Bea must have seen it
all in my eyes, because she sighed. “I knew you’d be like this. Try to listen to what I’m saying, though, would you? There’s a really large contingent of Elders who think the best course of action is to do nothing—to let all the vampires starve themselves to death.”
“That includes me!”
“Yeah, I don’t think your mom was counting on that.”
“Wait, are you saying that mass genocide was Mom’s idea?”
Bea tsked. “No, of course not. I just think she was more willing to entertain the idea when she thought it was, you know, just
them
.”
“I can’t believe that. I thought she was really starting to like Elias. God, how could I have been so wrong?” Of course, it seemed I’d generally put far too much trust in my parents lately.
Pursing her lips, Bea took a sip of coffee before answering. “I don’t know. Anyway, I thought she said something about his leaving to get married off in some political ceremony.”
That made a little more sense, at least. Mom was counting on Elias’s being away before letting the local vamps devour themselves, or whatever they thought would happen if they denied them the hunt forever.
Bea was giving me a funny look. “So it’s true?” she asked.
“Yeah, remember, I told you about this last night? Well, that prince wants Elias to marry his captain. Well, I guess ‘marry’ isn’t the right term. They’d enter a confarreatio.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Isn’t that just what they call vampire marriage?”
“No,” I said. “This seems like a completely different thing. My mom said she insisted on getting a real marriage to my dad on top of a confarreatio.”
“But it still binds two people, right?”
“Seems
to,” I agreed.
“Well, I thought you and Elias were together.”
I had no idea what to say about that. I mean, I’d thought Dad had broken us up, but now Luis suggested we were forever bound by some kind of “trust blood bond.” So I just shrugged.
“Is he really going to marry a dude? I didn’t know he was bi.”
Wow, my mom must have told the council everything. I guessed Bea just needed me to confirm it. “I don’t know if he’s bi. We never talked about that. I have to say that the confarreatio seems very arranged and political, not so much on the romantic side. I’m beginning to think vampires don’t marry for love, only politics. I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to have kids together.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Bea agreed. But she really didn’t want to let the subject of Elias’s sexuality go. “So you’ve never asked him? He’s been alive forever, and you’re not even curious if he ever kissed a boy in all that time? I mean, Constantine, right? That’s Greek, or Roman—whatever. I watched
Spartacus
. There was a whole lot of sex with dudes in those days.”
“Oh, would you stop it? Don’t we have bigger things to worry about than whether Elias has kissed a boy?”
She gave me a serious, measuring look. Setting her cup down, she declared, “You don’t like the idea, do you?”
“Well, would you? Would you want to know if your boyfriend had boyfriends?”
Bea smiled
lasciviously. “I’d think it was kind of hot.”
“You are so weird.”
“Oh, come on! You don’t think the idea of two Roman dudes together is kind of sexy?” she continued. “The point is, that’s like total
yaoi
fantasy.” Bea referred to a subset of Manga written for girls that features boys in love. We’d both gone through a phase when we read a lot of it, though apparently it had made a much bigger impression on Bea.
“Yeah, but see, that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s fantasy. Elias is my
real
boyfriend.”
Bea cocked her head. “So you
are
still together. Does Thompson know?”
I was seriously getting frustrated with this conversation. It had spun away from me—and from the point. “For the hundredth time, I’m not dating Thompson.”
“I don’t know if he knows that.”
Crossing my arms in front of my chest, I sat back. “Can we just go look at the book?”
Bea laughed. “You know what? No. Not until you promise on your witch honor that you will ask Elias about his past relationship with men.”
“Seriously? You are such a pervert.”
“I know I am, but what are you?” she said in that singsong tone we used when we were kids. Bea got up and put her coffee cup in the dishwasher. “Just ask. I’m curious, okay? I just told you a whole bunch of stuff I wasn’t supposed to, and that could get me in a whole shitload of trouble. You could at least do this for me.”
I raised my hands in defeat. “Okay, okay. You win!”
“Good. Now let’s go fetch the grimoire.”
When I told
Bea to hide the book, I’d had visions of secret caves or, at the very least, a wall safe with multiple combinations. She pulled a cardboard box out from under her bed.
