Honeymoon of the Dead (26 page)

“But just because we have demons, doesn’t mean we have to act like one, does it?” I asked, though in my mind the answer was clear.

“No,” Dominguez said as he folded the edges of his napkin. “We have to rise to our better angels.”

The question was, could I do that when I was merged with Lilith? Or had I made the wrong choice, after all?

The bell on the door clanged, and in walked William followed by Mátyás. Their presence instantly doubled the weird in the room; I no longer was the oddest person out.

A more unlikely pair you could hardly imagine. William’s short, spiky blond hair stuck up artfully, and round Radar O’Reilly glasses perched on the tip of his nose. William had trouble picking a pantheon in his various attempts to find the One True Path, and currently he was Pictish with a touch of the Fellowship of Isis. Under a lined leather jacket, I could see a silver chain with an ankh.

Standing next to him, looking a little baffled and a bit disgusted by the greasiness of the greasy spoon, was Mátyás. Thanks to an infusion of Sebastian’s blood, once Mátyás hit puberty he’d aged incredibly slowly. He’d been stuck as a kind of perpetual teenager, which didn’t make him particularly happy, so, as a bonus, he’d had more than a century to get that sullen thing down pat. He wore his black hair long and stylishly mussed. Ethnically, he was part Romany, and, possibly as a nod to that, he tended toward Euro-trash fashion. Slacks, shiny, snow-covered shoes, a heavy black knit sweater, and secondhand opera coat. It was a look that this place had never seen, I’d bet.

The waiter was eyeing them both suspiciously just as I waved them over. He exchanged a look with Dominguez that seemed to say, “Okay, but they’re your responsibility,” and then went back to reading the textbook he had laid out on the empty counter.

I stood up and accepted an enthusiastic hug from William and an awkward maybe-we-should-shake-hands-no-how-about-we-just-acknowledge-each-other-with-a-nod from Mátyás.

Dominguez then offered his hand to shake. “This is Special Agent Gabriel Dominguez of the FBI,” I said. William smiled and took his hand just as eagerly as he had hugged me.

Mátyás did so a bit more reluctantly and with a glance at me. “FBI?”

“Don’t you watch TV?” William asked Mátyás, scooting in next to a briefly flustered Dominguez, who quickly moved his coat to make room. “The Feds always handle kidnapping cases.”

Mátyás settled next to me somewhat gingerly, like he didn’t want to risk staining the opera coat. To me, he said, “Your love bite is showing, dear Stepmother.”

My hand flew to where Sebastian had nipped indelicately on me. I should really get a bandage. Every once in a while an edge of torn skin would catch on the tag of my sweater and sting.

William squinted, as if struggling to see between my fingers. “Did Sebastian do that?”

“He didn’t mean to,” I said, and then stopped, feeling a blush heat up my cheeks. Whenever I defended Sebastian’s occasional animal violence, I ended up sounding like some kind of battered wife. I hated that. So I diverted the conversation quickly. “He lost a lot of blood after he got staked in the heart.”

“Staked?” Mátyás was horrified.

“That doesn’t kill him,” William reminded everyone. “It just transfixes him.”

“I know what kills a vampire, William,” Mátyás sneered.

Dominguez raised his hands to stop the fight that clearly seemed to be brewing between the two boys. “Just so you know, everyone in this restaurant is listening right now. We should talk about something normal.”

“How about them Packers?” I offered. It was a standard joke among my Wisconsin friends to blurt out that phrase whenever things got strained or awkward.

But no one laughed nor really knew what to say next. Luckily, the waiter delivered some biscuits and gravy for Dominguez and eggs and toast for me. The boys declined to order until they’d had a chance to read the menu.

The silence stretched on until William finally broke it. “You know Mátyás and Izzy broke up.”

“What?” I was really shocked. Mátyás and my friend Izzy had been dating for months now. Last time I talked to Izzy everything was going great. She told me with far too much enthusiasm how much fun they had in bed together. Of course, all that had been before my wedding, and I hadn’t really checked in with her since. “What happened?”

Mátyás shot me a dark look. With an imploring glance at Dominguez, he asked, “Can we go back to vampires now?”

“No,” Dominguez said forcefully.

