In the Company of Vampires (26 page)

Ben was nowhere to be found when we made it back to the Faire. I considered calling him on my mental cell phone (it seemed so much easier than using a real one), but decided I wasn’t such a wimp that I needed to keep tabs on him every second of the day. He was a big boy—I could trust him to go off and do things on his own without knowing exactly what it was he was doing.

The fact that Naomi was at her tattooing booth might have had something to do with my determination to give Ben his space, but I preferred to think of it as being comfortable with our blossoming relationship.

“Let’s go find a quiet spot,” I told the Vikings.

“You are going to summon Loki?” Isleif asked, hope in his eyes.

“Yes.”

They cheered, and accompanied me to a corner of the field that held a couple of huge round cylinders made of up hay. I moved behind them, so they blocked the sight of anyone who might be arriving at the Faire, and pulled out the Vikingahärta. “I just hope I remember how to use this.”

“You will,” Eirik said, taking up a protective stance on my left. Finnvid did the same on my right, both swords in his hands, while behind me Isleif hefted his huge war ax. I didn’t point out to them that Loki wasn’t going to be as easy to destroy as the demon had been.

I held the Vikingahärta, closing my eyes for a few seconds to help calm my troubled thoughts, focusing on one image, as my mother had taught me to do whenever I was about to conduct an invocation.

That image was of her.

“By the fire that burns within thee.” My words came out halting and stiff, reflecting how uncomfortable I was with this. I held the image of my mother in the forefront of my mind and tried again to calm my nerves. “By the earth that feeds thee. By the air that hides thee, by the Vikingahärta that holds thee.”

The valknut grew warm in my unharmed hand, little pinpricks of light beginning to beam out from it. I slipped off the makeshift sling, not wanting Loki to see that I was anything but in the most tip-top shape.

“Deceiver.”

The air around us crackled.

“Slayer.”

Before us, motes of light started gathering together.

“Trickster.”

The lights swirled faster and faster around each other, spinning and elongating into a long oval shape.

“Betrayer.”

The shape shimmered, and darkened in the center as a human form began to resolve itself.

“I invoke thee and call upon thee to descend here!”

The man who stepped out of the light was not who I expected. We stared at each other for a few seconds—me utterly surprised, and he looking furious.

“Who are you?” he demanded, glaring first at me, then at the Vikings, who were just as taken aback as I was.

“I’m Fran. Er . . . you’re not Loki, are you?”

He didn’t look like Loki, whose appearance I remembered as an older man, rather thin, with very white hands and balding red hair. This man had dark brown hair, a goatee, and dark eyes that glittered with anger. I took an instinctive step back, raising my hand with the valknut in a protective gesture that attracted his attention.

“What do you have there? ” He ignored my questions, casting his own out with a sharp bark that had a compulsion attached to it—a sort of magic spell that made you want to do whatever was asked of you.

“It’s mine,” I said, struggling against the need to answer him.

“Vikingahärta,” Finnvid blurted out.

I glared at him.

“Sorry, goddess,” he murmured, looking somewhat chagrined.

“Goddess?” The man’s eyes narrowed on me. “Vikingahärta?”

I straightened myself up, holding the Vikingahärta firmly, drawing strength from the fact that it didn’t like this man. “No to the first, yes to the second. Would you mind telling me who you are, and why, when I summoned Loki, you appeared instead?”

“Do not summon me again,” he snapped, and while I stared at him in surprise, he spun around and walked back into the oval of light, which proceeded to dissolve until it was nothing.

“Bullfrogs! With warts on them!” I swore, wanting to do bodily harm to someone. “What was all that about? Who was that man? And why did he come when I called Loki?”

“Should we know the answer to that?” Isleif asked Eirik.

Eirik shrugged. “The goddess knows things. She tells us, not the other way around.”

“This goddess hasn’t a clue,” I muttered, kicking at a clod of earth. “Now what do I do?”

The sudden hum of the generators as they were turned on, triggering the big lights that lined the Faire, was the answer to that question. I sighed, felt sorry for myself for sixteen seconds, then turned and marched back to the Faire, slipping the Vikingahärta’s chain over my neck.

