Trill

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2I woke up to the aroma of frying potatoes, bacon, and coffee. Yum.

Hunger had my stomach in knots as I tumbled out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. The wonderful thing about my bedroom being downstairs was there was a second door that led into the bathroom through my bedroom, this way I didn't have to go out into the world looking like crap. The other door of the bathroom opened out to the dining room. My mother had never liked this door leading into the bathroom from the dining room. She'd felt it was nasty to have a bathroom right off the room where we ate Sunday dinner, but my dad had never walled the door off. He didn't think it was nasty as long as you closed the door. After all, there were three doors right next to each other. The door next to the bathroom went upstairs, and the door next to that led down into the basement—which was much nastier than the bathroom by a long shot. The house was over a hundred years old, all the original oak wood floors and woodwork still in place and not painted over.

The aroma of bacon and coffee reeled me toward the kitchen. Back when Dante had moved in, he had done a lot of the cooking, picked up after himself, did the dishes, and did his own laundry. I thought I had died and gone to heaven finding that kind of man after my first boyfriend had been such a louse. But, as they say, nothing lasts forever. It would be my luck that I couldn't have the perfect man. Maybe I didn't deserve him. I couldn't get beyond the fact that Tremayne held sway over what Dante did, or didn't do. Being a vampire's scion must suck eggs.

I noted that it was about three in the afternoon, but to our stomachs, it was breakfast time, and I was famished. Yawning, I padded into the kitchen in my furry purple slippers, dressed in gray sweats.

We used to greet one another with a kiss and a hug. Today though, we merely said, “Good morning.”

Shuffling to the mug tree, I got myself a cup and poured the brew, nearly splashing it all over the counter. Ditz. After wiping up the brown puddle, I doctored my coffee while breathing in the delightful aromas of bacon and fried potatoes with a little bit of onion, and watching Dante's small butt move around the stove. God, I missed playfully smacking his ass.

He already had the table set, napkins and silverware in place.

“Breakfast for two, my lady,” Dante announced as he brought both plates over to the kitchen table.

There was a pile of potatoes, five strips of bacon, and a slice of whole-wheat toast on each plate that he put down.

“I'm famished, and this looks great!” I said, picking up my fork, and digging in. We didn't say a word until we were nearly done.

“Let me guess. You saw what was about to happen this morning when that cat walked in front of us?” he asked, scraping up some lingering potatoes onto a plank of bacon and shoveling it all into his mouth.

“Yeah. In fact, the moment he sat down on my feet, I knew what was going to happen.”

“That was one major ward she put on the house.” Dante knew that Mrs. Bench, being a witch, could set up a protection spell called a ward. I didn't know how strong of a witch she was, until now.

“I'll say.”

“Do you think they'll come back with something for you to take a read from?”

I shrugged as I chomped into the last strip of bacon. Shifting the food to one side of my mouth, I said, “I wish I'd never told him to bring me something of Lundeen's.”

“They did seem desperate to find him.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I think he stole money from the group. That's why they want to find him.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I recall you telling me that you saw him in the bank, and he was taking a huge wad of cash out.”

I'd seen Lundeen—as a human—in the bank taking the large sum out, the day after he'd bitten me as a wolf. He told Jeanie Woodbine, who worked there as a teller (when she was still human), that he was going on a little trip. Now I knew why it was such a large sum.

“Yep. I think he took off with the pack's money.” I said.

“I think they'd probably pay you to find him, if they got their money back.”

“Yeah, maybe. You think?”

“Why not?”

I stood and stretched. “Anyway, I owe Mrs. Bench a huge thank you.”

He made a noncommittal grunt as he stood and helped me clear the table.

“Maybe I should bake some cookies and take them over there?” She'd done something immense for me, out of the blue. I couldn't simply ignore it. I didn't want to question why she did it, but I did wonder what would happen when I went over there. Vasyl had told me I would receive the ring from her. Evidently, this ring could keep vampires from putting a thrall on me. I wanted that most of all. It meant that no matter how strong the vampire was, he couldn't enthrall me. Tremayne would never be able to make me his puppet again. Vasyl had avoided being with me, because he knew that I was vulnerable to his equally powerful thrall.

Dante turned away from the counter where he'd placed the dishes. Opening the dishwasher he said, “You're going to bake cookies?”

“It's the least I can do.”

“What kind?” He loved my cookies.

“I don't know.” I went automatically to the cupboards where all the baking things like flour, baking soda and baking powder, brown sugar and such were stored. I realized I didn't have any chocolate morsels, but I did have a new jar of peanut butter. I pulled it out. “Peanut butter. You wanna help?”

“Only if I get to eat some,” he said as he closed the dishwasher up and pressed the start button. If nothing else, the man's stomach ruled him. I swear he had hollow legs, but I realized that a shifter had to eat almost twice as much as a normal human when he did shift, because shifting took everything out of them. Come to think of it, I was pretty hungry this morning, although we'd just had breakfast. I craved some cookies myself.

“Deal.”

