Fred took that in, then turned to Madison. “You ready to jump in?”
“Careful,” Betsy cautioned. “She might mean that literally.”
“I called you and then my mom, and she called Betsy, and here I am and here you guys are.” Madison lowered her voice, though no one seemed to be paying attention to them. “I didn’t think Betsy would get here so fast.”
“That’s what I do. Get places fast. D’you think they’d make me a custom smoothie if I said pretty please? I’m thinking peach and raspberry . . .”
“Are you two being obtuse on purpose?” Fred demanded.
“Mmmm . . .” She appeared to think about it as she licked her straw. “No?”
“I don’t think so . . .” Madison said doubtfully.
“Are you trying to goad me into beating you to death? Because you should know it’s not difficult to goad me into beating you to death.”
Madison sighed. “I met this great guy—I thought he was great—and a couple of his friends at the NEA, and they thought I was you and that was okay when they were just being touristy, but they want to kill you, Fred, and when they found out I wasn’t you, they tried to kill me. I got away and called Fred and my mom.”
“And you called your mom because . . .”
“She can always fix things.”
“And your mom called Betsy because . . .”
“Betsy’s the queen of the vampires.” Madison waited, as if that was a normal thing for a normal person to say. Then she stirred, as if remembering something: “Oh! My mom’s a vampire, too. Did I forget that part?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fred took a breath. Held it for a count of ten. Gave up at five, whooshed, then said, “Let’s take it from the top.”
“Again, she might mean that literally. She gets off on stripping naked and then jumping into things. So just, you know, be aware.”
“Your mom is a vampire.”
“Yes.”
“And Betsy is also a vampire; she’s the queen of them.”
“Yes.”
“All right. I can see why you wouldn’t want that to be gossip fodder. What I don’t understand is—”
“Wait, wait.” Betsy had put her straw aside, upended her near-empty glass over her open mouth, and was now thumping the bottom of the glass to get the last precious drops of the smoothie. “That’s it? You’re taking that in stride? You don’t want to take five and have a minor freak-out?”
“No. I believe you both.”
“Because, there being mermaids? Doesn’t prove that there are vampires.”
“It doesn’t disprove it, either.” The strength. The way she took a beating that might have killed a regular person. The thirst. The . . . What did she call it? The mojo? Those also helped prove her point. “Okay. So your mother, who is a vampire, called the qu—the quee—” The vampire part was believable . . . or at least, not unbelievable. The queen part was harder. This woman was a leader? People looked to her for guidance? The horror. So she veered off topic for a few seconds. “How is it that your mom’s a vampire? You’re adopted, right?”
Madison nodded and stirred her daiquiri, which she had barely touched. “Yeah. Mom’s raised lots of kids. She left England a while back to get away from the douche boat she married. She—”
Fred knew she shouldn’t, but did anyway: “Douche boat?”
“Cross between a douche bag and a dreamboat. Like Bradley Cooper in the Wedding Crashers. I think I read that in EW.”
“Right.” Madison nodded. “Mom wanted kids, but not his kids. And once she came to America and settled in and got established and died and came back, she started taking in orphans.”
“Define a while back.” Old money, that’s what Dr. Barb had told Fred several months ago. Interns were sometimes a burden, sometimes a blessing; the coin flipped and you got what you got. Madison wasn’t the first intern Fred had to put up with because Someone Important got her the slot. Fred had been expected to play nice with the Fehr-haired girl because her mother was rich and a generous sponsor of the NEA. So old money could mean—
“You know how people say so-and-so’s been here so long, their family came over on the Mayflower?”“Yeah,” Betsy answered. “Except in Minnesota, we say they’re so old they were the original Ole and Lena.”
“Okay. My mother really did come over on the Mayflower.”
Fred just stared.
“Uh-huh, rilly, I’m serious! A long time ago, hundreds of years, a small group of disgruntled English citizens decided to head forth to a new land in the hopes of—”
“I understand that.” The last thing I need is a history lesson from Madison Fehr. “That must be—Your mom must have some good stories.”
Madison sighed. “You’d think. But, no. At least none she’ll share. I get a lot of you’ve got no idea how good you’ve got it, but all moms do that. It’s, like, a mom rule. So my mom knew about Betsy.” To Betsy: “She gets the newsletter, so she had all your contact info.”
“What?”
