“Unconscious works too.”
I nodded. Then a few seconds later I caught his meaning. I stood up and started pacing around the bronze fountain of a woman pouring water from an amphora. “Unconscious! As in knocked out! Oh my God, are you okay? Is Sebastian okay?”
I almost fretted myself awake, but Mátyás put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back onto the bench. I felt myself settling deeper into sleep. “I never saw you stand up,” I told him. “How did you . . . ?”
“Dream logic,” Mátyás said. “It’s kind of cool; once you get the hang of it, you can do almost anything.”
“Are you okay?” I asked him. “I mean, where are you? Are you lying in a ditch somewhere? Will you get hypothermia?”
“I don’t actually know,” he said. “We followed my mother’s magic trail across the cornfield.”
Suddenly, the scene shifted, and we were standing out in the snow-covered field behind Sebastian’s house. The nubs of tough, sheared cornstalks stood in orderly rows. Blowing snow made it difficult to see, but Sebastian raced ahead of us at superhuman speed.
Somehow, we could nearly keep up. I’d never run so fast in real life. It was kind of invigorating, the supple way my muscles felt as I athletically bounded across the ground.
“Is this how it feels when you run?” I asked Mátyás.
“Only in dreams,” he said with a wry smile. “In real life, I’m a lot more chuffed. My side aches, and I sweat. I can nearly keep up with him, but it’s a lot of work.”
I was a little disappointed because with each of Mátyás’s’s words, I got the same sensations. Running was no longer easy. By the time we came to where Teréza and Sebastian stood together, we were nearly bent over with exhaustion. Teréza was angry. Her fangs had dropped, and her eyes flashed with barely contained fury. As we recovered, we could hear her yelling over the wind, “You betrayed me.”
Not good.
“I don’t know what you did to her in the barn,” Mátyás said to me, “But she wasn’t happy about it. She thinks that Papa was complicit and that he was too cowardly to face her alone, so he sent his errand dog.”
“Actually,” I said, watching Teréza’s lips move silently as Mátyás gave his voice-over recollection of the conversation, “I think the word she used was ‘bitch.’ ”
“Believe it or not, I was being nice,” Mátyás said.
“That’s hard to believe,” I said. “Now I know I’m dreaming.”
“Ha-ha.”
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“They started to fight,” Mátyás explained just as Teréza pushed Sebastian. I could see Sebastian straining not to hurt her, but Teréza wasn’t holding anything back. She bit him in the arm like a shark closing in on a kill. Blood flew . . . and then everything went black.
“Wait,” I said, standing in an unearthly darkness. “You’re missing something. What happened? Did you faint?”
“I suppose I could have,” Mátyás said, “But it’s not like I’ve never seen a vampire bite someone. I think . . . I’m not sure, but I think something explosive happened when Mother bit Papa, something neither of them was expecting.”
“Something magical,” I said. Lightning flashed in the darkness. “Because Sebastian’s blood isn’t normal vampire blood, it’s magic. And partly Lilith since, well, since that night you and your Vatican pals tried to kill us.”
Mátyás gave me a raised eyebrow as if to remind me that he could have told the Vatican what he’d seen that night but didn’t.
“Right,” I said. “Have I ever thanked you for not, you know, telling them we weren’t dead?”
“How do you know I didn’t?”
I pursed my lips. “No one has come after us since. Besides, I know you have your problems with Sebastian, but you still—”
“If it is something magical,” Mátyás cut me off sharply, “it could have affected mother too. The sun will be up very soon.”
“I need to find you,” I said out loud, as I pulled myself awake. I’d fallen asleep the second my face hit the pillow. I hadn’t even bothered to take off the one boot I’d gotten on.
Stumbling from lack of sleep to the coatrack, I pulled on the other boot clumsily. I grabbed my coat. I jammed my hat on my head and pulled on my mittens. If Mátyás’s vision of the weather outside was right, there was a serious storm raging out there. I pulled open the front door to near whiteout conditions.
Great. My fiancé, his lover, and their son were all caught out in a blizzard. And the sun was about to rise.
A good farm girl knows that the dumbest thing you
can do in a blizzard is go anywhere. Even walking a short distance like from the house to the barn can result in disaster. People have gotten lost in the blinding conditions of a blizzard and frozen to death before anyone found them.
