Summoning Sebastian (16 page)

It would have been enough to distract anyone. It might have stung unpleasantly in a human's eyes. But this guy's eyes started to smoke, and he started to scream. I grabbed Mom's arm. “Let's go,” I said. “Move. Move, move, move.” I didn't want to have to explain this to any authorities, much less to the Russian police. I had enough trouble on my hands without having to deal with them.

“What was—” Mom started.

“I'll tell you later,” I promised. “Right now let's just get the hell out of here.”

We got the hell out of there. It wasn't until we'd made it back home and I'd checked Sebastian's bottle that I allowed myself to consciously admit what had just happened. I'd been accosted by a vampire.

In broad daylight.

C
hapter Fifteen

It would be possible to make much more significant progress in the cataloguing of vampire-specific historical texts if the Church of the Eternal would loosen their stranglehold on these texts.
—Dr. Jacqueline Blachek, University of Chicago

T
o say Colin was unhappy to hear my story would be a vast understatement.

“You're sure he was a vampire?” Colin had asked the question at least three times already. I was getting tired of hearing it.

“Humans don't smoke when you spray them with holy water.” I'd answered the question six times. Two answers per question. And still he felt the need to quiz me. I was trying very hard to be patient. “They might get pissed, and with the garlic in it, it might sting a little—I don't know for sure. But they don't smoke.”

“In the daylight.” Colin said this grumpily, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “And you're sure this was the same guy you saw back home?”

“Yes. This time he was in front of the store where I bought my coat.” He'd quizzed Mom on the details too, but she hadn't seen much. She definitely hadn't seen the guy's face smoking. I'd been blocking her line of sight.

“Gregor.” He'd gone from question mode to analyze mode. Finally. “Tablet of Trichore, you said?”

“Yes. Have you heard of that before?”

He shook his head, the movement more thoughtful than a negation. “Trichore.” He frowned. “Place name? Person's name?”

“Could have been either. Both. I don't know.”

“Roland might.”

“Roland's not here.”

He shot me a sharp look but said nothing. Then he frowned and said again, “Trichore.”

I rubbed absently at my collarbones, where the ink still lay to betray me to anyone who cared to pay attention. No more collared shirts, then. T-shirts only. Except now they knew my face.

They knew your face before. How do you think they found you?

A knot of panic rose in my chest, moving up my esophagus until I felt like it would choke me.

“Nim.” Colin's hand touched my shoulder. I choked on a breath, only then realizing how much the panic had built. “Nim. It's okay. I'm here.”

“You're not here in the daytime.” It was the only thing I could think of, my brain circling the drain around that fact—he couldn't protect me when the sun was up, and that was when I was being threatened. Had we been back home, it might not have freaked me out as much. But here, in a foreign country, where I had my parents to protect too…and Sebastian…

I let him pull me against his chest. My heart was galloping as the attack of panic swallowed me. He pressed me close—feeling my heartbeat too, maybe, or absorbing my heat. It didn't matter—it was comforting. Made my breathing and my pulse ease back to a more normal rate.

“If I need to be there in the daytime, I will be.”

I twisted a little to look up at him. “How?” But he'd sat by my side through day and night when Pieter had bitten me, when we were counting against the clock, hoping I hadn't been transformed. If he truly needed to, I knew he could.

“I just will,” he said firmly.

“Thank you,” I said, and nestled my head back against his chest.

I
'd thought I was done unloading secrets to my mother, but as long as we were sharing space, more uncomfortable sharing was bound to happen. Especially when weird things had happened when all we were supposed to have been doing was buying a coat. Since I was having more and more trouble sleeping during the day when Colin was unconscious, I ended up in the living room with Mom one late morning, watching her knit. I was reading my Russian book, making notes in a notebook, Sebastian's bottle on the side table next to me.

“So,” said Mom suddenly. She pulled a strand up from the basket next to her. I couldn't figure out what the fuck she was knitting. It looked like a sweater for an octopus. “What's in the bottle?”

I blinked. Why was she asking that question? “Um…” I said, because I'm eloquent like that.

“C'mon, Nimuë. You carry it with you everywhere. I haven't seen you without it since you got here, except for when we went shopping.”

