Romancing The Dead (14 page)

“Beast of Bray Road,” Mátyás said when he saw my eyes had followed his. “Who knew Wisconsin had its very own werewolf, eh?”

I’d heard of the supposed werewolf that lived just north-west of here. It was in the news several years ago, but I’d never put much stock in it. Now that I’d met Micah, I wondered. I was curious what Mátyás knew about skinwalkers, but I’d ask him later. I knew a diversionary tactic when I saw one. “How can you be so sure Sebastian’s in . . . trouble?”— I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “hell,” especially since I got the impression Mátyás
did
mean it literally—“Did you have some kind of magical contact?”

“I have a . . .” He pursed his lips as his finger traced the grain on the tabletop. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something more, but then his eyes met mine and he stopped. “No. You’re not family.”

“What?” I was livid. By Mátyás’s own reckoning Sebastian was in danger, and now he wasn’t going to tell me the whole story.

“I’ve been worried sick. How can you come here and say something like that and not back it up?”

“You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“The heck I am. Tell me how you know.”

We locked gazes. The muscle in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth. “No.”

Izzy chose that moment to come over and ask flirtatiously if we needed anything else. She batted her eyelashes at Mátyás, but he mostly continued to glare at me.

“Well, there is one thing you need, hon,” Izzy said bluntly. “And that’s my phone number. Here.” She slapped a business card down in front of a startled Mátyás. “Call me.”

Even though her timing was less than impeccable, I had to appreciate her style. Mátyás’s baffled expression was priceless. As was his sudden attention to Izzy’s curvaceous form as she sauntered back behind the bar. “She just gave me her phone number,” he told me as he stuck it in the pocket of his jeans.

“I know. She thinks you’re cute. Goddess knows why.”

“You know her?” He seemed both skeptical and impressed.

I nodded. “I wish you’d talk to me about Sebastian.”

He stood up to leave. “It was a mistake to come here.”

“Please,” I said, taking his hand as he started to move past me to the door. “We both care about him. Tell me why you think he’s in trouble.”

“I can’t.”

His hand slipped from mine and he walked to the door. I stood up and shouted angrily at him, “It has something to do with the Vatican, doesn’t it? You’re still working with them, aren’t you? Come back here, damn it!”

The bells over the door jangled ominously as he walked away.

When I got back to the store I was greeted by a sudden influx of customers. I was grateful for the work. Taking care of business kept my mind from drifting back to Sebastian. Occasionally, I even allowed myself a quick day -dream about the things I would change about the store once it was mine. I was actually happily musing the ways I could bring more customers into Mercury Crossing when a young, freckle-faced woman cleared her throat. Bright red hair fell in loose ringlets to delicate, birdlike shoulders. My first impression was: brittle.

“Sorry,” I said, with an apologetic smile. “I was miles away.”

She returned my smile nervously. “I’m Alison,” she said without any preamble. She reached up and ran a finger across the bottom of one of the wind chimes. The soft cascade of bells made my throat ache.

“Alison?” It took me a second to place the name—one of Sebastian’s ghouls, the one I’d called yesterday with the Britney Spears voice mail. Goddess, how did she find me? I had a flash of telling her the name of the store during my flustered babble. “Oh!

Alison.”

I looked at Alison again, this time searching for clues as to why Sebastian chose her. I supposed she was pretty in a breakable, fragile way. She had that kind of porcelain, pale skin that a lot of Irish women naturally had, the kind, I might add, I used a great quantity of makeup to replicate. The sky blue of her eyes reminded me of glass too. She wore a patterned, vintage sundress and white, heeled sandals. She looked cool and effortlessly stylish.

“I’m Garnet,” I said and I offered a hand because I felt I should.

She inspected my hand momentarily, and then, with a sigh that seemed very put out, reached over. It was a clammy, halfhearted shake, but she must have shuffled her feet on a rug or something, because a static electric shock arced between us when we touched. Strangely, it reminded me of when I’d shook hands with Micah.

Sebastian had said that ghouls, in general, were discouraged from practicing magic. Practice and talent were sometimes two different things. What if someone were naturally inclined toward the occult?

