Blessed (3 page)

Taking the axe that Kieren and Clyde had left behind, I shuffled out of the lonely dining room and down the lonelier back hall. Ducking into a restroom marked
PREDATOR
, I leaned the long handle of the weapon against the counter and then splashed my face.

No mirror hung above the sink — another thematic touch, playing on the popular misconception that the undead can’t cast a reflection.

Hardly anyone knew much about vampirism — except that it was demonic in origin. By the mid-1700s, though, leaders of most major religions and various heads of state had acknowledged its existence, and according to a show I’d seen on the History Channel, the undead may have played a key role in the French Revolution, the sinking of the
Titanic,
and the JFK assassination.

Still, that didn’t give me a lot to go on. What the hell had I become?

I tore the sign that read
PREDATOR
off my restroom door and the
PREY
sign off its companion. The unisex approach might’ve been cutting-edge, but it was also a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I was calling the shots now.

I left the cross hanging where it was, on what had been the Prey door.

I needed to work. I was Mama’s daughter that way. The restaurant had always been more like home than my actual house was. I needed to cleanse it, reclaim it, if I ever hoped to feel safe and whole again. If that was even possible.

I dug through the storage closet — filled with artifacts from Fat Lorenzo’s — until I found the
M
and
W.
Then I grabbed the toolbox and nailed the letters back on their respective restroom doors.

Afterward, I returned to the closet for white cardboard and black markers. In the break room, I made two signs that read
CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY
, one for the front door and one for the back.

I probably didn’t need to haul the battle-axe around, but it made me feel better, having a weapon close.

On the employee bulletin board, someone had posted a newspaper clipping.

OBITUARIES

AUSTIN — Travis Reid, age 16, was called home by our Heavenly Father on September 13.

Reid was a sophomore at Waterloo High School, where he belonged to the Environmental Club and the Spanish Club.

He was preceded in death by his grandmother Christina Acosta. Survivors include his parents, Isabel and David Reid; his sister, Sierra; his grandparents Barbara and Clarence “Dutch” Reid; his grandfather Karl Richards; and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Visitation will be at 7
P.M
. today at Lane Family Funeral Home Chapel. The service will be at 10
A.M
. Tuesday at Bouldin Creek United Methodist Church. Burial will follow immediately at Magnolia Shade Cemetery.

The family has requested that memorial donations be sent in Reid’s name to the Austin Zoo and Rescue Sanctuary.

I hadn’t known Travis well, but he’d been shy, kind, and awkward, a pal of Kieren and Clyde’s, who’d briefly worked at Sanguini’s as a dishwasher. Beyond that, Travis may have been the only werearmadillo I’d ever met. His people were distant cousins to the Ice Age glyptodont, which had rivaled the VW Beetle in size.

He’d been murdered by Ruby, the same werecat who’d staked my vampire uncle earlier tonight before running off, hopefully forever. Not everybody with a tail or a heartbeat was a good person. It wasn’t as simple as that.

In the manager’s office, the digital clock read 3:38
A.M
. I stashed the axe in the safe, changed the combo, and grabbed my leather-bound planner book, nicknamed Frank. A gift from Kieren.

Kieren.
I flipped to a tasking page, determined to concentrate.

Sanguini’s would have to remain closed until I found a chef to replace Bradley. Talk about lousy timing! The place was booked solid for I-didn’t-know-how-long, and the customers would have hissy fits. But I had a much more serious problem than that.

Bradley had infused our signature dessert — the chilled baby squirrels, simmered in orange brandy, bathed in honey cream sauce — with his own blood. He’d hoped that those most predisposed toward viciousness, most likely to relish a vampiric existence, would order the horrific-sounding dish, ingest his blood, and thereby eventually join him — us — among the demonic.

According to Ruby, his intention had been to create an undead army to help him take over the underworld of Texas, whatever that meant. God only knew how he’d hoped to control the newly risen, but anyway, I didn’t find out about the plan until it was too late.

Before he left, Bradley had told me to consider the soon-to-rise neophytes a “parting gift,” but I didn’t for a minute believe that, after all of his scheming, he had any intention of actually abandoning them. Or, for that matter, me.

Regardless, Brad had been serving up death at
my
restaurant. What had been Mama’s and, before her, Gramma and Grampa Crimi’s restaurant. That made his victims my responsibility.

Frank in hand, I sprinted to the reservations book on the hostess stand in the foyer. Sanguini’s wasn’t big. We could serve fifty at a time, and we’d done only one seating for Friday’s party and two on both Saturday and Monday nights.

So, we’d served some 250 guests — plus those in the bar area. I figured upward of 325 total, give or take. I couldn’t know for sure how many had tasted the tainted dish, though, especially since people often split dessert orders.

