“How about Lillian?”
“Who?”
Charmaine laughed. “Lillian is Tante Lulu’s car.”
“She has a car?”
Charmaine laughed again. “Oh yeah! It’s parked in the small detached garage on the far side of her cottage.”
Gabrielle walked through the house to the other side and glanced out a window. Yep, there was a small building there. “Do you think she’d mind if I borrow the car for the day?”
“She’d thank you for giving it a run. Lillian isn’t taken out much these days. The keys are on that pegboard by the pantry.”
“Thanks a lot, Charmaine. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t seen Lillian.”
How bad could it be? After tidying the kitchen, Gabrielle showered and dressed, having discovered a packed suitcase in her bedroom. Had Ivak packed it? She shook her head, not wanting to picture him going through her underwear drawer.
Locking the house, she went over and opened the old-fashioned folding wood doors of the garage. She now knew why Charmaine had laughed.
Lillian was a lavender Chevy Impala convertible, circa 1965, with a St. Jude wobbly doll on the dashboard. On the back was a bumper sticker that said, “Not So Close, I’m Not That Kind of Car.” It was so big it barely fit in the small garage, and it took Gabrielle a good fifteen minutes before she was able to back out without scraping the sides.
Actually, Gabrielle enjoyed driving the big old relic of a luxurious past, with its white leather interior and all the bells and whistles of an older time, including, thank you, God, blessed air-conditioning, although she wouldn’t need that with the top down.
Of course, it took her a half hour to find a parking place big enough for the politically incorrect Purple Princess in the busy Saturday French Quarter, even though the Second Chances storefront offices were on a side street off the usual beaten path. Several of her coworkers who were just arriving stopped to witness her attempts to parallel park the oversize Lillian. She had no idea how the diminutive Tante Lulu managed.
Since she was early, she decided to walk down to her apartment, a mere two blocks away, and check on things. Surely she’d dreamed that a bunch of Viking vampire angels had suggested staying in her place to watch demon vampires across the street. It was too fantastical to be true.
She glanced over at the Anguish restaurant from the other side of the street, and everything looked perfectly normal, with tourists and Quarter residents walking in and out casually. No beasts with tails in sight. It must have been a bad dream.
Enough with the dreams already!
She unlocked the outside, street-level door to her apartment building and walked up the steep steps to the landing. Using a second key, she opened the door . . . and almost had a heart attack as one person yanked her inside the entryway, and five other people crammed into her small living room pointed weapons at her. Everything from rifles to swords. And was that a machine gun over there? Good Lord!
Each of them was yelling at her:
“Drop the briefcase!”
“Hands up!”
“Identify yourself!”
“Frisk her for weapons!”
“Are you carrying a bomb, ma’am?”
She regained her composure once another person entered from the kitchen carrying a mug. With hysterical irrelevance, she presumed the mug must contain her instant coffee. She didn’t own a coffeemaker. It was one of the men she’d met here last night, Ivak’s brother Harek. When he yelled, “Halt!” the others froze. “It’s the owner of this apartment, Ivak’s soul mate.”
“I am not—” she started to say, then stopped.
“Ms. Sonnier, we were told you wouldn’t be coming back until we gave the safe signal.”
“I came in to work today and—”
“You work on a Saturday?” Harek interrupted.
“Yes, some of us need to work,” she snapped.
He shrugged an apology, realizing how rude his question had been.
“I needed some papers from my bedroom filing cabinet,” she prevaricated quickly. Jeesh! Since when did she need to explain herself to strangers?
“Sorry if we scared you,” Harek said, then introduced her to the other six “vangels” in the room. She knew that’s what they were because that’s how Harek identified them. Welcome to Weirdsville. Again. There were five men and one woman, besides Harek. All tall, physically fit, and Norse in appearance. They stared at her with curiosity; she just stared.
“Come, have some coffee with me in the kitchen,” Harek suggested.
She was about to protest that she had to be in her office soon, but he was already walking away from her. On her kitchen counter now sat a state-of-the-art coffeemaker, the kind that cost as much as her car at stores like Williams-Sonoma. The kind that used those expensive little individual cardboard cups of specialty gourmet coffee. When Harek opened her fridge to remove some cream, she noticed there were about a dozen different kinds of beer inside, none of which she’d purchased.
“Don’t worry,” Harek said, motioning for her to sit at the small table where he placed a cup of coffee along with packets of sugar and the cream. Most of the table was taken up with a laptop computer and paperwork that Harek must have been working on. “We will leave your apartment like we found it when we finish here.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. I’m just stunned by all of this.” She motioned toward her kitchen-turned-office and the living room that had been turned into a fortress.
Harek shrugged, leaning back against the counter and sipping at his own coffee. “It’s the usual reaction of people on first meeting us.”
Gabrielle fought for something normal to say in a situation that was far from normal. “Um, how long have you all been around? I find it hard to believe that vampires of any kind exist in real life, let along demon vampires and angel vampires.”
“Viking angel vampires,” he corrected her. “You can’t forget that, at heart, we are still Norsemen . . . and women. As for how long, in the case of me and my brothers, more than one thousand years.”
