All Together Dead

I think you should go find Diantha, Mr. C. I think there’s something really strange and wrong about this extra coffin they’re talking about. There was that extra suitcase, too,” I said. “I carried it up to the queen’s suite.”
    Mr. Cataliades looked at me blankly. I could see that he considered the small problem of extra items turning up in a hotel to be a small one and below his concern. “Did Eric tell you about the murdered woman?” I asked, and his attention sharpened.
    “I haven’t seen Master Eric this evening,” he said. “I’ll be sure to track him down.”
    “Something’s up; I just don’t know what,” I muttered more or less to myself, and then I turned away to catch up with Sophie-Anne.
    Commerce was conducted in a sort of bazaar style. Sophie-Anne positioned herself by the table where Bill was sitting, back at work selling the computer program. Pam was helping him, but she was in her regular clothes, and I was glad the harem costume was getting a rest. I wondered what the procedure was, but I adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and I found out soon enough. The first to approach Sophie-Anne was the big blond vampire who’d served as a judge earlier. “Dear madam,” he said, kissing her hand. “I am charmed to see you, as always, and devastated by the destruction of your beautiful city.”
    “A small portion of my beautiful city,” Sophie-Anne said with the sweetest of smiles.
    “I am in despair at the thought of the straits you must be in,” he continued after a brief pause to register her correction. “You, the ruler of such a profitable and prestigious kingdom…now brought so low. I hope to be able to assist you in my humble fashion.”
    “And what form would that assistance take?” Sophie-Anne inquired.
    After much palaver, it turned out that Mr. Flowery was willing to bring a gazillion board feet of lumber to New Orleans if Sophie-Anne would give him 2 percent of her next five years’ revenue. His accountant was with him. I looked into his eyes with great curiosity. I stepped back, and Andre slithered to my side. I turned so that no one could read my lips.
    “Quality of the lumber,” I said as quietly as a hummingbird’s wings.
    That took forever to hammer out, and it was boring, boring, boring. Some of the wannabe providers didn’t have humans with them, and I was no help with those; but most of them did. Sometimes the human had paid the vampire a substantial sum to “sponsor” him, so he could just be in the hall and pitch his woo in a one-on-one setting. By the time vendor number eight simpered to a stop in front of the queen, I was unable to suppress my yawns. I’d noticed Bill was doing a landmark business selling copies of his vampire database. For a reserved kind of guy, he did a good job of explaining and promoting his product, considering some of the vampires were very mistrustful of computers. If I heard about the “Yearly Update Package” one more time, I was gonna puke. There were lots of humans clustering around Bill, because they were more computer savvy than the vamps as a whole. While they were absorbed, I tried to get a scan in here and there, but they were just thinking megahertz and RAM and hard drives—stuff like that.
    I didn’t see Quinn. Since he was a wereanimal, I figured he’d be completely over his wound of the night before. I could only take his absence as a signal. I was heart-heavy and weary.
    The queen invited Dahlia, the little, pretty vampire who’d been so direct in her judgment, up to her suite for a drink. Dahlia accepted regally, and our whole party moved up to the suite. Christian Baruch tagged along; he’d been hovering around Sophie-Anne all evening.
    His courtship of Sophie-Anne was heavy-handed, to say the least. I thought again of the boy toy I’d watched the previous evening, tickling the back of his ladylove in imitation of a spider, because he knew she was frightened of them, and how he’d gotten her to snuggle closer to him. I felt a lightbulb come on over my head and wondered if it was visible to anyone else.
    My opinion of the hotelier plummeted. If he thought such a strategy would work on Sophie-Anne, he had a lot of thinking to do.
    I didn’t see Jake Purifoy anywhere around, and I wondered what Andre had him doing. Something innocuous probably, like checking to make sure all the cars were gassed up. He wasn’t really trusted to handle anything more taxing, at least not yet. Jake’s youth and his Were