 

“What are you guys going to do this evening?” I asked Eirik later, as the three stood around my mother’s booth, where I was selling off the last of her stock.

“Bed Imogen when she is done,” Finnvid said immediately, casting a warm glance down the line of tents toward the one Imogen manned. “Until then, I will think about bedding Imogen.”

“We shall wench,” Eirik announced, nodding at Isleif. “There are many women in town who desire our rods. Then, after we have wenched our fill, we will pillage a McDonald’s. We have not done so in five years, and we have missed the joy of plundering Chicken McBlobs and dipping sauces.”

“And Big Macs.”

“Aye, and the Big Macs.”

“You would pillage without me?” Finnvid asked, looking hurt.

“You will be bedding Imogen,” Eirik pointed out.

Finnvid thought for a moment. “Imogen would like to pillage, too. We will do so after I have bedded her several times.”

“It is important that a man regain his strength after repeated beddings,” Eirik told me in the tone of one confiding a fact of great importance.

“Er . . . yeah.” I gnawed on my lower lip for a bit, wondering if I should ask Eirik and Isleif to stay with me when I tracked down the orgy Ben was supposed to go to, but decided that there really wasn’t any danger in what I planned to do—a little spying—and sent them all off with a happy wave, and a warning to Eirik and Isleif to use protection while wenching, and to be sure to pay for their pillaged goods.

I didn’t have much time to worry about them for the next four hours, since the crowds around my mother’s booth just about cleaned her out of all of her potions, charms, and spells. I waited until there was a lull, when the band started playing in the main tent, and tucked away the evening’s proceeds, shut down the booth, and dropped off the money with Absinthe.

“Peter says he is not sure if you will join us again or not,” she told me as she wrote up a receipt for Mom’s takings. “He says you may wish to return to your job.”

Absinthe and I never got along, at least we hadn’t when I was young and didn’t know how to protect myself against her mind-reading ability. Now I was an old hand at locking out people. I slid my mental barriers into place and gave her a placid smile. “That’s true. My plans are uncertain at this point.” Such as whether or not my future would involve a sexy vampire.

“Just so you do not forget your debt to me.” She tucked the money away in the big safe that sat in the middle of her trailer.

“I’m not likely to. You haven’t . . . uh . . . had any other visions of my mother, have you?”

One shoulder rose in a careless gesture. “I have not tried. It seemed clear to me that she was happy. I am not worried about her, although if she wishes to leave the Faire, I wish she would close her booth so that we may replace her. Peter says we must give her time, however.”

I murmured something polite and made my escape before she could pin me down with pointed questions, wondering once again how she and easygoing Peter could be twins and yet be so different from each other.

 

The speculation of what form paying off the debt to Absinthe may take kept me occupied as I sat in a taxi at the edge of the Faire parking area, waiting for the small blue car that I knew was Naomi’s to leave, praying to any and all gods and goddesses I could think of that they were actually taking Naomi’s car, and not going on Ben’s bike. I didn’t want to know if he’d taken her on long rides, where she could smell his hair and feel the warmth of his body pressed against hers, and even if she tingled all over just thinking about the way his muscles stretched and contracted as he moved with the bike . . . I shook away the image that was building in my head, just in time to point at the car that was exiting the pasture parking lot, and say, “That’s it. Could you follow that car, please, but don’t let them see you?”

The driver, dressed like a monk (complete with tonsure) in rough brown robes, and a rope belt upon which was attached his cell phone, gave me a long look in the rearview mirror. “If you get me into trouble—”

“I won’t. I promised you it was simply a little misunderstanding between me and my boyfriend, and that’s all it really is. So if you could just follow them, please?”

The driver gave me another stern look, but obligingly pulled out after them. I was a little surprised to find that Naomi drove not into town but away from it. I guess I’d always connected orgies with nightclubs and sleazy motels, but she drove deep into the countryside, entering what I judged from a sign to be some sort of official park.

“Now this is odd. They’re having an orgy outside?”

