The second I stepped through the gates, Kanesha grabbed my hand and started to drag me. Not that she could, but I let her.

“Hey. Where are we going?”

“We are going to have some fun. When was the last time you had some fun?”

“Unless you count killing vampires?”

“Not that kind of fun.” She was dragging me towards home, but I had no doubt that she had something in mind.

A date. We hadn’t done an actual date in a few weeks, and I began to suspect she hadn’t rushed off from lunch to study at all.

She’d rushed off from lunch to make plans against me. Well, I wasn’t going to complain. “You need to tell me where I’m going so I know what to wear!”

“Oh, I was thinking this restaurant in Old Town. Casual dining.”

I nodded. “Okay.” So, I didn’t have to dress up. Much. I didn’t ask how she planned on affording it. She’d found a way, and I trusted it was a legitimate way. Or Mike had given her the money.

I changed into a nice pair of jeans and a clean shirt and followed her out towards the Metro. “It had better not be interrupted,” I told her.

“It had better not be.”

I didn’t even have a gun, although I was sure I could handle most interruptions, at this point, even unarmed. Kanesha certainly could. Anything short of Tyz’vel actually trying to grab me.

We made it to Old Town without any interruptions. The restaurant she’d picked was southern style. Gumbo, red beans and rice, that kind of thing. I was starving and ordered a platter of catfish, red beans and rice and hush puppies. Good southern cooking.

“This place reminds me of my mother.”

“You’ve never talked about her much. What happened to her?”

A slow admission, “I don’t actually know. For sure. She disappeared and never came back. Maybe she was just trying to get away from my father.”

“I can’t blame her for that. I can blame her for not taking you with her.” Even if that might have meant we never met. What kind of woman abandons her child to a man like Vincent Clem?

“I don’t know what was going through her mind. She wasn’t…I don’t know that she was sane. But she could cook. I wish I had her recipes.”

I speared a piece of catfish with my fork. “Maybe you can reverse engineer them?”

“Maybe.”