“Stalker never showed last night,” I said to Veek over breakfast.
He looked heavy-eyed. “Yes, she did. I intercepted her.” He lathered his pancakes with butter.
“Thanks, buddy.” I flipped more pancakes off the griddle onto my own plate and brought it to the table. “What you gonna do, now that the old man isn’t pimping you out?” I said, stuffing my face.
“Go to France,” he said. “My heir has filed suit in the Direction des affaires civiles et du Sceau of the Ministère de la Justice. If I don’t present myself or send a lawyer in two weeks, I forfeit the title.”
He let his arms rest on the table, knife in one hand, fork in the other. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around long enough to learn American table manners. Those upper-crust Europeans had hammered their manners into him good and hard.
“I didn’t know you cared that much.”
He sighed. “I care. For a long time I’ve been planning to go back there, to fight this battle, once—” Once Jake died? “Perhaps I have no chance. I can’t walk into court to present this.” He lifted his arms again, as if showing me his hard, young-looking body. “This doesn’t look like a ninety-six-year-old man. I could wear an illusion of being an old man in court. But then, even if I win, I would have to spend the rest of—of my life pretending to be an old man.”
He seemed to shrink as he talked. I noticed the hesitation about his life expectancy.
I wanted to ask him why he cared about a title he’d ignored for decades. “Do you think the French will be cool with you looking too young?” I paused in the act of forking a thick stack of pancake wedges into my mouth. “I mean, once they get past how you look too black.”
He gave one of his shrugs. “I don’t know. Magic invaded Europe long before it came here. Other countries are beginning to adapt. But the French don’t change readily, especially their laws and traditions.”
He looked so worried that I changed the subject. “This stalker chick. What did Jake have in mind when he handed your navel string to her?”
Veek cut a slice of bacon in half and forked it into his face, chewing daintily. “I’ve been thinking about that. She was as surprised as I to hear of it. I don’t think he handed it to her. I think he hid it among her possessions. Perhaps he distracted her and put it into her pocket.”
“It’ll go through the wash and dissolve, and then you’re home free,” I said, pointing at the bright side.
“Or perhaps it’s in her shoe. Or in the lining of her handbag.”
I wiped melted butter off my chin with the back of my hand. “Something to worry about.”
“Indeed.”
I said, “Can the navel string stop me from helping you get it away from her?”
Veek gave me a look of such gratitude that it nearly made me mushy. That guy lived in silence, alone in the world except for Jake, like a hobo or a monk.
Okay, like a monk with very expensive tastes.
“I don’t know. It seems she can command me, but she doesn’t yet realize when she is doing it.”
“That’s a little weird.”
“It gets weirder.” He drank coffee from his bone-china demitasse, set it down with a precise clink, and blotted his lips with a paper napkin. “She is the daughter of my heir. Her father is the man who would be Vicomte Montmorency if I could be proven to be dead.” I opened my mouth and he held up a hand. “He’s here in Chicago, looking for me, presumably to find that proof. It is she who told me of the court hearing in two weeks. She thinks Jake was the true vicomte and that I’m ‘some kind of vodou demon Jake captured.’ This could be a problem if she comes to understand her power over me—and if she changes her mind and decides to side with him.”
I shut my gaping jaw. “You said she doesn’t know.”
“No. But luck may be smiling on me. She doesn’t want him to succeed. For reasons having to do with adolescent rebellion, I gather, she wishes to foil his plans, to fool him into declaring me the true vicomte. She wants me to go to Paris, to the court, and pose as,” he opened his hands, “myself.”
“Holy frozen shit on a stick with caramel coating.”
He nodded.
I wrapped my head around this for a while. “That navel string is gonna be a wild card. How the hell did Jake get hold of it, anyway? And how did you get hold of it?”
“My nurse gave it to me when I was very young. She was first my mother’s nurse. She warned me to guard it forever, so I did.”
“Obviously it got away from you.”
“I gave it to Jake.”
I stared at him. “I know you were close, but jeez.”
He flicked a glance at me. “We were boys in that vodou house in New Orleans together. He was my cousin. I was a stodgy fifteen, he was a reckless twenty. We, how you say, bonded. Soon after we ran away, I became uncomfortable with happenings—the stirrings of the powers I have now—and I wanted to ensure that someone I trusted was there to stop me. I feared that I might do something I should not.”
Which was so typical of Veek. Most guys who find powers like ours coming on don’t waste a minute trying ’em out. I began to see why Jake had wanted to shake him out of his sobriety.
Veek looked bleak. “Jake called it my ‘leash.’ Sometimes he would remind me he had it. If for example he got us into trouble, sometimes he worried I might not want to get us out.” Veek almost smiled. “I would always have done so.” He said simply, “We were like brothers.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“No, not lovers. Jake belonged to Samedi, who has his moments, but he never went there with me.” He smiled broader now. “Jake blamed all his peccadilloes on Samedi. I should have known he was hiding things from me. He liked to shock me. It was part of our friendship.”
I stared at him while he went back to eating bacon with a knife and fork.
Veek was the youngest of us slacker demons, not quite a century old, and the most fragile. Yes, fragile. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, toughened by hard miles, lean and muscular, a good boxer, inked on his face like a rapper. But he was nearly a century old.
A baby, in fact.
I was twenty-seven hundred myself, and our ex-roomie Kamadeva, who had recently moved out and gotten married, was over six thousand.
I wondered if it was time to talk about this stuff with Veek.
“Look, buddy,” I began. “There comes a time in every immortal’s life when he begins to realize that he isn’t going to die. Maybe he’s been told he won’t die, but it hasn’t sunk in yet. Or maybe nobody has told him, and it just happened somehow. That radioactive spider bite doesn’t come with an instruction booklet.”
Veek’s little hazel eyes got round.
I said bluntly, “Jake was your last tie to your past—your mortal life. He knew you when you were young and stupid. When the last friend of his first life dies, an immortal feels it. It’s when he loses an irretrievable part of his humanity.”
On some sneaky level I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge, I was glad to be the only person left who knew Veek for even half of what he was. He would need me. I was damned glad to have even one roommate left.
He said, as if he’d been thinking of something else, “I should have known Jake would save some secrets for the very end.” He raised his eyes to me. “He burned his candle at both ends. I read a poem about that once.”
“Dorothy Parker,” I said, hiding my astonishment.
He put his dishes in the sink, and picked up his briefcase. Not for the first time I wondered what the hell he kept in it.
“You’re still manning the shop?”
“The mambo from Jake’s people was supposed to come today for the burial ceremonies. She will be annoyed with me for not being already there to begin last night.”
“Sounds like a fun time. Write if you get work.”
“Text,” he said, showing his teeth, not a happy face if you knew him. “We text now.”
I waited ten minutes, then put on some street shoes and mooched out after him. When that priestess came for Jake’s body, she would have me on her tail.