Romancing The Dead (7 page)

“Have you and Sebastian reconciled?” I asked him as kindly as I could.

He didn’t even turn to face me, he just chuckled darkly. “How likely is that?”

Well, it didn’t seem impossible from where I stood. I knew that both men loved the other in their own way, despite all the twisted family history between them. I didn’t say anything, though, because I didn’t want to presume to comment on his relationship with his father.

“Yeah,” he said to my silence. “Exactly.”

“Then why are you here? Why come back?” I hoped my tone didn’t imply what I was really thinking, which was wondering if he’d come back with another agenda again. Maybe Sebastian’s disappearance wasn’t really such a surprise to him, after all. Perhaps he was back to finish the job he’d started.

His eyes narrowed. “Oh, now I’m responsible for his disappearance?”

“I didn’t say that,” I said, then just as quickly asked, “So are you?”

“No.” Mátyás said gruffly, though I thought I could sense a trace of hurt in his tone. “Disappointed?”

Unconvinced, maybe, I thought. “Why are you here again?”

“To torture you, of course.”

With that, he stood up and walked to the kitchen door. I followed behind, turning on lights. It was freaky that he didn ’t seem to need the light to find his way around; it was almost as if he could see in the dark. But I might have been imagining things. He probably just knew the place well. I was never really sure how extra-human Mátyás was, being a dhampyr and all. A dhampyr is what you get when you cross a vampire and a human. As far as I knew, Mátyás was the only one, ever. Traditional vampires like Parrish were dead. Their skin was cold, they didn’t need to eat or breathe, their hair didn’t grow much, and, well, let’s just say a sperm bank would be uninterested in their deposit. Sebastian was, for the most part,
fully
human. Thus Mátyás. Like I said, I never knew what, if any, superhuman powers Mátyás possessed. Other than his longevity and his awesome powers of annoyance.

Sebastian’s kitchen smelled like roasted chili peppers and stewed tomatoes. There were bottles and jars of all sorts around. Sebastian had just canned tomatoes and made several batches of salsa, which sat upside down on towels on the counter beside the stove. A few remaining fruits ripened on the windowsill.

Mátyás reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer. I watched him hunt through the drawers for a bottle cap opener. Our eyes met as he shut the drawer by my hip. I leaned against the counter, arms crossed in front of my chest. “I’m not here to kill him,” Mátyás said. “Or you.”

“Really,” I drawled. I was still unconvinced. “How convenient that Sebastian is missing when you show up.”

“Actually, it isn’t terribly convenient,” Mátyás said with a snarl. He levered the opener and gave it a forceful shove. The top came off with an audible pop and fizz. “I think he’s making a huge mistake and I was hoping to talk him out of it. Now I see it’s too late.”

He tipped the bottle in the direction of my ring before taking a swig. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I should have stayed in Rome.”

“Italy? Still hanging out with the Order of Eustace then?” I tried to make it sound casual, but my voice sounded strained even to me. Mátyás glared at me from where he leaned against the kitchen counter, bottle poised at his lips. He took a long, defiant swallow. His eyes never left mine. Finally, he said, “Do you really want to broach that particular topic with me?”

I sure as hell did if Sebastian was in danger.

“Depends,” I said slowly. “Do you have any new tats you want to tell me about?”

For a supposedly secret organization, the Vatican assassins liked to advertise their membership with a red -lettered tattoo of the numbers 22:18, a reference to the biblical chapter Exodus’s admonishment not to “suffer a witch to live.” If Mátyás had joined, he’d have gotten the tattoo. It was required, even of their sensitives—the magically abled turncoats that helped them hunt down and destroy Witches and their covens.

The kitchen was so quiet that the ticktock of the wall clock measured the seconds before Mátyás answered. “No new ink,” he said finally.

His answer was so cautious that I wondered what he’d left out. “What aren’t you telling me, Mátyás? Are you working for them in some other way? Or . . . Oh!” Suddenly I remembered that the Vatican had promised to try to resurrect his mother, Teréza who Sebastian accidentally left in a state of suspended reanimation when he tried to pass on his vampirism in the traditional way. “Do they have your mother hostage? Are they asking for a trade?”

“Trade?” he repeated incredulously. “I already told you I’m not working for them.”

“So sue me for being suspicious. It wouldn’t be the first time you’d sell out your father for your mother’s sake.”

