The waitress brought their food, passing out the assortment of plates, along with a small squeeze bottle of brilliantly red liquid that she set in front of Alexei.
Alexei unwrapped the tamales on his plate, then squeezed out a river of bright red sauce on top of them.
“I didn’t know sauces could emit light,” I said.
“What is that?” Lulu asked.
“Miguel’s special sauce,” he said. “He’s one of the owners. I talked to him last week and wondered if they had anything hotter. They do.”
Lulu held out her hand.
Alexei stopped squeezing, glanced at her. “You won’t like it.”
“I’d like to decide that for myself.”
He watched her in silence, then righted the bottle and handed it over.
She unscrewed the top, sniffed. And only barely managed to thrust it back at him before she began coughing. “Holy Batman Jesus. Is that battery acid?”
“Fermented peppers. Miguel’s own hybrid. He calls them ‘Filthy Susans.’ ”
Alexei resumed squeezing until the bottle was nearly empty, so it made gassy sounds as he worked to squeeze out the last of its contents, then pounded the bottle with a fist in case any drops remained. Then the top was off, and he was using a knife to fish out another dribble.
We’d all stopped eating to watch him and, for my part, to wonder at his patience and determination.
When he was satisfied he’d gotten the last drop, he screwed the top on again, set the bottle aside, and picked up his knife and fork.
“That was... intense,” I said.
Alexei merely shrugged, chewed. “No point in waste. No point in hurrying.” And then he slid that steady gaze to Lulu. “Some things take patience.”
“With sauce that hot, are you worried you might accidentally taste your food?” I wondered.
“No. I had practice. Military school,” he added.
“You went to military school?” Lulu repeated. “They made you eat hot sauce?”
“Yes and no.”
I thought back. My family had ties with the Brecks, but my mother hadn’t cared for socializing with Chicago’s financial “elites,” and they hadn’t been fans of vampires. So we hadn’t been close, and I’d only seen Alexei a few times before returning to Chicago a few months ago. I didn’t know much about his background.
“My parents sent me when I was nine. The first time. I left, got caught. Left, got caught. Left, got caught. Five times total.”
“Why military school?” Lulu asked.
He chewed, swallowed. “I didn’t care about money. I was grateful for it, as much as a kid can be. But I didn’t want to be the Breckenridge heir. And the family didn’t appreciate that, thought they could push ambition and drive into me.
“The area was beautiful,” he continued. “Upstate New York. Hills. Rivers. Trees. I wanted to be out there, not in macroeconomics. So I’d sneak out. Live wild in the woods as long as I could. Met some of the Consolidated Atlantic Pack. Good people. Wicked loud,” he said with a grin. “But they always dragged me back.
“The school was... hard. They wanted to create soldiers. Most of the Conks—that’s what they called us—were human. Few of us shifters. One kid’s dad was friends with mine, so that’s probably where mine got the idea. They preached being a unit. Being the same. As long as you were rich enough to pay the tuition, of course, and would keep to your own—support your own—when you got out.”
Alexei talked so rarely—and never for this long—that Lulu and I had gone silent and still to watch and listen. Connor, who’d apparently heard the story before, continued to eat.
“The upperclassmen still picked their allies, their enemies. They didn’t like me, but they respected my money. So the hazing was relatively minor. Locking us in rooms during dining hall hours, so we ate whatever cheap crap we could find. Hot sauce made it better.”
And that, I thought, explained a lot about Alexei.
“A couple of them beat the shit out of a maintenance guy for getting a scratch on someone’s car. He’d been taking down an old tree, and the car was parked illegally. School fired the worker,who probably needed the job, because why else put up with us assholes?”