I gave Alison the squint. Her aura was hazy and blurred. I’d never seen anything like it; it was almost as if there was a brighter one that a dark film had settled over. I couldn’t quite get a bead on it. Was this what Sebastian had meant when he said they had ways of keeping ghouls from doing magic? Was her natural talent being hobbled in some way?

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“It doesn’t seem right,” I said. What if she was meant to be the Einstein of Witches? Although I supposed if she stopped being a ghoul, she could start being a Witch.

“What doesn’t?”

Did she even know? Should I tell her? “Uh, nothing. Never mind.”

"O-kay,” Alison said with that look I’d seen a million times whenever I got all woo-woo. “Anyway, you tried to sound casual on your message, but I could tell you were worried.” She looked over her shoulder as if to check to see if anyone was listening in. No one was. William was in the storeroom sorting out a recent order. The last rush of customers faded after the lunch hour. Satisfied, Alison turned back to me. “None of the others has ever contacted me before in person. I figured it had to be some kind of an emergency.”

Others? She thinks I’m another ghoul, like her. I started to bristle with the desire to correct her assumption, but stopped. I’d let her think I was one of them for now. “When did you last see Sebastian?”

“Day before yesterday.”

Oh Goddess. She was the one he’d gone to after being with me.

I was still reeling from this revelation when she continued. “He told me he was getting married. Can you believe that shit? Married?

What does he think? His need is just going to go away because he’s giving a ring to some norm?” She made an exasperated sound.

“Did he tell you that too?”

Well, he had. “Yeah, he did.”

“It’s fucked up is what it is. I mean, what’s he going to do? Start knocking over the Plasma Alliance?”

What she was implying finally hit me through the onslaught of her constant babble. “Wait a minute. Did he break up with you?”

She frowned. “He thinks he did.” Then she actually snapped her fingers. With her too-thin fingers, pasty complexion, and twohundred-dollar casual wear, the gesture looked like a parody of urban hip. But, her eyes narrowed fiercely as she continued, “Just wait until he discovers that he can’t get enough from one woman, even if she is a willing donor, which I doubt she is. They never fall for one of us, have you noticed that?”

Alison didn’t wait for my answer. “Anyway, I bet he made the rounds, you know, cutting everyone off. So, what’s the deal? Did, like, one of us pop a cork or something? Do we need to go rescue him?”

Talking to Alison made my head spin. “You think one of the others is holding Sebastian hostage or something?”

She stopped short, and gave me a quizzical look. “Isn’t that why you called me?”

I suddenly had
no
idea why I’d called her. “Uh, he’s really only been missing a couple of days.”

Alison gave me a very curious looking over, then said, “So I was the last one to see him? Are you accusing me of something?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but luckily, I didn’t have to.

“Well, that’s just silly,” she answered her own question again. “I’d never hurt Sebastian. You know who I think did it?”—I didn’t, but I was sure Alison was about to tell me— “I think it was Traci. That girl’s a freak. She seems like a White Rose to me. Don’t you think?” Think? I had no idea what a White Rose was. But before I could ask, Alison answered herself. “Yeah, totally.” Then she glanced at my black, spiked hair and bloodred T-shirt with a vampire bat centered over my breasts. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I said easily since I had no idea just how I ’d been insulted. I was still surprised Alison knew the others’ names. What, did they have a newsletter? A LiveJournal community?

William came back from the storeroom with a box of books for shelving. He gave Alison and I a cursory glance and then did a textbook double take. “Ali?”

William knew one of Sebastian’s ghouls? Did I even want to know how?

“Oh, William, hey,” she sniffed, like something about William smelled badly to her. Undaunted by the obvious brush-off, William continued toward us. “Do you keep in touch with Feather? How is she?”

Of course! I’d forgotten that William’s ex-girlfriend Feather was a bite junkie. Was Feather one of Sebastian’s ghouls too?

“She moved to Chicago a couple of months ago.” And then, as if we were all thinking about the larger percentage of vampires living there, Alison added, “For school.”

“Right.” William’s tone conveyed that he didn’t buy that last bit either.

“I’m not supposed to talk about the business to you anymore, remember?”

Anymore? I looked to William askance. He looked away guiltily and scratched at the hairs at the back of his neck. I had a vague memory of William being nearly seduced by Sebastian’s glamour. “You weren’t . . . ? With Sebastian, were you?”

