Zen and the Art of Vampires (7 page)

The other eye-candy guy was driving, his gaze meeting mine in the rearview mirror for a moment before he said something in what sounded like German to the Italian guy. The latter answered with one word. “Zorya.”

“Oh, no, not you, too!” I said, goose bumps crawling up my arms and legs. “Look, you've made a big mistake!”

“I thought she was French,” the driver said, his voice a pleasant baritone with a slight German hint to it. “She sounds American.”

“She is American, and she's not very happy right at this moment, so if you would kindly pull over and let her out, she won't have to either scream, or go stark, staring insane, whichever comes first!” I said loudly, my temper finally frayed beyond repair.

“Kristoff—” the driving guy started to say, his eyes flashing from the road, to the mirror, to his buddy.

I grabbed for the door handle, so angry I was ready to throw myself out of the moving car to escape the two men. Quickly, the driver hit a button that locked all the car doors.

“Damned child locks,” I cursed as I tried to pry the lock upward.

“She has the stone,” the man identified as Kristoff said, his head jerking back toward me.

“It's not mine!” I yelled, shaking the stone at him. “I told the same thing to those other people, not to mention the ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” the driver said, looking more interested than skeptical.

“Yes. People who drowned on a ship, I think. A long time ago, but I'm not whoever they're looking for, either. I've never seen this stone before. I think it came in a book I bought this afternoon, a book that a Frenchwoman was trying to find.”

The unnamed man driving slowed down and pulled over in the parking lot of a darkened bank. “What is your name?”

“Pia Thomason. I'm from Seattle, here with a tour group.” My cheeks flamed to life again. I didn't think I could stand the contempt that was sure to be in Kristoff's eyes if I mentioned what sort of group it was. “I bought a couple of used books this afternoon, and I think the bookmark must have been hidden in one of them, because I sure as shooting never saw anything like it before.” Quickly I recounted the brief meeting with the woman in the square. “The bookmark is probably hers.”

“Bookmark?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, it's a bookmark, see?” I pretended my hand was a book and slid the silken cord over it.

“I can assure you, Pia, it is
not
a bookmark,” the man said, smiling at me in the mirror.

I couldn't help but smile back at him, charmed by the warmth in his expression. His face had a softer look to it than his harsh friend's, his green eyes slightly tilted up at the edges, with laugh lines radiating outward.

“That's as may be, but I assure you it's not mine. I was going to try to find the woman it belongs to, but there are so many people out, I doubt if I could spot her.”

He watched me for a moment before turning to Kristoff, who regarded me with suspicious eyes. “She could be telling the truth.”

“It's not likely,” Kristoff answered. “She saw ghosts.”

“That's probably to be due to the stone, since I've never seen anything weird before. Well, sometimes at the beach guys who think they are Speedo-worthy, but that's neither here nor there. And just an FYI—I hate being talked about as if I'm not here even more than I hate being stuffed into a car and driven off without my consent. I believe technically this a kidnapping, and I'm fairly certain it's illegal even in Iceland.”

They both ignored me.

“She was running from the sacristan,” the nice one said.

Kristoff's lips thinned. “It is an act, Alec, put on to make us think just what you're thinking.”

Alec! Aha, a name at last.

“But—”

“If you would oblige me by not believing everything a woman tells you, we might live to see this task done,” Kristoff said, rubbing a spot on his chest.

Contriteness filled Alec's face. I spent a moment musing just how much I liked his name, but dragged my mind back to the task of escaping the latest in what seemed to be an evening filled with strange episodes.

“You said the wound was healed. If it is still bothering you—”

“It has long since healed, but it reminds me of the folly of taking people for granted.” Kristoff's eyes glowed in the darkness of the car as he glanced back at me. “It is said the blood of a Zorya can heal any injury.”