I remembered chatting with guests from as far away as El Paso, Oklahoma City, and New Orleans. Not to mention the foreign exchange students from Ethiopia, the family on vacation from London, and the Middle Eastern studies professor on her way to Iraq. And then there were the innocents they would eventually kill or contaminate in turn.

I didn’t have to be a math whiz to realize that, in no time, the world could be faced with a full-scale preternatural crisis. But it wasn’t just about numbers.

Members of my staff — including my hostess, Yanira; my expeditor, Sergio; and my waitress pal, Mercedes — were among the infected, and they were practically family.

I turned to the calendar in my planner book. It took about a month after ingesting demonic blood for the transformation to occur. The first wave of Bradley’s victims would rise undead sometime after October 11, more with each passing sunset.

Happy Halloween to me.

Anticipating my arrival, Bradley had apparently excused the kitchen staff from cleanup. So, after posting the closed signs outside, I cranked Stevie Ray Vaughan on the sound system and attacked the job like I’d been tipped off to a health-inspector visit. I sprayed, wiped, and scrubbed. I spared no chemical cleanser, taking refuge in the mindless, familiar work. It felt surreal, like sleepwalking, but right then I couldn’t obsess over Kieren leaving or my own undeath or what my uncle and Bradley and the vice principal had done. Overwhelmed, I’d shut down inside. So I sprayed, wiped, and scrubbed some more.

Once the stainless-steel countertops gleamed, I threw Brad’s copy of
A Taste of Transylvania
and his prized collection of black-cherry cooking utensils into one of the trash bags and then hauled it outside to the Dumpster.

Cutting through the parking lot, I noticed Kieren’s mama’s van in the back row. The side read
Endless Love Bridal Planning
. Hours earlier, he had ripped the driver’s side door from its hinges so he could get to me. It made sense that Kieren had chosen to leave the damaged, easy-to-ID vehicle behind, but then what? Did he take Uncle D’s convertible or Clyde’s car? And where was Kieren
going,
anyway? The Wolf pack’s location was a secret that, until recently, even he hadn’t known.

It was just after 5
A.M
., the sun wouldn’t be up for another couple of hours, and I’d run out of to-dos to distract myself. The shock of all that had happened had begun to dissipate, and my throat ached. I felt my knees buckle from the losses, and nearly fell to the asphalt. It seemed like the right thing to do. Dead things had no place walking around.

Then the headlight beam of a motorcycle zooming north on Congress Avenue glinted against metal lying in the beaten brown grass of the empty lot next door. I jogged over to discover Kieren’s turquoise-and-silver crucifix. He’d torn it off last night before we’d gone inside to confront Brad. I’d flinched at the sight of it, but had my reaction been psychological or supernatural?

Contrary to popular opinion, the effect of religious symbols varied, depending on the symbol, depending on the vampire, but I’d always thought of myself as a believer. If I touched the crucifix now, would my fingertips burst into flames?

I crouched in the hard-packed, dirt-and-weed lot, feeling watched, even though the normally bustling restaurant-shopping-entertainment district was empty and quiet. Was Brad watching me from the shadows? From around a corner or some nearby rooftop? Had he left for good or just gone into hiding, biding his time?

I hesitated as a black bird landed a few feet away and began pecking and scratching at the ground. Another joined it. Another, another, another . . . until I was surrounded by swooping, prancing, cawing. I’d never seen so many crows. Ravens? Hundreds? Thousands?

They blanketed the empty lot and lined the arch of the streetlight, the roof lines, the phone and power lines, the branches of nearby trees, the restaurant itself. They chattered and danced and then, as if on command, went eerily silent. Eerily still.

Someone else might’ve viewed the birds as a bad omen, but I’d always thought crows were magnificent and proud and, really, what could be scarier than me? Besides, they were creatures of God, like human beings and the shape-shifters who straddled the human and animal worlds. I was the unnatural one.

A train whistle blew in the distance, and I snatched the necklace from the ground before one of the birds could beat me to it. Kieren had broken the chain, so I fastened the latch to a link. His neck was thicker than mine, and the cross fell against the V between my breasts. I braced for the burn, but the metal against my skin felt blessedly neutral.

Tension leaked from my knotted muscles, and, startling the crows, I spread my arms wide. As they rose, screaming, flowing in black waves into the dying night, I closed my eyes and raised my grateful, tear-stained face to heaven.

In the break room, I watched a News 8 cycle, making sure Kieren hadn’t been arrested, until dozing off on the faded floral sofa.

“I’m here,” he said. “You’re not alone, never alone.”

I found myself back on Sanguini’s dance floor. “Kieren?”

“You can’t forget me,” he answered, leading me in a waltz. “We’re one blood.”

“Who?”

“I know you,” he replied. “You’ll try to fight it. But you’ll only be fighting your true self. It’s done. It’s destined. In time, you’ll come to accept it.” He pulled back his sleeve to reveal two dress watches. “In time, you’ll come to me.”