“Yup. You bet your ass there was some praying going on that night.”
“You know,” Blay said as they started walking toward the gate, “I didn’t realize Qhuinn could fly an airplane.”
After they dematerialized through the slats of the iron work, Zsadist said dryly, “I think it came as a surprise to him, too.”
Up on the second floor of his parents’ transformed house, Qhuinn stared down at the little girl standing in front of him. Then he looked back into the dim bedroom.
“Yeah, I’m allowed to be here,” he said in answer to her question. “’Cuz this is the house I grew up in. Like you’re doing now.”
“Oh, okay. So you’re going to hurt us? You look a little scary. You’re really tall.”
“No, honey. I’m not going to hurt you or your family.”
“That’s good.”
He’d fix her memories in a second. Right now, he was too freaked at the idea he might be fucked on his mission because of these humans’ need to change every single frickin’ thing about the house they’d bought.
Leaving her be, he walked into the room, the echo of his boots loud on the hard marble floor. Currently, there was a bed over there, a desk opposite it, and then something weird across in the corner—a sofa, maybe? In his mind, he tried to remember things as they had been when Luchas had lived in the suite. The bureau had been centered between the two windows that overlooked the garden. Yes, that was where it had been.
Going over, he knelt down and passed his hand over the smooth stone tile. He wasn’t well versed in construction, but it didn’t take a Bob Vila to know that if you wanted to put in marble flooring, you had to have a clean slate to work with. So those floorboards, and whatever had been tucked under them, were long gone.
Oh, Luchas, he thought. Why didn’t you tell me what you needed me to do after I got the damn stuff? Why didn’t you put it in the letter so I had something else to go on—
“What are you looking for, mister?”
Ignoring the kid, he tried to figure out his options. He supposed he could go get a hammer and bust up this section of the tile . . . at which point he’d have Ron, the second wife, and at least two kids as a peanut gallery—
“What’re you doing, Mouse?”
Qhuinn closed his eyes. Great. Ronnie was back.
“There’s this man in the house, Daddy.”
“Oh, hi,” Ron said as he came into the doorway. “How you doing?”
Like the pair of them were old friends.
As Qhuinn shot a glare over his shoulder, he was ready to fuck them both off—and yet, as he saw the pair standing together, both dark-haired, the little girl leaning onto her sire’s leg, the father with his hand on her shoulder, he knew he couldn’t curse at them.
He pictured him and Lyric doing the same thing, like, five years from now.
Well, okay, fine. If somebody broke into the mansion, they’d be vaporized before there was any conversation with anybody. But still.
“Hi, Ron.” Qhuinn let himself fall on his ass. “How are we doing?”
He asked this on a reflex because he knew exactly how everyone was: He’d lost his shot at helping Luchas, Ron had a vampire in his house, and little Cindy-Lou Who, or whatever her name was, was recording this whole thing like her brain was the Rosetta Stone.
“Are you looking for those old letters?” Ron asked.
Qhuinn frowned. “What?”
“The stuff in the floor? When we did this room over, we found this bundle of, like, envelopes.”
Before Qhuinn had a conscious thought, he was up on his feet. “You kept it? Them, I mean.”
“Yeah, I thought maybe someone would ask about whatever they are. But the guy I bought this place from—well, you, actually—see, I didn’t ever meet you, and when I tried to get in touch through the real estate agent, they couldn’t find your representative.”
Fritz was a very good proxy, wasn’t he. Present when he had to be, invisible to humans of all kinds when the legal work was done.
Ron rubbed his side like he had an itch on his liver. “They said this house had been in your family for two hundred years. Is that true?”
“Hey, Ron, I’d love to keep chatting, but I don’t suppose you could grab those letters for me?”
The kid looked up at her dad. “This was his older brother’s room.”