I cowered in the corner, waiting for a response. There was only silence. I peered over my shoulder cautiously. The plastic hung pulled to the side as if held open by an invisible hand.
“Benjamin?” I asked tentatively. “Are you—?” I almost said “spying on me,” but I didn’t want to piss off the creepy Peeping Tom ghost. “What are you doing?”
Not like it wasn’t obvious: Benjamin was watching me, admiring me . . . ogling me.
“Okay,” I said, my mind filling with all the times I ’d wandered around the house naked, not to mention all the times Sebastian and I had sex. “We need to talk.”
With the shower still running, I let myself drift into a semiconscious state. When I focused my astral sight, Benjamin appeared. Rail-thin, he was dressed in a simple white button-down shirt and black trousers. Inside hollow sockets, his eyes glinted darkly. Dark hair was shaved close to his scalp in a style I might have pegged to be from the thirties or forties, but it could have been any era, really.
Benjamin looked surprised and, I was pleased to notice, a bit taken aback to see me. “It’s my job, you know,” he said, a little defensively. “To keep you safe.”
“You do a good job of that,” I said. It was true, after all. I could always count on Benjamin watching my back during a fight, especially a magical one. Now how to get him to stop, well, watching the rest of me?
“It’s not like that,” he said, a little offended. “I keep to myself most of the time.”
Except at night, in bed, I thought.
His eyes flashed darkly. “You need protecting.”
“You can read my mind?” I asked, too startled by the revelation to really notice the snarling curl of his lip or how his face became skeletal when he was angry.
Sidetracked, he shrugged. “I guess.”
“I suppose on the astral plane thoughts are closer to words than in reality.”
“What are you talking about? This is real,” Benjamin said. His eyes narrowed, sharp as obsidian. Did Benjamin not know he was dead?
He snarled again, showing chipped, rotting teeth. The scent of decay jolted me out of my trance. I blinked. Benjamin had disappeared, leaving only a lingering smell of rot. The water had grown cold. Down the hall, I heard a door slam. Crap, I thought. I shouldn’t try to talk to anyone today. I twisted the faucet to turn off the water and stepped out onto the mat. Especially not in the astral plane where I can ’t shield my thoughts. At least in the here and now, I had a prayer of surviving a conversation by just keeping my mouth shut.
By the time I’d finished and gotten dressed, Pete had
ended his concert, and Bob Dylan had taken the stage. My folks looked up a little guiltily from the pile of vinyl records they sorted through on the floor of the living room.
“Mátyás said it was all right,” my mother said. “You don’t think Sebastian would mind, do you?”
Sebastian had a lot of antiques, but he never treated them that way. He didn ’t believe in putting away “the good china,” for instance. If he bought it, he wanted to use it. “I’m sure it’d be fine,” I said. “I guess you guys have similar taste in music, eh?”
Apparently willing to let go of our dress argument for the sake of music, my mother excitedly showed me Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and a number of other bands from her generation that I was supposed to be impressed that Sebastian owned. Frankly, I was just grateful that his musical taste continued to evolve. I wasn’t a huge fan of country western, which was his current favorite, but I’d learned to appreciate it from him.
When it seemed appropriate to interrupt Mom’s gushing over Sebastian’s albums, I asked, “Where is Mátyás, by the way?”
“He’s gone out to look for Sebastian and that crazy woman,” my father said.
“We told him not to go out. He’s really not in any condition yet, but he said something strange about a mutant healing factor. Do you know what that means?”
It meant he was the son of a vampire, but I shrugged it off. I headed for the door, snatching up my coat. If Mátyás had gone after them, who knew what he’d do with Teréza. “It’s not even dark yet,” I said. “What is he thinking?”
My guess was that he was thinking he’d get the jump on me. Mátyás didn’t want me around when Teréza woke up, probably so he could spirit her away somewhere again.
I fumed as I pulled on my mittens. There had to be a solution to Teréza and all the problems she posed. I’d tried to get Parrish interested in taking care of her, but that had failed pretty spectacularly. Yet every time I tried the direct approach and confronted her, we both ended up bruised and battered with neither one the clear victor.
“Don’t you have a snowsuit or something warmer?” My mother clucked.
“It’s real deep out there,” my dad said. “I almost had a heart attack shoveling out your driveway.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Dad,” I said. The drive was nearly eighty feet long. Besides, Sebastian had a snowblower in the barn.
