Summoning Sebastian (3 page)

Still not getting it, I automatically reverted to glib. “Well, that kind of thing is bound to happen when you legalize marijuana.” I was silent a moment, judging his expression. I'd obviously missed something. Then it hit me. “No. That's not possible, and I'm not even going to consider it as a possibility.”

“That was my reaction too, but what if—”

“No.”

“He's been acting so—”

“No! Hell, no, no, no, and fuck no. Seriously, what part of no do you not understand?”

He drew in a breath, puffed it out. Yeah, definitely hanging around with breathing people too much. “Honestly, it doesn't make much sense to me either, but I guess I just wanted to talk it out. See if I was overthinking it or just crazy.”

“You're crazy.” Maybe I was being too vehement, but dammit, this couldn't be Sebastian. Sebastian would never do anything like this, disembodied sort-of-ghost or not. It just wasn't possible.

Apparently Colin had finally accepted my very poorly presented argument against his very stupid theory. He uncrossed his legs and jumped off the desk. “Let's hit the books.”

Six hours later, I scrubbed grit out of my eyes and closed the tablet I was using to record my work. Colin had presented the tablet about the same time he'd promoted me. We'd also had a talk about my responsibilities, which had changed from actually working for Bernstein and Carter to focusing on translating the texts we'd gotten, in which, theoretically, lay the answer to bringing Sebastian back. And he'd given me a hefty raise. I didn't tell people about that, generally, because I don't want anybody to think I'd slept my way to the top. Especially since I had really only slept my way to the middle.

I deserved the raise, though, because it was a fucking hard job. I would have done it without the money, of course, because it was for Sebastian. But it was pretty damn intense mental labor, especially for somebody like me who has the attention span of a ferret on crack. Some days I managed to struggle through one or two words. Yesterday I'd managed a full sentence. Today I was reviewing what I'd put together over the past week to be sure it made sense.

Surprisingly, it did make sense. I've never claimed to be any kind of language expert, but experience with this particular manuscript and this language had made me into one. Sort of. I'd done a lot of studying, spent time online with Roland, the head of the vampire studies department at the University of Illinois, who'd been helping us with our work, and had poked around on the Internet using my access to vampire boards and other places most humans couldn't get into. In addition, it seemed like I had some kind of connection with the language. I didn't think too much about that. I suspected it had something to do with being partially bound to the vampire stone.

Said stone had been a not entirely welcome intruder into my life. Sebastian had been protecting it when I'd met him, and it had killed him in the end. Russian Asshole Pieter took it from him and tried to use it to take over the world, more or less, with vampire zombie followers. He'd bitten me, and I would have become one of those vampire zombies if Colin and Sebastian hadn't put me through a torturous but effective healing process.

Weird things had happened after that, one of them being that I seemed to be able to fight my way through the tablets faster even than Roland, who'd spent years working on them. At this point, I could probably chat with people in the ancient vampire language written on the tablets in Linear V. Except nobody knew how to pronounce it.

“The power in the stone can bring the spirit to the air.” That was yesterday's sentence. The full section from the last week came to “The stone breaks the spirit and the power in the stone can bring the spirit to the air.” In and of itself, it made no sense. But something about it made me think I was on a track that was going to lead somewhere. The texts were like that. They seemed impenetrable, leading nowhere, until a few sentences fell next to each other and suddenly seemed to mean something. That was usually when I got in touch with Roland.

I wasn't quite ready for her yet, but it was getting close. I had that flutter under my diaphragm that made me think something there was going to add up to answers.

Colin had been out of the office since midnight, aka lunchtime, hunting down information that actually had something to do with his job, my job and the company we worked for. He'd left with a list of names of some folks who hadn't followed up on our numerous attempts to get them to pay their bills. I figured he'd be back at about the time we usually closed up shop, and I was right.

He sauntered in with his suit jacket gone, his sleeves rolled up and a smear of blood on his right-hand knuckles. Whatever wound had caused the smear was healed already, or maybe the blood was somebody else's. Either way, he didn't seem to notice it, which surprised me. Then he licked it off, and I wasn't surprised anymore.

“How's it been?” he asked. He seemed overly cheery—he must have gotten some money back or just enjoyed himself beating somebody's face in.

“All right. A lot of phone calls.” I'd heard the phone ringing regularly throughout the night, and Colin's receptionist had dropped off a stack of notes from people who were going to be deeply disappointed when Colin didn't call them back. “You?”

