“This means they were right about me, Garnet.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I replied. Sebastian had grown up in some remote part of the proto -Austro-Hungarian Empire at a very superstitious time. He had been born on Christmas, which was considered supremely bad luck, because it meant your parents were fornicating on the same night the Holy Mother was getting the Big News from the archangel Gabriel or something crazy like that. Why this was considered bad any time after A.D. zero, I never really understood. But what I did know was that it mattered to Sebastian. It haunted him, actually, because people had lost no opportunity to remind him his whole life that he was dirty, evil, corrupt . . . and cursed. In fact, he’d studied all the “dark arts,” partly because it was what people expected of him. When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “You know that, right?”
He made a noncommittal grunt.
I reached out a hand and squeezed his knee. The sun had set, even though it was only just a little past seven. The dashboard lights illuminated his angry, twisted scowl.
“God didn’t curse you because your birthday was Christmas, Sebastian. If everyone who was born on Christmas was turned into a vampire, my vet would be one.”
“Maybe she will be when she’s dead,” Sebastian said grumpily, though he wasn’t being serious.
“You told me yourself you only started studying alchemy because people expected you to. Their prophecy was self -fulfilling. Not the other way around. Anyway, I thought we got over this last winter.”
“You mean when we were attacked by the frost demon on my birthday?”
“Um, well, yeah.”
“Because
that
didn’t seem cursed,” he said with a sarcastic little eye roll. Okay, maybe that was a bad example. It would be just our luck to be jumped on by something supernatural after I ’d cajoled and begged Sebastian into going out on his birthday. I tried to shrug it off. “Well, it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
“Garnet, that’s like saying you’re lucky to have survived a car accident. True luck is not getting into one in the first place.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Half-Empty.”
It was hard to believe we weren’t already married, the way we bickered. Sebastian must have had the same thought, because he smiled fondly at me. “I suppose the parents weren’t terribly impressed with Teréza, eh?”
I shook my head. What a disaster. “I can’t wait until they meet Mátyás.”
“That boy really needs to get his own apartment,” Sebastian muttered as we turned onto the highway. I craned my neck to see if my folks made the turn. They did.
I nodded. Having Mátyás live with us was completely cramping our style, especially given that the guest bedroom was haunted, so he slept in the middle of the living room on the couch. Sebastian had offered several times to buy him a place in town, but Mátyás refused any charity.
It wasn’t that Mátyás wasn’t willing to work. The problem was that his résumé hadn ’t been updated since the turn of the century. I’d been working on my friend Izzy, who managed the coffee shop next to my bookstore, to take him on as a barista, but so far she’d chosen to date him instead. Talk about awkward: your best friend dating your fiancé’s son. Double-dating was out of the question, believe me.
“You don’t think Mátyás had anything to do with all this, do you?” I asked. I mean, Mátyás had never made any secret of the fact that he preferred his mother to me.
Sebastian shrugged. “The boy loves his mother.”
And mostly hated me—although that wasn’t an entirely fair assessment. Lately Mátyás and I had a kind of détente that involved only the occasional volley of insults over breakfast. I ’d actually kind of grown fond of it all. After he ’d helped me exhume Sebastian some months ago, I’d given up imagining Mátyás was actively trying to get me killed. But then again, he had stood by while Vatican agents put an arrow through my leg, and, well, memories like that were hard to shake. My calf twinged at the thought. I rubbed at it absently. That night had revealed something else though, I remembered. “Yeah,” I said. “But he loves you too.”
I heard Sebastian’s soft sigh in the darkness.
Without a doubt I was marrying into a complicated family. We rode in silence for a little while.
“What was it that you said to Teréza, anyway?” I asked, remembering the creepy-crawly feeling that came over me when she cursed us. Lilith perked up as though interested in the answer as well. “What language was that?”
“Romany,” he said.
“You speak Gypsy?”
“Gypsy isn’t really the polite term these days,” Sebastian reminded me, which was funny if only because normally I was the one who had to admonish him for his use of outdated, politically incorrect terms. “But yeah, I speak it. Teréza and I were together a long time. Her father was quite adamant that I learn when he discovered she was pregnant with my child.”