Well, she had me there. Sebastian hadn't left my side since we'd left home, except for that shopping trip. And of course I didn't take him with me to the bathroom. Usually.

I shook my head. I couldn't imagine Colin would approve of my telling my mother what was going on. “You wouldn't believe me.”

Her eyes narrowed, and her knitting needles started to clack a little faster. “Try me.”

I sighed. She wouldn't be put off—I knew that much. And if I told her the truth, she probably wouldn't believe me, so the secret would still be mostly safe. On the other hand, if I tried to lie to her, she'd know. Partly because I'm a terrible liar, but mostly because she's my mom.

“Okay,” I finally conceded. “I'll tell you. But it's not something you can spread around, so you'll have to keep it under your hat. Or…” I made a vague gesture, “…whatever it is you're making.”

“It's a tea cozy.”

“With legs?”

“Yes.”

Well. That answered that question. I gave the bottle a sidelong glance and said, “It's my other boyfriend.”

The needles stopped dead. “I'm sorry. What did you say?”

“In the bottle. It's my other boyfriend.”

Mom stared at me for a moment, then laid the octopoid tea cozy aside and set her chin in one hand. “All right, young lady, I'm going to need a bit more of an explanation than that.”

So I told her the story. The whole thing. All the ugly details, from Sebastian's brush with the law to my brush with vampire zombie-hood. To my surprise, she listened intently, nodding and making sympathetic noises from time to time. When I was done, she folded her hands and regarded me for what felt like a long time. I resisted the urge to reach over and pick up Sebastian's bottle to cradle it and protect it from her motherly judgment, especially when her gaze drifted to it, her eyes narrowing as she took in the bottle's curve.

“So…” she started, then tilted her head, pausing for a moment. “This Sebastian was in a ménage a trois with you and Colin, and he sacrificed his life to save the world, basically, and now his spirit is in the bottle while you and Colin look for a way to reconstitute his body?”

“That's…basically it.” Maybe she believed me after all.

She was silent again for a time as she rearranged her knitting, which she'd allowed to lie half-forgotten in her lap while I told my story. “You know, I always wished for a normal life for you girls.”

I started to open my mouth to apologize for disappointing her, but she wasn't done. “I'm not sure why I did that when this kind of thing is so much more interesting.”

My unformed apology turned to a snort. “You're a complete head case, you know that, Mom?”

She just grinned. “That's what your father tells me.”

We
stayed for a couple more days. I didn't go shopping again, and I let my sleep schedule go from attempting to be normal to thoroughly fucked up. It made it hard for me to keep track of time.

So whether it was Tuesday or Friday or Sunday or maybe Wednesday, I was sitting on the couch, curled up next to Colin and drinking a cup of tea that I'd diluted just a little too much with water from the samovar, when Roland returned from her wanderings.

It was the middle of the night. I knew that much. Which was fortunate because Mom and Dad probably would have flipped their shit if they'd seen Roland appearing in the middle of the living room the way she did. Vampires. Jesus.

I choked on my tea when I looked up and saw her, but Colin just tweaked an eyebrow. “What's up?”

“Quite a lot, as it turns out.”

“You don't say.” The utter dryness of his tone made me think there were things neither of them had bothered to tell me.

“Yeah.” Roland's expression remained neutral, almost bland. “Let's go grab a drink. I'll get you up to speed.”

Colin started to get up, and I followed, picking up Sebastian's bottle as I did.

“You're staying here,” Colin said firmly.

“The fuck I am,” I shot back, and that was that.

Col
in was nice enough to take us somewhere I could get coffee while they enjoyed their blood. I opted for tea with jam, though, a Russian habit I'd picked up that was probably going to get me into trouble with my dentist or my doctor—or both—at some time in the near future. I set Bastian's blue bottle on the table and picked up my tiny spoon to enjoy the strawberry jam the waitress had brought me.

“We don't get many humans here,” she said as she set the cup of tea next to the saucer of jam. I surprised myself by understanding her Russian.

“He's my boyfriend,” I told her, mostly because it was the first relevant Russian phrase I managed to cobble together on the spot.