“Impossible!” That would mean Ivak must be . . . no, it was too unbelievable.
“Believe it or not, it is what it is.”
“Why are you . . . and Ivak . . . being so open about all this? Aren’t you afraid I’ll go to the police or the news media?”
“You could try. Before you could do that, though, we could erase your memory, but mainly we do not fear your treachery because you are obviously Ivak’s soul mate.”
“Aaarrgh! I am not a soul mate.”
“Ivak said you were, and I could practically see the sizzle between you two last night.”
The dream occurred to her suddenly. “Sizzle does not mean soul mate.”
“You could be right about that,” he said dubiously, “considering that Ivak is the expert on sizzle.”
She shouldn’t ask. She really shouldn’t. “The expert on sizzle?”
“I suppose Ivak hasn’t had time to explain everything to you. My brothers and I were each guilty in a big way of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Mine was greed. Ivak’s was—”
“Lust,” she guessed.
Harek didn’t even bother to answer, just sipped at his own coffee.
“Why am I not surprised? That still doesn’t mean I’m some kind of freakin’ soul mate. Is this soul mate nonsense a common thing for you . . . um, vangels?”
“Not at all. Until recently, we didn’t even know that we vangels, especially the VIK . . . that’s what we call us seven brothers as leaders . . . could marry humans. But then my brother Vikar met Alex, a magazine journalist. They live in Transylvania.”
“Romania?” Why that shocked her, she wasn’t sure.
“No, our headquarters is a run-down castle in Transylvania, Pennsylvania.”
When she appeared too confused to ask more, Harek continued, “After that, my brother Trond met his soul mate at Coronado, California where they are both
Navy SEALs. Well, he is a SEAL in training. She is a member of WEALS, or female SEALs.”
Gabrielle put both hands to her throbbing head. “This is too much for me to comprehend, and I have to get to my meeting ASAP.”
As he walked her to the front door, Harek remarked, “It’s really not a good idea for you to be in this neighborhood until we clear out the Lucies. I should accompany you, at least part of the way.”
She was about to open her door when it burst open and there stood an obviously furious Ivak, hands on hips, legs widespread in a battle stance, glaring at her.
“Wench, you are in such trouble.”
Ten
Oh, for the days when women were meek and biddable . . .
Ivak was so angry he could scarce hold his fangs in.
The woman stood before him, exactly where he’d told her not to go, and dared to shoot darts of her own anger at him. Was she so stubborn that she would put her life in danger just to prove a point? Did she have any idea what he could do to her?
“There are mules with more sense than you have,” he snarled.
“There are asses with more sense than you have,” she snarled back.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“What are you doing here?” she countered, and stepped around him and proceeded to walk down the stairs.
“Where else would I be?” He followed her to the bottom of the steps, where they both stopped. Deciding he’d had enough of her mulishness, he picked her up by the waist and lifted her against the wall so that her feet dangled above the floor. So shocked was she, and thankfully silent for the moment, that the leather briefcase in her hand dropped to the floor with a thud.
She soon regained her voice, however. “Let me go, you big oaf. I don’t appreciate being manhandled by some obnoxious Viking wannabe.”
“Obnoxious, am I? A Viking imposter, am I? Have a care, wench, you are pushing the bounds of my temper.”
“That’s another thing. Are you aware that wench is an insulting term to use for a woman?”
“It is?” That surprised him. Somewhat. He shrugged. There were more important issues at hand here. “I do not know if you are truly my soul mate, or not. God knows, I would prefer that you are not. But, on the off chance that you are, that makes you my responsibility, and that means I cannot have you strolling into danger like a willful child.”
“You . . . you . . .” she sputtered, and raised a fist.
He kissed her lips quickly, before she had a chance to hit him, and set her back on her feet. “Now, where are you off to that is so important?”
“My office. I have work to do.”
“I will go with you.”
“You will not!” She turned and leaned down to pick up her briefcase and some papers that had fallen out.
He noticed then that she was wearing braies today, black pleated, linen-like pants that hugged her hips and long legs. On top, she wore a silky white blouse tucked into the waist with a wide silver linked belt. Her black hair was loose, in waves, to her shoulder and held off her face with two pearl combs. “I like your ass,” he remarked.
She glanced up at him over her shoulder and then shot up straight. “Are you really so clueless you don’t know how obnoxious you are?”
“Huh? I just paid you a compliment. I would not be insulted if you said you liked my ass.”
She shook her head as if he were a hopeless case, then opened the door and stormed out to the sidewalk.
He followed, of course, checking right and left to make sure there were no Lucies about.
At first, she ignored his presence, but then she made a snide remark. “Don’t you ever dress normal?”
“What’s wrong with my attire?” He could understand her comment about his apparel at the prison, or his cloak last night, but today he was wearing an open, long-sleeved denim shirt over a white T-shirt with denim braies and lightweight ankle boots. No priestly dog collar.
“It’s ninety degrees today. You must be sweltering.”
He shrugged. He needed the outer shirt to hide the weapons strapped to his back and tucked into his waistband, and the boots held several knives.
Now that his anger had subsided, he tried to make conversation with her. “Why do you live in New Orleans? Why not somewhere closer to the prison, like Baton Rouge?”
