“DJ, nothing personal, but you aren’t the caregiver type. I’ll settle for some juice from the fridge. You might burn down the kitchen if you tried to make tea.” Eugenie’s smile was faint but heartfelt. She really didn’t look well, so I let the wisecrack pass.
“Gotcha.” I shuffled into the kitchen, pulled open the door of the old white Frigidaire, and stared at the top shelf. Last time I’d been here, it had contained bottle after bottle of Abita beer and soda. Now, a menagerie of juice filled its shelves—grape, apple, orange, pomegranate. Lots and lots of cranberry. Not a soda in sight, which amounted to gastronomic blasphemy.
Before Eugenie had talked me into staying with her, I’d planned to spend the cold wave in the warm, posh Eudora Welty Suite at the Hotel Monteleone. The lavish suite, which rented for more money per night than I earned in two weeks, currently lay unoccupied. Its normal resident, the undead pirate Jean Lafitte, was holed up in his outpost of Old Orleans, a border town between modern New Orleans and the preternatural world Beyond.
Ostensibly, he was recuperating from his latest death, one of the subjects the council would be discussing.
In reality, I suspected he was mixing his recovery with a heavy dose of plotting. I expected him to arrive at the Interspecies Council meeting heavily armed and with vengeance on his mind. Jean Lafitte might be handsome and flirtatious, but he was also lethal. He wouldn’t roll over and take an act of betrayal, and he had definitely been betrayed.
I picked a bottle of grape juice and one of apple, and let the fridge door slam shut. Setting the bottles on the counter, I opened the cabinet where Eugenie kept the cups and glasses—or at least she used to. Now, the shelves bulged with protein bars, oats, and honey. A freaking bottle of agave nectar taunted me from the bottom shelf.
The glasses had migrated one cabinet over, and I retrieved a couple for our juice and took them into the living room. “What’s with all the healthy crap in the kitchen? Looks like I need to make a run to the grocery store for real food.”
Because I wasn’t consuming cactus juice, no matter what fancy name one called it.
“Yeah, I threw all my junk food out.” Eugenie had managed to sit up. Forever the hairstylist, she was trying to fluff the bedhead rumples out of her hair. She’d canceled her appointments for the day and closed her salon, Shear Luck, in honor of her illness. “I’m trying to eat healthier.”
“Bad idea.” Speaking selfishly, of course. If Eugenie hopped on the Alex Warin healthy living bandwagon, I’d be riding alone on the fried food train to clogged arteries. Chocoholics needed friends with whom to binge. “Junk food nurtures the spirit. I think there’s scientific research to prove it.”
Eugenie didn’t answer, just poured apple juice into a glass and sipped it. She didn’t look at me. In fact, she’d been withdrawn since I’d arrived a couple of hours ago, overnight bag in hand.
Maybe she regretted the invitation to let a beer-swilling, fried-food-eating houseguest move in, even temporarily. I was okay with that; the Monteleone had an awesome room service menu.
“Look, we’re best friends, right?” I waited until she finally looked up at me. “If you need to do something or I’m getting in the way, tell me. No hard feelings. I can go to Jean’s suite like I’d planned, or stay at Alex’s.” Whether he invited me or not.
To my horror, a stray tear trickled down Eugenie’s cheek. “Please don’t go. I…” She shook her head and resumed her intense gaze at the dark green and rust–colored area rug.
I set my glass of juice on the scuffed coffee table and went to sit on the sofa next to her. We’d been through a lot in the last couple of months, my friend and I. That we were still friends at all—maybe on the way to becoming better friends than before—was a testament more to her than to me. I could admit my own failures. Eugenie Dupre was big-hearted and brave and fiercely loyal, all things I aspired to but didn’t always achieve.
I ignored the pinch of the wrap around my ribs when I settled back on the sofa, and reached out to grasp her hand. “Talk to me.”
More tears, and she wouldn’t look me in the eye. “It’s nothing. Ignore me. Hormones.”
I squeezed her hand. Not buying that one. “This is me, Euge. Don’t give me the ‘hormones’ crap. What’s up?”
She didn’t answer for a long time, but clutched my hand like a lifeline. “Well, it’s about Rand, sort of.”
I should’ve known. That freaking elf Quince Randolph had caused nothing but misery since he’d opened his Plantasy Island nursery across the street, wooed Eugenie as a way to get to me, and turned on her like a snake as soon as he’d found a way to slither into my life for political gain.
She ended up with a broken heart, and I ended up with a lifelong bond to an elven asshat. Frankly, I thought she got the better end of the deal.