Honeymoon of the Dead (2 page)

 

 

 

 

 

A honeymoon in Transylvania with her vampire hus
band. I ask you: What more could a witch ask for?

Well, for starters: How about everything going smoothly for a change and this plane leaving the tarmac sometime this year?

Minnesotans like to say “could be worse” or “can’t complain” at times like this, but I’ve been living in Madison, Wisconsin, for several years now, so forget that. Besides, my wedding was nearly a nonstarter, what with the ex-wife zombie and all, so was it too much to ask that my honeymoon be just a touch better?

I could probably deal if the airline hadn’t screwed up so that Sebastian and I not only didn’t get first-class seats but also now sat two rows apart with me wedged between a sumo wrestler and a stringy-haired teen with his MP3 player so loud I could hear every word Slip Knot belted out.

And then there was the dinner with my Minneapolis cousins who couldn’t make my wedding. My mother had insisted we see them before we left for our honeymoon, despite the fact that Sebastian and I had nothing in common with the ultraconservative, fundamentalist Christian, meat-loving side of my family. My stomach was still urpy after making polite attempts to ingest bacon-wrapped chicken drowned in beefy marinara sauce. I don’t think they had a vegetable in the entire house! And the wedding present! Who wants to lug a heavy, antique porcelain figurine of two cherubic angels all the way to Europe? We would have shipped it home, but there just wasn’t time, what with the storm and a plane to catch.

I didn’t want that horrible thing in my possession at all. Sebastian privately joked about just leaving it on the side of the road, but it was Great-Aunt So-and-So’s, so now it was taking up valuable space in my luggage.

My stomach roiled unhappily.

The heavy metal bass line beat in time to the pounding of my head.

Couldn’t we at least get off the ground?

I adjusted my hips in the narrow seat and looked around the other passenger’s girth at the gleaming expanse of the jet’s wing through the window.

Admittedly, Sebastian and I couldn’t have picked a nastier time of year to go on honeymoon. At least the flights were cheap thanks to the New Year’s holiday. Sleet rained from a dismally gray sky. It’d been an oppressive drive up from Madison to the Saint Paul/Minneapolis International Airport yesterday. If it wasn’t for the oh- you’ll-have-a-lovely-time-with-them-I-promise cousins, we’d have headed south to O’Hare and hopped a direct flight to Austria, but no . . . Instead, we braved ice slicks on the curvy stretches of Interstate 94 that had me holding on to the door handle with white knuckles. The snow really started hitting somewhere around Menomonee. The weather had only grown worse and worse the closer we got to the Cities. Honestly, I’d been surprised they’d let us board. I was sure the flight was going to be canceled.

In a way, I wished they
would
just call the whole thing off. At least then Sebastian and I could be laughing at our misfortune while snuggled under a scratchy blanket at a Days Inn.

I wished we could even just sit together.

I turned back to try to catch Sebastian’s eye when the teen accidentally elbowed my breast. My stomach lurched in a you’re-falling-catch-yourself sensation. I rubbed the injured part absently as I acknowledged the teen’s mumbled apology. Laying my head back on the hard cushion of the seat, I waited for the dizziness to pass.

I’d been getting these strange touches of vertigo for a couple of weeks now.

In fact, I got them nearly any time someone touched me. It was almost as if the nausea was some kind of magical feedback loop when my aura and someone else’s collided unexpectedly.

Sometimes I experienced double vision too.

I should’ve probably told my new husband about all this before we booked a flight to Vienna, but I didn’t want to worry him. Sebastian and I’d had a lot of adventures so far—crazy stuff involving zombies, shape-shifters, and ex-dead Gypsy ex-wives. And, you know, I just didn’t want to burden us with what could just be some version of witch-aura flu.

Rubbing the space between my eyes, my frown deepened. In fact, because Sebastian and I had such a tendency toward trouble, before we left, I cast a just-let-it-all-be-normal spell. It wasn’t much. Just a candle and some hurried visualization before rushing out the door to head to Minneapolis. I sure hoped Mátyás remembered to blow out the candle like I asked.

Mátyás was Sebastian’s half-vampire, immortal son, now my stepson. There was something that was going to take some getting used to. Mátyás and I didn’t always get along. Now we were family.