“Not bad.” His feral grin made me not want to ask him for details. He dropped into a chair, a bit out of character since he usually plopped his ass on the desk. He reached over and tapped the spiral-bound notebook where I'd been jotting notes. “Any progress?”

“I have a new sentence.” I hesitated, then added, “I think I'm close to something. I think.”

I qualified a lot whenever I told Colin about my progress. I didn't want to get his hopes up. I didn't want to get
my
hopes up. But my gut feeling was that I was close to something important.

His expression had settled into something more sober. “We'll look at it together when we get home.”

I nodded. Suddenly I felt like I'd dragged concrete blocks up a hill all night instead of translating an obscure vampire script. “I'm so tired.” The words just slipped out of me, unbidden. I wanted to drag them back. I didn't like showing weakness to Colin in spite of our relationship and where it had gone.

But he rose from his chair and came to me, dipped his head and dropped a soft kiss on my forehead. It felt warm—not temperature-wise because, hello, vampire—but in a way that touched me more deeply than I often let things touch me. My eyes went wet and I blinked hard a few times. “Thank you,” I mumbled.

He let his hand drift over my hair, then he stepped back. “Let's go,” he said, and I nodded.

Chapter Three

“A
scribing magical powers to these documents simply because they are possibly old and mostly untranslated is an exercise in stupidity.”
—Martin Friedberg, PhD, Dean of Vampiric Literature, Boston University (human)

W
hen we crossed the threshold into the house, Colin caught my hand and drew me to him. His cool lips walked over mine, then meandered across my face. I closed my eyes, just taking it in. It was a rare moment when he indulged in this kind of easy affection, but I'd noticed he was doing it more often lately. Loosening up, maybe. I'd never thought of him as particularly reserved, but he actually was, in his own way.

He lipped my ear, and I made a little humming sound to encourage him. My hands had found his biceps, not really drawing him closer or pushing him back, just anchoring myself and holding him there. It felt nice, and for a moment, I was able to forget about everything else that was weighing on me.

Then he picked me up and headed for the bedroom, and, weirdly, the moment shattered.

“Do we have to?” I said, and I couldn't believe those words had come out of my mouth. What woman in her right mind would turn down crazy monkey sex with the gorgeous hunk of vampire that was my current boyfriend? A crazy one, that's what kind.

He stopped in his tracks, peering down at me with exactly the kind of bemused expression you'd expect under the circumstances. “Really? Are you not feeling well?”

It was the right question, at least, and his tone was sincere. He really was inquiring after my health and comfort, not implying I'd lost my ever-loving mind. Although the latter was a distinct possibility.

I wove my fingers together behind his neck. He was secure and solid, and I felt safe perched there against his hard chest. “I'm just…” I hated to say what was bothering me. It seemed so petty and selfish. I let my gaze drop, focusing on his throat. “It's not really about the sex so much anymore, is it?”

His forehead creased into an impressively deep frown, and his hands tightened on me a little, tucking me closer to him. “I get what you mean.” He lowered his head, his gaze searching for mine. “Just us tonight,” he said. “I mean, if company shows up, that's fine, but we won't focus on that. Okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” And now I felt horrible. I loved Sebastian. So did Colin. I didn't want to lose him. But I didn't want to lose Colin either, and having sex that wasn't so much sex as an erotic séance was starting to wear on me.

He kissed my forehead. “It's okay, you know. It really is.”

Shrugging, I pressed my head against his chest. “I miss him.”

“I know.”

Holding me firmly against his chest, he carried me the rest of the way into the bedroom and laid me down on the wide bed.

What lay unspoken in this agreement was that there was no way to know when or if Sebastian would make an appearance. So it was hard not to think about it, hard not to wonder if he might show up any second. Colin lowered himself over me, and for a few minutes I closed out everything else, focused solely on the hands on me, on Colin's mouth. They were good hands. It was an excellent mouth.

In the last moments, when fire burned through me and Colin's still-blunt teeth clamped on my neck, I felt a shimmer. It was vague, but it was familiar, running all along my skin, and when it disappeared, I pressed my face against Colin's chest and cried.

I
didn't quite cry myself to sleep, but it was a close thing. I hated feeling that way. Maybe I was just being hormonal. I'd know if I kept better track. Maybe in the morning I'd drag out my calendar and figure out if I was PMSing.

