All Together Dead

Cater and the remaining Arkansas vampires. She needed to be grilling Towel Guy, the surviving vampire—Henrik Whatever. She didn’t need to be trailing around meeting and greeting. But Sophie-Anne didn’t ask me what I thought, and I’d volunteered enough of my ideas for the day.
    The lobby was thronged. Plunged into such a crowd, my brain would normally be going into overload unless I was very careful indeed. But when the majority of the beings with brains were vampires, I got a lobby full of nothing, just a few flutters from the human flunky brains. Watching all the movement and not hearing much was strange, like watching birds’ wings beating and yet not hearing the movement. I was definitely working now, so I sharpened up and scanned the individuals who had circulating blood and beating hearts.
    One male witch, one female. One lover/blood donor—in other words, a fangbanger, but a high-class one. When I tracked him down visually, I saw a very handsome young man wearing everything designer down to his tighty whities, and proud of it. Standing beside the King of Texas was Barry the Bellboy: he was doing his job as I was doing mine. I tracked a few hotel employees going about their business. People aren’t always thinking about interesting stuff like, “Tonight I’m in on a plot to assassinate the hotel manager,” or something like that, even if they are. They’re thinking stuff like, “The room on eleven needs soap, the room on eight has a heater that won’t work, the room service cart on four needs to be moved…”
    Then I happened upon a whore. Now, she was interesting. Most of the whores I knew were of the amateur variety, but this woman was a thorough professional. I was curious enough to make eye contact. She was fairly attractive in the face department, but would never have been a candidate for Miss America or even homecoming queen—definitely not the girl next door, unless you lived in a red-light district. Her platinum hair was in a tousled, bedtime hairdo, and she had rather narrow brown eyes, an allover tan, enhanced breasts, big earrings, stiletto heels, bright lipstick, a dress that was mostly red spangles—you couldn’t say she didn’t advertise. She was accompanying a man who’d been made vamp when he was in his forties. She held on to his arm as if she couldn’t walk without help, and I wondered if the stiletto heels were responsible for that, or if she held on because he liked it.
    I was so interested in her—she was projecting her sexuality so strongly, she was so very much a prostitute—that I slipped through the crowd to track her more closely. Absorbed in my goal, I didn’t think about her noticing me, but she seemed to feel my eyes on her and she looked over her shoulder to watch me approach. The man she was with was talking to another vampire, and she didn’t have to kowtow to him just for the moment, so she had time to eye me with sharp suspicion. I stood a few feet away to listen to her, out of sheer ill-bred curiosity.
    Freaky girl, not one of us, does she want him? She can have him; I can’t stand that thing he does with his tongue, and after he does me he’ll want me to do him and that other guy—geez, do I have some spare batteries? Maybe she could go away and stop staring?
    “Sure, sorry,” I said, ashamed of myself, and plunged back into the crowd. Next I went over the servers hired by the hotel, who were busy circulating through the crowd with trays of glasses filled with blood and a few actual drinks for the humans scattered around. The servers were all preoccupied with dodging the milling crowd, not spilling, sore backs and tender feet, things like that. Barry and I exchanged nods, and I caught a trailing thought that had Quinn’s name embedded, so I followed that trail until I found it led to an employee of E(E)E. I knew this because she was wearing the company T-shirt. This gal was a young woman with a very short haircut and very long legs. She was talking to one of the servers, and it was definitely a one-sided conversation. In a crowd that was noticeably dressed up, this woman’s jeans and sneakers stood out.
    “—and a case of iced soft drinks,” she was saying. “A tray of sandwiches, and some chips. Okay? In the ballroom, within an hour.” She swung around abruptly and came face-to-face with me. She scanned me up and down and was little impressed.
    “You dating one of the vamps, blondie?” she asked. Her voice was harsh to my ears, a