Good farm girls, however, didn’t harbor the Goddess Lilith. I stepped outside and put my back against the door, even though the porch provided a bit of shelter. The wind whistled through the railings. Huge drifts of snow covered the area where the front steps should be. I closed my eyes and tried to calm my beating heart. Luckily, as tired as I was, it was fairly easy to fall into a trance. The hard part was actually staying on my feet and staying conscious.
That gave me an idea. Though I’d never tried to contact Mátyás on the astral plane, I wondered if I could reach out to his dream self while in a meditative state. Mátyás’s bogeyman persona was a bit scarier than the real-life version. His face was often shadowed, and he always wore a long trench coat the color of a raven’s wings. I imagined him appearing out of the whiteness, striding with that certainty and presence he seemed to only have in dreams.
“You rang?” he asked.
“The weather has gotten worse,” I told him. “I need your help to . . . uh, find you.”
“Aren’t you asleep?”
“Not entirely,” I said. “I’m in a trance.”
“Sleepwalking,” he said.
I was hardly going to argue semantics with the bogeyman when Sebastian and company were lost in this storm. “You could be right,” I said. “Does it matter as long as I’m mobile?”
He laughed at that, showing off crooked, sharp teeth. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Just make sure you stay upright.”
“That’s the goal,” I said. I gestured for him to get going with a “Lead on, Macduff” half bow. He stepped out into the whiteness, and suddenly we were at the scene of the fight. “You fell asleep,” he said.
“What? Uh,” I roused myself from where I’d slumped down against the door. “Crap, I wonder if I’m too tired for this?”
Mátyás reappeared. “We don’t have much time. I can feel myself fading.”
“Fading?” I asked. “But you’re already out cold.”
“I think cold is the problem,” Mátyás said grimly. “Unlike my parents, I’m not impervious to cold. I’m freezing to death.”
That woke me up, or, rather, kept me from falling further asleep. For added strength, I called on Lilith. Her fire raced across my skin, warming me and rousing my magical senses.
Interestingly, with Lilith’s added vision, Mátyás’s image softened. He appeared less demonlike, though he glowed with a pulsating purple aura so dark it almost seemed black. I got the sense that Lilith considered him a kindred spirit. Given that she was Queen of Hell, I wasn’t sure that comparison actually flattered Mátyás.
“Well,” said Mátyás with a look that swept me from head to toe, “Look at you.”
I had no idea what he saw, but I didn’t appreciate being gawked at by my fiancé’s son, no matter how old he might really be.
“Keep your eyes on the prize, kiddo.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mátyás said with a mock salute and a click of his heels.
This time, when we stepped off the porch, the first thing that happened was that I sank into snow up to my knees. Apparently, I missed the step entirely. Not that it mattered much in the drifts. I pushed through some that were hip high, only to stumble into patches only ankle deep.
Mátyás led the way, sometimes disappearing as the cold momentarily jolted me out of my trance every so often. He was always there, waiting patiently when I returned, though his face was growing frightfully pale. “Hang on,” I told him. “I’m going as fast as I can.”
Although what I was going do with them when I found them, I had no idea. Then, I remembered: Mátyás had left without his coat. I could at least cover him with mine, and maybe, if I could rouse Sebastian or Teréza, they could help me carry him back. But without him to guide us, would we be able to find the farm?
At last we reached the spot where the fight had taken place. I knew we’d arrived because, in the trance state, Mátyás indicated the spot with a freeze-frame of the last thing he saw: Teréza’s teeth sinking into Sebastian’s arm.
“I need to go,” Mátyás said weakly. “I need to sleep.”
“No,” I told him, reaching out the way he had in my dream. “You need to stay with me. Stay separate, if you have to. Then, if your body dies . . . Well, maybe we can find a way to reconnect you.”
“Are you serious? What if you can’t?”
“At least part of you would be alive,” I said.
“Wandering around in people’s dreams for all eternity? Sounds like hell. I think I’d rather die.”
“Don’t die,” I said. I wanted to tell him how fond I’d grown of him and how much he meant to me, but I was worried that if I got all sentimental, he’d shut down on me again, like he had when I’d tried to remind him that he still loved his father. So instead, I said the one thing I knew would piss him off so much he’d refuse to die. “It would ruin my wedding.”
He growled in a nightmarish way, and his image sharpened.
“Hold on to that thought,” I said, shaking myself awake.
