Tall, Dark & Dead

by Tate Hallaway

  “I’m not really sure,” I admitted, standing back up. William followed my motion like a nervous shadow. “Neptune retrograde in a natal chart is all about self-deception and mysterious circumstances. Pluto means secrets and other people’s money. So,” I added with a laugh, “we could lose out on an inheritance and not even know it.”

  William chuckled, but I could tell I’d worried him. He adjusted the counter display of polished gemstones. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I moved out from behind the counter to unlock the door. “Jupiter’s moving backwards, too. In a birth chart, I’d say you’d be a fundamentalist in your religious outlook. What it means about today, I haven’t a clue. Maybe we can look it up in one of the books.” I gestured in the direction of the astrology section.

  When I got to the door, I jumped. To my surprise, there were two people waiting for us to open. I let them in with a smile. Inwardly, I groaned. Looked like it was going to be a busy day.

  And it was. William and I spent the rest of the day rushed off our feet. We never did have the time to find out what it meant that Jupiter had gone retrograde.

  * * * *

  I don’t know what it is about spring. Maybe the same natural force that draws plants from the ground brings out the New Age tendencies in Midwestern housewives. I must have sold a zillion leather-bound diaries and witchcraft starter kits today.

  To be fair, it was a new season, a new semester. Everyone was in the mood for starting fresh. Though I really should have been closing up, I found myself scanning the Burpee catalogue that came in the mail, wondering if we should try selling some of the more exotic herb seedlings.

  William’s girlfriend had picked him up as the shift ended. There was something about her that made me wary. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but… well, I was probably being silly. William always provoked my latent maternal instincts. He seemed in need of protection. Plus, I’d been working here for several months and she’d never once come in and introduced herself. She always just waited for him in the car. I found that odd.

  The tills were cashed out and the lights dimmed. In fact, I’d have sworn I’d locked the door until I heard the telltale jangle of bells.

  “I need mandrake, a whole root,” a masculine voice called out from the doorway. “Harvested by new moon. Best if from a crossroads.”

  I laughed. “Why not just ask for it grown under a gallows?”

  “My God, yes. Do you have it?”

  “No.” I was being sarcastic, anyway. I was about to explain to this dimwit that there hadn’t been a public hanging in America for several decades now, when I found myself struck dumb. Glancing up from my catalog, I gazed into the most gorgeous brown eyes I’d ever seen.

  I mean, they were really beautiful. Besides being almost perfectly almond-shaped, his eyes had those long, thick lashes usually reserved for very young boys.

  Eyes aren’t usually the first things I notice on a man. Though I hate to admit it, normally, what I check out is “the ratio.” That is to say, shoulder to waist. I like that triangular shape of broad to narrow.

  This man had it. In fact, I’d say his body spelled out a perfect T, for tall, tough, and tasty.

  And trouble.

  Despite a slight, cultured British accent, he dressed like a hoodlum. He wore a leather jacket, broken-in blue jeans, and a white T-shirt just tight enough that it hinted at a hardworking body underneath. His long, black hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail at the nape of his neck. And, just to drive me absolutely wild, a touch of stubble dotted a chiseled jaw. I hate that. Pretty men make me stupid. Suddenly, all I could think about was stroking my finger along his high cheekbones down to the hollow of his throat.

  I pulled myself away from that image only to get lost in those damn eyes again. They were the color of polished oak in sunlight. In fact, they had that kind of captivating, enchanting, inner glow that I’d come to associate with the dead, or rather, undead.

  “Well, can you get it?” he asked insistently.

  “What?” I asked, still staring stupidly.

  “The mandrake.”

  “Uhm, probably,” I said.

  I leaned a little over the counter, trying to smell him. I caught a whiff of motorcycle exhaust and leather. I couldn’t detect the scent of human sweat, which unnerved me a bit. So I let my eyes unfocus and scanned for an aura. Just as I suspected: none. Not even that faint purple glimmer you get from a well-made zombie. He was definitely a dead man walking.

