Now she waggled her finger, swishing it at the women. “Don’t you two look at me all wide-eyed and aghast while you clutch your proverbial pearls like you haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about. Don’t even. Since Nina’s vampiric demise in Shamalot, if she’s not stuffing her gullet with food, she’s arguing with you, Marty. Who, I might add, just can’t seem to let it go. Okay, so Nina has no powers anymore and she doesn’t want them back. She’s reveling in her returned humanity. So the hell what? If she had no legs, would you razz her like this?”
Marty pursed her lips in thought, her soft cheeks sporting two bright red spots. “Could we try the scenario where she has no mouth as our example for today, Principal Wanda?”
“Shut it! Shut it now, or I swear on your fruity color wheels I’ll GD well kill you, Blondie!” Nina bellowed, her husky voice reverberating around the forest as she attempted a run at Marty, only to get caught up in her bulky boots.
“Again I ask, how?” Marty yelped back with devilish glee. “A chicken wing to my head, perhaps? A six-pack of brewskies to the throat? A slip and fall in a melted puddle of the gallons of ice cream you’ve consumed since Shamalot?”
Wanda the Elegant lost it then. Something Cormac rather had the notion she didn’t do often. In fact, the entire time he’d been tracking them, she’d not been the least ruffled as they’d charged through the snow, battled a squall of even more of the white stuff (bickering the entire way), and eventually landed mere moments from the cabin he’d so carefully pieced back together away from prying eyes.
But right now, Wanda’s eyes grew all hot and furious, while her spine went rigid. “Eeeenough!”
Aw hell. She’d yelled so loudly, snow from the branches of the tree he was beneath shed in icy clumps, thumping to the ground and just missing his head.
Obviously, Wanda had been dealing with the sort of grief these two doled out on a fairly regular basis, and her eyeballs were floating from trying to keep her head above water.
“I won’t have this anymore—understand?” she said with a hiss. “We’re here for Toni, got it? All the rest of the crazy from Shamalot, like Nina losing her powers and making cheesecake the new breakfast, will have to wait. Got it? We have a lead, ladies, a solid lead after a month-long search for Cormac. Are we going to do what we came to do for Toni or are we going to continue this pointless argument about Nina’s choice not to return to her vampiric ways? Because honestly, I’m up to my eyeballs. It’s not up to you to help Nina find a way to become undead again, Marty. Nina didn’t have a choice when she became a vampire. It was an accident. She can certainly choose not to be one now. It doesn’t mean she’s less our friend if she remains human. We just have to adjust to her human needs.”
Wait. What the what? Toni was alive? They knew his sister Antonia? They knew him? And where the hell was Shamalot?
Cormac wasn’t sure whether he should bust out from behind the tree and demand they explain why they were looking for him and how they knew Toni, or if he should continue to eavesdrop before making a final judgment call.
Marty bristled, adjusting her blue knit hat. “You mean like adjust to the fact that she’s slower than molasses uphill in the winter time—literally—or that she’s always whiny and cold now? Or that she’s no longer the muscle of this trio yet continues to behave like Thug Lite? Fine. Forget it all. She can do whatever she wants to do. I agree. Don’t be undead, for all I care. But quit your bitching about not being able to keep up with us to a minimum while you fill your big mouth with whatever isn’t nailed down, or I just might see if intestines really can be yanked out by way of your ever-increasing gut!”
Ohhh, Marty sure was damn angry Nina had chosen humanity. Almost as though being human was going against her belief system—a betrayal of some kind. But wait. Were Marty and Wanda vampires, too?
How could he tell? He was still learning to parse scents, but he had no clue what a vampire would smell like anyway.
Nina’s deep dark eyes went wide with hot fury, her next question asked in total girlish horror. “Did you just call me fat?”
Marty sucked her cheeks in, making her lips purse, as though she were utterly appalled. “I did no such thing. I said a body part was increasing. Which, like I’ve been saying, isn’t a surprise, seeing as you’ve made it your mission to work your way through an entire ice cream case at the grocery store one pint of Ben & Jerry’s at a time.”
Nina pulled one of her hands from her incredibly bulky down jacket and gave Marty the finger before she began an awkward attempt to unwrap a bite-size Snickers with gloves so thick, she fumbled and dropped it smack in the snow.
“Oh, fuck you, Werewolf. If you couldn’t eat real food for eight GD years like the blood diet I’ve been on, once you got your hands on some vittles, your ass’d be the size of a freightliner. Wait. It is the size of a freightliner. So quit paranormal-shaming and piss the hell off!”
Picking up the fallen Snickers, Nina held it up to the sky, kissed it and popped it in her mouth, smiling in defiance at Marty as she chewed.
Okay, so Marty was a werewolf. Arooooooo.
Interesting.
Wanda closed her eyes before lifting her face to the heavens and blowing out a disgusted sigh.