William raised his hands quickly. “No. I’d never do that to you. Honest. It was Parrish.”

I remembered William had gone all black -haired and Goth after discovering that vampires were real, but I had no idea he ’d become anyone’s ghoul, much less my ex, Parrish’s. That just seemed so wrong. It would almost be better if William had said he’d ghouled for Sebastian. At least I knew Sebastian was a gentleman and would have treated William well; Parrish was a bad boy to the core.

Alison turned to me conspiratorially. “Do you have somewhere private we can talk? Now that he’s left the fold, we need to uphold the vow of secrecy.”

“Uh, right.” To William, I mouthed “later.”

“Yeah, okay. Anyway, Ali, it was nice running into you,” he said, as he continued to the back of the store where we kept a small alcove of pagan-friendly kids’ books.

Alison and I watched him go. “It’s too bad he’s out of it. I hear he was always in demand. He’d be cute if he did something with that hair.”

I nodded absently, still trying to wrap my head around William as a ghoul. Anyway, William ’s hairstyle changed as often as his religion. Currently, he seemed to be trying to emulate the side curls that some Orthodox Jews wore, except his sort of looked like messy sideburns heading toward muttonchops.

As Alison still seemed to be considering William’s finer assets, I tried to steer her back on track. “Do you really think this Traci character could hold Sebastian against his will?”

Her theory went with Mátyás’s strange statement this morning that Sebastian was “in hell.” Maybe that was some kind of dhampyr code word for “stuck in a ghoul’s basement,” but why he couldn’t just come out and say that I’ll never understand.

“Totally. She’s always talking about leather and chains and things.”

Leather? The more Alison spoke, the more certain I was that there were things I did
not
want to know about Sebastian’s life. Being face-to-face with this fragile, non-sequitur spewing woman was hard enough, but now I had to think about Sebastian in S

and M dom mode too? Or as a bottom? I shook my head to clear it of half-formed images involving shiny buckles and leather. I shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. After all, I’d been wrong about Walter. Maybe Alison was wrong about Traci. Alison was giving me a curious look. “You want to go kick some butt right now?”

If Alison was right, and somehow Traci had captured Sebastian for some bondage fantasy, I did. Definitely.

As it happened, Slow Bob came sauntering in at that very moment to relieve me. With all the chaos of being late, making the deal with Eugene and such, I’d half forgotten that I’d asked him to cover for me this afternoon. I told Alison to wait for me at the coffee shop next door for a few minutes, and I got myself ready. William whined a little at being left with Slow Bob, but I reminded him that he could have Bob take care of the orders while he staffed the register. While Slow Bob was painfully deliberate with every transaction he undertook in inverse proportion to the number of customers waiting in line, he stayed on the store ’s roster because he was an absolute whiz when it came to alphabetizing and sorting. Besides, I swore he ’d read every book and tested every product in the entire place. Despite the fact that Slow Bob worked irregularly, sometimes it seemed he knew more about my inventory than I did.

With William thus mollified, I gathered my things and skived off. A twinge of guilt hit me as I punched out. It felt a lot like playing hooky given how late I’d come in. Still, if Alison was somehow right and Sebastian might be trapped at some ghoul ’s house, I didn’t want to wait around until after close to check things out.

Izzy was chatting up Alison when I came in. When Alison turned at my wave, Izzy flashed me the international cuckoo symbol by twirling her finger near her temple. I widened my eyes in the I-know-but-she’s-all-I’ve-got-to-work-with glare. Alison, now armed with some frothy-looking caffeinated drink, met me halfway across the room. “Where do you want to look for Traci?”

“How about her place?” I asked, fishing Sebastian’s book out of my purse.

Seeing the black book made Alison’s pert lips form a perfect O. “Is that
his
?”

You would have thought I was holding the Shroud of Turin the way her hands reached for it reverently. Since I didn’t know how to deal with her creepy admiration, I ignored her and flipped to Traci ’s entry. “Crap,” I said. “We’re going to have to call a taxi or something. She’s way out past Lake Monona.”

“Taxi? Why not just take my SUV?”