  Wow.

  Well, today just got a lot more interesting.

  “Could you check?” he asked.

  “On what?” I asked, thinking about his aura, or rather, lack thereof.

  “On the mandrake.” He backed up a step, as if he thought my behavior strange.

  I wanted to point out that he was the dead guy standing around in my store, but I didn’t. “Uhm,” I stalled as I tried to collect my thoughts. “There is this place that does hand-harvesting by moon phases. New Moon Wimmin’s Herb Collective or something like that. I think I have them book-marked on the computer. They might grow mandrake in their greenhouse. I mean, I assume you want the real deal, not American mandrake.” American mandrake was sometimes called mayapple. I had some of that under my pine tree. It was pretty common throughout Canada and the East Coast, though I’d cultivated it purposely.

  “I need Atropa mandragora. ” He spoke the Latin perfectly and without even the tiniest hesitation. When he was alive, this man had either been a serious herbalist or a Church scholar.

  “Yeah, I figured,” I said as I searched the Collective’s Web site. “Looks like they have mandrake root harvested by new moon. I can order you one or however many you want, but if you need it in a hurry, it looks like it’s going to cost you.”

  He didn’t even ask how much, he just pulled out his wallet. The fold was crammed with bills of every denomination. I was relieved to see cash. I really didn’t want to take credit card information from a dead guy. Just my luck, he’d have been murdered, and I’d become a suspect. No cop in the world would believe me if I said, “Oh, yeah, he came in two days after he died and just gave me his account information. Honest.”

  “How soon can they get it here?”

  I filled out the online form, pressed Enter, and waited for the mailing information options to appear on the screen. “Looks like they can promise two to three business days.”

  “Fuck me,” he swore. While I was thinking, Yes, I’d like to, he said, “I really needed it today.”

  “We have mandrake powder,” I offered. When he shook his head, I pointed to the herbal section of the bookshelf. “You could see if there’s a substitution.” Though probably not for something involving mandrake. That was kind of a specialty herb, and, frankly, a bit out of most tree-hugging Witches’ leagues.

  He gave a sad little laugh like he thought I was the biggest idiot on the planet.

  “Should I order this?” I asked, pointing to the screen. “It’s going to be a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  He rubbed his chin as he considered his options. His gestures all seemed pretty normal for a dead guy. He was either so recently dead that it hadn’t sunk in yet, or he’d been dead so long he’d gotten used to it.

  My next thought would normally have been: vampire. Problem was, the sun was still high in the sky. On Mondays, we were only open until six. I gave a meaningful glance at the light shining though the windows, “Aren’t you up a little early?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Uhm, I’ll need a name and address for the order form. You know, and a number where I can reach you when it comes in.” He seemed so genuinely startled by my question that I decided to change tactics.

  Maybe this guy didn’t know he was dead.

  He gave me another slightly nervous look. Then he pulled a business card out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The buckles jangled. I loved that sound. He laid the business card on the glass counter. I got a glance at his fingernails. Short and
trimmed, not broken or bleeding—but there was something dark, like dirt, encrusted under a few nails. I’d have wondered if he recently clawed his way out of a grave, but with the funerary regulations of concrete and steel vaults, few people could do that anymore.

  Unless someone had hurriedly buried him in a shallow grave.

  “Order it,” he said finally. “I don’t think I have any other choice.”

  The name on the card said Sebastian Von Traum, herbalist. On the back was a local address, e-mail, Web site, and phone numbers. I keyed all the information in. Though I could have had them send it directly to his home address, I did a bad thing. I wanted to see him again, so I entered the store’s address instead. Feeling a tiny bit guilty, I said, “I’ll call you the instant it comes in.”

  As I pressed the Order button, Sebastian let out a tiny, sad sigh that almost broke my heart. Those beautiful eyes held the look of a man who knew his time on earth was limited. I felt like the cad who’d signed his death warrant by telling him I couldn’t get the root today.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll give them a call tomorrow and explain the situation. Maybe we can arrange something so you can get it sooner.”