“This is where my work is. I need to be with a firm that understands about my brother and allows me to work flexible hours so I can take care of his business. A big law firm wouldn’t be so compassionate.”
Maybe he should offer her money to alleviate her hardships. He would save that suggestion for later. If she was so stubborn about his care for her physical safety, she would surely balk about financial help.
“Besides, I love this city with all its history and quaintness. The architecture, like those iron lace railings over there, and the many preserved buildings in the old Quarter. The food. The traditions. Mardi Gras. Jazz. Oh, I know it’s seedy in parts, and I certainly grew up in the section that was downright dismal, but it’s where I want to be. For now.”
He nodded. “I was here before the war, and it was a grand place, even then. You should have seen opening night at the Opera House. The men in perfectly tailored suits with silk shirts adorned with ruffled lace, waistcoats of brocaded satin, even gloves. And ladies were beautiful in their hooped dresses and daring décolletages.”
“What war?”
He glanced at her. “The Civil War, of course.”
She stopped and stared at him.
Belatedly, he realized that she still did not believe his vangel story. With a sigh, he took her hand as they continued walking. For a moment she resisted his hand holding, but gave up under his persistence. He continued talking, “The Vieux Carré, that is what the French Quarter was called then. It was just as busy as it is now, but instead of cars and buses, there were horse-drawn wagons . . . the milk wagon, the water wagon, the kerosene wagon. Then there was the Waffle Man, and vendors in wagons selling Roman candy and flavored snowballs.”
Her eyes were wide with amazement, but not yet belief.
So, he continued, “It was not uncommon to see black women carrying baskets or wooden bowls on their heads as they rhythmically sang out their wares for sale. ‘Strawberries, fresh and fine!’ ‘Calas! Calas! Get them while they’re hot!’ Shutters would fly open and servants or housewives would invite vendors over to display their wares.”
“You could have read all that in a book.”
“I suppose, but I am not much for reading. I am more of a doer.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“You make it sound like a better time than today.”
“Not at all. There was also yellow fever, hurricanes, floods, dueling, unbearable heat and humidity, body odor like you wouldn’t believe, and of course slavery, the biggest abomination.”
She still frowned.
He decided that now was not the time to inform her of his having owned slaves himself at one time. “Then, of course, there were the fancy girls in the sporting houses.”
“And you know all about them, I’ll bet.”
“Of course. I saved many a soul about to be taken by the Lucies in the red-light district. Dominique was not established here then, but there were Lucies drawn by the decadent lifestyle.”
They had arrived at Gabrielle’s offices by then and she put up a halting hand. “You are not coming in with me.”
He stiffened. “Are you ashamed to be seen with me?” After all, she had commented on his clothing.
“I don’t want to have to explain you.”
Just then a woman of forty-some years came up to them. “Are you going in now, Gabby? Hey, who’s your friend?”
He could tell that Gabrielle didn’t want to introduce him. Tough! He extended a hand and said, “Greetings. My name is Ivak Sigurdsson. I am a chaplain at Angola Prison. And you are . . . ?”
“Estelle Johnson,” the woman replied with a warm smile and squeeze of his hand.
“Ah, a good Norse name! Johnsson. I am Viking, too. A friend of Gabrielle’s.”
He could tell that Gabrielle wanted to refute their connection, but Estelle spoke first, “Are you coming inside to wait for Gabby? I’ll put some fresh coffee on.”
“Thank you for the invitation,” he said, and stepped through the doorway before Gabrielle could object. Tapping a fingertip on her frowning mouth, he whispered, “I do not like the name Gabby. You shall always be Gabrielle to me. Or sweetling. Although you are not looking so sweet at the moment.”
She growled. She actually growled.
The sound zapped him with an instant shot of arousal, almost as if she’d grabbed his male parts and given him a little squeeze. He must have been gaping because she said, “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
Truth be told, he feared he was getting a little sick. Lovesick. But what he said was, “Hurry up with your meeting, love, and I will show you my side of the Old South. The best side.”
So, this is what it’s like to date a vampire . . .
Love? Had the man really called her “love”? Not for the first time, she saw Ivak as a player, pure and simple. Did he think he could charm her with such throwaway endearments? Hah!
To Gabrielle’s chagrin, however, Ivak did charm every one of the women who entered the offices. He obviously loved women, and he showed it in the complete attention he gave each and every one of them and the way he constantly touched them, the innocent squeeze of a shoulder when Lisa O’Dell, the secretary, told him of her disabled child, or the brush of hair off the face of the newly widowed Georgia Lane, their lead attorney. She also noticed the appreciative scrutiny he gave the good-looking ones, or those with ample curves. A testosterone-oozing horndog, she decided. One she needed to avoid.
But, truthfully, the men were impressed, too. He could discuss the New Orleans Saints or local jazz musicians with equal ease. His size and physique impressed the men, as well as the women. Steve Mason, who managed their office, even asked him if he was a professional athlete.
To her embarrassment and chagrin, in the brief time before her meeting started, he grilled each of the men, clearly staking his claim on her. “Are you married?” “How long have you known Gabrielle?” That kind of thing.