“Well, I needed to get outside a bit,” he said.
I nodded and stood there silently for a moment. I needed to get going, but I felt like there was something else I was supposed to say. Why was it always impossible to do quick good-byes to Minnesotans? “Well, thanks, anyway. Okay, I have to go.”
“Okay, good-bye,” my dad said.
“Bundle up, honey,” my mother added.
I dutifully wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and waved as I headed out the door. As it swung shut, I heard my mother say, “We’ll pray for you and Sebastian and his, uh, friend.”
That gave me pause. I stood on the porch for a moment and stared at the door. My mother was a devout enough Lutheran, but she wasn’t usually given to bouts of praying for me or anyone I knew. Sure, when I was a kid, the family went to church most Sundays, and I dragged myself to Bible study in the summer. But church was kind of the
social
thing to do in a small town like Finlayson.
Seeing me throw magic around must have really bothered her. I resolved to sit down with Mom and have a heart -to-heart about Wicca. I didn’t want her to be scared of magic . . . or me, for that matter. Turning, I headed down the steps that my father had somehow shoveled into perfect rectangles. Well, at least with the deep snowfall, it would be a fairly simple matter to track Mátyás. A snaky, waist -high trail cut through the yard toward the cornfield. Thanks to Mátyás’s struggles before me, I was able to set a good pace. The clouds had moved on, and hardly any wind blew. The sun hung low on the horizon, casting long, purple blue shadows on the white blanket covering everything. Wetness soaked into my jeans, and I wished I had taken the time to put on my snowsuit like my mother suggested. I hate when she’s right about things like that.
Before long, I could see Mátyás. He stood at the spot where Teréza and Sebastian were buried. He hadn’t noticed me yet. Instead, he seemed lost in thought, staring at the snowpack. Though he was still several feet away, due to the stillness of the air, I heard him talking softly to someone.
“I know you’re scared,
miri dye
. Be patient; the sun is setting.”
Sebastian told me that Mátyás used to sit beside Teréza when she was dead. He’d lay her out in a bed, hold her cold, stiff hand, and tell her things like you might to someone in a coma.
Mátyás looked up then, as though checking the progress of the sun, and caught sight of me.
“Goddamn it,” he said and crouched a bit in a kind of fight -or-flight stance. He glanced around like he wished he had a weapon. Finding nothing, he stood resolutely in front of the two humps in the snow.
“I come in peace,” I said with a little laugh at Mátyás’s overreaction. “Seriously.”
A glint of gold caught my eye in the sunset light, and, for a second, I thought I could see the edges of a giant shield lying over them.
“Peace? Don’t be absurd. I trusted you,” he said. “But you didn’t tell me how you viciously attacked my mother in the barn. That’s why she ran away when I opened the door. She’s afraid for her life.”
“How did you find out about that?” I asked, and then instantly realized it was the wrong thing to say.
“She’s reliving it in her dreams,” he said, pointing at the ground. “Do you realize how close they both are to going into torpor?”
Vampires called the deathlike sleep they went into when buried torpor. You need blood to wake a vampire in torpor, a lot of it.
“I guess that leaves you and me as volunteer donors, eh?” I said. “I take dibs on Sebastian.”
“You’re not coming near either of them until you promise never to attack my mother again.”
“Fine, as long as you can guarantee that she won’t come after me.”
Mátyás said nothing, and his breath came out in short puffs. We seemed to be at an impasse.
“That’s what I figured,” I said. “But I don’t really want to hurt her, Mátyás. I just want—” My cell phone rang. Ricky Martin serenaded me again. I fished it out of my pocket to check caller ID. The Unitarian minister? Great Goddess, was she canceling too? I had to know. I held up a finger to Mátyás.
“Are you kidding me?” he said.
I ignored him and answered. “Yes?” I asked wearily, expecting the worst, like maybe she was calling from the hospital because she’d been hit by a bus. Instead, she said she was just checking in. I breathed a sigh of relief and started to thank her profusely for not being yet another foul-up in my wedding from hell. Before I could speak, she said she just wanted to say one more thing: remember the rehearsal is all set for tomorrow evening.
“Tomorrow?”
That’s what she had on her schedule. She cheerfully read me the date and time.
“But the wedding isn’t for another week.”