Over the intercom, the captain apologized for the continued delay. I snorted in disgust.

Had my “normal” spell even worked?

Given all the problems we’d had on this trip so far, I’d doubt my abilities as a successful witch if it weren’t for the fact that where other people talked about being “goddesses,” I really was one. Okay, really, it was more like this: I had this full-time resident Goddess, Lilith, whom I accidentally permanently bonded to me when I needed help fighting off an American Indian Trickster God.

The good news was that I could now call on Lilith when those zombies and whatnot attacked Sebastian and me, but the bad news was that She was the Queen of Hell and Mother of Demons.

And, worse, the more time we stayed together, the more inseparable we became. Yeah, I was becoming the original bitch. Nice, huh? I felt it today for sure. Carefully, I shifted in my seat, impatient for some movement. The snow outside continued to fall.

No offense to Sebastian, but I wished we were headed somewhere warmer—the Bahamas, Tahiti, or even Greece.

That reminded me, I was actually carrying two Goddesses around. Because of Lilith’s darker side and tendency to destroy anything She touched, I called on another Goddess during the last big crisis that befell us—Athena. She could be hanging around because I kind of sort of promised to devote my life to Her worship in exchange for Her help.

In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.

I mean, I was beginning to think that maybe my body was overcrowded, and that was part of what was causing all these flashes of dizziness. Perhaps Lilith and the new Goddess in residence were duking it out for control over my spiritual real estate.

The speaker crackled to life overhead and the captain’s voice informed us that we’d be taking off as soon as the deicer had a chance to work. Thank Goddess!—whichever one of my divine occupants answered my prayer!

The sumo wrestler’s knee grazed mine and I felt that odd disorienting tingle, like the world just shifted under my feet. For a second, I thought maybe the plane was finally moving. I checked out the window. No such luck . . .

And it looked like we wouldn’t be going anywhere for some time given that there was a Frost Giant on the wing.

Wait, what?

Doing a classic double take, I looked again. Yep, there she was crouching on the wing with a huge, black wolf-dog at her side. “Giant” might be a bit of a misnomer. She wasn’t precisely a ginormous woman, but she had the build of a linebacker and enough magical energy to make her “feel” big. She crouched on the wing, her Prince Valiant cap of white gold hair barely shifting even as her fur cloak flapped furiously in the howling wind. Ice blue eyes met mine and she smiled wickedly.

Hey, this wasn’t just any Frost Giant—I knew her!

It was Fonn, the ice-storm demon who tried to ruin Sebastian’s birthday last Christmas.

Despite the nausea, I poked the sumo guy in the arm. “Hey,” I asked him. “Do you see a woman out there?”

He dutifully pressed his face to the window and then gave me that you’re-totally-doing-a-William-Shatner-in-that-
Twilight-Zone
-episode look. “There’s no one out there, lady.” I think if he could have, he would have edged away from me.

“Really?” Last time I interacted with Fonn she was very real to everyone else. In fact, she nearly sucked the life out of a snowplow driver.

I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Fonn was still there; this time, she waved.

“Seriously, you don’t see her?” I asked the sumo wrestler.

Her dog’s tail wagged happily. Like a Labrador on steroids, he bounded up to the window to look in at me, and stuck his big, black nose against the windowpane with a smack.

I started, nearly knocking the earbuds out of the teenager.

“Watch it, lady!”

“Sorry,” I said, clutching at my spinning stomach. Unbuckling the seat belt, I stood up. The dog’s snout left a wet smear on the glass.

“Nobody sees this?” I asked, pointing at the window. “You really don’t see a black dog and a big, old Frost Giant with a personal vendetta against me on the wing?”

Because, you know, Sebastian and I did splash antifreeze into her face. She might still be a
little
mad about that.

A flight attendant tottered in high heels down the aisle, her face tense. “Ma’am?”

I glanced toward Sebastian and saw the other attendants looking at me nervously.

Outside of the window, Fonn grinned. She’d moved close enough to look in and she pointed a long, bony finger at me and then to the ground. I didn’t need to hear the words her lips made when they moved. The implication was clear:
You’re going down!