“That's it!” I said, holding up my hands. “I'm officially through. I've been insulted, challenged, nearly brainwashed by some deranged cult, hunted, pleaded at by a pair of ghosts and leered at by a third, rejected, and now kidnapped, but when you start talking about using my blood, it's time for me to go to bed and pretend I never came on this trip. Since you're so determined to drive me somewhere, would you please drive to the Hotel Andersson? Thank you.”

I sat back in the seat, determined to hang on to what was left of my shreds of reason. If I believed hard enough that these two handsome, but clearly unbalanced, men were just taking me to my hotel, and not about to commit some sort of ghastly blood sacrifice, perhaps I could escape with my sanity intact.

Alec considered me again with a not unfriendly eye. “We could go to the bookseller, to see if it proves her story.”

“That would just be a waste of time. The shop is sure to be closed at this time of night.”

“If I was still talking to either of you, which I'm not because I no longer recognize your existence, I would point out that although the shop was closed, there might be some sort of clue there as to the origins of the bookmark,” I said, calmly examining a fingernail.

“She has a point,” Alec agreed.

I decided to unbend enough to give him a grateful smile. He returned it with a little wink. I started to feel a bit warm as another blush swept upward. Could it be possible he was flirting with me? A man as handsome as him? As unobtrusively as possible, I sat up a little straighter to maximize my good points (large boobs) and minimize the bad (rest of the body).

“Not really, but if you are going to insist on giving her the benefit of the doubt, we might as well get it over with quickly so we can take her before the council.”

“Council?” I asked, grabbing the backs of their seats and hauling myself forward. “What council?”

Kristoff's face could have been made of granite, so cold was it and the accompanying gaze he cast toward me. “I thought you weren't speaking to us.”

“I have decided in the interests of avoiding an international incident that I will keep the lines of communication open. What council?”

“The Moravian Council,” Alec said, hitting the gas and sending us shooting down a bumpy street, making a tight U-turn to head back into the heart of town. “Don't worry, Pia; if you're truly what you say you are, you have nothing to fear from the council.”

I sat back, grasping the seat belts, unwilling to strap myself in just in case I needed to make a fast getaway. “Just out of morbid curiosity, what exactly is this Moravian Council? And what would happen if I wasn't telling the truth?”

“You will be taken before the council to answer for the seventy-three deaths your people have caused over the last three years,” Kristoff answered in a deep, lyrical voice that would have sent shivers of delight up my back if he hadn't clearly been repulsed by me, and obviously under the delusion that I was someone bad.

“My people?” I asked, running my mind over my immediate family members. “They run an apple orchard in eastern Washington. I don't think they've conducted any mass executions in, oh, geez, years and years. Although with my brother, you never can tell. He's a Microsoft yuppie.”

My humor, sarcastic as it was, was not wasted on Alec. He chuckled and flashed me a quick grin in the mirror before returning his eyes to the road as we approached the square.

Kristoff grunted and looked out the window.

I figured it would take Alec forever to find a parking spot, but he solved the issue by simply parking sideways across a sidewalk. “That is the bookstore?” he asked, pointing to the end of the street, where it opened into the pedestrians-only square.

I nodded.

“Let me see the books,” Alec said, opening the door for me and offering his hand to help me out of the car.

I was simultaneously charmed by the gesture and pleased by the warmth in his eyes. “I'm afraid I only have one of them. I dumped the other one when Mattias started after me.”

“Mattias?” Alec asked, examining the book I held out for him. He riffled the pages but found nothing.

“The sacristan,” Kristoff informed him. He turned a hard gaze on me. “Why, exactly, were you running from him?”

I was flummoxed for a moment when Alec tucked my hand in the crook of his arm, covering my fingers with his free hand as he led me down the street. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture, one that gave me more pleasure than I wanted to admit.

Part of me, the vindictive, evil part that I really liked to pretend didn't exist, wished that Denise would walk past us at that moment. I wouldn't gloat, I wouldn't preen, I'd simply smile and allow my two incredibly handsome escorts to accompany me.

