“Make sure you throw some ice cream in the cooler too. I want to make us some of my famous super-duper sundaes later while we’re relaxing.”
“Right. Ice cream.” Marcus nodded.
“And the fixings,” Vincent added.
“Right. Fixings.” Marcus nodded again.
Divine couldn’t see his expression, but whatever it was made Vincent suddenly frown. “You do know what fixings are needed for sundaes, right?”
When Marcus didn’t respond Vincent clucked impatiently and yelled upstairs, “Honey, can you throw a couple pairs of shorts and some T-shirts in a bag for me? Marcus hasn’t eaten in more than two millennia. If we leave it up to him we’ll be stuck with Puppy Chow or something.”
“You have a puppy?” Divine asked curiously.
Vincent lowered his gaze back to them and grinned. “Yeah. We dropped her at the vet’s last night. She was being operated on this morning. Spayed,” he added and then frowned. “We were supposed to pick her up at four.” Raising his head he yelled, “Jackie, we forgot to pick up Little One at four.”
“Crap,” they heard from upstairs. “I think they’re open until eight. I’ll call.”
Divine raised an eyebrow. “You don’t plan on bringing her along to, do you? I mean, what if they set the RV on fire again or blow it up this time or something?”
Vincent stiffened and then raised his head and yelled, “I’ll call the office and have someone pick her up if they’re open. They can take her to the kennel tomorrow until we get back.”
“Oh, but—”
“It’s safer for her,” Vincent interrupted.
There was a pause and then Jackie sighed. “Okay.”
Vincent nodded, but didn’t look pleased himself as he came down the rest of the stairs to join them in the kitchen. Once there he commented, “You know, Bastien should really have some of his scientists look into developing nanos for dogs.”
“Why not just give our nanos to the dog and see if it takes?” Divine suggested, crossing the kitchen to a set of double doors she suspected was the pantry. She was right, she saw once she opened them.
“Because that wouldn’t work,” Marcus said with a laugh.
“Why?” Divine asked absently as she flipped on a switch, lighting up the small room lined with shelves. A survey of the contents on the shelves left her a little bewildered. There were fruits and vegetables. She recognized those, but there were a ton of other items she didn’t recognize. What the devil was Spam? she wondered.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Divine glanced over her shoulder to see Marcus in the doorway, peering at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. Shifting uncomfortably, she asked, “About what?”
“About why our nanos wouldn’t work for dogs,” he said. “I mean, they were made to work with the human anatomy and chemistry only. The scientists who made them programmed them that way. They—”
“Scientists?” Divine interrupted with surprise before she could catch herself. She hadn’t realized the nanos that made her so strong and gave her such a long life were man-made. She’d thought . . . well, she supposed she’d just assumed they were a part of every immortal, as natural as gills on a fish. That immortals were maybe a different species to humans or something.
Divine hadn’t been educated on the origin of immortals before she’d been kidnapped, and certainly Leonius hadn’t had any desire to teach her anything that didn’t have to do with horror and pain. Once she was free of him, her time had been taken up with running and hiding and constantly moving to avoid the great and monstrous Lucian Argeneau. It had left little time to ponder the origins of her people or the source of their nanos.