She hemmed and hawed and made a lot flipping through her calendar noises. Oh, yes, there was the wedding on the twenty first, that was all booked, but it seemed the church was packed with holiday events until then. We ’d simply have to do the rehearsal early. Unless I wanted to skip it?
“No,” I said emphatically. The way this wedding was going, I needed all the practice walking down the aisle I could get. “It’ll be fine. I’ll let everyone know.”
I hung up the phone. The sun set with a deep, amber color. The chill in the air made the colors that much more vibrant. Mátyás and I watched as the last sliver of light sank slowly below the horizon.
He started to dig. I knelt beside Mátyás, shoulder to shoulder, and began pawing at the thick, heavy snow. As cold wetness seeped into my calves, I remembered a time last summer when Mátyás and I silently, methodically unearthed Sebastian from a cemetery. My fingers in my mittens were getting chilled, but at least I wouldn’t have blisters this time.
This time,
I though ruefully. I wondered how many times this scene would repeat itself. Would marriage put a stop to the supernatural insanity in our lives? Somehow I doubted it, especially given the fact we could hardly
get
married without someone throwing a curse on us.
“Are you all right?” Mátyás asked. “You’re mumbling to yourself.”
“Sorry,” I said, just as I uncovered a pale hand. Sebastian, it seemed, had already started to dig himself out. His arm stuck straight up, and his fingers, slowly, painfully twitched.
“That’s Father,” Mátyás said with a touch of pride. “Nothing keeps him down long.”
Once his whole hand was revealed, I kissed Sebastian’s ice-cold palm. His fingers curled around my face, and I knew he was going to be okay. Tears threatened to cloud my vision.
“I can’t find Mama!” Mátyás shouted. After we’d exposed Sebastian’s hand, he’d renewed his own excavation with vigor. Now he was frantic.
I saw the problem instantly. Teréza, in fact, was already exposed. He couldn’t see her, however, because of Athena’s shield, which protected her from discovery.
“Hold on a minute. I can fix it,” I said to Mátyás, but he didn’t hear me. He kept scrabbling at the snow. So I closed my eyes briefly to reconnect to a meditative state. I was still tired enough that it took less than a half a minute to get there. Once in the trance, I imagined Athena standing over Teréza’s body and said, “I thank you and release you.”
With a Romanesque salute, she disappeared.
“Mother!” Mátyás cried out. “Oh God, you’re okay!”
“You protected her.” Sebastian’s voice was scratched and gravelly. While I’d been discharging the spell, he’d pulled himself upright. “Does Mátyás know?”
Mátyás had pulled Teréza into his arms and hugged her tightly. I shook my head.
“Are you going to tell him?”
I didn’t want to wreck Mátyás’s moment by making it all about me. “You need blood,” I reminded Sebastian. He didn’t look very good. Snow streaked his hair, which hung in wet, limp strands in front of his face. He ’d grown gaunt with the effort of keeping himself from freezing. His clothes, which looked ridiculously inappropriate for the weather, clung wetly to his frame.
“If we’re distracted, he’ll take her away and hide her again,” he said tiredly.
“Let him,” I said.
Sebastian stood behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. I could hear the frown in his voice as he said, “It’s not a good idea. This has to end.”
“We can’t kill her. How does that joke about men go? You can’t live with ’em and you can’t kill ’em.”
“So, what do we do?”
I covered his hand with mine. “Do you think Teréza will ever stop trying to kill us?”
We watched as Teréza began to revive. Her hands twitched as they combed through Mátyás’s hair, like a blind woman seeking something. Mátyás was already rolling up his sleeve.
Sebastian leaned in close to my ear, his breath warm on my skin. “When I talked to her in the woods, I came to realize she was gone to me. Being dead for so long has changed her irrevocably.”
“So your little kiss was a kiss good-bye?”
He nipped my earlobe. His fangs stabbed like a needle. “Don’t be so cheeky.”
Teréza hissed hungrily before her fangs plunged into Mátyás’s bare arm.
Sebastian growled against the flesh of my neck. Except, if he bit me there, he’d surely hit an artery and I’d bleed out in no time flat.
“We need to go somewhere,” I said. I could take my coat off, but I wasn’t sure that Sebastian could bite through my thick sweater. Getting naked in subzero temperatures and then “giving blood” didn’t really seem like a winning combination to me.