All Together Dead

people don’t like—”
    Working with the damn vampires, Donati completed his sentence silently to everyone but me and him. He reminded himself harshly to stick to the immediate present. “Don’t like the hours it takes to run security in a big place like this,” he finished out loud, for the vampires’ benefit. “But I enjoy the work.” My kids will need the benefits when I die. Just two more months and coverage will stay with them after I pass.
    He’d come to the queen’s suite to talk to me about the Dr Pepper incident (as had the police, and the ever-present Christian Baruch), but he was staying to chat. Though the vampires didn’t seem to notice, Donati was so chatty because he had taken some heavy pain medication. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time I realized that someone with so many distractions wasn’t likely to be doing a good job. What had gotten by Donati in the past couple of months, since his illness had begun affecting his daily life?
    Maybe he’d hired the wrong people. Maybe he’d omitted some vital step in protecting the guests of the hotel. Maybe—I was distracted by a wave of warmth.
    Eric was coming.
    I’d never had such a clear sense of his presence, and my heart sank as I knew the blood exchange had been an important one. If my memory was clear, it was the third time I’d taken Eric’s blood, and three is always a significant number. I felt a constant awareness of his presence when he was anywhere near me, and I had to believe it was the same for him. There might be even more to the tie now, more that I just hadn’t experienced yet. I closed my eyes and leaned over to rest my forehead on my knees.
    There was a knock at the door, and Sigebert answered it after a careful look through the peephole. He admitted Eric. I could scarcely bring myself to look at him or to give him a casual greeting. I should be grateful to Eric, and I knew it; and on one level I was. Sucking blood from Andre would have been intolerable. Scratch that: I would’ve had to tolerate it. It would have been disgusting. But exchanging blood at all had not been a choice I got to make, and I wasn’t going to forget it.
    Eric sat on the couch beside me. I jumped up as if I’d been poked by a cattle prod and went across the room to the bar to pour myself a glass of water. No matter where I went, I could feel Eric’s presence; to make that even more unsettling, I found his nearness was somehow comforting, as if it made me more secure.
    Oh, just great.
    There wasn’t anywhere else for me to sit. I settled miserably by the Viking, who now owned a piece of me. Before this night, when I’d seen Eric, I’d felt simply a casual pleasure—though I had thought of him perhaps more often than a woman ought to think about a man who would outlive her for centuries.
    I reminded myself that this was not Eric’s fault. Eric might be political, and he might be focused on looking out for number one (which was spelled E-R-I-C), but I didn’t see how he could have surmised Andre’s purpose and caught up with us to reason with Andre, with any degree of premeditation. So I owed Eric a big thank-you, no matter how you looked at it, but that wasn’t going to be a conversation we had anywhere in the vicinity of the queen and the aforesaid Andre.
    “Bill is still selling his little computer disk downstairs,” Eric remarked to me.
    “So?”
    “I thought perhaps you were wondering why I showed up when you were in dire straits, and he didn’t.”
    “It never crossed my mind,” I said, wondering why Eric was bringing this up.
    “I made him stay downstairs,” Eric said. “After all, I’m his area sheriff.”
    I shrugged.
    “He wanted to hit me,” Eric said with only the hint of a smile on his lips. “He wanted to take the bomb from you and be your hero. Quinn would have done that, too.”
    “I remember that Quinn offered,” I said.
    “I did, too,” Eric said. He seemed a bit shocked at the fact.
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, and I hoped my tone made it clear I was serious. It was getting close to dawn, and I’d had a stressful night (which was the mildest way I could put it). I managed to catch Andre’s eye and give him the tiny nod toward Todd Donati. I was trying to clue him in that Donati was not entirely okay. In fact, he was as gray as a snow sky.
    “If you’ll excuse us, Mr. Donati…. We’ve enjoyed your company, but we have much to discuss about our plans for tomorrow