“Is the mandrake for her?” I’m not quite sure why I asked, but it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Sebastian was holding out hope for a cure for Teréza, after all.
He met my eyes for the first time since we started talking about her. “Partially, yes.”
I put my hand on his arm. “You can’t cure death, Sebastian.”
“Actually, I can.” Even in the semidarkness of the shade, I could see Sebastian’s eyes glitter.
“What are you talking about?”
“Magic and science. Alchemy. I devoted my entire lifetime trying to cure death. And, at some point I stumbled across the answer. After all, I’m living proof.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “What are you saying exactly? You became a vampire through alchemy?”
“I did.” He flashed me a very satisfied grin. It wasn’t at all like Mátyás’s snotty, smug smiles, but instead was pure boyish isn’t-it-cool enthusiasm. I felt the corners of my mouth tipping and my heart melting.
“You’re cute,” I said.
His eyebrows raised skeptically. “I am?”
I leaned over to kiss him on the nose. “Yeah, you are.”
He put an arm around my shoulders, holding us close. “I always thought cute was a bit of an insult. Shouldn’t I be handsome or powerfully sexy or… ?”
I gave him a more serious kiss, hard and full. His tongue tasted of dill. I lingered long enough to let him know exactly how hot I thought he was. “You’re definitely all that, Sebastian. But, cute, in this case, is good. Trust me.”
“I guess I’ll have to.”
I smiled warmly at him. I could live with the whole buried/not-dead lover thing, I decided. Sebastian had a good soul, even if I couldn’t see his aura. I was curious about something, though. Something that could complicate my newly sparked feelings toward him. “Are you hoping to use alchemy to revive Teréza?”
“Yes.” He paused and chewed on his lip, his eyes focused on some internal argument, to which he responded, “Well, no.” He looked at me and let out a sigh. “I don’t really know.”
I frowned, unable to follow his thoughts.
“Teréza’s situation is complicated,” Sebastian said. “At this point, she’s been dead, or rather, undead for a long time. If I could duplicate the formula successfully, which I’m not even sure I could, how can I make her swallow it? An injection wouldn’t work, either. It’s not like her blood is flowing anymore. I’d have to come up with something that could be absorbed through dead skin, and again you really need blood flow for all of that to work properly…”
His voice trailed off. Perhaps he realized how much like Dr. Frankenstein he sounded, or maybe he just noticed the horrified look on my face. I wanted to say, Great Goddess, Sebastian, what are you thinking? You don’t reanimate a corpse after a hundred and fifty years. Have you never read “The Monkey’s Paw”? It occurred to me his whole life, or, rather, existence after death, was one big Pet Sematary moment after another. Of course, it seemed reasonable to him.
“I have to re-create the elixir somehow,” Sebastian said sounding nonchalant again, as though we were discussing something completely ordinary. Settling back down in his chair, he turned away from me. “I can feel the effects fading. If I can’t rework my magic, I’ll soon be a prisoner of the night… or, well, I’m not sure.”
“So, the potion that made you a vampire also protects you from the sun?”
Sebastian’s jaw worked for a moment, then he said, “Yes.”
I waited for more, because there was something about his simple affirmation that seemed to suggest a but or an and. Instead, he stood up. Walking over to the fence, he pulled up a weed that had sprouted near the base of one of the posts. Methodically, he began moving along the perimeter, gathering up the offending plant matter.
For the moment, at least, the sun seemed to love Sebastian. The brightness that reflected from his white shirt as he stooped and dipped almost hurt my eyes. I sipped more coffee and popped another sandwich in my mouth. As I reclined deeper in the lawn chair, I felt like that old joke, “I love work—I can watch someone else do it all day.”
I must have dozed, because I dreamt. In my dream, a blue jay hopped out of the maple tree to perch on the linen-covered table. It scolded me with a loud cawing, which somehow I understood as words. The jay said, Get Sebastian’s formula, Garnet. It is our demand for what he’s taken from us.
Shooing the bird with my hand, I said, “No way. Anyway, what does a Goddess need with a vampire’s magic potion?”
The bird hopped deftly out of my reach and flapped back onto the table. It pecked at the sandwiches, then cocked its head to glare at me with a glittering black eye. This time I heard its reply in my mind. The formula is more powerful than he admits. It makes life. That is a woman’s power. It should belong to womankind. We want it. It is owed to us.
“We want it, my precious,” I hissed, mocking the Goddess. “You sound crazy. Forget it.”
“Channeling Tolkien, are we?”
