"Why not?" she asked. "If your father is no-fanger, surely you—"
"My mother was immortal."
"So if the mother is immortal and the father is no-fanger, the baby can come out immortal or no-fanger?" she asked curiously.
"The baby will always come out whatever the mother is," he said with disgust. "The father only ever passes the sperm. The blood makes the baby. If the mother's immortal, the baby's immortal, if the mother is no-fanger, the baby is no-fanger. My mother was immortal, so I was too," he muttered.
"You don't sound too happy about that," she pointed out quietly.
Ernie shrugged, but then scowled and said, "Why should I be? Most immortals are weak and softhearted like Lucian and his gang. They protect mortals rather than farm them as we should. They give us all a bad name," he added with disgust.
The bathroom door opened then and Dee came back out. Jo tried to twist in her seat to see her, but Ernie hardly glanced her way, merely turning on his heel and moving to the bed.
"Feed her when the food comes," he ordered, dropping to lie on the bed. "And make sure she doesn't get away. Wake me when night falls."
Ernie closed his eyes and completely relaxed, seeming to drop off to sleep at once, and then Dee moved into view beside Jo. The girl was looking toward Ernie, watching as his breathing became slow and steady, but Jo was looking at the girl's throat. All there was to see was a large, neat bandage covering the wound on her neck, and then the girl turned to look at her. If Ernie hadn't already told her Dee didn't like her, the look she gave Jo then would have told her so. Dee's eyes were lasers of hatred, slicing her to ribbons.
"He's mine," Dee hissed, glaring at her.
"You're welcome to him," Jo said solemnly, keeping her voice low. "In fact, if you want to untie me, I'll happily get out of here."
Dee hesitated, and Jo felt a moment's hope, and then Dee glanced to Ernie. Jo did as well, her heart sinking when she saw that his eyes were open and focused on them.
"If she escapes, you die, Dee," he said calmly, and then closed his eyes again.
Dee's breath hissed out and she scowled at Jo and then moved to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and retrieved something. It wasn't until she turned and headed back to the table that Jo saw it was a gun. She watched the other woman drop into the seat across from her and set the gun on the table. Jo stared at what to her appeared to be a very large gun barrel pointing in her direction, and then glanced to Dee and asked, "Yours?"
"Mine now," Dee said defiantly, and picked it back up to examine it briefly as she said, "We got it off a cop on the way out of Texas. He stopped us for speeding."
"You don't sound like you're from Texas," Jo said quietly.
"I'm not. I'm from here." She set the gun down again. "We were just passing through Texas on the way back to Canada."
"And the policeman you took the gun from?" Jo asked.
"He won't need it anymore," Dee said with a shrug, and then added defiantly, "He was an arrogant prick anyway. He shouldn't have insulted Ernie."
"Right," Jo said on a sigh, trying not to imagine some poor police officer stopping a car on a lonely road at night, never knowing it would be the last car he'd stop. Forcing the image away, she asked, "So how did you end up traveling through Texas with Ernie if you're from here?"
"His father took me south," she muttered.
Jo felt herself tense. Ernie's father was who she was being taken to, and it did seem smart to learn all she could about him. "Why did he take you south? What's he like?"
"He's crazy mean," Dee said quietly, beginning to rotate the gun slowly on the table. "He and a couple of his sons showed up at our farm earlier in the summer."
Jo blinked in surprise, not at the news that Ernie's father and his brothers had shown up at Dee's farm, but that she actually came from a farm. With her piercings and dress, Jo would have guessed she was a city girl.
"They came in the middle of the night, killed my father, kept cutting and feeding on my mother, sisters, and me for a couple days, and then they killed my mother and two of my sisters and took my younger sister and me and headed south. They fed on just the two of us on the journey, occasionally dragging in another person to feed on. Usually a girl. They seem to prefer girls, but then probably because they didn't always just use us to feed on. Ernie's father mostly left us alone except to bleed us, but his brothers…" She swallowed and shuddered. "They liked to do other things too."
Jo didn't need her to spell out what those other things were. Ernie had said some of his brothers weren't past the sex stage. She could figure it out. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "It must have been awful."