Summoning Sebastian (8 page)

In any case, I pushed to my feet, swallowing back the nausea threatening to crawl up my throat. I took a few steps forward and called Sebastian's name.

It didn't seem to do any good. The tentacle kept squeezing, and the vamp's eyeballs kept bulging. “Sebastian!” I said again. Still nothing.

Then, suddenly, I had an epiphany. Not that anyone ever has epiphanies that aren't sudden, but hey, it's me, so anything's possible. My brain flashed on a page—well, a tablet—from the text I'd been translating then just as quickly flashed on one of the symbols I'd seen on the talisman. They weren't the same, but something…

I couldn't take the time to puzzle it out. I just did what seemed right, and what seemed right was to draw the symbols next to each other in the air and, once again, call Sebastian's name. I'd figure out why I'd done it later.

The result—well, it worked. In a way. The phosphorescent cloud contracted on itself, and a horrific sound came out of it, like screeching pain combined with metal files tearing the shit out of a chalkboard. I pressed my hands over my ears, my stomach dropping. Had I hurt him? Killed him? Was he killable when he'd already been dead for weeks? I didn't know. All I knew was the sound he made felt like it was bursting my eardrums.

Then, in the midst of it, I heard words. Faint, shaped out of the horrible, screeching sounds but barely discernible.

“Help me.”

And everything stopped. The glowing mass disappeared. I felt something rush by me—
through
me, almost—and turned to see a slight disturbance in the dirt where Colin had buried the talisman. Then everything fell silent.

So silent, in fact, that for a moment I thought the horrible sound had destroyed my hearing. But then Eric let out a breath behind me and said, “What the everloving
fuck
was that?”

Chapter Eight

“I
have no idea what the fuck any of it says.”
—UCLA Chair of Vampire Studies, re: Linear V

I
had no answer for him then, and I had no answer now, as we sat again at the police station being debriefed or whatever the hell you call it when your annoying cop ex-boyfriend interrogates you about what weird thing just happened when he was there and really ought to write his own damn report instead of transcribing what you have to say about the situation. I suppose there was some question of differing eyewitness accounts, but since both of us boiled down to “really weird shit went down”, it all seemed fairly pointless.

On this side of things, anyway. I was eager to get home, back to my translation and, yes, back to Roland. I had a feeling what had happened tonight had more than a few answers threaded through it. Questions too, of course, but I could take those as long as they came with some hints as to how to proceed.

Because humans don't really respect vampire time, it was nearly daylight before we got home. We'd had to take some extra time swinging back by the pot shop to grab the talisman from the planter. I wasn't sure what we were going to find out from it, but we couldn't leave it behind—that much was obvious.

Colin was antsy; he screeched his tires pulling into his driveway. Once the garage door had trundled down behind us, though, he relaxed.

“It's not sunrise yet,” I consoled him as we got out of the car. “You've got time to change into your jammies.”

Colin wasn't ready to be consoled. “That boyfriend of yours has no respect for anyone, does he?”

I gave him a narrow look over the top of the car as we got out. “Must I remind you that
you
are my boyfriend, not Eric? Or are we forgetting who had whose tongue in whose vagina this morning?”

He didn't even leer at me. Never a good sign. He was thinking, and thinking for Colin never ended well.

“You really should be with a human,” he said as we headed into the house. “Somebody nice and normal. Not mixed up in all this vampire nonsense.”

“Oh, don't give me that ‘you'd be happier and safer without me' bullshit. I'm a grownup, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm capable of making my own decisions, thank you very much. Besides, even if I did find myself a human boyfriend, it sure as hell wouldn't be Eric.”

His responding grunt oozed with skepticism. “He's very attractive.”

“You bone him, then,” I shot back, and stormed off to my office. I had work to do.

I
wanted to sleep, but I was so wired I probably couldn't have drifted off even if I'd tried. I pulled out my work on the tablets instead to see what I could find out that might enlighten me about what had happened tonight.

It took me a while to find the symbol that had invaded my brain during the encounter with…yes, I had to admit now that it was Sebastian. It was on one of the tablets I hadn't looked at in several days. In my transcription, where I was trying to translate the text, it was circled, and there was a red star drawn next to it, which meant the symbol only appeared once in the text and I had absolutely no fucking clue what it meant.

