Page 13 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
She seemed less annoyed than amused, probably because the caller ID in question had come up “Scary Mary, Answer the Damn Phone.”
“Miss Windsor,” I answered, as chipper as I could manage before noon. But that was the weird part. Itwasalmost noon, and my mother’s assistant was calling me. The sun had been up for hours, and Mary Windsor, vampire for hundreds of years, was awake and on the phone, to me. “What can I do for you?”
“You can go to Charles Mailloux’s house,” she answered, crisp and businesslike, as always. “Your mother wants you investigating as soon as possible.”
“Investigating”—a click on the other end indicating she’d hung up left me uselessly asking—“what?” to dead air.
Still, I pulled the phone away and looked at it, like maybe it would say something other than “call ended” along with a count—the all of ten-point-four seconds that the conversation had taken.
Huh.
A second later the call screen disappeared, and I was back to the screen to pay for my ad in the Advocate. I turned back to the woman who’d been helping me, and gave her my most charming smile. “Sorry, I guess I have to wrap this up. I have a job to get to. Anything else I have to do?”
“Just click the ‘pay now’ button, and then remember to cancel the ad when you rent the space, or it’ll keep running and charge you twenty dollars every week.” She gave me a look, like she knew full well that I wasn’t going to remember to cancel thething, so I just smiled even more brightly as I hit the payment button, nodding.
“Thank you so much for your help. Hopefully a week will be all I need.”
She gave a little shrug, her expression dubious. “If the space is good, maybe. You never know.” From the look on her face, I was pretty sure she thought the place I was trying to rent out was a former hoarder-home, filled with a lifetime of garbage and a family of rabid raccoons.
That . . . might have been cool, actually. I liked raccoons.
Well, not the rabid part. I hated for anyone to be sick, especially animals, who sometimes struggled to understand why things like that happened.
Speaking of animals, a tiny black head popped up out of the inside pocket of my motorcycle jacket to look at the woman, blinking sleepy blue eyes.
The woman jolted back at the motion, then in real time, I watched her melt at the adorable face Twist was giving her.
Meanwhile, it was good, as usual, that people other than me didn’t understand animals. “I hunger, Father. Is she for eating?”
The words came out as a meow aloud, and the woman further melted at the tiny kitten mew. “Aww, how adorable. What’s her name?”
“This is Plot Twist,” I told her, then looked down at Twist. “We’ll stop and get you some lunch on the way to Charles’s house, kiddo. How does tuna sound?”
Twist cocked her head at me. “I do not know how it sounds. Is it an animal? Does it make a sound?”
Right. Baby animals, the most literal creatures in existence. Whywouldshe understand random human colloquialisms? I had no idea how my words translated to animals at all, but sometimes multiple meaning words and terms got a little jumbled up.
“Aww, it’s like she’s talking to you,” the newspaper-employee lady cooed, one hand to her chest in a gesture I was more used to meaning she was scandalized by me than that she thought I’d done something adorable.
But also, it wasn’t me who was cute, it was Twist.
Fair enough. I probably hadn’t been cute in close to thirty years.
I refrained from pointing out that the kitten had asked if she was lunch—people usually reacted poorly to hearing what animals said, even when they believed I wasn’t making it up. Besides, everyone deserved an illusion or two, especially after she had kindly dragged me through the whole process of setting up my ad to rent out half of the shop, and hadn’t even complained—much—when my attention had drifted.
Still, I needed to get moving, especially if I was going to stop and get Twist food before I went to Charles’s place.
I didn’t want to piss off Mary—no one in their right mind wanted to piss off Scary Mary. She was not only an extension of my mother, but she was an ancient vampire who was terrifying in her own right.
So I thanked the lady for her help, then headed out.
Twist had downed most of a pan of salmon already, and she was already hungry again. While I’d never had a cat before, I also wasn’t an unintelligent guy.
Twist? Was definitely not your average house cat. She hadn’t vomited it all back up, and wasn’t in horrible pain from eating more than her body weight in fish.
And Doc had said that she’d had a surprising amount of energy, so there was that, too. She was also trying to replenish after a magical healing, which took a lot out of a guy. Or a lady, as the case may be.
So instead of stopping at a grocery store and buying fifty cans of tuna, I decided to go through a drive-through. Unusualcat, unusual diet, right? “I’ll take fifteen unbreaded chicken sandwiches,” I told the lady over the speaker. “Fourteen of them without the buns, or the sauce, or the vegetables.”