A blue pitcher of ice water sat in the spot the jay had occupied. I blinked, trying to pull myself from my dream/vision. “Uh, sorry,” I said. “I’m still kind of woozy, I guess. I was kind of dreaming or something.”
He looked sheepish. “Yes, well, I got caught up in the moment. It won’t happen again.”
A lascivious smile crept across my face; I certainly hoped it would. I remembered Mátyás’s remark, and my expression sobered. “It’s not dangerous if I don’t bite back, right? I mean, that is, if you… we… had an accident.”
He grinned lightly. “I don’t think so. No one else that I’ve… uh… well, let’s just say, there’s only one Teréza.”
“Mátyás made it sound like—”
“Mátyás would prefer it if I didn’t have a sex life.”
Made sense. I mean, I didn’t always want to think about my folks getting hot and heavy, and they were married. Sebastian sounded pretty terse about it, though, which made me wonder if there was some history of Mátyás coming between his father and a lover. I started to ask him about it, but what came out of my mouth was completely different.
“So, about your formula. You wrote it down?” What? Why had I asked him that? Focus on Mátyás, Garnet. I opened my mouth and, “You have notes at least, right?” came out instead.
“A grimoire.” He nodded. When Sebastian sat back down, I detected the sweet, grassy odor of pineapple weed on his skin. He smelled surprisingly good for someone who’d been working in the hot sun. There was no hint of sweat. “I have a ton of notes.”
“What did you mean when you said alchemy made you?” I asked, trying to sound casual. Somewhere, deep inside, I felt the Goddess smile.
He poured himself a large glass of ice water before answering. He drank it in several fast gulps. “Just what I said,” he replied. Then, after a moment of consideration, he continued, “No. The truth is, I’m not certain how I became a vampire.”
How could he not know? “Isn’t it kind of a big moment, the Awakening?”
Sebastian sputtered out a laugh. “The ‘Awakening’? Where do you get your vocabulary?”
I blushed furiously. “What is it supposed to be called? Anyway, you said, ‘dark gift.’ That’s pretty damn cheesy, too.”
He nodded. “Good point. I also think I talked about being a prisoner of the night.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So there.”
Taking a sandwich, he smiled to himself. “Still, ‘the Awakening.’ Do other vampires say that?”
“You’ve never talked to any?”
He shook his head. “Not many. And those few I’ve met have not really been the sort to hang out and swap terminology with. I find other vampires to be, well, somewhat territorial.”
Well, there was that.
“Yeah, they do call it the Awakening, as a matter of fact,” I said since he couldn’t refute my claim, taking the last of the sandwiches out of spite. After I’d swallowed the final delicious bite, I added, “A
nyway, I still don’t get how you could not remember the big waking-up-dead moment.”
“Oh, I remember that,” Sebastian agreed, with a wistful look at the crumb-filled plate. “Who could forget the moment you realize you’ve been left for dead and buried in a mass grave? Many of us were killed the night the Turks attacked the stronghold. I wasn’t the only person to claw his way out from the dirt and bodies. A lot of people had been left for dead, but I wasn’t weakened. In fact, I possessed surprising strength and speed to defend the others from the wolves. Still, I would probably have thought nothing of it, if it wasn’t for this,” he touched the spot above his sternum where the scar lay beneath his shirt. “And, of course, the Hunger.”
Despite the seriousness of his revelation, I couldn’t help but tease him, “The Hunger?”
He laughed, but shook his head with the memory. “It’s a startling thing, the Hunger. Even after all this time, I find it somewhat disturbing when it comes upon me. And, then, when I wasn’t expecting it…”
A car sped down the highway. I craned to watch its approach, afraid it might be the Vatican agent. I didn’t get a good look except an impression that it was silver or maybe gray. At any rate, it zipped by without slowing.
I glanced at Sebastian, who was chewing on his lip, apparently lost in thought. “So, you weren’t expecting to become a vampire?”
“People were telling me I would become a vampire my whole life.”
“Huh?”
“I was born on Christmas.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling intensely dense. “That still doesn’t make any sense to me. Shouldn’t that make you holy?”
Sebastian shook his head. “It’s an old superstition. Where I’m from it was once considered sacrilegious to share a birthday with Our Savior. The thought was that one’s parents were committing carnal sin on the same night the Blessed Virgin received the Holy Ghost.”
“You’re not two thousand years old,” I said.
“I’m not saying it made any sense,” Sebastian said. “Though it made me a wildly unpopular kid, especially since vampirism was considered contagious.”
“That must have sucked.”