  Of course, I had no idea what I’d say to them. “Hey, could you rush it because this very sweet reanimated corpse really, really needs mandrake, or I think he might suffer Final Death?” sounded a little strange, even if it might be true.

  “That’s brilliant. Thanks.” Sebastian flashed one of those gorgeous smiles that usually only belongs to movie stars. I found myself grinning back foolishly, even while I scanned for fangs. His canines were long, but the smile was gone so quickly I couldn’t decide if they were sharper than average.

  I hated to say it, but I had to. “I can’t promise anything. What are you going to do if we can’t get it?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to look into those substitutions.”

  The tone in his voice made it clear he didn’t believe anything else would work. I wanted desperately to see that smile again, so I said, “Well, if I can’t get you the root, I could see if I could score you a hand of glory. Those are always good in re-animation spells.” Personally, I found the whole concept of the hand of glory creepy as sin. They were wax-dipped severed hands—real hands, like, that were once on living people— usually from a murderer, the fingers of which the practitioner would light like a candle. “Ooh! Or maybe some graveyard dust. I think I have a vial of that under the counter.”

  “No thank you. I have all that already, though I prefer grave mold myself,” Sebastian said.

  It took me a moment to realize he was joking. The broad smile tipped me off.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said lamely, smiling back. “Handy.” I instantly thought of the hand of glory after saying that. “Oh, ick! No pun intended.”

  He laughed. Sebastian had one of those hearty, open laughs that puts a person instantly at ease. A strange quality for a dead guy, but even so, I found myself laughing along. I mean, if the guy were a vampire I could chalk his charming manner up to glamour—their unearthly attractiveness. My experience with vampires was that when they laughed it was usually not a good thing. Sort of like when a hit man chuckles.

  No, this was a nice laugh, a damn-you’re-so-cute-why-the-hell-haven’t-you-asked-me-out-for-coffee-yet? laugh. Too bad he was dead. It was ruining the romance for me.

  “Why do you think I need the mandrake for a reanimation spell?” he asked.

  I was tempted to point out the obvious, but instead I asked, “Isn’t it called the funeral herb?”

  “It is,” Sebastian said with a hint of surprise in his tone, like he hadn’t expected even such basic knowledge from me. “Though it’s also a laxative.”

  I smiled. “Are you telling me you’re desperate for gallows-grown mandrake because you’re constipated?”

  “No,” he said, with that infectious chuckle. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “It’s also a narcotic,” I pointed out. “Maybe you’re some kind of mandrake junkie.”

  “Maybe I am,” he said with a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know smile.

  And, indeed, I did. There were several other things I wanted to know, too, like what it would feel like to untie that luxurious looking hair and run it through my fingers.

  Vampires tended to have long hair. After all, once cut, it didn’t grow back. The hair follicles being dead and all that made it difficult to be a slave to fashion. Sometimes you could tell how old a vamp was by the style of their hair. I kind of felt sorry for those guys who died in 1789 or whenever and had shaved heads because they wore wigs most of the time. Though the bald tough-guy look was coming back, it was often hard for a former fop to pull off.

  Sebastian didn’t look like he’d been a fop. Oh, no, not with that body.

  I wondered when Sebastian had died. I really, really wanted to ask, but it seemed so rude, particularly since he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Between my sun obsession and the reanimation bit, I’d given him several opportunities to come out, as it were. I sighed. Too bad he didn’t seem as into me as I was him.

  I picked up his card and put it beside the register. Letting my eyes feast on his masculine beauty one last time, I was about to open my mouth to regretfully kick him out of the store so I could close up when he read my mind.

  “You look hungry,” he said. “Can I buy you a pastry or some coffee next door?”

  Finally.

  “Sure.”

  * * * *

  We went out the side door, which connected directly to Holy Grounds, the coffee shop adjacent to Mercury Crossing. I waved at my best friend Izzy, who was serving behind the bar, but she was too busy with a customer to see me.