When I did fall asleep, I was restless for the most part, unsettled and caught in shallow dreams. Colin, of course, was dead to the world, mostly because he basically was just plain dead. At least I never had to worry about disturbing his sleep.

Even though I knew I couldn't wake him up, lying there tossing back and forth next to him didn't seem to be doing me any good. Finally I pulled a blanket off the bed and went downstairs to sleep on the couch.

Rufus was curled up in his fuzzy fleece dog bed on the floor next to the fireplace. He looked up and thumped his tail when I completed my trek down the stairs. As I started to arrange things on the couch, he jumped up and joined me.

I let him, tucking the cover around both of us. It was nice having his warm bulk there with me on the couch. When I'd lived in my own house with my sister, Rufus had slept with me every night, but now Colin didn't much care to have him in the bed. I would have thrown down with him about it, but Rufus didn't much care to have Colin in the bed either. I tried to make it up to Rufus by napping with him on weekends. I didn't need to make anything up to Colin because of the regular sex.

Rufus seemed happy to have me to himself, curling up next to me and letting me wrap an arm around him like he was a stuffed toy. It was a big couch, which was fortunate because Rufus is not a small dog.

I felt safe and happy and comfortable with him there. And dogs are much better at keeping you warm than vampires.

When I fell asleep, though, the safe and happy went away. I was floating in some kind of cloud, dark and opaque. As I drifted through it, I realized it was made up not of water droplets but of characters in Linear V. They danced and swam all around me, a fog of incised lines and sharply geometrical patterns.

Then I saw Sebastian. He was in the middle of the swimming lines of strange letters, his body arched in pain and limned with orange, as he had been the last time I'd seen him alive. Light poured from his chest, there where he'd shoved the vampire stone into himself, thus destroying it. But unlike when I'd actually seen this scene, now the light was filled with words. Not just the Linear-V letters this time, but English words too. And a few in Spanish. Of course. I'd always known high school Spanish would come back to haunt me someday.

My subconscious was having a heyday with the language, obviously, toying around with what I'd transcribed and what I'd learned over the past weeks working with it. Words began to form and reform, swimming around each other, making strange patterns. They seemed to grow arms and legs, and to dance. They danced around Sebastian, cloaking him in light that poured out of his chest, out of his heart, out of his head. They danced and danced and suddenly I sat straight up on the couch.

“Holy shit,” I said to no one. Rufus snored.

When he finally meandered downstairs, when the sun was down and it was safe for all good vampires to wander the streets, Colin found me not cuddling Rufus on the couch but hunched over my laptop, my tablet and a stack of legal pads sticking words and sentences together that had never made sense to me before. They made sense now, though I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make that sense apparent to Colin. It was more a gut thing than a break-it-down-into-a-bullet-list thing.

“Hi.” His quizzical tone, even in the single word, was enough to make me look up. His expression was quizzical too. He was wearing jeans he'd conveniently forgotten to zip—or wear underwear with—and nothing else.

“Go away,” I told him. “You're distracting me.”

“With my hot-ass bod?” He moved up behind me where I sat at the kitchen table and rubbed his hairy pecs against the back of my head.

“Yes. Take it somewhere else.”

He chuckled, seemingly unoffended. Then my sixth sense, the one that told me somebody was reading my computer over my shoulder, told me he was reading my computer over my shoulder.

“Stop that,” I told him. “Go make me some coffee.”

He's always been terrible at following orders, and this time was no exception. He pulled up a chair and sat next to me, peering over my elbow now at the pile of pixels and paper I'd assembled in front of me. “Progress?”

I decided just to focus on the work and not let him distract me. Not the easiest thing to do since he'd completely derailed my train of thought. Also because he smelled like horny vampire. Which sounds like it would smell terrible, but it really doesn't.

“I had a dream,” I told him. “One of those weird ones where you wake up and go, ‘Holy shit, was I ever a fucking idiot, because now everything makes complete sense', except it doesn't and then you have to actually work to figure out how to make it make complete sense, and oh my God would you please make me some coffee?”

This time he actually levered himself back up out of the chair. By the expression on his face, I couldn't tell if it was because he'd finally figured out I actually needed the coffee or because he feared for his life after my incoherent rant. The lifted hands as he backed away from the table implied the latter.

“I don't know, Nim. You sound like the last thing you need is more caffeine.”

