Free Blood Bank by Tanya Huff Page B

me, Nightwalker. As for the others..." The deliberate pause held a clear warning. ". . . they don't know."
    "All right." It was an acknowledgment more than agreement. "So why did you send for me?"
    "I saw something."
    "In my future?"
    "Yes."
    Vicki snorted, attempting to ignore the hair lifting off the back of her neck. "A tall, dark stranger?"
    "Yes."
    Good cops learned to tell when people were lying. It wasn't a skill vampires needed; no one lied to them. So far, Vicki had been told only the truth—or at least the truth as Madame Luminitsa believed it. Unfortunately, truth tended to be just a tad fluid when spoken Romani to gadje.
    The other woman sighed. "Would you feel better if I said that I saw a short, fair stranger?"
    "Did you?"
    "No. The stranger that I saw was tall and dark, and he is dangerous. To you and to my family."
    Now this meeting began to make sense. Intensely loyal to their extended families and clans, the Romani would never go to this much trouble for a mere gadje, even, or especially, if that gadje was a member of the bloodsucking undead. Self-interest, however, Vicki understood. "I'm listening."
    "It isn't easy to always see, so I look only enough to keep my family safe. This afternoon I laid out the cards, and I saw you and I saw danger approaching as a tall, dark man. Cliche," she shrugged, "but true. If you fall, this stranger will grow so strong that when he turns his hate on other targets, he will be almost invincible."
    "And the danger to you?"
    "He hates you because you're different. You haven't hurt him or anyone near him, but neither are you like him." Madame Luminitsa paused, glanced around the room, and spread her hands. "We are also different, and we work hard at keeping it that way. In the old days, we could have taken to the roads, but now we, as much as you, are sitting targets."
    "You're sure he's just a man?" Vicki asked, twisting a pinch of the tablecloth between thumb and forefinger. She'd met a demon once and didn't want to again.
    "Just a man? Men do by choice what demons do by nature."
    Vicki'd spent too much time in Violent Crimes to argue with that. "You've got to give me more to go on than tall, dark, and male."
    From a pocket in her skirt or perhaps a shelf under the table, Madame Luminitsa pulled out a deck of tarot cards. "I can."
    "Oh, come on..."
    Shuffling the cards with a dexterity that spoke of long practice, the older woman ignored her. She placed the shuffled deck in the center of the table. "With your left hand, cut the cards into three piles to your left," she said.
    Vicki stared down at the cards, then up at the fortune teller. "I don't think so."
    "Cut the cards if you want to live."
    Put like that, it was pretty hard to refuse.
    Tarot cards had made a brief surge into popular culture while Vicki'd been a university student. A number of the girls she knew laid out patterns at every opportunity. Vicki'd considered it more important to maintain her average than to take the time to learn the symbolism. She also considered most of the kerchiefed, sandaled, skirted amateur fortune tellers to be complete flakes. As a history major, she was fully aware of the persecutions the Romani had gone through for centuries, persecutions that had started up with renewed vigor after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and she was at a loss to understand why anyone would consider the life of the caravans to be romantic.
    The pattern Madame Luminitsa laid out was a familiar one. "Aren't you supposed to start by picking a card out to stand for me?"
    "Do I tell you your business?"
    "Uh, no."
    "Then don't tell me mine." She laid down the tenth card, set the unused part of the deck carefully to one side, and sat back in her chair, her eyes never leaving the brightly colored rectangles spread out in front of her. "The Three of Swords sets an atmosphere of loss. Reversed, the Emperor covers it; a weak man but one who will take action. In his past, the star reversed; physical or mental