The driver, who had pulled up just outside the open gate, shot me an accusatory glance.

“Party, I mean. Not orgy. Er . . . here, will this cover it? Thanks. I’ll just get out now.”

“Yes, I think you should.”

I slipped out of the taxi, waved politely as he pulled a U-turn and sped off into the night, then slipped into the shadows of some scraggly fir trees that dotted a tiny parking lot, and immediately stepped on something soft and squidgy that moved.

Before I could scream, a hand clamped over my mouth. I didn’t wait to find out who it was—I brought my knee up, slammed the heel of my hand into his nose, and was about to gouge at his eyes with my other hand when a garbled, “Stop! It’s me!” reached me. I peered in the darkness at the shape as he doubled over, breathing hard.

“Who’s me?” I whispered.

“David. I think you broke my balls.”

“Frogspawn! I’m so sorry, David. I didn’t know it was you.”

“I really am going to have to stop surprising you,” he said softly, pain threading his voice as he lurched upright. Although the moon was almost full, we stood in the shadow cast by the trees, and all I could see of him was a silhouette. “One of these days you’ll actually succeed in breaking something.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, straightening up even more. “So long as you don’t attack me again. Damn. You have a good right punch.”

“Why on earth are you here lurking in the trees?”

He took my arm and steered me to the side, so that we skirted the edge of the parking lot, deep in the shadows. “For the same reason that I suspect you are here. Diego? How many?”

I stifled a squeak when another shadow loomed up next to me. “Five, counting the Dark One.”

“Two more to come, then.”

Even if I couldn’t see him beyond a black outline, I could feel the other man examining me.

“Fran, this is Diego, one of the members of my pride. Fran is Benedikt’s Beloved.”

Diego murmured something polite. He had a Spanish accent that made me think of Antonio Banderas. “Is she staying here?”

“No, she’s not,” I answered firmly.

Diego gave a soft chuckle. “It’s like that, is it?”

“On the nose.”

“Don’t mention noses,” David said, obviously feeling his nose. “Ow. Benedikt would have my balls if I left you alone, Fran, so it’s best if you come with me. Diego, you know what to do.”

“I’ll be on the south side. If he shows up, do you want me to take him?”

“No. It’s important we see what they are doing. If things get out of hand . . . we’ll deal with it.”

“Agreed.”

Diego moved off, as silent as the shadow he was.

“Who’s the ‘he’ Diego was talking about?” I asked as I followed David around the edge of the parking lot and up a steep, forested hill.

“Luis, Diego’s brother. He is the one the Agrippans have taken. We expect them to bring him here tonight.”

“For what purpose?”

David was so hard to see in the dark, I grabbed the back of his black shirt and held tight to it as we climbed up and over a rocky hill covered with dried pine needles. “Most likely to kill him.”

“They’re going to orgy him to death?”

“Sex isn’t the only thing they do at the tyro.” His voice was grim.

At the top of the hill, he paused. To the south of us was an open area ringed with tall, narrow fir trees. A couple of rustic tables and fire pits indicated it was normally used as a picnic area, but the tables had been stacked to one side and several blankets had been laid out in the center of the ring. As we watched, torches were placed and lit in an outer ring, while the two fire pits on either end had been set ablaze. The light from the fires and the moonlight made it possible to see the people beyond just their shapes. I was suddenly nervous as I recognized Ben’s form before he stepped into the firelight. I was sick at the thought that Naomi and her people might actually harm someone, but at the same time, I definitely did not want Ben there.

I’d gone and fallen in love with him, I chastised myself, while being very careful to keep my mental shields in place so Ben could not pick up on what I was thinking. All that talk about wanting to know if you were really meant for each other, or just programmed that way, and what do you do? You fall for him. Hard. Fran, you’re a boob.

David turned toward me, still in shadow. “Did you say something?”

“No. Just yelling at myself.”

“Ah. About what?”

“Ben.”

He gave a ghostly laugh. “I won’t say I’m glad you’re yelling at yourself, but in fact, I am. It means you care about him.”