Teeth

Elsie Pt 2

Elsie is surprisingly spry for a woman of her age, especially with the arthritis that has clearly bent her hands like gnarled trees, but she never the less directs Carolyn crisply in applying some first aid to the cut on my heel, and instructs her in helping me down the hallway into the kitchen.

I still haven't seen any staff, but maybe they get time off when there are vampires on the property, but I'm not sure if its rude to ask. Carolyn just looks disapproving, and deposits me in a steel and red leather chair with a snort, and huffs off again, leaving Elsie to deal with things, which doesn't seem to bother her, as she bustles her way to a stainless steel refrigerator and retrieves a carton of orange juice and a plastic bag of bagels.

"I assume you're not allergic to anything exciting, dear?" She chirps, setting them on the counter. At this point I'm sufficiently hungry that eating cold bagels and drinking juice from the carton sounds like heaven, but I swallow my drool, and attempt to be polite longer. I'd have been hungry anyway after missing breakfast, but I suspect that everything I've been through and Carolyn's description of how much energy it takes to fix the kind of damage I took isn't that far off.

"No, not at all." I promise. Which is just as well, somehow I suspect tracking an allergy would have suddenly become infinitely more complicated.

"Good." She wanders off again to grab a glass  and clunks it on the counter in front of me, sliding the container of juice over. "Help yourself, you need it. You like cream cheese or butter on your bagels?"

"Um, Either's fine? Cream cheese I guess." I offer, since I catch a glimpse of a container of it in the fridge, the whipped kind that's easy to spread, and Elsie chortles as she -tosses it- across the kitchen, making me lean to grab for the glass as they bump together, almost sending the glassware skittering off the bar counter.

"Hang on I'll throw one of those in the toaster for you. I'd offer you eggs but I've never been good at making the damn things and my cook won't be in until this afternoon."

"No no that's fine. This is fantastic. Seriously fantastic."

Granted I'm pretty sure that if I got much hungrier I would chew on a stick of butter if it were offered to me, but being offered things I legitimately enjoy? Almost slightly relaxing, or maybe that's Elsie, who sort of casts an atmosphere of being the grandmother I wish I had. I didn't really know my grandparents. My dad's folks were dead, and while my maternal grandfather was alive, I remember him in fragments and a perpetual sense of being somehow disappointing.

Ellie is a stranger still, technically, but she's the sort of stranger who doesn't feel like one, and I wish I'd had a chance to meet her under slightly less surreal circumstances.

"So... how long have you known Carolyn and Lily?" This I hope isn't as taboo a subject as the mysterious 'bad blood' between my family and Lily.

"Them? Oh Years, since I was a young looker, they right swept me off my feet, but I decided to plant my heels again and be a bit mundane, married my husband and all that. Lily's a very alluring woman to be sure, but I had plans for my art and faffing about taunting a bunch of murder-minded old men with more ammunition than sense wasn't going to get me anywhere. Never did lose touch with her though, we've done each other a few favors through the years, but I keep my nose just clean enough that the fuckers don't dare touch me."  She smiles brightly with slightly crooked but very white teeth as she chirps her F-bomb in happy Disney princess tones.  If it's intended to make me grin, it works, because I almost can't help it.

"Sounds like it must be quite a story."

"All stories are interesting, didn't you say that in one of your books?" She points out, brandishing a pair of toaster tongs at me as the bagel pops up out of the toaster as a exclamation point to her question. She's right, I did once.

"I did." I admit, ducking my head sheepishly. "I mean they are, but yours definitely has a few points not too many people can say they have."

"Mm, so does yours rather at this point. Even I'm not one of Lily's little strays, and I've met a few."

"I... guess that's true isn't it? I always kinda figured I'd just -tell- the interesting stories, not, you know... be in one. Maybe I should be a bit more sympathetic to my protagonists in the future."  It would definitely give me a whole new perspective next time I swept a character out of an ordinary life into something crazy.

"So... what were they like? Lily's strays?" And were any of them still alive? Carolyn hadn't given me any particularly great forecast on my survival, and it made me wonder how many had come before me, and what had happened to them.

"Oh a colorful lot." Elsie wandered back over and slid the toasted bagel to me on a plate, with a knife beside it. "Some of them... worked out better than others, but that's what happens when you give broken people the kind of powers she has. Sometimes it works out, sometimes they turn into the kind of person they were trying to get away from." She lowered her chin slightly and studied me from under her raised eyebrows as she added. "That's why Carolyn is afraid of you, I think. She's afraid you're your mother's son."

I flinch, putting the knife back down with a clink, bagel untouched.

"If I thought for a second I was like her I'd..."  I don't know. It makes me want to scrub my brain out with an brillo pad, to make sure there's nothing of her in there.  "I didn't even know she'd ever met you. Usually if she knows someone even remotely well off she'd have been off printing it on her business cards."

"But she doesn't know you. You're a gamble in her book and you might." She pops the lid off the cream cheese container and pushes it toward me with a bent finger, and I feel a hint of guilt for allowing her to do it, though she doesn't complain. "You might be a trap for all she knows. Give the poor girl time. She was one of Lily's broken dolls too, regardless of how well she hides the cracks."

I let this settle in, scooping cream cheese onto the bagel before it gets cold, and decide to change the subject.

"So... special agents? Is that real?"

...Perhaps not because Elsie cackles like an henhouse.

"Oh is that how she phrases it? Nice way of telling a boy like you that you can't trust the police."

"Oh god please be kidding." It sounds almost too cliche to be true.

"Sorry dear, but it's an very poorly kept secret that they can have more bullets than brains and an increasingly well publicized tendency to kill unarmed people would sign on for more chances to flex their trigger fingers? They're not all bad, mind, but that's like pointing out that not all the chambers in a gun are loaded when you play Russian Roulette. Not terrible comforting is it? It's just you've probably never had to think about it before now, never had to wonder if you had more to fear than a speeding ticket."

She's right. It's not comforting at all.