“They had a big fight just before we left,” William said. “He told me all about it on the drive up. I guess, you know, Izzy has some problems with . . . well, no offense, man, but you do sometimes look sixteen. Ow!” William rubbed his leg where Mátyás had kicked it under the table.

“Can I visit Papa in jail? Will they let me?” Mátyás asked Dominguez.

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

“I guess it had been brewing for a while,” William continued to me. “They get a lot of hassle in the clubs. He’s always getting carded, aren’t you, dude?”

“Is it physically impossible for you to keep a secret, William?” Mátyás asked. The booth echoed hollowly with another kick. William had apparently tucked his feet up.

“She’s going to hear it from Izzy. Don’t you want to have a preemptive strike?”

“I don’t really want to deal with it at all, okay?” Mátyás admitted, and now I knew he was really crushed by the breakup because he wasn’t snotty or flippant at all. Even though it was weird for my now stepson to be dating my best friend, I did think they were a cute couple. I’d had no idea Mátyás got so hassled about his apparent age, but, when I thought about it, Izzy did look like she was dating jailbait sometimes.

“Oh, Mátyás,” I said sympathetically. Momentarily forgetting what might happen, I patted him on the back. He cringed; I flinched.

And then I saw that the bogeyman had a beautiful, if treacherous, soul.

His face blossomed into a thousand flowers, shoots growing and twisting until they became the soft features of a woman. Her lips were truly rosebuds, and her skin bright white lilies. A dark cascade of woodland violets and so-purple-they-were-almost-black pansies formed the curly locks that flowed past her shoulders. I remembered the story of Blodewedd, whom Irish druids formed out of flowers and magicked to life in order to wed her to a chieftain cursed to never be king because he couldn’t take a human wife. After their wedding, Blodewedd eventually betrayed the king with another man, Guinevere-style, and then successfully plotted to kill him.

That last part was maybe a little troubling given Mátyás’s penchant for taking sides against his father and me.

I wondered if I should warn Sebastian about this, or if I should follow my own advice. After all, I’d told Dominguez not two minutes ago that we didn’t have to be the demon we had inside.

When I blinked, Mátyás was himself again and everyone was staring at me. I cleared my throat. “So, uh, I’ve got something that will distract you from your heartache,” I said. “Dominguez needs me to do some magic, and I know just the thing.”

“Yeah,” said William. “I read up on Goddess banishing for you.”

“Oh, great!” I’d actually been thinking about reversing the love spell on Larkin, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the history of all that with William and Mátyás. I mean, I didn’t want them to necessarily know what a cad I’d been. William might think less of me and I couldn’t bear that. And, well, honestly, Mátyás would just use it against me next time we fought.

So I changed the subject. “How’ve things been at the store, William?”

Though I think Dominguez and Mátyás were deeply bored by the whole thing, I easily filled the rest of the lunch conversation by asking after clerks, customers, and inventory. After we got the bill, Dominguez motioned me close.

“You should probably fill us in on the details of your plan before we leave.” He gave a knowing nod in the direction of hottie waiter. I surmised that the idea was to make sure the kidnappers and their cohorts knew where to find us, so the trap would be set.

“Sure,” I said, trying to be overt in broadcasting the information by overenunciating and projecting my voice in hottie’s direction. “Okay, so here’s my thought,” I said, as we all stood around by the door, putting on jackets and hats and mittens. “There’s a huge cemetery just up the road called Lakewood. It’s where Hennepin Avenue ends,” I told William who was already getting out his phone to use the GPS app. “We’re going to do a ritual there.”

“What are we planning to do? Raise the dead in broad daylight?” Mátyás said with a slight sneer. I understood his objections. He’d practiced the Old Religion his whole life and knew that all the Halloween stereotypes of spooky witches conjuring skeletons and whatnot were a load of bunk. But I wanted to choose the kind of place the Illuminati boys/vampire hunters expected, or maybe even feared, that we’d be up to something powerful. That way they’d be more inclined to check out our activity.

“Something like that,” I said.

William looked positively horrified. Even Dominguez raised an eyebrow in concern.

 

 

As soon as Dominguez and I drove through the front
gate, I realized I was returning to the scene of the crime, albeit the lesser one. Parrish had helped me hide the bodies of six Vatican priests in the lake in the middle of this very cemetery.