“That’s unfair,” he snapped.

“Is it? You left us for dead.”

“I did, did I?” Mátyás took a long pull on his beer. I could smell the yeast from across the room. “Is that how you remember it?”

I had to break eye contact because I suddenly remembered how Mátyás had, in fact, not entirely betrayed us. Though my spell had fooled the Vatican agents on the other side of our magical circle, Mátyás had stepped through and knew that Sebastian and I were alive, and, even though the order wanted us eliminated, he ’d walked away without letting on that there was a chance we had survived the ordeal. It had been mercy so much as Mátyás was capable of it. “Fine,” I said. “Are you planning on betraying us now?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. The fingers holding the beer bottle tightened. “No.”

I stared at him trying to decide if I believed him.

Mátyás broke eye contact to look at the wall clock. “It’s only been a couple of hours. Maybe we shouldn’t be pointing fingers just yet. It’s possible he’ll come home any minute—blood on his lips and a spring in his step.”

“Stop it,” I said, though I knew it was a distinct possibility.

“If he’s not back by morning, you can paint me as the villain then, okay?”

Not back by morning? My heart skipped in my throat. “Bright Goddess, Mátyás, you don’t think . . . ? He’ll be back by then, won’t he?”

“Yes, of course, he will,” Mátyás said, though his eyes didn’t meet mine. Reaching for his cell phone, he said, “Look, maybe we should try Papa again.”

I nodded and watched anxiously as he dialed. In the quiet of the kitchen, I could hear the phone ring. By the third tone, I knew there would be no answer. Mátyás stared at the ceiling as Sebastian’s voice asked him to leave a message. He said something short and curt in a language I didn’t recognize—not that I knew a lot of languages, but it wasn’t Spanish, which I knew the sound of from spending some formative years with
Sesame Street
.

As he snapped the phone shut, it occurred to me that Sebastian might be ignoring any calls with Mátyás’s caller ID. “We should try from here too,” I said.

“You think he’s avoiding my calls?”

Mátyás sounded genuinely hurt by the suggestion, so I was gentle when I said, “It’s good to cover all our bases, don’t you think?”

But I didn’t have better luck. As I replaced the receiver in its cradle, it occurred to me that there was supposed to be a way for me to check my cell phone voice mail remotely. I started hunting for the cell phone manual. I was sure Sebastian had kept it here at his place because he always teased me that I’d lose track of it. Which was true, of course. Pushing papers aside in his junk drawer, I wished he were here to tell me which “safe place” he’d put the damn thing in.

I heard the bottle clink in the kitchen, which made me think of my neighbors’ recycling bins. I picked up the phone again and called my answering machine at the apartment to retrieve its messages. William had called to let me know that he ’d found a bunch of vegan pate recipes he planned on serving at the coven meeting at his place tomorrow. After that, there was a hang up. I tended to get a lot of those as my number was one digit off a hair styling salon, but this time it sounded ominous. I listened to the quick click click three times, straining to hear the sound of Sebastian’s breathing or any extraneous noises. Did that sound like how Sebastian usually hung up the phone? As I finally gave up trying to decipher it, Mátyás came into the living room. I could tell he was acting cool and distant again by the swagger in his hips. “Still no answer, eh? She’s keeping him quite preoccupied.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Am I really that much fun to poke at?”

“Yes.” Mátyás smiled, leaning his hip against the backside of the couch. “You’ll make an excellent wicked stepmother.”

“I suppose that makes you Cinderella?”

“Prince Charming.” He smiled.

“Oh, you’re a
prince
, all right.”

“Finally, we agree on something,” Mátyás said, feigning exasperation, except a smile slipped out—one, much to my surprise, I found myself returning.

The rumble of a passing semi rattled the window slightly, and for a second I mistook the sound for a car coming up the drive. I rushed to the curtain and glanced outside, disappointed by the bright red glow of retreating taillights. Holding the muslin aside a little longer, I scanned the darkness. All I really saw was my own worried expression staring back at me. Upstairs, Benjamin threw a pile of books on the floor.

Noticing Mátyás’s startled jump and sheepish recovery, I said, “Even Benjamin’s worried. That can’t be good.”

Perhaps in deference to our shared smile, Mátyás merely shrugged. “He’s a vampire, Garnet.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t get in trouble,” I said. “He could be hurt.”

