There were rules. Rules like, don't go to the same place more than two times. Maybe a third if you were desperate and the place was well fortified. But you didn't want your fresh-meat human scent lingering around where the zombies shuffled. Or else you'd be dinner.
And immune, while an excellent evolutionary advantage, did not guarantee your survival if the fucking undead masses decided you looked just like their next meal. Sparrow was many things, but an idiot was not one of them. You didn't survive by assuming immune meant invincible.
You also, generally speaking, did not survive by getting attached. And he resented the very implication of attachment, but he couldn't deny that there were a very few people he counted as his. But they weren't people he cared about. They were like toys no one else could play with. His own little harem of dark-haired girls.
He hated the serial killer for taking his type. He hated the serial killer more for breaking the unspoken code that only Sparrow knew. Irrational, maybe, but Sparrow's code of 'ethics' had never claimed rationality as its highest point.
Most of his girls were the sort of girls that other people just didn't fuck with. Emilie, Big Blue, nena--the big-eyed crazy bitch Sparrow had made it his mission to manipulate. Junkies were easy. His little snake queen, Arden Serpico, the bitch of all bitches. He liked her best. Marina, the girl who had been his for far too long. Long enough that she fit like a second skin and he hated her as much as he wanted her.
But some of them were younger, less violent. Panahedan, whose name he did not know, who had wanted choking lessons. Violent, but maybe not the same kind of girl as Big Blue and the little snake queen and the firebrd. And North, who was very much a normal girl, but who was an excellent booty call. And therefore, in the unstable world created by the apocalypse, semi-irreplaceable.
It was these two he was set to meet, with one of his Cartel members waiting in the wings with a junkie for the strangling lessons. Once North had left, of course. She wasn't the type who liked to strangle.
He'd put the bird skull on the door and was inside, waiting; perched atop the bar and walking back and forth from end to end. Looking far more like a bored teenager than an adult man who was pretty far into the realm of dangerous and deadly.
When the door opened, he didn't bother to look up; his man in the corner would have said something if it was a danger and not one of his two girls.
Arms spread wide to keep his balance as he moved along the edge of the bar, he said, "Well, that makes one of you. Come in, come in."