“This is where you hid the grimoire?”
“Don’t act so horrified,” she said. At least she’d put a few decoy papers on top. As she shifted them to the side, I thought they looked like old school papers. Bea sat in a clear spot on the floor of her room. “No one knew I had it. It was as safe here as anywhere else.”
The walls of Bea’s room were covered in movie posters and pencil sketches of celebrities. In a corner she had a wooden drawing table and a stool, which I perched on. There were art supplies everywhere. Magazines and books littered the floor and all other flat surfaces. Discarded clothes draped over everything else. Bea was a slob; I felt completely at home.
She handed me the book. It was leather bound and smelled of red rot. The pages were brittle and so thin as to be nearly transparent. Spidery, cursive handwriting and illustrations filled all the spaces. Here and there pressed flowers, which had been pasted to the paper, crumbled into the book’s gutter.
I looked at the words for a clue, and I discovered I couldn’t read it.
“Is this English?” I asked.
“Kind of. It’s Old English,” Bea said. When I gave her a how-did-you-know-that look, she shrugged. “I looked it up on Wikipedia.”
“Can you read it?”
“If I work at it, but I never even really learned cursive, did you?”
Actually, I
had. I’d suffered through hours and hours of rote practice because my mother, being a college professor, said she would be damned if a child of hers couldn’t read historical documents such as the Constitution because no one in the St. Paul public school system could be bothered to teach it. Still, it wasn’t something I used every day. “A little,” I admitted.
I joined Bea over on her bed, and we sounded out the titles to most of the entries. There were effective poultices for the treatment of gout and other ailments, botanical lists, and even a spell for the “discoverie of a familiar” that both Bea and I kind of wanted to try.
Outside of that and the one very important spell for the “creation of the vampyr,” nothing in the book seemed terribly outside of what you might find in a modern grimoire. I copied down everything written on vampires, all three pages of it, but it seemed everyone had called this one: the grimoire wasn’t going to be much help.
At least not in any obvious way.
Resting my back against the headboard, I felt defeated. Bea sat beside me adding sketches of the symbols and other illustrations to my notes. She hummed to herself as she drew. Under the surface of reality, I could feel another vibration, not unlike when Bea worked magic. Her fingers dashed lightly over the paper, and I was amazed, and, as always, just a little surprised at how good she really was.
“Are you going to apply to MCAD?” I asked. Minneapolis College of Art and Design would be a perfect fit for a college for Bea. They even taught courses on graphic novels and animation.
She shook
her head lightly, not breaking the deep concentration she always entered when drawing. “My dad won’t pay for it. He thinks art is a fine hobby, but I should get a real education to support my ‘dabbling.’”
“Your dad’s an asshole,” I noted, leaning over her shoulder to watch as she transformed the blank section of the notepaper into a work of art. “You’d be wasted as a computer programmer.”
That was what Bea’s dad was, and, consequently, he thought all this artsy-fartsy stuff such as theater and drawing were trivial distractions from the real world. Bea’s mom was a little more supportive, but she was in the same camp when it came down to the importance of a decent job and financial security.
Heck, neither of Bea’s parents had much respect for my mom’s work. I’d heard them at parties tell her half jokingly, half seriously that it was time for her to grow up and move out of the dorm. It was true that my mom worked long hours, but that was because she wasn’t tenured. To make up for that, she taught as an adjunct professor at several different colleges and universities in the area.
At least I knew my mom wouldn’t turn up her nose if I applied to a theater program somewhere. She figured all college degrees were valuable, even the most liberal of the liberal arts. But I would have a fight if I decided not to go to college, or, Goddess forbid, a technical or community college. In fact, I’d better pick a school with a good reputation or I’d never hear the end of it. She would probably rather die than tell her colleagues her daughter was off at some kind of party school, like the University of Florida–Gainesville.
“You’re missing driver’s ed,” Bea noted when she looked up long enough to stretch her neck. Pointing to the candy red analog alarm clock, complete with big brass bells, she said, “It’s after ten.”
