Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“Oh, come on!”

“It’s only temporary, until I can get somebody in to upgrade the wards.”

“When will that be?”

“Couple hours. We had someone do a hatchet job last night, just in case Jonas managed to find—hup,” he said, and quickly put another few paper plates under the first one, which was quickly soaking through.

“Just in case he managed to find . . . what?”

“Not what. Who,” he corrected. “His boys. Who you shifted . . . where?”

I had a vague recollection of a bunch of angry, half-drowned war mages thrashing their way up a familiar, pebble-strewn beach. Bet it hadn’t been a fun swim with all that hardware, I thought evilly. And then looked up to see Marco cocking a thick black eyebrow at me.

“Lake Mead.”

“Ha!” Fred said.

“It isn’t funny,” I told him, trying not to grin. And it wasn’t, really. This thing with Jonas wasn’t likely to go away just because we changed the wards. Or sent his boys for a surprise midnight swim. I needed to talk to him, right after I figured out what the heck to say.

I sighed and put it on my list.

“You going to eat that, or admire it?” Marco asked me.

I looked down at my plate. There were thick, crispy bacon, lovely meaty sausage, eggs fried in what might be bacon grease if I was lucky, polenta, and some weird white crumbly stuff I couldn’t immediately identify. But overall, an easy nine out of ten.

“Eat it,” I said, and found a stool at the bar.

The crumbly white stuff turned out to be some kind of delicious cheese. Which went really well when mixed with everything else in a gooey mass of heart-attack-inducing awesomeness. I started shoveling it in.

“What did you say this was again?” I asked after a heady few minutes.

“Moldavian breakfast of champions.”

“And you know how to make it why?”

“Horatiu taught me,” Marco said, referring to Mircea’s oldest servant. “It’s from the old country.”

“Old country my ass,” a redheaded charmer named Roy said, coming in. “That’s Southern cooking.”

“Southern Romanian, maybe.”

“Moldavia’s actually to the north,” Fred piped up.

“I don’t care where it is,” Roy said, bending over my plate. “That’s bacon, eggs, and cheese grits. Half the South eats that for breakfast every morning.”

“Well, I learned it from an old Romanian, and I’m pretty sure they had it first,” Marco said, in his don’t-argue-with-me-I’m-the-boss voice. And then he looked down, and his face changed. From hard-ass master vamp to . . . well, I didn’t know exactly what that expression was. But it was soft and he was smiling.

At the barefoot cherub in a crumpled white nightgown who was tugging on his pants leg.

“Phoebe!” Rhea said, quickly coming around the table. “Don’t bother the . . . the man. He’s cooking.”

She reached for her, but the little girl had already been swept up into Marco’s arms, looking impossibly tiny next to my giant of a bodyguard. Whose bicep was bigger around than her whole body. He showed her the contents of the pan. “You want some bacon and eggs?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“I—was going to make oatmeal,” Rhea said, looking between the two of them.

Marco and the girl wrinkled noses at exactly the same moment, causing me to burst out laughing. And to almost swallow my damn spork. Rhea looked back at me in alarm.