I grimaced at “my Thierry.”
“He’s become sort of my adopted sire. He helped me when I’d first been made into a vamp”—I glanced around. Better rephrase that—“An executive assistant of the night. He saved me from the, uh… mean people in human resources.”
“He saved you?” Thankfully, she seemed to be following my line of thought with an amused nod of her head. “Interesting. What about your natural sire?”
“He was transferred to the big company branch in the sky, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, dear.” She shook her head and made a tsk-tsk sound. “How horrible for you. And how long ago was that?”
“A week tomorrow night.”
She looked surprised. “Truly? I would have taken you for much older than that. You glow with an inner energy one normally only sees in much older… executive assistants.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of what Zelda told me, too. She said it’s because I’ve had Thierry’s blood… er… coffee. Yeah, Thierry sure does make a strong cup of coffee. More like espresso, if you ask me.”
She nodded. “Of course that would be it. Yes, his coffee would be strong by now.”
I sighed. “I can’t deal with the office analogy anymore. Can we talk about something else?”
She studied me for a moment. “I’m beginning to think that your friendship with my husband is more than I originally thought.”
I shook my head. “No, don’t think that way, because it’s not true. We’re just friends, and after tonight I’m not sure I even want to be that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sorry if this comes off as extremely naive to somebody like you, but I didn’t like what I saw tonight. That he would do something like that, it’s just so horrible. Even if he feels that he’s doing it for the right reasons, I’ll never understand it.”
“It is true.” She took another tiny sip of her drink. At the rate she was going, we were going to be there all night. “It is more his style to hide when danger appears and not come out until it’s gone.” She laughed then, and her voice sounded like delicate wind chimes.
“Excuse me?”
She smiled. “I’ll tell you one thing, my dear, you are very brave to go through all you have in the past week and come out on the other end looking no worse for wear. Truly admirable. But then there are those who would rather hide their heads like ostriches in the sand and hope no harm befalls them.”
I blinked at her. “Are you trying to say that Thierry’s an ostrich?”
She had to be mistaken. Were we talking about two different Thierrys? Maybe I’d blanked out at that part of the conversation earlier. Could happen.
“He once was. Oh, I could tell you stories.”
I ordered another drink. “For example?”
“No, no. I should say no more. I wouldn’t want to ruin his fa?ade as a brave and powerful leader of the… executive assistant community.”
I spotted an empty booth in the corner, which would afford us some privacy. My heart thudded in my chest at the thought of learning something about Thierry he’d prefer I didn’t know.
Veronique followed me as I moved through the wall of muscled beer-drinking men—and a few muscled, beer-drinking women—to the new table.
“I told you the other night that we met during the Black Death in Europe centuries ago, yes?” she said as she flicked her dark, gorgeous hair so it draped perfectly over one pale shoulder.
I glanced over to see a large, hairy man crack his pool cue into the next game so hard that several of the balls went flying off the table.
I leaned forward so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice to be heard. “Yes, you mentioned that.”
“Before the plague, it was a glorious time in France. I was the daughter of nobility, living on a vast estate.” She sighed. “Good times, let me tell you.”
“No indoor plumbing,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“No indoor plumbing,” I repeated. “I couldn’t have handled that. I can’t even deal with going camping. Okay, uh, never mind. Please continue.”
“One day my family entertained a very rich, very handsome gentleman. I fell immediately in love with him.”
I nodded. “Thierry.”
She laughed at that. “No, silly girl. Decidedly not Thierry. His name was Marcellus, and he was a powerful vampire. He took a liking to me and made me what you see before you today.”
Annoyingly perfect ? I hoped I hadn’t said that aloud.
“We were together for twenty glorious years. I was so happy. And, might I add, he was a magnificent and insatiable lover.”
I signaled to the bartender to bring me another shot. Immediately.
“Alas, my happiness was not to last, for one day he did not return to our homestead. I didn’t know if he’d been murdered, or if he simply felt that it was the right time to move on. I would have liked to believe that he was murdered.”
“Of course.” I nodded.
“By this time, the plague had befallen Europe. Without Marcellus’s money to support the way in which I was accustomed to living, I had to take to the streets. There were no servants to bring me my blood in a silver goblet anymore. I had to fend for myself. But during such a time of illness, there was plenty to drink just lying around.”
The bartender brought us three shots of tequila each. That would do for a couple of minutes.
Veronique continued when he walked away. “This was a terrible time for me. The sick would drop at your feet and die in a stinking mess right in front of you. It was rather unsavory. And unclean. No wonder they were all so ill. They can blame it on the rats all they like, but a proper floor scrubbing does no one any harm. Except perhaps the scullery maid.”
I glanced at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock. I hoped this wasn’t going to be a long story. I’d been the only one I knew who’d fallen asleep during Titanic.
“So, how did you meet Thierry?” I asked wearily.
“I’m getting to that, dear girl. But first I must set up the background of the story. So there
I was, a beautiful, helpless—yet immortal—woman in the middle of plague-ravaged Europe. Wandering aimlessly, searching for more of my kind who might take me in.
“Finally I came upon a small town called Le Vieux Cochon. Most of the peasants had left, but their homes were still fairly intact, so I decided that I would stay there for a while.
Wait out the plague, for I knew I had the time to be patient. I set myself up in a small but quaint cottage, and hoped not to be disturbed.”
She frowned. “But disturbed I was. One day there came a knock at the door and when I opened it, there was a wild-eyed man outside. Dirty, long-haired, and desperate. He begged me to take him in, that there was a mob after him. You see, then, those who were still healthy ran off those who were ill. If they couldn’t run them out of town, they simply killed them, burned their bodies in large piles in an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease.”