I stared up at him, wondering if all Mircea’s masters were mind readers. And not even caring right now. Because everything I felt was probably on my face anyway.
“Okay, this is getting heavy,” Fred said, sticking his head in the kitchen, and looking back and forth between the two of us. “Come on out if you want to see the big reveal.”
They had put the safe in the lounge, on a big cleared spot on the floor near the pool table. Or what had been a big cleared spot, since it was now almost covered with people. Everybody was in there: the kids, the vamps, and Marco . . .
Who gave me an inscrutable look as we came in.
I found a spot on the carpet and settled down, because this might be a while.
It would have been easier if we didn’t have to worry about the integrity of a small glass object, or if the mechanism hadn’t gotten screwed up when Rico punched a fist through it, or if the safe hadn’t been quite so high-end. But it was what it was, so I waited. And chewed my lower lip. And watched as a blond vampire nicknamed Teddy, “’cause I’m so cuddly,” worked on the safe.
I wished to God he’d speed up, and then a second later I was wishing he’d slow down. Because right now, it was like Schrödinger’s potion bottle, both there and not there. But once that safe was opened . . .
I felt my palms start to sweat.
“It’s like a whacked-out Christmas morning,” Billy said, oblivious.
Several of the girls nodded, apparently agreeing with him, and a little one even reached out to touch him, giggling.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her.
“Hat,” she told him, looking at his Stetson.
“This hat?” He took it off and put it on her head. It didn’t exactly fit, floating a few inches above her dark curls. But she seemed happy.
“I’m gonna want that back,” he warned her.
She laughed.
“Hey, that’s like giving away your right knee when you’re a ghost! It’s all me.”
She laughed some more.
“This is going to take some getting used to,” he informed me, staring around. And apparently being weirded out by the fact that half the eyes he met were staring back. “Make that a lot of getting used to.”
Yeah, I thought, scanning the crowd of little faces. And suddenly feeling panicked. Because they were my responsibility now, too, all of them.
And how the hell did that happen?
“Remember that Geraldo thing?” Fred asked me suddenly. “With Al Capone’s safe?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s rig
ht, you’re too young. Well, back in the . . . eighties, maybe? Geraldo did this big special where he was gonna open one of Capone’s safes live on TV.”
I wiped sweaty palms on my jeans. “And did he?”
“Oh yeah. In a big way, too. I mean, they promoted that thing for weeks.” He beamed at me.
“So?”
“So . . . what?”
“So what was in the safe?”
“Oh, well, that’s the thing. It was, like, this forty-hour special or something—at least it felt that way. It just went on and on and on. I mean, I think they interviewed anybody who had ever even looked at a picture of Capone. And they did all these reenactments. And they had all these talking heads come on to speculate about what kind of stuff might be in the safe. I guess they were just stretching it out for more commercial time, but I thought I was going to go crazy.”