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just heard about. Bill’s little CD was making more money for his boss, the queen, than I could ever have imagined. But you had to be a vampire to purchase a copy, and they had ways of checking.
    “Well, since Bill is charging five hundred dollars a pop, and impersonating a vampire is a dangerous risk...” I said.
    Amelia waved her hand. “It’d be worth it,” she said.
    Amelia is a lot more sophisticated than I am . . . at least in some ways. She grew up in New Orleans, and she’d lived there most of her life. Now she was living with me because she’d made a giant mistake. She’d needed to leave New Orleans after her inexperience had caused a magical catastrophe. It was lucky she’d departed when she had, because Katrina followed soon after. Since the hurricane, her tenant was living in the top-floor apartment of Amelia’s house. Amelia’s own apartment on the bottom floor had sustained some damage. She wasn’t charging the tenant rent because he was overseeing the repair of the house.
    And here came the reason Amelia wasn’t moving back to New Orleans any time soon. Bob padded into the kitchen to say hello, rubbing himself affectionately against my legs.
    “Hey, my little honey bunny,” I said, picking up the long-haired black-and-white cat. “How’s my precious? I wuv him!”
    “I’m gonna barf,” Amelia said. But I knew that she talked just as disgustingly to Bob when I wasn’t around.
    “Any progress?” I said, raising my head from Bob’s fur. He’d had a bath this afternoon—I could tell from his fluffy factor.
    “No,” she said, her voice flat with discouragement. “I worked on him for an hour today, and I only gave him a lizard tail. Took everything I had to get it changed back.”
    Bob was really a guy, that is, a man. A sort of nerdy-looking man with dark hair and glasses, though Amelia had confided he had some outstanding attributes that weren’t apparent when he was dressed for the street. Amelia wasn’t supposed to be practicing transformational magic when she turned Bob into a cat; they were having what must have been very adventurous sex. I’d never had the nerve to ask her what she’d been trying to do. It was clear that it was something pretty exotic.
    “The deal is,” Amelia said suddenly, and I went on the alert. The real reason she’d stayed up to see me was about to be revealed. Amelia was a very clear broadcaster, so I picked it right up from her brain. But I let her go on and speak, because people really don’t like it if you tell them they don’t have to actually speak to you, especially when the topic is something they’ve had to build up to. “My dad is going to be in Shreveport tomorrow, and he wants to come by Bon Temps to see me,” she said in a rush. “It’ll be him and his chauffeur, Marley. He wants to come for supper.”
    The next day would be Sunday. Merlotte’s would be open only in the afternoon, but I wasn’t scheduled to work anyway, I saw with a glance at my calendar. “So I’ll just go out,” I said. “I could go visit JB and Tara. No big.”
    “Please be here,” she said, and her face was naked with pleading. She didn’t spell out why. But I could read the reason easy enough. Amelia had a very conflicted relationship with her dad; in fact, she’d taken her mother’s last name, Broadway, though in part that was because her father was so well-known. Copley Carmichael had lots of political clout and he was rich, though I didn’t know how Katrina had affected his income. Carmichael owned huge lumberyards and was a builder, and Katrina might have wiped out his businesses. On the other hand, the whole area needed lumber and rebuilding.
    “What time’s he coming?” I asked.
    “Five.”
    “Does the chauffeur eat at the same table as him?” I’d never dealt with employees. We just had the one table here in the kitchen. I sure wasn’t going to make the man sit on the back steps.
    “Oh, God,” she said. This had clearly never