Though snow was piled up on either side, the roads were only lightly slushy—which was probably a good thing as Kelly drove like an eighty-year old abuela. Traffic was bad on Reserve Street, as usual. By the time they reached his hotel, Asil was sure that his car was safe, but uncertain of their chances of making it to the ball before midnight.
When packing, he had briefly considered an outfit he’d saved from the rococo era. The silver-blue looked particularly good on him and the fabric looked as though it had been manufactured yesterday instead of nearly three hundred years ago. But, in keeping with the style of the era, it made him appear a little pot-bellied. It hadn’t bothered him at the time, but his tastes had changed. He also had no inclination to wear a powdered wig.
He’d decided upon a set of Renaissance clothes, his favorite era for fashion, when men’s wear vied with women’s for sheer spectacle. It wasn’t original to the period—none of his Renaissance clothes had survived. But he’d had these clothes made for somebody’s wedding or something a few decades ago.
His coat was hand woven silk brocade. The base color was a tawny amber, making the gold threads a subtle addition—the only subtle thing about the whole costume. Purple, pink and blue flowers exploded across the fabric in a pattern designed to show off his physique. Beneath the coat his doublet was a complimentary brocade. All of the patterning was the same but the base color was black. Beneath the doublet he wore a gold silk shirt. A creamy lace collar fountained down his chest and out from under his coat sleeves.
He looked in the mirror and regretted that his hair was cut short. Properly he should have a mane of curls to balance the lace, but he looked magnificent, anyway.
He had been careful to ascertain that Kelly had a costume that would not show badly against his own—he’d brought a tuxedo which would have been acceptable wear in case his choice had been too elaborate. But Kelly had assured him that his clothing was professional costume level—a grad student friend was earning spare money by sewing costumes. Kelly’s she’d done for the cost of materials so she would have some clothes to show for a portfolio.
Pleased with his appearance, Asil opened up his laptop to micro-manage a few of his investments. When he’d finished, he checked his email and found a message from his son. On a whim he told him about the game he was playing—and of his date so far. Hussan was evidently on-line because he replied immediately.
Why would people want to be vampires? A ball? In Missoula, Montana? How many people pretending to be vampires live in Missoula?
Asil replied:
Not that many. But the Christmas Masquerade Ball is a regional event with groups coming from Seattle, Portland and even Denver. Apparently they are expecting three hundred people.
He waited. Finally Hussan wrote:
Three hundred people who want to be vampires.
Asil smiled. It had taken him aback, too. But he had learned some things from Kelly tonight, more that what the boy said.
They have never met a vampire and would not recognize one if they did. These are children playing a game without winners or losers, telling stories to each other. It is for fun. It is also, I think, a way to empower themselves in a world that leaves them feeling alienated and helpless. Overall, a healthy response.
Hussan’s reply came as a hesitant knock sounded on his door.
If you say so, Papa, it must be so. Still, be careful.
Kelly’s eyes widened when he saw Asil, though he looked quite fine himself. His clothing, in browns and blues, had indeed been tailored to him—Asil knew the difference between off-the-rack and hand tailoring. The style was flattering to his lanky build, drawing attention to the grace of his movement while adding a touch of width to his shoulders.
“Very nice,” Asil said—and Kelly blushed.
“I told you my friend Meg is a genius,” he said flashing acrylic fangs.
“She did a good job.” Asil was pleased. Though he liked to be the best-dressed person in the room, it was well not to make your date look bad.
When they got to Asil’s car, Kelly handed over the keys with a sigh of relief. “Here. You drive and I’ll direct.”
Asil’s wolf was displeased at being given orders by a wet behind the ears pup. Asil nodded, got in the car, and concentrated on controlling his wolf while not hitting anyone who shared the road with him.
“Are you all right?” Kelly asked. “You seem … angry.”
“I’m having an argument with myself,” Asil told him truthfully. “Happily, my good side is winning.”