Once I found it, I compared it to the copies I'd made of the symbols on the talisman. Sure enough, there it was, carved into what was probably a bit of bone. The two marks were nearly identical. What did they mean, though? I looked over the other symbols from the charm, looking for more parallels between it and the tablets. After some poking around, during which my eyes started getting sticky and it became apparent I seriously needed sleep, I found every one of the symbols from the charm on the tablet transcript. Every one of them was circled and had a red star next to it.

I scrubbed at my itching eyes. I couldn't do much else with this at the moment. Sad to say, I was probably going to have to chat with Roland. Which was fine—that was why she'd come out here, after all. I just wasn't looking forward to it,

Get over yourself,
I chastised myself.
This is for Sebastian.

Yes. For Sebastian. And for Sebastian, I could definitely get over myself.

I was so tired I couldn't even think about walking to the bedroom without feeling like I was going to cry. Colin was there, but he wasn't exactly a warm cuddle at the moment. On the other hand, there was a couch in the office, and Rufus was already curled up there, snoring non-musically. I left the computer on and went to Rufus and stretched out next to him. He shifted a little and fell back to sleep.

I woke to the sound of mumbling voices on the other side of the room. For a moment, my brain interpreted the sounds as Colin and Sebastian. Then, as I blinked myself the rest of the way awake, reality set in. I hadn't heard Sebastian's voice—just his name. One of the voices was Colin's, the other was Roland's. I couldn't make out anything they were saying, but their voices held the cadence of a back-and-forth discussion with a lot of theorizing in it.

I turned over to see what they were up to. They were both sitting in front of the computer, bent toward the screen, heads nearly touching as they spoke in quiet undertones.

“I think…” Colin's voice rose for a moment before descending again.

“But maybe…” Roland countered. They weren't exactly arguing, but their voices were getting more intense. I was starting to get the impression they'd either stumbled onto something useful or were about to throw down over some theory one liked and the other didn't.

I really didn't want to wake up. I wanted to roll back over, cuddle up with Rufus—who had abandoned me, making that point moot—and go back to sleep for a week. But it was nighttime. Time for all good vampires and their humans to get busy with a productive day. So I sat up and said, “Hey. What's up?”

Colin straightened and turned to smile at me. “Hey. Sleep okay?”

I shrugged. “More or less. I was up pretty late. Early. Whatever.” Most of my brain still struggled with phrasing these concepts for my nocturnal habits. Diurnal human bias, I guess.

“Well, you did some great work,” Roland leaned to the side in her chair, her spine popping.

I nodded, my brain still gummy. “I circled some things.”

“All important things.” Roland seemed intent on bolstering my self-esteem. Which was fine. We can all use a boost now and then. I straightened, my back, making crunching noises every bit as impressive as Roland's had.

“How important?”

“Important enough I think we can use them to get Sebastian away from whoever's controlling him.”

That perked me up. She waved me over, and I went to stand by the computer until Colin got up and gave me his chair.

I wasn't quite awake enough to follow all the details, but the gist of what Roland had worked out was easy enough to follow. The symbols I'd circled were all related in a way no one had noticed before, because they'd never been singled out in this pattern. They also appeared on the talisman and in the codex in the same order. I hadn't noticed this.

“I think you had the talisman upside down,” Roland clarified. “Also, I'm thinking you were paging back and forth to find the matches.”

I nodded. “I was.” I'd had the individual files mixed up, too. Now that someone awake and alert had set everything in the right order, the pattern was obvious.

“And the third thing—and this you had no way of knowing—is that a subset of the same symbols appears in a document that is traditionally connected to the stone but isn't generally included in the main texts. Apocryphal data, as it were.”

I puffed my cheeks out with a breath, eyebrows rising. “How many weird-ass vampire documents do you guys have hanging around, anyway?”

“A lot more than you might think,” Roland admitted, “and we have almost nobody to actually work on them—or at least nobody who'll talk.”

“We could find someone from the Church of the Eternal,” Colin muttered. “Swat them around a little.”

“I tried that in the '70s.” A pause. “1870s,” Roland clarified, as if only then remembering she was now in a completely different century. “Didn't work.”