  Sebastian chose a table near the window. Though the sun had begun to set, a bright shaft of light shone precisely on his seat. I had to bite my lip to hold back a gasp of fear as he sat in it. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I still figured him for a vampire.

  I checked his aura again. Yep, still dead.

  “Too bright for you?” he asked, apparently mistaking my squint.

  “No, I guess it’s all right,” I said, watching for tendrils of smoke snaking up from the top of his head. Nothing, except the usual swirl of dust motes dancing through the air. I sat across from him, scanning his face. His skin had none of the waxen, gray slack of a zombie. In fact, if anything, he looked a bit tanned.

  Weird.

  Of course, he derailed my investigation completely by taking off his jacket. The muscles on his arms couldn’t be called anything other than sculpted. When he was alive he’d worked out, or he’d worked hard, but no matter which it was, it’d produced magnificent results. “What did you do?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t imagine you made your living as an herbalist.”

  “I’m a mechanic these days. I work down at Jensen’s Service Station near Vilas.”

  A day job. Present tense. This poor man doesn’t know he’s dead. “Wow.”

  He shrugged. The slight, unconcerned lift of his shoulders was such a normal-guy, mundane gesture, it seemed wrong to me. The dead should be stiff, or at least stately. “It’s a job. I like working on the classic cars. These new ones with their computers annoy me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Cars should run on fire, water, and air. It’s alchemical. Magic. Computers interfere with the elemental nature of engines, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Huh,” was all I could think to say; I was totally in love with the man at that moment.

  “So, what can I get you?” he asked, standing up.

  Now he was offering to pay? A mystical car mechanic and a gentleman… he could have me on this table right now, even with the whole dead thing. “I like the honey latte,” I said. “And if they have a croissant or something like that?”

  “Right. Coming up.”

  Because the coffeehouse and the magic shop had once been jointly owned, they had a similar flavor. The Holy Grounds had gone for New Age couture. Lush oil paintings of Gods a
nd Goddesses hung on exposed brick walls. Each table had a candle nestled in a glass holder that was surrounded by five vaguely feminine iron figures connected in a circle. Across from me, in the space by the front door, hung a large poster of the chart I’d cast for the business using the date it opened. Brightly colored construction paper stars hung from thin strings in front of the window, and moon-shaped lights snaked around the bookshelf in the back near the comfortable couches and overstuffed chairs. A group of Renaissance Festival types dressed in peasant shirts and woolen cloaks sat there, softly drumming on borhans and dumbeks.

  I watched as Izzy leaned in very close to take Sebastian’s order. Izzy, née Isadora Penn, was undeniably beautiful. Her skin was several shades darker than the mocha lattes she served, but it was just as creamy and smooth. She kept her tight curls clipped close to her head, and her profile always reminded me of that famous bust of Nefertiti. If Sebastian were like every other red-blooded man I knew, it would be difficult for him not to notice her.

  Yet somehow, though she flirted outrageously throughout the entire transaction, he seemed uninterested. In fact, when he paid, he pointed to where I was sitting. Izzy’s eyes searched the room jealously but brightened when she saw me. She gave me a wave, and, when Sebastian wasn’t looking, a big thumbs-up. I returned Izzy’s smile.

  As Sebastian walked past a long, narrow mirror hanging above the booths, I found myself relieved to see his reflection. Then I chided myself. Of course he had one. Everything does. I never understood how the storybook vampires could make their clothes disappear as well. I mean, shouldn’t you still see whatever they were wearing?

  I returned my attention to watching Sebastian make his way back to our table. I grinned; even his walk was sexy. Some men stomp across a room, but Sebastian had such grace he seemed to glide.

  Gliding. That was like floating, and floating wasn’t sexy at all; it was creepy.

  I peered at Sebastian’s feet. They touched the ground. His gait had none of that odd tiptoe-lide of a ghost-possessed corpse. Of course, neither was he Chinese, and it was those ghosts who possessed people by sliding underneath the soles of their victim’s feet.