I’m good for the moment. But pizza in an hour would be good.”
“Pizza? Oh my God, Mikey. No wonder you like the boy. Sounds just like you!”
Nick hesitated just inside the shop at the sound of an unfamiliar male voice that was thick with a middle Tennessee drawl.
Reserved around strangers, he turned to see an average height, heavyset man at the counter who was probably in his late fifties. Even though they’d never met before, Nick knew him instantly. “Hey! It’s Bubba from the commercials!” The only difference was that he didn’t have on the flannel shirt or zombie tee either, but rather wore a red polo shirt and jeans, and his black hair and beard were laced with gray.
Bubba stepped around him to put his backpack down behind the counter. “Nick, meet my father, Dr. Burdette. Dad, this is Nick.”
Nick moved forward to shake his hand. “Real pleasure to meet you, Dr. Burdette.”
“And you, though to hear my son and wife talk about you, I was expecting an ankle-biting rug rat. Not a half-grown man who stands eye to eye with my giant beast of a son.” He glanced at Bubba and shook his head with a sigh. “I swear to God, that boy’s mama must have been feeding him fertilizer when I wasn’t looking. Ain’t nobody in my family ever been that tall … hers, either, for that matter. If he didn’t look just like me, I’d be wondering, and eyeballing the mailman.”
“Daddy!” Bubba barked in a chiding tone.
“What?” he asked, blinking innocently. “It’s God’s truth, and you know it.”
Laughing, Mark stepped out from between the black curtains that separated the front of the store from the back room. Only a few years older than Nick, he was Bubba’s sidekick and best friend, and fellow zombie-hunting lunatic. The two of them got into all manner of madness whenever Nick turned his back on them.
The ying to Bubba’s yang, Mark was as fair as Bubba was dark, with shaggy light brown hair, and bright green eyes that seldom stopped laughing. Like Bubba, he’d gone to college on a full football scholarship and they’d grown up together in Tennessee before moving to New Orleans.
“Ah now, don’t let Nick’s height fool you, Dr. Burdette. He’s still an ankle-biter.” Mark smirked at Nick. “How you feeling, kiddo?”
“Sick.”
“Well, don’t give it to me or I’ll make you wash Bubba’s underwear for the next month.”
Bubba snorted as he started opening the day’s shipment and checking it in. “Don’t I pay you to work?”
“Nah. You pretend to pay me and I pretend to work.”
Ignoring them, Bubba’s father came around the counter to examine Nick. “So what are your symptoms? Sore throat?”
Eyes wide, Nick glanced at Bubba.
“He’s a GP … general practitioner. Worse than my mama, any day, and twice on Sunday. Surrender, kid. It’s just easier that way. He ain’t going to let you alone until you do.”
Oh great. If the doctor pulled him in for tests … he was still the Malachai with some unusual traits, and if they uncovered the fact that he wasn’t human this could turn ugly fast.
Clearing his throat, Nick sought to avert disaster. “Not too bad. Mostly headache and tired and achy.”
“Hmm, might just be a cold. Let me take you in back and get your vitals. Check you out.… You’re the one with the preexisting heart condition, right?”
“He is.”
“Bubba!” Nick snapped.
“Don’t Bubba me, boy. Your mama and mine would skin me alive if anything happened to you on my watch. Personally, I think my mama likes you better, anyway.”
His dad laughed. “Completely not true. I was once mopping the kitchen floor when Mikey came running through the house for no good reason—like someone was trying to kill him—and fell. Now a normal woman would be mad at the kid for tracking mud on my freshly mopped floor. Let me reiterate normal woman … I didn’t marry normal. I married Bobbi Jean Clinton-Burdette. Ain’t no normal in that family tree, I’m telling you. So faster than I could blink, his mama took that mop handle to me ’cause that boy done skinned his knee on my fresh clean floor. I’m telling you, she got ahold of me so viciously over it that I thought one of them Greek furies had done descended on me from Mount Olympus. You’d have thought that boy lost his leg the way she carried on. But he barely bruised it. Didn’t