“Or he could just be off having the time of his life, ” Mátyás said. Then, holding up a hand to stop my hot retort, he added, “Even the police won’t file a missing person’s case until he’s gone at least forty-eight hours. You saw him today?”

I nodded. “A couple of hours before the lecture.”

“Had he fed recently?”

I pursed my lips and shook my head, not trusting my voice not to betray my frustration that I couldn ’t get Sebastian to take my blood the night before.

“How long had it been?”

How was I supposed to know? It wasn’t like Sebastian shared his bloodletting calendar with me. “I don’t know,” I muttered. Mátyás was smiling again, but it wasn’t at all the kind I wanted to share. “If you’re worried,” he purred, “maybe you should call them.”

“What?”

“I know he keeps his black book around here somewhere,” he said, walking back into the kitchen. I stomped after him, curious, despite myself. Mátyás must be putting on a show rifling through all those recipes and such on the top of the fridge; there was no way Sebastian’s estranged son knew more about where he kept his most personal things than I did.

“Black book?” I repeated, even though I was afraid I knew exactly what could be found in this supposed book of Sebastian’s.

“Ah, here we go.” Mátyás held up a thin black planner. He started flipping through it. He stood close enough to me that I could smell the beer on his breath. I resolutely kept my eyes from looking down at the book.

“I’m not going to call those . . . ghouls,” I told him.

“No worries, darling. I’ll do it,” Mátyás said.

I snatched the book from him. “No, you won’t.”

Mátyás put a hurt expression on his face. “I thought you were really worried about Sebastian. Perhaps if I called, you could put your mind at ease.”

“You’re not doing this. Nobody is doing this,” I said. My hands shook just about as much as my voice. I really wanted to hurl the book out the window, into the trash, at Mátyás’s smug face—anything to get the tangible evidence of the other women out of my hands.

Mátyás held up his hands in mock surrender. “I was just thinking of you.”

“Liar,” I snarled. Before I succumbed to the desire to pummel him, I turned on my heels and trudged up the stairs. After nearly tripping on Mátyás’s suitcases in the hall, I threw myself on Sebastian ’s bed. Tears burned in my eyes as I caught the scent of Sebastian’s shampoo on the pillows. In my hands, I still clutched the book. I threw the evil thing against the wall with a shriek of frustration.

I lay on the bed and stared at the corner where the black book fell. After several attempts to ignore it, I got to my feet and picked it back up. The book itself was thin and flimsy —cheaply made. The edges were worn and the spine broken. My fingers felt the roughly textured cover as though looking for some clue as to its contents without actually opening the thing. There were no identifying marks on the outside, nothing to indicate that it held anything earth -shattering. What was I afraid of? That I would find the name of someone I knew? So what if I did? Sebastian took their blood; he wasn’t sleeping with them. Was he?

This was the part of the whole ghoul situation that I was never entirely sure about. All my interactions involving Sebastian and biting happened during sex, but they didn’t have to. The times I’d seen Sebastian sink his teeth into someone in a nonsexual way, it was always ultraviolent— with the intent to kill. But I imagined there could be a happy medium . . . Right?

I shook my head. I never asked, so I didn’t know the answer. Never more did I regret my resolute policy of ignorance than I did right now. If I did open up this book and called any of them, I wouldn ’t even know if I was talking to food or a fuck-buddy or whether there was a difference.

I set the book down on the bed—no,
our
bed. The bed where Sebastian and I made love, the bed we were going to share after our marriage. I couldn’t go through with the wedding with this big secret hanging between us. Despite everything, I still didn ’t believe that Sebastian had just lost track of time. He’d always had ghouls, and he never missed an appointment before. Something else must have happened to him, and maybe one of these people had seen him last, knew what time he left —something that might help me figure out where he was and what kind of trouble he was in.

Besides, what did I have to say other than, “Is Sebastian there?” or “Have you seen him today?”

Closing my eyes, I tried to summon the courage to walk downstairs and pick up the phone. Instead of finding any extra mettle, I felt Lilith roiling just beneath the surface. Her presence reminded me that I
could
try magic first. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a celestial GPS system, but I could tug the blood connection that was forged between us the night we joined forces to defeat the Vatican agents. At least then I would know if he was still alive. Maybe too I could tell if he was in any kind of trouble. It was worth a try. And, as a bonus, I wouldn’t have to talk to any ghouls.