“No! I no cheat on my Shauna! Her blood-kin to Doucette clan. I no dishonor her like dat.”
“Sooo . . . ,” I said, thinking, my fingers combing through the mess of my hair. “No fun and games.” And then it hit me. “She walked in on you?” Gabe nodded, the motion as jerky as a human. “And it looked like you were having a little too much fun?”
“Yeah. It did dat.”
“Idiot.”
“Yeah, I am dat too.”
“Who was she?” I asked as I started rebraiding my hip-length hair at the base of my head, pulling and slinging each third through the rest.
“You know her,” he said after a few quiet seconds. “Her be Margaud.”
I stopped braiding and narrowed my eyes at him. He glanced up at my silence and the expression on his face said he knew how stupid he had been. Simply put, the three Mouton siblings hated vamps. The three adult children of the family were the former army twins, Auguste and Beno?t—alligator hunters and vamp haters from way back—and their sister, who was as beautiful as they were ugly. A trained sniper, Margaud had seen some real-time action in some foreign battlefield. And she hated vamps maybe even more than her brothers did. “Just to clarify. You drank from Margaud?”
“I did.”
“She let you drink from her?”
“I at de bar. All alone on Saturday night. Hongry, I was. She come in, sit beside me, order her a whiskey. We talk a bit. She buy me a whiskey. We talk some more. She say, ‘How you doin’, Gabe? You looking pale.’ She smile. She ask, real sof’-like, ‘You need some-a dis?’ I stupid.”
I don’t cuss as a rule, except sometimes to yank people’s chains, but this was a special case. “You’re a dickhead.”
“I dat too. Before she sit by me? I found later dat she done call Shauna and tell her to come to de blood bar. Dat why Shauna walk into back room when I feeding from Margaud.”
I yanked on my hair, braiding fast, thinking. “You know she was trying to cause trouble, right?”
“I know.” Gabriel sounded ashamed and devastated all at the same time. He looked at me, and his eyes, still human-looking, filled with pale pink tears. “I love my Shauna. I die now of heartbreak, I am. I die for sure, before I drink again.”
Pinkish tears meant, well, not starvation, but certainly long-term hunger. His body looked thinner, as if lanky had been stretched to its limits. His physical control, under the hunger constraints, was pretty amazing. It left me with nothing to say. Margaud was a bitch and Gabe was an idiot. A starving idiot, but still an idiot. I finished braiding my hair and twisted an elastic band around the tip. “Anything else I need to know?”
Gabe’s head dropped even lower, so I couldn’t see his face. His voice a mutter, he said, “When Shauna come through the door and see us, she throw a vase at us, she did. Margaud, her run to Shauna and take her hand, like friend. Say she willing to . . . to share me with Shauna.”
“Oh.” Yeah, That’s a great way to make everything worse.
“Fight, there was. Catfight. I stupid, and blood-drunk just a bit, so long since I drink my fill, and I laugh. Shauna left. Went back to Clan Home, took Clerjer, took the wreath, and disappear.”
“The wreath outside in the witch circle?”
“De same.”
“Margaud set up the whole thing to mess with the vamps and start trouble.”
“Yeah. I tink dat so too.”
Margaud was a beautiful, deadly woman, with ash brown hair, blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and last I saw her, she had looked too small to transport or position the sniper rifle she had used to give us cover when my team approached the Doucette Clan Home. She was muscular and fit, and carried herself with a capable, confident air, the exact opposite of a woman who’d just had a baby, all full of baby fat and hormones. No matter how unearthly beautiful Shauna Landry Doucette was, the sight of her husband in the other woman’s arms would have hurt. Bad.
The sharpshooter had played a hand and played it well, and now I had not only to try to fix things with the wreath and repair the damage to the marriage, but figure out Margaud’s next move and stop it before it happened.
I frowned. People skills were not among my best talents; I was more a shoot-first-and-bang-heads-together-later kinda gal. “You talked to the witches? To Shauna’s daddy?”
“I try. Him come at me with carving knife, he did. And then him throw spell at me from them fire tattoos on he arm. I get away alive, but barely.”