Within the hour, my kitchen filled with new aromas, and the baked cookie smell had awakened my guests—or more likely, the sun was going down, and they were hungry for their liquid food.

I heard the seemingly unsure movements of two bodies shuffling through the dining room and hesitantly poking their heads through the kitchen doorway like a couple of cocker spaniels, sniffing.

“Oi,” Heath simpered. “I haven't smelled that since I was little!”

Leif nudged past him, arrowed directly for the refrigerator, opened it, and found what he wanted. He held two of the black bottles of Real Red out to his brother. “Warm? Or cold?”

“Warm. With a cookie,” Heath said.

“You ass,” Leif berated him as he twisted the bottles open and popped them into the microwave.

By having regular donors and learning not to take more than a pint at a time, modern vampires no longer killed humans by draining them of their precious blood. Bottled blood was another solution. There were types made from human blood, some was strictly animal blood, and still others were a blend. Those weren't very popular, I could tell by the grimaces the two would make when they drank them. Tremayne Enterprises manufactured Real Red, and, from what I understood, since he owned the patent rights to it, it was a moneymaker. The man was a genius. No wonder he was richer than Donald Trump and Oprah combined.

I pulled out the last sheet of cookies and set them out to cool a bit before I transferred them onto the cooling racks. I'd made at least two and a half dozen. Dante had already eaten two and was eying a third, glass of milk in hand. Heath closed in and gazed hungrily at the cookies.

“You can have one, if you want,” I told him, holding out a plate of still-warm cookies to him. Heath gazed at the cookies with obvious longing.

The microwave pinged. His brother handed him his bottled blood.

“I wish I could, but…” Heath tipped the bottle to his lips, “I'm on a strict liquid diet. It wouldn't taste very good,” he explained.

“Vampire's taste buds become more highly developed, strictly for blood. Everything else has no taste,” Dante explained.

“That's okay,” I said. “It was the thought that counts. Right?” I asked Heath.

“Right,” he said and moved along with his brother into the next room to finish their bottled blood.

My cookies had turned out beautifully. I scrounged for paper plates in a high cupboard shelf, to take some to Mrs. Bench. Grasping the paper plates, I rocked slightly on the chair I used for a stepping stool. Dante grabbed me by the waist and brought me down to the floor in a graceful way. I wanted to turn and hug him, but resisted. When I looked up at him, he stepped back. Hiding my hurt feelings, I turned back to the counter and the cookies.

“I want to get these to Mrs. Bench while they're still warm,” I said, my voice controlled but feeling tightness in my throat.

“Those are for her?” Heath had longing back in his eyes.

“Yep, I want to thank her for this morning. I don't know how you thank a witch for magically saving your butt, but this is the first time I've had someone do that for me.”

“Peanut butter cookies should get pretty high marks, I would guess,” Leif said while his brother nodded approvingly. I was glad the blood had softened his sour mood some. Leif's moods changed as rapidly as a chameleon's skin color. I was glad to not to be alone with him. I trusted that we would always have a chaperon, because I knew, I knew he would cross the line.

I piled a dozen cookies on a plate, covered it in plastic wrap. Dante and I threw on our coats and walked out into the chilly autumn late afternoon. The sun was at the horizon, and the sky was becoming dark in the east. I threw Dante a worried look.

“Am I going to change, again?”

“I don't know.” He'd told me that born Weres had to go through the transformation all three nights of the full moon. He wasn't sure about a bitten person. I hoped I wasn't going to go through that three nights in a row.

Once across the road, we shuffled through crisp, fallen leaves—ones that Mrs. Bench hadn't gotten in her annual leaf-burning day, back in October—and strode up her cement steps to her open porch. It felt strange being here. I couldn't remember having been on Mrs. Bench's porch since my brother and I went trick-or-treating when I was small. I remembered her always as being old, back then. I never knew her real hair color. It was always white, to her shoulders and loosely curled. I would see her out in her yard and gardens spring through fall. Sometimes she wore a straw hat with a tie under the chin. She especially loved petunias and marigolds, and I always enjoyed watching her yard go through transformations throughout the year as one thing or another blossomed.

Dante knocked on the wooden framed screen door. There was a light on inside, I noticed as I peered below the white eyelet curtains, which hung on the door's window. I saw a wedge of a medium blue on white kitchen. It was tidy with all-white appliances.

After a moment with no answer, Dante opened the screen door and rapped on the main door.

“She's old. It might take her a while to…”

The door opened an inch as if by itself. We both stared at it with astonishment.

“Mrs. Bench?” I called.

The door moved inward a little more. Down about a foot from the floor, I saw the white paw of a cat hooked around it, pulling it.

“Hel-l-o?” I called out through the gap in the door, which had opened about six inches now. The same black and white cat who had come to our rescue early this morning now sat before us.

“Her familiar,” Dante whispered.

“Yeah.” I pushed the door open a little further. The cat stared up at us and made a weird-sounding meow. “Hi, there. Is Mrs. Bench at home? We'd like to see her. Look, I baked cookies!” I held out the plate, speaking as though he could understand me. For all I knew, he did.