Page 10 of Rock Bottom
A few weeks before, Marco had advised me to try making friends with her. Adelaide resents having to be both my keeper and my bodyguard. She’s a high-level security expert, and that’s why he’s assigned her to me — because I’m valuable to him. I figure it’s also because I know so many of his secrets and my shielding isn’t great, so his enemies could probably extract truckloads of information from my mind if they stole me. I’m working on my shielding, but I wouldn’t have a chance against someone centuries older than me.
But whoever kept me safe was also responsible for me as a slave who is still learning how to function in modern human society after living behind castle walls for centuries. She wasn’t just my protection, she was also my handler for specific parameters, and I was nearly positive she resented having to not only guard someone as lowly as a slave, but also one who required her to be keeper on top of guard.
So, Marco was leaving it up to me to make Adelaide like me more, or at least dislike me less.
“Is there anything I can do tonight to make your job easier?” I asked.
“Stick to the game plan and stay in your corner. Don’t go wandering.”
I’d reserved a table in the rear corner of one of the darker rooms, with the tables lit but everything else in shadow. Adelaide would have the table beside ours and would play enough to keep someone from thinking they could claim it. She’d said we couldn’t reserve an entire room or Silver would notice.
“Cora told me about the jukebox. It’s in another room. How can we work that?”
She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Telepath me a few minutes before you head towards it so I can have TBC security in place to watch you, and I won’t have to follow you.”
Silver showed up dressed as a man, driving a beat-up old truck. He wore dark blue jeans and a black shirt, and his hair was in a ponytail, but it didn’t look anywhere near as long as it’d been the week before. Honestly, if I hadn’t recognized her brain wave when she pulled into the parking lot, and also been able to scent that this was Silver when he exited the truck, I wouldn’t have recognized this version of him.
“Did you cut your hair?”
It was probably the wrong thing to ask, but it just came out. Her hair had been so beautiful, before.
“No. I had extensions in last week that gave me an extra seven inches. I hope you’ve had a nice day.”
Marco had said to be as honest as possible, so I told Silver, “I was up working most of the night, so I haven’t actually been awake long. My boss prefers working at night, so that’s usually when I work, often going to bed around the time the sun rises.”
“Our hours get crazy on the road like that. Also, with Hailey’s sun allergy, it just makes it easier to do things at night with her. We usually go to bed around three in the morning.”
That’s right, one of their band members was some chimera form of a Lugat, a werewolf, and if the rumors were correct, also a snake. Of course, Silver didn’t know this, so that wasn’t going to help the conversation along.
I’ve been trained in how to converse with people and keep them feeling comfortable, and I focused on my training.
“Have you lived in Chattanooga all your life?”
He shook his head. “I grew up in New Hampshire, and I spent a good bit of time in New York and Atlanta before Byron brought me to Chattanooga. My folks are still in New Hampshire, so I don’t get to see them often. They call me when a new song releases, or when Mythic Beast is up for an award, or when they’re planning a family shindig. We all follow each other on social media, so I’ll call them if I see something going on I want to talk to them about.”
“I want to ask about your childhood, but I don’t want you to think I’m prying.”
I opened the door for him, which maybe wasn’t the right thing to do when he was dressed as a man, but I did it before I really thought about it.
“My parents are great, and they let me figure out who I am without trying to put me into a gender box, but we can talk about childhoods later. You said you’ve performed?”
I didn’t want to lie to her, but there wasn’t a way around it for this. “Not on the scale you do — small opera houses in Italy. It was enough to get me through college, and to introduce me to my first true boss, who took a chance on me and hired me. I can’t talk about the people I’ve worked for because of various NDAs, you understand, but I’m happy with my current situation. It’s a lot of work, but it always is when you organize the life and businesses of workaholics who rarely take downtime.”
And that was enough about me. “I find it intriguing that you play the cello. Is there a story there?”
“My high school had an orchestra instead of a band, and the cello seemed cool to me on the day we had to decide what to learn. One of my bandmates dug up old pictures of all of us, and when they saw me on the cello, they decided we had to incorporate it. Suli’s learned to play the violin since then, and it works well for us to break things up a little with some different stringed instruments. You have an accent, but it isn’t hard to understand you, and your English is extraordinary. Was Italian your first language? How long have you known English?”
“Yes, Italian was my first language, along with Greek, and later I learned French. I suppose that makes English my fourth language, though I also know a touch of Turkish. Marco had me work with a speech coach before I arrived, to tone down my accent to be sure Americans could understand me.”
I’ve known English for more than a century, so I couldn’t answer her last question. I changed the subject and hoped she wouldn’t notice. “When did you learn to play the guitar?”
* * * *
Silver
Julian was pretty good at pool. I am, too, so most of our games were pretty close, and we each won and lost about the same number.
A waitress came, and I ordered some cheese sticks, onion rings, fried pickles, and chicken tenders, assuming I was ordering for both of us. I looked at Julian and asked, “All of that good for you? Do you want to add or subtract something?”