Madison ignored Fred’s squawk. “And I told her I was in a jam, and she sent Betsy here to help me.”
Betsy smiled. “Not quite right, since there’s not a vampire on the planet who can send me anywhere.” She said so in a perfectly pleasant tone. So why, Fred wondered, staring at her, did all the saliva in my mouth just dry up?
Madison had caught it, too; the whites of her eyes were showing all the way around, like a horse about to rear. Between one second and the next, the room seemed darker and colder; between one breath and the next, the world was scarier. Because Betsy had spoken one sentence. And smiled as she did it. Fred had felt that sort of indifferent menace before: from hammerhead sharks.
“I mean—I mean, then you agreed. When you heard my mom needed you. That I needed you. When she told you—when she asked you and you agreed to come. But you didn’t have to. Because no vampires can send you. You came because you wanted to. Out here.”
“Well, it’s not like I can’t watch my TV shows online,” Betsy replied, instantly back to herself. Or was she? Maybe the giddy twit is the mask, and her true self is the vampire no one can send anywhere. “Take a breath; you look like you’re gonna faint.”
While Madison managed a sickly smile, Fred leaned back in her chair and studied Betsy. She was glad she’d chosen the venue she had. Yes, on the one hand they were discussing matters that were complex and dangerous and, most of all, private. Things you didn’t necessarily want to discuss in public. Things that, if overheard, at best would bring eye rolls and titters, and worst, wooden stakes.
On the other hand, the chances were good that Betsy and/or the bad guys wouldn’t try anything in such a public place. The more she learned about Betsy, the happier she was that they weren’t in a big empty aquarium at night with lots of natural soundproofing.
“Okay, I get why you’re here, Betsy, but why not contact Madison directly? Go right to her for the scoop? Why skulk around—”
“I never skulk.”
“—and hijack my brain?”
“Barely. More like temporarily borrowed. You got it back, didn’t you?” Betsy shrugged. “I wanted to see things for myself straight out. As much as I could, I wanted to get a fix on the bad guy, right? Which worked out exactly as I planned, except for the part about how you weren’t the bad guy.”
Her cell buzzed. “Dammit, Jonas! Enough! Take a hint.” She glared at it, irritated, then did what she should have half an hour ago and clicked it off. Her best friend had been bugging her for hours to have dinner with him, and, yes, she’d been out of town for weeks and wanted to hear his news, and she had missed him, too, but the last thing she needed was to have Jonas—
“There you are, you uncommunicative tart!”
—dragged into this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jonas Carrey, her best friend since the second grade, bounded up to their corner table and greeted her with, “Forgot to shut down your cell tag, dummy.” To Madison and Betsy: “You guys know she’s a scientist, right? Unreal.” To Fred: “So I was able to Sherlock my way right to your doorstep, not that this is it, exactly. And—hello!” He’d hello’d! because he’d gotten a look at Betsy. Who was, Fred had to admit, very pretty if you liked vulgar blondes with nice racks and long legs and big clear greenish blue eyes and wiseass grins.
“Go away, Jonas.”
He ignored her, which he’d also been doing since second grade. “If you’re waiting for Fred to remember her manners and introduce us,” he said to Betsy, shaking her hand, “I hope you packed a snack.”
Betsy laughed. “I don’t need to, here. And be nice to poor Fred. I kind of dropped in on her tonight.”
Kind of?
Fred gritted her teeth. Years of experience had proven Jonas would remain as long as he liked; nothing short of knocking him unconscious would prevent his presence. Since he was already here, and presumably protected under the earlier probably-won’t-make-a-scene-in-a-public-place logic, she reserved knocking him unconscious as Plan B. “Betsy Taylor, this is my friend, Jonas Carrey. Jonas, this is Betsy. She’s in town visiting Madison for a few hours.” Please let it only be a few hours. “I think you met Madison last year.”
“Meetcha.” He stepped to the empty table beside them, snagged a chair, and settled in. “So what’d I miss? What’s going on? And hey—great shoes.”
The vampire looked absurdly flattered. “Thanks. I know they don’t look it, but they’re pretty comfortable.”
“Alice and Olivia, right?”
“Yeah.” At once Betsy was a great deal more animated. “Yeah, they just screamed, ‘Spring!’ at me and it was a cloudy chilly day and I’m one of those people who’s always cold so I couldn’t resist.”