How appropriate, I thought, pulling a drawer open and tossing the hideous thing inside. I slammed it shut and didn’t even hear it rattling around. Not too surprising—the front panel had to be a foot thick.
Nobody knew better than the Senate that “dead” is a malleable term.
“We’re in the morgue,” Ray said faintly, looking at the row of coolers with glazed eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Fitting,” he said, and tried to say something else, but got a mouthful of blood bubbles instead.
I jerked open his shirt, and yeah, he was messed up. Maybe because the damned vamp had bled all over him, and he’d been one of Slava’s boys, so the result was akin to having an acid bath. Or because he’d landed badly, tearing his leg open on something that had left a wound ten inches long.
He’d managed to close it, vampire healing being what it was. But he couldn’t replace the blood he’d lost, and he’d lost a lot. And now somebody was trying to cave in the door behind us and finish the job.
I ignored them and knelt beside him, having no time for my usual squeamishness. And shoved my arm under his nose. Not that it did any good, other than to have him give me another weird look, confused and hopeful and wary and shocked, all rolled into one. It made him look constipated.
“What are you waiting for?” I demanded.
“I—what?”
“Feed, damn it!”
He stared at my arm; he stared up at me. He didn’t move. “Why are you doing this?”
“I lost one partner this week. That’s my quota.”
“Partner?”
“Well, you said it. I make a lousy master.”
Ray just looked at me for another moment, and the constipated look got worse. And then his fingers closed over my forearm, slowly, delicately. “Yeah, well. I may have to rethink that,” he said, and began to pull.
He wasn’t biting, just pulling blood molecules directly through the skin. But I had to swallow and look away, not to show how much I really, really hated this. But I guess I didn’t do so great, because Ray started talking again. Only this time I didn’t mind so much.
“So I guess this makes me your sidekick, right?” he asked. “Like I could be…”
“Robin?”
He scowled. “I ain’t no Robin.”
“What’s wrong with Robin?”
“What’s wrong?” Ray rolled his eyes. “Two words: green Speedo. And he was lame. Batman was always having to save his ass.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hey, I was doing okay before you showed up. All right?”
I decided not to comment on that, mainly because I hadn’t been doing any better. “So Robin’s out.”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I always figured I’d be more like…Q.”
“Q?”
“From James Bond. You know.”
I looked at him. “But Q had stuff.”
“I got stuff.”