I waited for him to say more. Despite being a thousand years old, Sebastian hardly ever talked about the past. I always figured that he coped with the cumulative effects of all the mistakes made and loves lost by living in the present as much as possible. I laid my hand on my tummy. Underneath my fingers, I felt the electric hum of Lilith. She no longer slept inside me the way she once did. Since bonding with her in order to defeat a thieving Trickster God, Lilith ’s entire being whispered across my skin in a much more present way. I was no longer entirely human, myself. I’d become a demigoddess. In fact, I might live a thousand years now too.
What would it be like to live on while friends died around me? Shaking my head, I dismissed the tumult of fears that threatened to overwhelm my thoughts. I’d only barely begun to cope with the fact that my magical abilities had quadrupled since the bonding .
. . and the fact that my temper was a lot shorter. No need to start freaking out about the future when I had enough problems right now.
At least my new perspective on my own life gave me a lot of sympathy for Sebastian ’s situation. Teréza hadn’t been around long, but she was someone with whom he had capital
H
, History. As much as I’d like him to be able to shrug off his relationship with her as so yesterday, I knew that was unrealistic. I gave his thigh another sympathetic squeeze.
“At the restaurant,” I asked. “How did you get Teréza to leave? Where do you think she went?”
“It was a spell. It was supposed to send her back to her grave.”
“You can do that?”
“She has my blood. She’s a part of me.”
I hadn’t really thought about that. I knew the history, of course, but I hadn’t thought about the consequences of the fact that Sebastian’s magic-laced blood was the only thing keeping Teréza from the grave. “So, you have blood power over her?”
Parrish, my ex, who was the only traditional vampire I had any significant contact with, used to talk about his maker in hushed tones. She had a kind of power over him that was akin to glamour, the vampire’s ability to charm the pants off anyone, only ten times more powerful.
Sebastian lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “I honestly don’t know, but I suspected that any spells I cast would have a strong effect on her magical blood since I am, in essence, her Sire. Anyway, it seems to have worked.”
I nodded. That made sense. “Okay, so she’s headed back to her grave—but which one?”
Sebastian lifted his shoulder lightly, like he didn’t care, but I could see his lips press into a thin, tense line. My understanding was that Teréza had been interred a number of times. Before the pope ’s exorcism apparently woke her, Sebastian believed Teréza “rested” better underground. Mátyás, meanwhile, felt that putting her in the ground was akin to burying someone alive. So, the times Sebastian had possession of Teréza’s body, he’d arrange a grave. When Mátyás discovered where she was planted, he’d play grave-robber and “liberate” her corpse.
It was particularly morbid, especially since I’d gotten the sense that Mátyás tended to go all Norman Bates about his mother. Sebastian had alluded to the fact that Mátyás would keep Teréza in a nice room and talk to her as though she wasn ’t dead, merely sleeping.
Mostly, I tried to ignore this particularly creepy aspect of Sebastian and Mátyás ’s relationship. Now she was up and in my face.
We pulled into the driveway in front of Sebastian’s small farm. The tires crunched on the gravel and ice. Despite the fact that I’d been living here since my apartment was attacked by a tree, I still thought of it as Sebastian’s place. I might have been born on a farm, but I had the soul of a city girl, and all the quiet of rural living was alien to my sensibilities. However, my cat Barney loved it. Sebastian had a tendency to think of cats as farmhands. Thus, despite my constant reminders that Barney was to continue the life of a pampered indoor feline, she ’d been put to work in the barn catching mice. Sebastian constantly nudged her out the door; I always let her back in. She ’d gotten over her initial dislike of Sebastian and was now sleeping on his chest most nights. To me, she gave her mutilated rodent “presents.”
I tried not to be jealous.
Sebastian cut the engine. “We need to tell Benjamin that we’re having guests.”
Right, another complication: Sebastian’s house had come with an overprotective ghost. I suppose technically Benjamin was a poltergeist, since he was more than capable of flickering lights and tossing things around when he got cranky. Which was often.
“You tell him,” I said. “Benjamin likes you better.”