“I can't have
more
caffeine. I haven't had
any
caffeine. This is sleep deprivation you're seeing right here, my dear.” Wait, wait… That little bit of text in the computer file fit right next to the one on the sticky notes. I momentarily forgot Colin was in the room while I transcribed the sequence into the tablet.

“Then you need sleep.” I jumped at the sound of his voice.

“Coffee, Colin. Please. Like, an hour ago.”

Finally, thank God in heaven and all the tiny naked angels, he began to putter with the coffee machine. I heard him start to say something, but then he stopped. Which was fine, because I had found a couple more pieces that fit together and I really didn't want to talk to him right now.

By the time I came back up, Colin was next to me at the table again and the coffee was by my elbow. I grabbed it and took a long swig. It was lukewarm.

“Why isn't it hot?” I whined.

“Because I set it down there an hour ago.” He reached over and stroked a hand down the back of my head. Probably trying to sort out my hair, which felt like it had turned into a wayward and possibly inebriated hedgehog. “You need to sleep, love.”

I took a deep breath. He'd called me love. That was a nice thing, or it would have been if I'd been in any condition to appreciate it. “I know. But look…” I handed him the tablet. “Look what I did.”

He took the tablet from me and frowned at it, reading the translation I'd typed into it. It had been broken bits and pieces before; now it was three full paragraphs. I watched his lips move slightly as he read a few passages over a few times in a row.

When he lifted his eyes to mine, I saw something in them I hadn't seen very often. Respect. Pure, unadulterated and unfiltered by any attempt on his part to hide it. “This is… Shit, Nim, this is what we've been looking for.”

“Damn fucking straight it is.” I picked up the coffee, slugged down the rest of it, then wished I hadn't as the caffeine made my head spin.

“Nimuë, go to bed. Sleep. An hour or so, please. I'll work on this while you're out. I think I know how to fit the next section in.”

Oh, right. He knew this script too. He'd taught it to me, after all, and had been checking my work. I'd run with it after I felt fairly competent, and had almost forgotten I wasn't the only person on this case who had some knowledge.

The realization relieved me to such an extent that I literally drifted off to sleep for a split second on a wave of relief. When I came back, Colin was holding my arm. “Couch. Now.”

I went to the couch. I didn't remember anything after that for a good long time.

When I finally woke, it was because I had to pee like nobody has ever had to pee before in the history of peeing. I rolled off the bed and ran for the bathroom, barely aware of Colin chuckling from the kitchen table. Fine for him to laugh. He never has to pee. Damn vampires.

When I emerged, though, feeling surprisingly refreshed, his expression had shifted back to frowny-thinky.

“Accomplish anything?” I asked.

“Yep.” He swiveled away from the table and passed the tablet back to me. I glanced at the time at the top before I looked at the contents. I'd been out for four hours. “You read this over,” he told me. “I'll get you something to eat.”

That was nice of him, since he doesn't like to cook. He'll make coffee till the cows come home, but cooking eggs bugs him for some reason. I meandered to the couch and settled back into the pile of blankets I'd left behind. Absently, I picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. Maybe the news channels would have something more about the killings.

Within moments, though, I was too absorbed in what I saw on the tablet to pay any attention to the TV. Colin had slid several sentences into blank spaces I'd left behind and had tweaked a few of my translations to make everything fit together more smoothly. I read through it, feeling as if something was very close to making sense. If only it had been in straightforward diction. But no. Like most semi-mythological ancient documents, it was like reading riddles.

“Nim.”

I waved Colin off—he didn't seem to have eggs yet, so I wasn't interested.

“Nim,” he said again.

“What?” I snapped.

“Look at the TV.”

I looked at the TV.

“This police sketch,” the announcer was saying, “was presented earlier tonight at a press conference regarding the recent killing of vampires in downtown Denver. It was based on eyewitness reports who saw the latest attack, which unfortunately affected a human.”

“Fuck me,” I said, and Colin didn't even take the opportunity to make a stupid joke.

Because the police sketch looked just like Sebastian.

“It's not possible.” I'd said it about fifty times, the last ten or so with eggs in my mouth. “It just isn't.”

Colin, about as sober as I'd ever seen him, stirred his breakfast blood with his glass stirring stick and didn't even look at me. “I would have said the same thing. But…”

“But nothing. Sebastian would not randomly kill vampires. He definitely wouldn't randomly kill people. He's not that kind of person.”