'Good points,' he said, but he still sounded shell-shocked.
'Do you need me to stay on the phone?'
'You can't call about the plane if you're talking to me,' he said. The words were reasonable; the tone was still stunned.
'True, but you sound like you need me to keep talking to you.'
'I do, but I need you to arrange the trip more. I'll give myself a few minutes to process and then I'll arrange for other people to take the business end here while I'm gone.'
'I'll do the same.'
'I love you,' he said.
'I love you more,' I said.
'I love you most.'
'I love you mostest.'
It was usually something that he, Nathaniel and I said to each other, but sometimes just two of us would do it. Sometimes you just needed it.
It was late enough in the day that the vampires had begun to rise in the underground beneath the Circus of the Damned, so when I called to see if we could borrow the private jet, Jean-Claude was awake enough to take the call himself. His voice held none of that sleepy edge because he didn't really sleep; he died during the day, so when he woke it was abrupt and instant 'awake.' Vampires sleep more like a switch: on, awake; off, dead. His body would even cool over the hours, not as cold as a real corpse, and there was no color change, because the body wasn't really 'dead,' and it wasn't beginning to rot. If you were really dead, and human, the body began to rot as soon as the heart stopped. It's like cutting a flower in your garden; you can put it into water, delay the process, but from the moment you pick it, it begins to die. The flower looks pretty for a long time, but it's just a waiting game, the end is inevitable. Jean-Claude was a vampire, Master of the City of St Louis, and he'd been dead and beautiful for about six hundred years; his end was not inevitable. Theoretically, he could still be fresh as an unblemished rose five billion years from now when our sun finally gave up the ghost, expanded, and ate the planet. Of course, I'd killed enough vampires in my job as a legal vampire executioner to know that even being master of a territory and head of the newly formed American Vampire Council didn't make him truly immortal, just fucking powerful. That was one of the reasons he was awake with the sun still shining in the sky. If he hadn't been deep underground in what had begun as a natural cave system but had been carved out decades ago into luxurious rooms, even he would have still been dead to the world.
'I can feel your anxiety, ma petite. What has happened?'
I told him.
'I can arrange for you and Micah to go, but I will not be able to follow until I have reassured the master of that territory that we are not coming to take over his lands.'
'It hadn't occurred to me that we'd need to clear it with the local vamps to visit Micah's dad in the hospital.'