Sebastian nodded, but what I’d said wasn’t entirely the truth. Despite the fact that we’re pretty certain Benjamin axe-murdered his wife in what is now the guest bedroom, Benjamin had started sleeping next to me from time to time. Sometimes at night I felt his arms around me or saw the depression of his body on the edge of the bed. I figured Benjamin ’s new interest in me had something to do with the time we met in the spirit realm, but I found him especially scary up close. I hadn ’t told Sebastian about Benjamin’s sudden familiarity, because I didn’t want to worry him. Anyway, I was sure it could all be cleared up with a little chat on the astral plane, though I hadn’t quite figured out how to tell a serial-killing ghost I wanted to “just be friends.”
Between Barney, Benjamin, Sebastian, and me, the bed was starting to get a little crowded. The headlights of my parents’ car flashed as they rounded the corner. Sebastian headed inside to convince Benjamin to be on his best behavior, and I stepped out of the car into the cold to greet my folks. A hostile ghost and a half -vampire son waited for them inside. I sighed. And they thought they’d had a lot to deal with at the restaurant.
“Hey,” I said, as my dad came up beside me. The wind rustled through the white pine windbreak and brought with it the scent of woodsmoke. I could almost see my father’s shoulders relax.
“You’ve been living here?”
He sounded surprised, as well he should. I fled farm life the first moment I could. Even before that, every chance I got, I snuck away to Hinckley or any town with a population over forty. “Yeah,” I said, smiling. Unlike most Minnesotan farms, Sebastian’s property encompassed several hills. The stubby remains of the corn that poked up through the snow cover followed the curving contours of the land.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” my mother said, joining us. She tucked her hand into my father ’s parka pocket to hold his. My smile broadened. They were always an affectionate couple. “How much land do you have?”
“Not much,” I said. A yard light glowed brightly on the country graveyard just over the side fence. “Sebastian owns the outbuildings and a couple square acres. The rest belongs to a commercial operation.”
My dad gave a nod of understanding. It was how a lot of farms ran these days. Of course, their chicken ranch stretched acres and employed workers. But, in the grand scheme of modern farming, they were considered quite small.
“So, is that where he buries his victims?” Dad asked, jerking his thumb in the direction of the headstones. Mom gave Dad a jab in the parka-covered ribs. “Honey!”
“Well, she says he’s a vampire, doesn’t she?”
Did they think I was making it up, even after they met the zombie, half-dead girlfriend?
Then I remembered how difficult it was for the uninitiated to accept the magical world. They ’d probably found some rationalization for Teréza’s odd appearance and behavior. She was drunk. Homeless. Insane. Anything other than a living corpse hell-bent on choking Sebastian to death.
Since it seemed we couldn’t get along for more than ten minutes at a time regardless of how hard I worked, and they thought I was making all this stuff up anyway, I decided to go for honesty. “Sebastian doesn’t have to kill to get enough blood to survive.”
“That’s a relief,” my mother said, her lips a thin line. “The fiancé isn’t a murderer, at least.”
My father harrumphed, unimpressed.
An eddy of snow drifted in a lazy circle across the driveway. The snow had turned dusty in the cold, and the wind eroded miniature canyons in the mountains of ice on either side of the drive. “I know this is a lot to take in. How about we talk about everything inside? Sebastian has a fireplace,” I added hopefully.
“I’d rather work it out here. Privately,” Dad said. “I don’t want to embarrass the young man, who otherwise seems nice enough, I guess.”
Wow. From my taciturn father, “nice enough, I guess” was tantamount to approval. Did he actually like Sebastian, despite everything?
“Why must everything be such drama with you?” Dad continued. “We don’t hear from you for years, and suddenly it’s ‘I’m marrying a vampire’?”
Oh, okay. Sebastian might be “nice enough,” but I was still the weirdo who pretended magic was real. The biggest hurdle, of course, was the fact that my parents had never had contact with real magic.
There is a kind of veil of denial most people never pass through, which is how most vampires and other denizens of the night manage to say hidden in plain sight. Until my parents experienced the touch of real magic firsthand, all my talk of Vatican witch hunters, etc., would seem like the ramblings of a madwoman.
Of course, the moment they walked through Sebastian’s warded doors and had any kind of significant contact with Benjamin, they’d be able to see what some part of them always knew existed. Probably their interaction with Teréza was already unraveling their worldview, which might explain why my father sounded so hostile.