“And if your bad side were winning?”
Asil shook his head. “Blood and gore.”
“Well,” said Kelly, evidently believing Asil’s teasingly solemn tone rather than his words, “We are going to a vampire ball, after all.” He contemplated traffic for a moment. “I think this will be my last one. Grad school means I don’t have much time to play anymore, anyway, and … the group has changed from when I joined it. I guess growing up means you have to quit playing games, making stuff up, and dressing in costume.”
“Nonsense,” said Asil. “I love to dress in costume.”
Kelly laughed. “But you’re not much older than I am, anyway.”
“I am older than I look.” Asil changed the subject before Kelly chose to pursue that one. “Since this is a ball, there will be dancing?”
“Yes. Starts with a tango, ends with a waltz and everything else is in between.” Kelly said it like a tag-line.
“And do you tango?” It was his favorite dance. Asil had never tangoed with another man before, but at his age new experiences were to be savored.
“Fourteen years of ballet with classes in ballroom dancing, historical dancing, tap and jazz along the way.” Kelly grinned at him. “I told my parents that I was gay when I was sixteen. I’m pretty sure, now, that they already knew. Then, I was scared of what they would do. My dad said, ‘So that’s why you took all those dance classes.’ My mom pretended to hit him. It wasn’t quite the response I’d been expecting—I think I was even hoping for more drama. Looking back on it, I am grateful.”
“Can you follow?” Asil would not follow another in a dance or anything else. If Kelly were not willing to cede the role to him, they would not dance—which would be too bad because Asil was a very good dancer.
“Lead, follow, shadow.” Kelly said. “I can do it all. You really are willing to dance with me? In Missoula, Montana, where you might get beaten up for it? You aren’t like any straight guy I’ve ever met.”
“I am like no one you have ever met,” said Asil with assurance.
Kelly laughed, though Asil was serious. But he didn’t mind if Kelly didn’t understand that it was true. It was enough that Asil did.
The ball was being held in an event center just outside of town. There were people dressed as zombies directing the parking lot. Asil understood the people who dressed up like zombies even less than the people who dressed up like vampires. By reputation if not in truth, vampires were powerful, brooding, beautiful—rather like Asil really was. Zombies were unattractive dead things with bits and pieces falling off.
He parked the car and escorted Kelly to the entrance. Just inside was a pseudo-vampire in the clothes of a barrister collecting tickets and taking stage names and affiliations.
“Kelly Lieberman and Asil Moreno.” Asil handed him the tickets.
“Vampires?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Kelly. “Missoula chapter.”
“Kelly is a vampire,” answered Asil. “I am a werewolf. Marrok pack.”
The man looked up at him with a hostility that Asil’s nose told him was entirely faked. “Monsters are supposed to be in costume. Where is your tail and ears?”
“Vampires don’t like werewolves—the werewolves play another game entirely,” Kelly informed him in a rushed undertone. “You won’t find many people playing werewolf here, tonight. We’re supposed to give each other a hard time when we interact.”
Asil showed his teeth to
the ticket-taker. “Once you see my ears and tail, it is too late for you.”
The vampire grinned in a very unvampire-like way. “Nice threat. Cool accent, too. I’ll put you down as a mixed-race couple, then. Vampire and werewolf. That’ll be good for some terrific role-playing later on.”
“Why not vampire?” asked Kelly as they passed the door. “When did you decide to go werewolf to a vampire ball?”
“It was decided for me.” Asil took a deep breath, but if there were any real vampires in the room, they had taken great pains to hide their scents.
He wasn’t surprised. Missoula was too small and too close to Bran’s pack to be good hunting grounds. Besides, a vampire ball would be the last place he’d expect to find real vampires. Vampires tried very hard to stay out of the public view. If people knew they were real—like the werewolves and fae were real—the vampires would be hunted into extinction. Asil would not grieve over the loss, but there would be a lot of bloodshed on all sides before it happened.
