Page 21 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Also, a plaintive meow as Twist burrowed up out of my coat pocket. “It isn’t for me?”
I frowned at her. “Of course it’s for you. There’s just some for him too. And some for me.”
She narrowed her eyes as she looked at first Davin, then me, and finally huffed and nodded. “I suppose if you are to be able to continue retrieving food, you have to have your own as well.”
Retrieving food. Yup, that was what I was good for.
Weirdest thing ever, just as I sat the bag on the arm of the sofa, there was a ringing sound. I jerked back, and Twist craned her head around, trying to locate the source of the noise. Davin, though? He just reached across a pile of papers and...picked up a phone. My land line phone for the office, that I’d never actually plugged in. “Knight and Daywalker.”
I blinked at him. Knight and...had he named our nonexistent business?
Actually, that was kind of clever. Probably better than Knight and Byrne. That would be funnier if my surname was Salt, but I didn’t think regular people were actually named Salt.
“Of course,” he agreed, and I ignored it as Twist slid her way up and out of my pocket, down onto the sofa arm. “I have an appointment available to see the place tomorrow at ten-thirty, or at one.” Another pause, then he nodded and typed something into his phone. “One it is, then. We’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
He hung up the phone, setting it back on its cradle, where I’d forgotten it even existed, and turned back to me.
I stared at him, waiting. When he didn’t speak up, I frowned. “What the hell was that?”
His “bitch, please” face was...well, I wanted to be able to look that unimpressed. He was almost as good as my mother. No wonder she liked him. “People answering your ad in theAdvocate, of course. You’ve got appointments most of the day tomorrow. I think six now, to show the place to people.”
Appointments.
And they’d called...the office, of course. I hadn’t really wanted to put my cell phone number in the ad, so it only made sense to put the office phone in it instead. I just hadn’t really thought about how that would go, since I would have to plug the phone in and like, take messages and stuff.
Wait. “What happened to my answering machine?”
He blinked at me. “Answering machine. You mean that ancient thing with the tiny little cassette tape, that squeaked and rattled and then died when the phone rang the first time?”
Ouch.
Well, that wasn’t the world’s biggest shock. I’d saved the thing from an acquaintance who’d been planning on pitching it because it was “more outdated than grunge,” so I hadn’t expected that much out of it. I had kind of expected it to do more than nothing, but also, I’d never properly planned to get phone calls at the office.
It was one of those things Mother and I often argued about: I didn’t plan much...okay, fine, at all. Ever.
Or maybe I planned a ton and sucked at following through.
Whatever, I was fine. I was a grown ass adult, living on my own and doing okay. Ish.
The sound of paper ripping snatched my attention, and I looked down to find Twist once again trying to get into the food source, and probably eat it all before anyone else had a chance to get a bite. “Okay,” I said, pulling the bag away from her and opening it up to start pulling out chicken breasts.
I spread out the first two paper wrappers and dumped one chicken breast after another onto it, and she...she just ate them. One after another, one tiny bite at a time, without so much as pausing for breath.
I set aside the two actual sandwiches and fries, but went through and made a whole pile of chicken. Frankly, it looked like too much food for me for a whole day.
“Stop the lights,” Davin muttered as she started into her third one. Before I could ask him what the heck that meant, he turned to me, black eyes wide. “What kind of cat is that?”
I shrugged. “Not sure yet.” I wasn’t too worried about him freaking out. Vampire, after all. He of all people knew there was more in the world than most people were aware of. Instead of worrying about it, I set the sandwich marked “special” aside, and handed him the other, and a container of fries. “I thought...you might want food?”
He accepted them and immediately started munching on fries. And he thought Twist was weird. At least normal cats ate, if not usually quite so much.
For a while, we all sat in companionable silence and ate our food. I was trying not to think about how much of my dwindling bank account the food had cost me, because it wasn’t like any of us could choose not to eat. Well, at least not me or Twist. I had no clue about Davin, and was mostly trying not to stare at a vampire eating food, because it was freaking weird.
“Your mam called to check in,” Davin finally said after taking the last bite of his sandwich, breaking the silence with the weirdest sentence ever.
My mother hadn’t “checked in” when I was two, let alone now that I was over thirty. Also, she’d called him to check in? Was he her kid? Okay, that was weird. Also, I had to stop checking him out and thinking about how cool black eyes were if he was, like, my brother.
Right?