Lakewood wasn’t your typical garden of stones. The rich and famous had been buried here since before Minnesota became a state, and it had funerary art to rival some of the more famous cemeteries of Europe, à la Père Lachaise in Paris or Highgate in London. There were Art Deco pyramids as large as houses, as well as modern brushed-steel sculptures. Weeping angels perched on top of obelisks well over twenty feet tall and Celtic crosses stood as tall as nearby maple trees. Even the plain headstones tended to be large, as if trying to compete for attention.

Roads wound around numbered, hilly sections, where trimmed cedar bushes stood sentry over markers, and oaks, elms, and pines sheltered noisy flocks of starlings. Passing a bronze, life-size statue of an elk, we made our way closer to the lake in the interior of the cemetery.

Despite the morbidity, there was a stately peace about Lakewood that attracted regular visitors who used it like one of the many parks that stretched between Lakes Harriet and Calhoun. In the summer, people could be seen picnicking near the lakeside with binoculars, on the lookout for passing wood ducks and gaggles of Canada geese. I’d even heard that foxes and deer lived inside Lakewood’s fenced confines, undeterred by the headstones and graves.

Dominguez pulled to a stop alongside the lake. It had changed a bit since I was last here. When Parrish and I had stashed the bodies under the cover of darkness, you could walk right up to the water’s edge. That was no longer possible.

Poking through the snow, I could see thick matted masses of prairie grasses. A bit of orange flexible fencing was also visible. I wondered if they’d made the changes after the drought that had unearthed the grisly corpses of Lilith’s adversaries.

Lilith stirred warmly under my skin as though pleased with the memory.

When Dominguez coughed, I wondered if he’d sensed Her. I put my hand over my stomach to hide my shame. Snakes hissed in my subconscious. Athena reminded me that I still had other options.

“Uh, so . . .” Dominguez said, with an uncustomary lack of words. He scratched at the short hairs at the back of his neck. “Here we are.”

Could this be more awkward? Especially given that he was probably the guy they’d called when the bodies surfaced.

I could still picture Parrish carrying the plastic-wrapped bodies one at a time into the water. His head would disappear under the water as he made his way to the center of the shallow lake while I sat on the shoreline, tears streaming from my eyes.

Not the best night of my life.

Though, without Lilith, I’d be the one dead and buried.

The cloth upholstery creaked as Dominguez shifted in his seat.

“I wonder where the boys are,” I said, anxiously looking for something, anything else to talk about. I was seriously regretting my decision to come here, of all places. “Did they get lost or something?” Given the size of Lakewood, it was a real possibility.

Just then William pulled into the space behind us on the narrow road. I all but jumped out of the car to get away from Dominguez.

“Wow,” William said. “Did you see this place? It’s awesome!”

“How is it I always end up in a cemetery with you?” Mátyás grumbled. “At least this time we didn’t have to bring shovels.”

A nervous glance confirmed that Dominguez was staring at me very disapprovingly after that remark. “Heh. Heh,” I said unconvincingly. “Good joke.”

“I’d still rather do this in the parkway or the rose garden,” William said, still mostly to himself. “This place is cool and all, but it doesn’t seem very kosher to hold a ritual in a cemetery. There’s, like, all the dead spirits and stuff.”

“Nothing says ‘evil witches’ like a ritual in a cemetery,” said Dominguez. “Let’s just hope it’s worrisome enough to spark the concern of the vampire hunters.”

“Wait, vampire hunters?” Mátyás interrupted. “No one told me anything about vampire hunters.”

“Oh, yeah, those guys Sebastian thinks are in the Illuminati Watch? Well, Dominguez thinks they’re actually vampire hunters.”

“Illuminati?” William asked. “Who’s in the Illuminati?”

“How did they find out about Sebastian?” Mátyás asked. “He’s a day-walker, not exactly your usual suspect.”

Dominguez, who had wandered off apparently to do a little reconnaissance, piped up, “That is the question I plan to ask when I catch them.”

The wind had picked up a little and murmured pleasantly through the trees. We stepped off the road and into the snow pack. Mátyás complained quietly about his shoes getting ruined. After we came to a good spot, we stopped and stood in a loose circle around a crumbling gravestone that pictured a relief of an upside-down torch. Our breath came in white puffs.