Fortunately for my ego, she wasn't present in the crowd that now pulsed and bobbed in that odd throbbing fashion large groups of people packed into a small space have when they attempt to dance. The music hit us with the force of a brick wall, and it wasn't until we slipped around to the back of the row of buildings lining that side of the square that I could make myself heard above the noise.

“No answer?” Kristoff said, stopping at a metal door bearing a faded plaque with the name of the shop. One of his chocolatey brown eyebrows rose in mock surprise. I had the worst urge to yank it back down.

“I'm not avoiding the question. I just didn't want to bellow it out in front of everyone,” I said with dignity. “I was running from him because he was just as mistaken as you two—he thought I was this Zorya person, and wanted to marry me.”

Alec pulled out a large set of keys and started applying them to the door.

Kristoff eyed me from toes to nose. I flushed for the umpteenth time that night and, in order to forestall the obvious comment, said quickly, “You can stop looking at me like I'm a big, fat liar, because I'm not.”

Kristoff blinked for a moment in surprise; then his face hardened into its familiar suspicious expression.

For some reason, that just seemed to irritate me more than if he'd come out and accused me of trying to pull his leg. “You can believe what you want, but it's the absolute truth. The lady . . . what's her name . . . Kristjana mentioned Mattias and me getting married so he could die in my arms or something like that. So you can just wipe that you're-so-insane-you're-barking look right off your face.”

Behind me, Alec started laughing. Kristoff's eyes lit from within with anger, and for one horrible second, I thought he was going to hit me. But instead he took two steps forward, backing me into the wall of the shop. “Do you have any idea who I am, woman?”

“I know you don't like me, and I have to say that the feeling is reciprocated,” I told him, my stomach quivering, but whether it was from fear or anger, I wasn't quite sure.

Kristoff wrapped the long fingers of one hand around my throat, tightening them with uncomfortable pressure. “I could kill you right now.”

Fear won out over the anger, but I wasn't going to let him see that. I clutched the material of my skirt with both hands to keep from grabbing at his wrist. “If I'm who you say I am, that would defeat your purpose,” I pointed out, ignoring the fact that my voice was quavering. “You'd have to explain my death to the Brotherhood.”

A slow smile curled the very edges of his mouth, but didn't do much to warm up his icy gaze. “I believe I would enjoy that.”

My eyes widened at the threat obvious in his voice, but before I could protest, Alec interrupted.

“Stop frightening her, Kris. It serves no purpose.”

His gaze continued to bore into mine for another few seconds, and I felt swamped by the waves of anger and hostility that all but rolled off him. He snarled something under his breath and released me, turning on his heel and stomping off down the alleyway.

I collapsed against the wall, my legs feeling like they were made of tofu. Instantly, Alec was at my side, propping me up, peering down at me with a concerned look. “Are you all right, Pia?”

“Yeah. Your friend is a bit intense, isn't he? I'm thinking anger management classes might be in order,” I answered, rubbing my neck as I watched the dark silhouette disappear into the shadows.

To my surprise, Alec defended his friend. “He has no love for the reapers.”

“Reapers?” I pulled my gaze back to him. “That's what the ghosts kept calling me. Who are they?”

“Reapers were once Ilargi. That is, technically they still are, although they were divided into two types, sun and moon reapers. The former were called Ilargi before they were all but destroyed. The latter . . . well, that is a long story.”

“Ah. The Brotherhood of the Blessed Light,” I said, nodding.

Alec eyed me for a few minutes before answering. “You do know of the Brotherhood?”

“No. Not really. I ran into a couple earlier, but that's all.”

I thought he was going to tell me about the organization he and his buddy belonged to, but instead he changed the subject. “Kristoff had a mate. Not a Beloved, you understand, but a woman whom he considered his mate. Angelica and Kristoff were together for many decades. She was killed three years ago. He has not forgotten her death. It haunts him still.”