“I
know,” I said. Speaking of things Mom would be mad about, I’d begged and begged her to get me into a driver’s education program that wouldn’t interfere too much with my summer plans or my vampire princess duties. To spite me, I swear, she got me into a class that started at eight in the morning. This would be the third class I’d missed. I’d slept through the other two. “I’m never going to get my license.”
“You don’t need to drive. You could get an Igor as a chauffeur,” Bea pointed out.
I made a face. “Only if he’s not one of the smelly ones.” A lot of the Igors I’d met had a dubious sense of hygiene. They hung out in too many caves, I guessed.
My cell beeped. I checked the text. It was Thompson, wanting to know if I was up for meeting him for lunch before tryouts for the Renaissance Festival. Sounded like a date to me, so I turned to Bea. “Want to go to lunch with me and Thompson?”
“I don’t want to be a third wheel,” she teased.
“Gah! We are not dating!” I said, though I was beginning to wonder if I
had
missed that particular memo. Anyway, I was already telling him that he could pick us up at Bea’s house because she was coming along. Having done this with theater people before, I added, “We should decide now where we want to go. I hate all that ‘I dunno, where do you want to go’ stuff.”
“Jimmy John’s,” Bea suggested.
I had enough
money for that, so I texted Thompson. Then I sent another one telling him to bring his truck because I needed to throw my bike in the back.
He replied, “Bike? Bet u look like W. Witch.”
Bea, who read it over my shoulder, chuckled. “He thinks you’re cute.”
“How do you get that? The Wicked Witch was green.”
“You know that’s not how he meant it,” Bea said, her grin widening. “I don’t know why you’re so resistant. He’s cute and sweet on you, and now he’s a theater guy. That’s all win, girl.”
“If you ignore our terrifying history.” I grimaced. When Bea had the audacity to look confused, I explained. “He used to bully us, Bea. All the time. Don’t you remember putting a spell on him when it looked like he was going to punch us? The rude words on my locker? The licking incident? Hello, that was only last year.”
Bea frowned briefly and then dismissed all that with a little shrug. “We were in a show together. That forgives everything.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed. Sure, doing the updated version of
My Fair Lady
opposite Thompson was pretty amazing. He seemed like a completely different person during the run of the show. Maybe that was part of it. I just didn’t trust the change to last.
I had to admit it was nice to be worrying about boys instead of vampires for the moment. I wondered, however, if Bea intentionally distracted me. She’d dropped a pretty big bomb at the breakfast table—that the Elders were seriously considering letting everyone in the kingdom die from neglect, as it were. I wasn’t even sure that would work. I got the impression from Elias that they would become nosferatu before that. Mom had found that out last night too. Hadn’t she brought that up to the Elders at their secret meeting?
I wanted
to ask Bea but was afraid that if she didn’t know, she’d tell. I didn’t want the Elders to have any more of a head start than they already had.
Knees bent up and ankles crossed, she lay on her bed, putting the finishing touches on her drawing. The grimoire sat open beside her. She looked so comfortable with the book that I got the feeling she’d done this many times before. She claimed she couldn’t read the writing, but I’d have bet it wouldn’t take her artist’s eye long to parse out the letters if she put any effort into it at all. She’d known it was in Old English.
Bea was craftier than I gave her credit for.
Putting her pencil down, she noticed me staring at her and smiled broadly. “Hey, what do you think I should wear to tryouts?”
And she hopped up to drag me into the furious business of fashion decisions. I didn’t surface until we heard the beep of Thompson pulling up to the house.
Matt Thompson arrived in the kind of truck you’d expect to have a gun rack in the back and, in the proper season, a dead deer in the bed. He was a hockey player and had the kind of dark curly hair that made cheerleaders swoon. His jeans were dusty and grass-stained, and he had a body that looked as if he actually used it for something.
I dare say
I noticed that body thanks to a nicely fitting T-shirt that clung in all the right places.
We stood on the stoop as he walked up the sidewalk. Bea leaned into me and quietly said, “Yum.”
“You should date him,” I told her, even though I couldn’t have agreed more about his appeal.