Colin grunted. It was just a grunt, but it held a world of meaning. I interpreted it as saying that if he'd been doing the swatting, the results would have been much more useful. Roland gave him a side eye that made me think she spoke that obscure language, as well.

I didn't step into that exchange. It wasn't worth it. I knew something about the Church—enough to know Colin was posturing. Quelle surprise.

“It's a moot point,” I said. “We have what we have, and we need to figure out how to work with it or leave Sebastian under the control of a bunch of asshats who obviously don't have his best interests at heart. And I'm not nuts about that idea.”

“Neither am I.” For once, Colin's tone was serious, not mocking or tight like he thought I was accusing him of not caring what happened to Bastian. I reached over and stroked his arm. Positive reinforcement is never a bad idea. Also, he has nice arms.

“Anyway,” Roland went on, “I think we can reconstruct this talisman and use it to summon Sebastian. From there, we just have to work out a way to keep him with us. Keep him safe.”

I studied her face. I could tell by the crease between her brows that she had some ideas along those lines. I could also tell her concern was genuine. Which made me wonder—again—exactly how close she and Sebastian had been in the past. It was one of those I-want-to-know-but-I-really-don't-want-to-know kind of things.

Colin leaned back. “I'm going to go get us some coffee,” he said. “You want the usual, Nim?”

“Please.” Why he was going out, I didn't know—we had plenty of coffee. Then again, we were out of Jamaica Blue Mountain, so really what was the point of drinking anything else?

“Americana for me,” Roland offered. “Throw some cream in there if you would.”

Colin nodded and headed out of the room.

“What is it with vampires and coffee?” I asked Roland, just before I realized I was alone with her and that probably meant we'd end up conversing or something.

“We can actually taste it if it's strong enough,” she said. “Most things we can't. I like the cream for texture more than anything else.”

I nodded. There was a moment of silence as the awkwardness set in, then I ventured, “Do you think we can make this work?”

She blew out a slow breath, mousing back and forth between the lists of documents. “I think so.” She hesitated. “I hope so.”

She leaned back then, meeting my gaze directly. “I'm sorry I dropped all this on you. I know it isn't exactly your forte.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it isn't really. I'm finding the challenge…interesting, though. Of course, it'd be more fun if I weren't trying to save my boyfriend from an afterlife of ghost slavery. That takes a lot of the joy right out of it.”

Roland looked suddenly very sad. And old. Not in her face—that would always look young and perfect—but in her eyes. “I know. But you've done an amazing job. And…well, I would have taken it on if I could.”

“Why couldn't you?” It seemed odd to me—had from the beginning—that handing all this highly sensitive information over to a human would be preferable to having someone experienced in vampire studies puzzle it all out.

“Politics,” was her only answer. “I don't really want to get into it, but you're actually safer with it than I would have been at the time.”

“That doesn't seem to make much sense.”

“I know. But there you have it.” Obviously that topic was not one I should try to pursue. I tried another one, probably just as delicate. “What was he to you?”

Her gaze flicked up to mine, the deep age in her eyes now sheltered behind an odd mask. “About what you'd expect.”

I nodded. “Lovers?”

“For a while. Nim—”

I broke her off with a raised hand. “I'm sure this was all before I was born, so what difference does it make to me, right?”

She smiled vaguely. “It was before he and Colin were an item, if that helps.”

I gave a low whistle, more for effect than anything else. “A
long
time before I was born.”

“Yes.” She paused. “He was different then. So was I. I hurt him a lot—we made some very bad choices. If nothing else, I hope helping him might make some of that up to him.”

I nodded. I didn't want to know any more. They were vampires. Very old vampires. And from what I knew, any bad choices they might have made probably involved mass murder. Or at the very least a large quantity of human blood. He'd hinted before that his early life as a vampire hadn't exactly been roses and puppies. Unless the puppies had been lunch.

“So you couldn't help before because of politics, but you can now? I'm sure I shouldn't ask, but I have to admit I'm curious.”

“Very long story,” she said. “Maybe I'll explain it later.”

I nodded. “Fair enough.”

I could tell I wasn't going to get anything else out of her right now. So I let it drop. I could always apply the thumbscrews to her later. The important thing was, we were well on our way to a plan.