“Sit down,” groused the teen, as he jabbed the buds back into the hollow of his ear. “You’re freaking everybody out.”

“Are you all right, ma’am?” the flight attendant asked in a tone as crisp as her uniform and as tight as the bun of her bright blond hair.

Sebastian looked up from where he sat two rows back. He caught my eye and gave me the raise of the eyebrow that asked if everything was okay. I shook my head. Instantly, he started to unbuckle his own seat belt.

“Ma’am? If you could return to your seat . . .” The nervous flight attendant was starting to sound bossy in a very I’m-scared-of-you way. I noticed that another flight attendant seemed to have moved into position to guard the pilots’ cabin door.

Nearly everyone was looking at me like I was planning to kill us all. How ironic that no one could see the real danger. Fonn giggled at me from the other side of the window.

“Um,” I said, but didn’t know where to start. “I’d like to, you know, maybe take the next flight. Please.”

Sebastian came up the aisle to stand next to the blond attendant. Another attendant followed at his heels. Her arms pumped as she walked, and I thought she might be ready to tackle him.

Of the two of us, I could understand why the flight attendants might be afraid of Sebastian. Despite being able to walk around in the daylight, there was something preternatural about the silky, fluid way he moved. He’d removed his jacket in deference to the stuffiness of the canned air of the plane. The black T-shirt he wore stretched tight across taut muscles. Matching jeans showed off lean, long legs. Long black hair framed a vaguely aristocratic face and a chin scruffy with five o’clock shadow. He had a lot of the scary don’t-mess-with-me-I-could-totally-eat-you vibe. The whole package just screamed
predator
.

And, well, yum. But that was my personal opinion.

By the way the attendants were staring at him, I didn’t think they agreed.

“Sir!” The attendant who was trailing Sebastian nearly bowled him over when he came to an abrupt halt. Everyone was crowding around me now. The teen and the sumo wrestler were scowling bitterly up at me.

If Fonn weren’t doing the happy Snoopy dance on the wing, I’d totally sink back into my seat and die from embarrassment.

“What’s wrong, darling?” Sebastian asked, ignoring all the others.

Everyone was listening, so I couldn’t exactly tell the truth. “We should get off the plane, I think,” I jerked my head in the direction of the window.

Sebastian leaned down to peer through the small, oval opening. He gave me a quizzical look.

I spasmed my head at the window trying to suggest he look. Harder.

“She thinks there’s a monster out there,” the sumo wrestler said to be helpful.

I glared at him. Dude was
so
not from Minnesota. Here in the Scandinavian-populated upper Midwest we tend to keep our opinions to ourselves.

“Shut up,” I said because I was starting to panic and I didn’t know what else to say. I noticed that two or three people sitting next to the windows actually lifted their window shutters and checked. Alas, no one confirmed my vision.

Everyone stared at me like I was insane, except Sebastian, who mouthed,
Monster?

I nodded.

“I strongly suggest you take your seat,” said the feisty attendant who’d doggedly pursued Sebastian. She looked ready to grab his elbow and return him to his spot. She touched his sleeve urgently.

It was obvious he didn’t like to be pawed at. Narrowing his eyes, Sebastian looked down at her from an intimidating height. “My wife and I will be disembarking,” he said in a tone that wasn’t to be trifled with. I smelled cinnamon and baking bread. He was using his vampire glamour. “Make it happen.”

Someone—I think it was the teenager—groaned unhappily.

The flight attendants all bobbled their heads in disagreement and frustration. “It’s impractical,” said one. “We’ll have to call security,” said another. “I’ll alert the captain,” said the last, and she hurried off to do so.

Once the aisle was mostly cleared of attendants, Sebastian went back to fetch his bags from the overhead compartments. I stepped over the teen to get my own. I’d forgotten how heavy the statue was and nearly brained him. “Sorry,” I said.

He shook his head at me. “You’re crazy.”

Fonn curled her fingers in a flirtatious wave.

“Yep,” I said, hitching the bag over my shoulder. Sebastian retrieved his and came back to stand by me. Our every move was scrutinized by the other passengers. A toddler stood on his seat, his eyes following me as he slowly extracted boogers from his nose.