All Together Dead

said in a voice that was just short of a hiss. “No. And the witch who cursed me is dead, though the curse was broken. Now she can’t tell me what her curse entailed. Was I supposed to look for the person I hated? Loved? Could it have been random that I found myself running out in the middle of nowhere…except that nowhere was on the way to your house?”
    A moment of uneasy silence on my part. I had no idea what to say, and Eric was clearly waiting for a response.
    “Probably the fairy blood,” I said weakly, though I had spent hours telling myself that my fraction of fairy blood was not significant enough to cause more than a mild attraction on the part of the vampires I met.
    “No,” he said. And then he was gone.
    “Well,” I said out loud, unhappy with the quiver in my voice. “As exits go, that was a good one.” It was pretty hard to have the last word with a vampire.

Chapter 8
    “My bags are packed…” I sang.
    “Well, I’m not so lonesome I could cry,” Amelia said. She’d kindly agreed to drive me to the airport, but I should have made her promise to be pleasant that morning, too. She’d been a little broody the whole time I was putting on my makeup.
    “I wish I was going, too,” she said, admitting what had been sticking in her craw. Of course, I’d known Amelia’s problem before she’d said it out loud. But there wasn’t a thing I could do.
    “It’s not up to me to invite or not invite,” I said. “I’m the hired help.”
    “I know,” she said grumpily. “I’ll get the mail, and I’ll water the plants, and I’ll brush Bob. Hey, I heard that the Bayou State insurance salesman needs a receptionist, since the mom of the woman who worked for him got evacuated from New Orleans and has to have full-time care.”
    “Oh, do go in to apply for that job,” I said. “You’ll just love it.” My insurance guy was a wizard who backed up his policies with spells. “You’ll really like Greg Aubert, and he’ll interest you.” I wanted Amelia’s interview at the insurance agency to be a happy surprise.
    Amelia looked at me sideways with a little smile. “Oh, is he cute and single?”
    “Nope. But he has other interesting attributes. And remember, you promised Bob you wouldn’t do guys.”
    “Oh, yeah.” Amelia looked gloomy. “Hey, let’s look up your hotel.”
    Amelia was teaching me how to use my cousin Hadley’s computer. I’d brought it back with me from New Orleans, thinking I’d sell it, but Amelia had coaxed me to set it up here at the house. It looked funny on a desk in the corner of the oldest part of the house, the room now used as a living room. Amelia paid for an extra phone line for the Internet, since she needed it for her laptop upstairs. I was still a nervous novice.
    Amelia clicked on Google and typed in “Pyramid of Gizeh hotel.” We stared at the picture that popped up on the screen. Most of the vampire hotels were in large urban centers, like Rhodes, and they were also tourist attractions. Often called simply “the Pyramid,” the hotel was shaped like one, of course, and it was faced with bronze-colored reflective glass. There was one band of lighter glass around one of the floors close to the base.
    “Not exactly…hmmm.” Amelia looked at the building, her head tilted sideways.
    “It needs to slant more,” I said, and she nodded.
    “You’re right. It’s like they wanted to have a pyramid, but they didn’t really need enough floors to make it look right. The angle’s not steep enough to make it look really grand.”
    “And it’s sitting on a big rectangle.”
    “That, too. I expect those are the convention rooms.”
    “No parking,” I said, peering at the screen.
    “Oh, that’ll be below the building. They can build ’em that way up there.”
    “It’s on the lakefront,” I said. “Hey, I get to see Lake Michigan. See, there’s just a little park between the hotel and the lake.”
    “And about six lanes of traffic,” Amelia pointed out.
    “Okay, that, too.”
    “But it’s close to major shopping,” Amelia said.
    “It’s got an all-human floor,” I read. “I’ll bet that’s this floor, the one that’s lighter. I thought that was just the design, but it’s so humans can go somewhere to have light during the day. People need that for their well-being.”
    “Translation: it’s a law,” Amelia said. “What else is there? Meeting rooms, blah blah blah. Opaque glass throughout except for the human floor.