Still, he would keep an eye out.
The room was decorated in keeping with the vampire theme—lots of reds and blacks with fog machines in the corners pumping out fog and fog-machine stink. They had arrived a half hour before the dancing was scheduled to start, but there were a lot of people in the room already. He rather thought that they would exceed the three hundred mark that Kelly had told him earlier.
“Kelly!”
Asil turned to see a woman in authentic Elizabethan dress bearing down upon them. She was tall and large-boned without being heavy in the least—but that was the second thing anyone would notice about her. The first thing was the magnificent cascade of hair that was every shade of gold and red.
He frowned suspiciously. The hair was familiar.
“This is the friend who made my costume,” Kelly said, his voice warm. He raised his voice and called, “Hey, Meg. You finished the dress in time. You look fantastic.”
Meg started to say something, saw Asil and went pale. “Excuse us,” she muttered at him as she grabbed Kelly’s arm and yanked him away.
“I knew I’d seen that hair before,” said Asil to himself, not at all perturbed.
He stood at ease and listened, unrepentantly, to the conversation taking place twenty feet away.
“I told you not to go,” Meg all but wailed. “I told you it was dangerous, but until Uncle Tag called me tonight, I had no idea how dangerous.”
“It’s fine,” said Kelly. “I’ll admit when I saw him I thought I was dead meat, he’s got that dangerously beautiful vibe going on, doesn’t he? But he’s pretty cool, even if he’s not gay. He didn’t like being set up by Trace—but said the best way out was to not give them what they wanted. We came here, we’ll party and then he’ll go on his way.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Uncle Tag, you remember my uncle who is more like my great-great-great uncle, right?”
“The werewolf?” Kelly said. “The one you’ve never let me meet?”
“That one,” she said. “Yes. I was pretty upset when I heard what Trace did to you. When Uncle Tag called me yesterday to check up on me, like he always does, I told him about it. He called me tonight to tell me that he knew the guy they set you up with. Because someone decided that this guy needed to get out more—and to tease him, they signed him up on a whole bunch of dating sites. A werewolf. They signed a werewolf up on a vampire dating site because they thought it was funny. You were apparently the only candidate within a five hundred mile radius. They did all the initial emailing and then presented it to him as an accomplished thing.”
“He said he was a werewolf,” said Kelly, sounding shell-shocked. “At the door.”
“He’s dangerous,” Meg told Kelly, and Asil started to work his way over to them. He needed Kelly not to “run screaming into the night” and to stick around for another half hour—at least.
“Really, really dangerous,” Meg continued in a furious whisper. Her back was to him, but Kelly saw Asil approach. “No one screws with him, not even my Uncle Tag, because Asil is crazy. Uncle Tag told me to tell you to be very polite and to keep your eyes lowered—and whatever you did, excuse yourself as quickly as possible.”
Instead of being properly frightened, Kelly laughed. Asil considered being offended.
Kelly saw the expression on Asil’s face and covered his mouth. He put his free arm around Meg and turned her so she could see Asil. “You have to admit it’s funny, Meg. A werewolf set up on a date with a girl pretending to be a vampire—who was actually a guy pretending to be a vampire. And both of us were set up—by different people.”
“Coincidence, indeed.” Asil was better pleased when both of them started at his silkily voiced observation and Kelly’s wide grin disappeared. He directed his question to Meg. “Are you sure that your Uncle Tag didn’t have anything to do with this? Interesting that he knows us both, don’t you think?”
“It wasn’t Uncle Tag,” she squeaked. She looked at Asil, then jerked her gaze to the floor. “Not him. I told him a friend of mind had been set up on a vampire dating site without his knowledge. He’d heard that someone had set you up, too. He told me he was suspicious because—how many people in Montana would sign up on a vampire dating site? Turns out that whoever set you up, sir, only found one profile in a five hundred mile radius. And that was Kelly—who, on the profile Travis and his rat-bastard crew wrote up, appeared to be a girl.” She took a deep breath, then raised her eyes. “Kelly doesn’t deserve to get hurt over something that’s not his fault.” Her eyes left his again before she finished, but her chin was still up.