I could hardly see them. Someone’s arm—I thought it might be Mátyás’s by the pale, almost bluish tint to it—stuck up out of the snow. When the fingers curled painfully slowly to give me the finger, I knew it must be. Frantically, I began to dig. Even as I pulled snow off his body, I wondered if I should let it blanket him. Was it worse to be exposed to the wind? Despite my doubts, I couldn’t stop digging. I had him uncovered in a matter of minutes. The snow had stopped coming down quite so hard. Though it still fell in furious sheets, I could now clearly make out a second, funny-shaped pile of snow that probably contained Teréza and Sebastian.
I shimmied out of my coat and tossed it over Mátyás. I rubbed at his exposed skin to try to warm it. The vampires, I knew, would be safe under the snow. Teréza might even be mostly protected from the sun. However, despite the snow, the sky had begun to lighten. Dawn had arrived.
After what seemed like a lot of rubbing, I pulled Mátyás upright and hugged him close to me. Lilith turned up the heat of my body until my nerves felt almost painfully scorched. Steam rose around us in huge puffs as the snow hit my overheated skin and turned to steam.
Mátyás stirred.
“Oh thank the Goddess, you’re alive,” I said. Tears came to my eyes. I didn’t realize just how grateful I’d be at this moment. I think I even kissed his cheek and pulled him closer.
“Uh, I’m being mauled by my future stepmother.”
Now I wept in earnest. Mátyás hated the idea of my marriage to Sebastian; I never thought I’d hear him acknowledge it, not even in a wisecrack. “I love you,” I said.
“Stop,” he said, pushing away from me. Even so, I saw him smile as he said, “You’re going to make me sick, and I don’t think my body can take that kind of strain.”
“We need to get you to shelter,” I said. “You’re not out of the woods yet.”
“But what about them?” He pointed to the place where I thought Sebastian and Teréza were buried.
“The snow is only going to get thicker. They’ll be safe until nightfall.”
“That’s twelve hours from now!”
I pointed to the sky, which had definitely brightened. “If we dig them out, are you sure Teréza can handle that?”
He stared at the sky for a long time. Finally, he should his head. “She can’t even tolerate an overcast day. The torpor takes her the second the sun is up, visible or not.”
“So she’s already asleep.”
“Aren’t you worried about Papa?”
“Of course I am, but he’s a thousand-year-old vampire. Besides, he’d kill me if anything happened to you.”
Somehow, Mátyás and I made our way back to the
house. I stoked up the fire and got Mátyás blankets. “Get out of those wet clothes,” I told him. “I’m going to run you a bath.”
I ran into my mom in the shower. She was wrapped in a towel and putting on mascara in the mirror. “Oh, sorry, honey,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “Did we wake you?”
“No,” I said, wondering how she failed to notice my soaking-wet clothes. “Mátyás got lost in the storm without a proper coat,”
I said. “What’s the right temperature to make this bath if he has hypothermia?”
“Oh, God!” Mom shouted, dropping her tube of makeup. “Are you serious?”
I nodded.
“Glen Lacey!” she shouted. “Get in here! We need some help.”
My dad came rushing in wearing only blue and white striped boxers. Large curls of gray frizzled hair stood out on his slightly pudgy chest. It was more of Dad than I really needed to see.
“What’s going on?”
“Mátyás is downstairs,” I explained. “He might be suffering hypothermia. I know I’m not supposed to make him a hot bath, but how warm
should
I make it?”
“Room temperature to start with,” my dad said authoritatively. “Hell, I’d think anything just short of cold is going to be a shock.”
“Could you start it for me? I’ll go get him.”
Back downstairs, Mátyás had stripped off his clothes. They were steaming on the stone tiles in front of the fireplace. He huddled, shivering fiercely, nearly on top of the fire.
“I can’t seem to get warm,” he said pitifully.
“We’re going to get you into a bath. It’ll help. Hopefully, you didn’t get any frostbite. I don’t think it was cold enough, but you were out there a long time.”
I helped Mátyás negotiate the stairs. In the bathroom, I let my father deal with getting him into the tub. Coping with my dad ’s chest hair had been weird enough; the last thing I wanted was to see Mátyás buck naked. Even so, I managed to glimpse a tramp stamp tattoo before I scurried out the door.
“Good-looking kid,” my mother said appreciatively when we were in the hallway.