Page 73 of Crimson Oath
Rumi’s eyebrows went up. “You want to knead bread?”
“I used to bake when I was a child,” she said. “With my grandmother. I’m pretty good at kneading.”
“Ha!” Rumi was delighted. “If it were colder, I would take you up on your offer in a second, but we only let vampires knead bread in the winter.”
“What?” Tatyana frowned. “Why?”
“Your energy.” Rumi pointed to Tatyana’s hands, then returned to the stew. “The yeast loves vampire energy. When it’s warm like this, it will rise too fast and throw off the texture.”
Tatyana’s mouth fell open. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I was because vampires make excellent bakers.” Rumi winked at her. “Do you know any fire vampires we could borrow?”
“I… No.” She stammered. “I mean… No.”
Rumi looked like she wanted to ask more about that, but instead, she pointed at the stew. “You can stir this if you like” —she glanced at Tatyana’s hands— “so I can chop onions for the next batch. If it gets too hot, you know how to cool fire down, yes?”
Pulling water from the air and directing it to put out a fire was one of Tatyana’s earliest lessons with Kato. “Yes, I can do that.”
“Good. If you let it stick, the darigan will never let you forget it.” Rumi left Tatyana stirring the goulash and walked over to a wooden table that had been folded down from the side of a kitchen wagon. “So you made it a month before you got bored.”
She smiled. “I have never been a person who did not have a job. Even when I was a child, I had chores with my mother or my grandparents.”
“Like baking bread?”
“That was a pleasure,” Tatyana said. “Mostly I shoveled a lot of shit.”
Rumi barked a laugh. “I’ve never heard a vampire who’d admit to something like that.”
This was so much better. Talking with Rumi while she chopped onions and Tatyana kept the stew moving over the fire felt like being back in her grandmother’s kitchen.
“My mother keeps birds,” Tatyana said. “Pigeons? She loves them, but they shit a lot, you know.”
“Bird shit is good for the garden.”
“That’s what she always said too. Our neighbor would take buckets of it and give us vegetables in return, so it was a good trade. We had the roof apartment, so no garden for my mother unless we went to the farm where she grew up.”
“You’re young, aren’t you?” Rumi asked. “For a vampire.”
“Yes.” Tatyana nodded. “I’m new at this life.”
“But you’re not with your sire?” Rumi frowned. “That’s hard to be away. You should be with your sire.”
Tatyana felt a burning pain in her chest where Zara’s blood had tied them together. “We had a complicated relationship.”
“Family is always complicated.” Rumi said nothing else. “Still, you must be doing well for yourself if you can afford to be here.”
Tatyana smiled. Poshani humans were not deferential around vampires. Polite, yes. But also blunt. It was wonderful. “Unlike most of the older vampires, I’m actually quite good at computer technology.”
Over the years, she’d discovered that vague references to computers often let people assume she was whatever they wanted to imagine. In her experience, most people thought that those who worked in technology could make a lot of money, and they usually didn’t ask how.
“My brother would love to meet you.” Rumi scraped a chopped onion into a bowl and started on another. “He works in Vano’s office with… information systems or something like that?”
Tatyana filed that information away for future use if necessary. “Vano is the terrin who will join the kamvasa later, correct? The one who takes care of most of the human business matters?”
Rumi nodded. “He used to keep the main Poshani offices in Kyiv, but he has relocated to Warsaw these days.”
“Of course. The current political situation…” She trailed off with a meaningful shrug.