“I’m fine,” said Kelly. “He’s not going to hurt me.”
“Yes,” agreed Asil. “I never blame the messenger. The perpetrators on my side of the fence were misguided, but not malicious. I accept that Tag was not one of them—he is more inclined to use an axe than a keyboard. When I find out who they are, I will serve them with justice—but no bodies will be strewn about. Especially since I am enjoying myself.”
“Kelly is gay and Uncle Tag says you aren’t.” She said it really fast to get it all out. Unwilling to leave her friend at the mercy of someone her uncle warned her about without checking to make sure he was really safe. He had no doubt, since she was related to Tag, that if she thought he would hurt her friend—she’d throw herself into the fray.
He liked her. A lot. He had always liked Tag, too.
“We have already established that I prefer women and he prefers men. But I have no problem dancing with a man, because my reputation is such that pretty little things such as yourself and also big, scary men like your uncle tremble in fear of me. Dancing with a man is unlikely to change that—and I like dancing.”
She frowned.
“He’s funny,” said Kelly. “You have to watch for it, but he’s pretty funny underneath the Castilian manners and straight face.”
Asil took pity on her. “Your friend is safe with me.”
She took in a deep breath that threatened to release parts of her that the Elizabethan dress put under a lot of pressure. “Really safe?”
“Safer than anyone else here,” said Asil showing her his teeth. He might like her, but he didn’t like her questioning his word.
“Okay,” said Meg. She let out a breath in a huff of air. “Good.”
A fanfare sounded through the speakers to draw their attention to a stage that had been erected against one wall.
“Well, that was embarrassing,” muttered Kelly as he tugged Asil toward the stage—and away from his friend—by tucking a hand unselfconsciously in the crook of his arm. “I’m sorry about my friend.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. Who a man’s friends are, says a lot about him. She knew who and what I was—and still tried to save you from me. She is brave and loyal. No one needs to apologize for such a friend.”
Beside him, Kelly straightened a little. “She did throw herself in front of the bus, didn’t she? Even if the bus was already stopped.”
“I
am not a bus,” murmured Asil as someone stepped up to a microphone and chatted some canned welcome speech. “A chariot. A Porsche. But not a bus.”
“See,” said Kelly to no one Asil could discern. “He’s funny.”
The speaker nattered on for a few minutes more before announcing the opening dance.
They had never danced together before, and it was obvious that many of the couples on the dance floor practiced for this dance. But Kelly did indeed know how to dance, and they soon progressed beyond the simpler moves into some more daring, dramatic … even melodramatic moves. There were a few stumbles here and there—it was very obvious that Kelly was used to leading, no matter what he’d said.
But when the music ended, and they froze for that last dramatic moment, chest to chest, face to face—Asil realized he was really having fun. More fun than he’d had for a very, very long time.
As they stepped away from each other, exchanging grins, Asil wondered when he had forgotten how much fun dancing was? How much fun flirting was? Especially when both people knew it was not going further than that?
In order to properly repay the people or person (he was not ruling out someone using the royal “we” to obfuscate his or her identity), Asil was beginning to believe he might have to buy a gift instead of dealing out vengeance. Though he had no intention of letting his benefactors know it until the whole thing was over. Let them fear his wrath for a while more.
“Hey Kelly, is this the date?” A young man Asil had not seen anyone who looked to be over twenty-five came up to them swaggering a little. He was the type to impress people under thirty—big, athletic, handsome. “It worked out? Awesome. You owe me one.”
“This is Trace,” said Kelly.
Before Asil could say anything, Trace looked over his shoulder at the entrance. “Late comers,” he said. “Next time I’ll tell them the party starts an hour before the doors open.”
A Fantastic Holiday Season Page 29