"I have a house outside Memphis."

"Oh," I said, thinking that seemed a long way away for a dating relationship.

"I'm partner in a company called Special Events. We're a sort of secret offshoot of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events. You've seen the logo, I know. E(E)E?" He made the parentheses with his fingers. I nodded. E(E)E did a lot of very fancy event designing nationally. "There are four partners who work full-time for Special Events, and we each employ a few people full- or part-time. Since we travel a lot, we have places we use all over the country; some of them are just rooms in houses of friends or associates, and some of them are real apartments. The place I stay in this area is in Shreveport, a guesthouse in back of the mansion of a shifter."

I'd learned a lot about him in two minutes flat. "So you put on events in the supernatural world, like the contest for packmaster." That had been a dangerous job and one requiring a lot of specialized paraphernalia. "But what else is there to do? A packmaster's contest can only come up every so now and then. How much do you have to travel? What other special events can you stage?"

"I generally handle the Southeast, Georgia across to Texas." He sat forward in his chair, his big hands resting on his knees. "Tennessee south through Florida. In those states, if you want to stage a fight for packmaster, or a rite of ascension for a shaman or witch, or a vampire hierarchal wedding—and you want to do it right, with all the trimmings—you come to me."

I remembered the extraordinary pictures in Alfred Cumberland's photo gallery. "So there's enough of that to keep you busy?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "Of course, some of it is seasonal. Vamps get married in the winter, since the nights are so much longer. I did a hierarchal wedding in New Orleans in January, this past year. And then, some of the occasions are tied to the Wiccan calendar. Or to puberty."