She nodded soberly. She was human, I was certain. I'd developed a sixth sense about these things. Or maybe I was up to seven senses by now. Hard to say. She leaned forward and asked in an undertone, “Does he speak Russian?”

“No,” I said, then qualified, “maybe a little.”
Mozhad buit nimnoga
. Russian was fun, I decided. I held thumb and forefinger about a quarter inch apart to indicate my estimate of his vocabulary.

This seemed to satisfy her. She leaned a little closer. “Are they as good in the bedroom as they say on TV?”

I snorted a laugh. Obviously that stereotype wasn't exclusively American.

“Better,” I said, and her eyes widened. Then she smirked and bumped me with her elbow.

“I bring more jam,” she said in English. “You need energy.
Da
?”

I snorfled again. Colin frowned at me. “What are you talking about?”

“The size of your dick,” I told him.

He frowned more deeply, probably trying to figure out where my quarter-inch gesture had fit into that conversation. The waitress howled with laughter, then departed, presumably to fetch me more jam. I was very much in favor of the more jam plan.

Roland's mouth had quirked up at one corner, which made me wonder how much Russian she actually knew. She didn't rat me out, though, only ducked her head to sniff the glass of warm blood she'd ordered. She swirled it in the glass, and it crawled down the inside surfaces. There'd been a time I would have found that repulsive, or at least disturbing. Now it didn't even faze me.

“So.” Colin took a sip of his own drink. “What's the news from up north?”

“It's snowing,” Roland answered blandly. Colin gave her a look. I drew the blue bottle a little closer across the table. It was starting to hum again.

Roland drew a hand through her long, straight hair, obviously mulling her next words. “There's a lot of news from up north, truth to tell.”

“Any of it good?”

“Not much.” She sighed. “They'll help us. They're not happy about it.” Another hesitation as she sipped her drink. “Well, more specifically, they're not happy about her.” Her head tilted toward me.

I started to protest but stopped myself. There was no point taking it personally. They wouldn't be objecting to me, per se. More to the fact I breathed and had a pulse and could enjoy my tea and jam.

Roland seemed to have caught the drift of my aborted protest. “It's nothing personal.”

“I know.”

“In fact, if I wasn't damn sure we couldn't do this without you, I'd suggest you stay here safe with Mom and Dad until we get Sebastian settled.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Colin, though, asked the question I'd swallowed. “Why are you so sure she needs to be there?”

With a slow shake of her head, Roland said, “The stone. It's all about the stone.”

“Isn't it always,” I muttered and tried to make myself small in my chair.

The stone. The motherfucking stone, which had changed my life and taken Sebastian's, changing him into the disembodied spirit he now was. For a fleeting second, I wished those few moments on a dark sidewalk in Englewood had never happened. Those moments when I'd first seen Sebastian's too-blue eyes peering at me through my car window.

“This isn't going to end up being horribly painful, is it?” I wasn't even sure I wanted an answer. If it was going to hurt, I might be better off not knowing beforehand.

Roland frowned, running her fingers absently along the stem of her glass. She was giving the question some consideration, at least.

“I don't think so,” she finally said, then leaned forward. “Let me explain.”

No
, I thought,
please just sum up
, but by then she had already begun her story.

On July 30, 1908, something happened in Tunguska that was weirder than most things that happen in Siberia. Which is to say it was pretty fucking weird. According to reports gathered years later from interviews with the locals, there was an explosion and a flash of light. Trees in an area of eight hundred square miles were flattened. Officially, no one was killed. According to the Evenki people, an aboriginal tribe who lived in the area, and who probably had reason to know, it was the arrival of Ogdy the Thunder God, and many people died. These deaths remained unrecognized by the tsar. Days later, it was bright enough in the streets of London to read a newspaper in the middle of the night on the fourth of July.

To this day, no one knows what caused it. Theories abound—from a comet exploding just above the earth to a meteor doing the same, much as happened in Chelyabinsk a century later. One school of thought involved a death ray invented by Nikola Tesla, being tested a continent away—

“A Tesla death ray?” I couldn't help it. I had to interrupt her at that point.

Roland's mouth tightened. She'd been on a roll and apparently resented the interruption. “It's a theory.”