“Brace yourself. Tonight’s the night,” he said.

I was so proud he’d told me, and he’d echoed my own thoughts so closely, I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m ready. I’ll be right here.” I dropped my purse in the deep drawer in his desk and went to tie on my apron. I was relieving Holly, but after I’d had a talk with her about the customers at our tables, I said, “You oughta stick around tonight.”

She looked at me sharply. Holly had recently been letting her hair grow out, so the dyed black ends looked like they’d been dipped in tar. Her natural color, now showing about an inch at the roots, turned out to be a pleasant light brown. She’d colored it for so long that I’d clean forgotten. “This going to be good enough for me to keep Hoyt waiting?” she asked. “Him and Cody get along like a house on fire, but I am Cody’s mama.” Hoyt, my brother Jason’s best buddy, had been co-opted by Holly. Now he washer follower.

“You should stay awhile.” I gave her a significant lift of my eyebrows.

Holly said, “The Weres?” I nodded, and her face brightened with a grin. “Oh, boy! Arlene’s going to have a shit fit.”

Arlene, our coworker and former friend, had become politically sensitized a few months before by one of her string of man friends. Now she was somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, especially on vampire issues. She’d even joined the Fellowship of the Sun, a church in all but name. She was standing at one of her tables now, having a serious conversation with her man, Whit Spradlin, a FotS official of some sort who had a day job at one of the Shreveport Home Depots. He had a sizeable bald patch and a little paunch, but that didn’t make any nevermind to me. His politics did. He had a buddy with him, of course. The FotS people seemed to run in packs—just like another minority group they were about to meet.

My brother, Jason, was at a table, too, with Mel Hart.