"Eureka?" she asked.
"Or Stars Hollow."
Mallory made a sound of agreement and picked up the second bag. "I assumed you'd leave after you got knocked up by a twenty-one-year-old classics major and the two of you ran away to Bora-Bora to raise your baby in the islands."
I stopped halfway to the door and glanced back at her. "That's pretty specific, Mal."
"You studied a lot," she said, edging past me into the hallway. "I had the time."
I heard her trot down the stairs, but paused in the doorway of the bedroom that had been mine since I'd returned to Chicago three years ago. I took a last look around at the old furniture, the faded comforter, the cabbage rose wallpaper, and flipped off the light.
Chapter Two
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS... NOT NECESSARILY WHERE YOU SLEEP
Okay, so I was procrastinating. My bags were stuffed in the backseat of my boxy orange Volvo, but instead of heading directly to Cadogan House, I passed my future Hyde Park home and kept driving south. I wasn't quite ready to cross the threshold of Cadogan as an official resident. And, more importantly, I hadn't seen my grandfather in nearly a week, so I opted to do the granddaughterly thing and pay a visit to his South Side office.
My grandparents had all but raised me while my social-climbing parents, Joshua and Meredith Merit, were gala-ing their way across Chicago. So paying my grandfather a visit was really the least I could do.
The Ombud's office wasn't glamorous; it was a squat brick building that sat in the midst of a working-class neighborhood of small, squarish houses, tidy yards, and chain-link fences. I parked the Volvo on the street in front, got out of my car and belted on my katana. I doubted I'd need it in my grandfather's office, but word that I hadn't been diligently armed was just the kind of talk that Catcher would pass along to Ethan. It's not that they were buddies, exactly, but chatting about me seemed like the kind of thing they'd do.
It was nearly eleven o'clock, but the few windows in the office were ablaze with light.
The Ombud's office, or so my grandfather figured, served creatures of the night. That meant third-shift hours for my grandfather, his admin Marjorie, Catcher, and Jeff Christopher, my grandfather's second right-hand man, an undefined shapeshifter and computer whiz kid. Who also had a giant crush on yours truly.
I knocked on the locked front door and waited for someone to let me in. Jeff turned a corner and headed down the hallway toward me, a grin breaking across his face. He was all lean appendages and floppy brown hair, and tonight he wore his usual uniform - pressed khakis and a long-sleeved button-up shirt, the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms.
When he reached the door, he typed an alarm code into a keypad beside it, then turned a lock and opened it.
"Couldn't stand being away from me?"
"I was hurting a little," I said, then stepped inside as he held the door open. "It's been, what, almost a week?"
"Six days, twenty-three hours, and about twelve minutes." He recoded and locked the door, then grinned over at me. "Not that I'm counting."
"Oh, of course not," I agreed as he escorted me down the hallway to the office he shared with Catcher. "You're much too suave for that kind of thing."
"Much," he agreed, then entered the room and moved behind one of the four metal, atomic-era desks that sat in two rows in the tiny room. The top of Jeff's desk was taken up by a Frankenstein-esque collection of keyboards and monitors, upon which sat a stuffed toy I'd learned was a model of H. P. Love-craft's Cthulhu.
"How was tap class?" asked a sardonic voice on the other side of the room. I glanced over, found Catcher at the desk opposite Jeff's, hands crossed over his skull-cut head, an open laptop on the desk before him. One brow was arched over his green eyes, his curvy lips slightly tipped up in amusement. I had to admit it - Catcher was irritating, gruff, a demanding trainer... and ridiculously pretty. Mal definitely had her hands full.
"Hip-hop," I corrected, "not tap. And it was just fancy. Your girl nearly coldcocked the instructor, but it was pretty uneventful other than that." I edged a hip onto one of the two empty metal desks. I wasn't entirely sure why there were four desks in all. Catcher and Jeff were the only two in this office; my grandfather and Marjorie had desks in other rooms. My grandfather had reached out to a vampire source since Catcher and Jeff represented Chicago's sorcery and shapeshifting communities, but the secret vamp avoided the office in order to avoid House drama, so no desk for him. Or her. Or it, I suppose. I was still trying to work that one out.
Catcher glanced over at me. "She nearly cold cocked the instructor?"
"Well, she wanted to, not that I blame her. Aerobics Barbie is hard to stomach for more than five minutes at a time. But thanks to my excellent mediation and negotiation skills, no punches were actually thrown." The pad of footsteps echoed through the hall, and I looked over at the door to find my grandfather in his usual plaid flannel shirt and sensible pants, his feet in thick-soled shoes.
"And speaking of excellent mediation and negotiation skills," I said, hopping off the desk. My grandfather extended his arms and beckoned me into a hug. I walked into his embrace and squeezed, careful not to inadvertently break ribs with my increased vampire strength. "Hi, Grandpa."
"Baby girl," he said, then pressed a kiss to the top of my forehead. "How's my favorite supernatural citizen doing this fine spring evening?"
"That hurts, Chuck," Catcher said, crossing his arms over his chest. "I thought I was your favorite sup." His voice could hardly have been dryer.
"Seriously," Jeff said, his gaze shifting between computer monitors. "Here we are, slaving night and day - "
"Technically," Catcher interrupted, "just night."
"Night." Jeff smoothly adjusted. "Trying to keep everyone in the Windy City happy, trying to keep the nymphs in line." He bobbed his head up toward the posters of scantily clad women that lined the walls of the office. They were river nymphs - tiny, busty, doe-eyed, and long-haired women who controlled the branches of the Chicago River. They were also, as I'd seen on the night of my twenty-eighth birthday, pretty dramatic. They'd shown up en masse at my grandfather's house, all atwitter because one of the beauties had cheated on her with another nymph. It was a catfight of monumental proportions, complete with tears, swearing, and raking nails. And it'd been stopped, surprisingly enough, by our Jeff. (My reticence notwithstanding, Jeff had a way with the ladies.)