Sebastian nodded and took a sip of his coffee. A cool breeze rustled the leaves of the maple, sending dappled light dancing across his shoulder. He shrugged. “It gave me a lot of time to read.”
“Occult stuff,” I reasoned. “Since you ended up an alchemist.”
“Cause and effect,” Sebastian smiled.
“So I guess they were right.” The passage of the car made me anxious. I shifted in my chair, no longer feeling content to stay still. A tremor passed across my stomach. I clutched at it, as though to say, Down, girl.
I found myself on my feet. “I have to pee. Then I should go home.”
What? Why had I said that? I mean, yeah, I had to pee, but I was really enjoying hanging out with Sebastian in the cool shade of the maple. I felt Lilith rumbling restlessly under my skin, pushing me forward. I headed back toward the house only half under my own control.
Sebastian caught my arm. “Go? I thought you took the day off work.”
“I’m more worried about leaving William at the store on his own than I realized.” It was a lie, and my lips said it without any go-ahead from my brain.
“Right.” He sounded a little hurt, but he rallied quickly. “Well, allow me to treat you to dinner, then.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if he’d really want me back if he knew what We were planning. “That would be nice.”
The entire pot of coffee I’d had this morning had made its way through my system. The first stop I made was, in fact, the bathroom. I didn’t flush right away, however, just in case Sebastian followed me inside. I wanted him to think I was still on the toilet while I investigated the locked room.
I put my hand on the doorknob and shut my eyes. Lilith’s power rose easily in me like a bubble. With a slight magical nudge, I slid the bar back. Slowly and as noiselessly as possible, I swung the door open. Just as I suspected, the room was Sebastian’s sanctum.
The smell of old books permeated the space, which was no surprise, considering the fact that hundreds, possibly thousands, of volumes crowded the floor-to-ceiling shelves. All of them were about magic in some form or other. Many more were open and piled on two long oak tables set in the shape of an L, which had been lifted straight from my memory of fifth-period chemistry class, complete with stainless steel sinks and racks of test tubes. It was not my image of an alchemist’s lab. Instead of greenish liquid bubbling in various bits of glassware, all the test tubes were arranged by size in a rack. An unlit Bunsen burner had been stored neatly and carefully to one side of all the books.
Despite the evil laboratory look, the room was sunny. Morning light streamed in from large windows, and an open doorway led to a sun porch. A framed picture of something abstract hung on the wall. I took a closer look. A signed Cézanne.
I poked my head through the doorway into the porch. Besides the ubiquitous crammed bookshelves, a comfortable chaise lounge and a reading table were nestled into the sunniest corner. A leather-bound journal, the kind we sold at Mercury Crossing for forty bucks, lay open to a page partially filled with Sebastian’s distinctive cursive. A fat, silver Montblanc pen had been tucked into the seam of the book. I doubted this was the book I was looking for, however. This looked more like a personal diary not a Witchy one, from what I could see.
Sebastian had implied that the spell had been recorded a long time ago. With a defeated sigh, I scanned the shelves.
How on earth would I find what I was looking for among all of these books?
Well, I told myself, his book of shadows would be old. If Sebastian were actually the age he claimed to be, the book would likely be hand-bound. That presumed, of course, that he hadn’t recopied his original grimoire or, fuck me, just scanned it onto a CD. Great Mother, it could be any one of these.
Why was I doing this anyway? It suddenly occurred to me that my entire obsession with Sebastian’s grimoire wasn’t mine at all but Lilith’s. I wasn’t going to do this. It was bad enough I’d broken into his special room; no way would I violate his trust even more.
So resolved, I headed off to grab my clothes from the shower curtain and flush the toilet. My foot had just about crossed the threshold into the hallway when I felt the sensation of being pushed aside. It was a relatively gentle shove, and my center of gravity shifted just slightly to the left.
Except, when my body turned around and headed back into the room, somehow, I didn’t. That is to say, the part of me that was me, disconnected. “I” became a camera-eye view stuck in the doorway of Sebastian’s sanctum, a helpless watcher, as I strode purposely around the room, my hand trailing across the bookshelves, eyes closed. Even not being me at that moment, I knew what I was doing. I, or rather Lilith, used magic to attempt to locate Sebastian’s book of shadows.
Whoa.
Nothing like this had ever happened before.
When Lilith took over in the past, I blacked out. This time, I was riding shotgun in my own body, watching myself from the outside.
Weird.
She/I paused at a bookshelf near the entryway into the sun porch. I hated to admit it, but I looked very silly in Goddess mode. The slight bluish glow at my fingertips rocked, but the smudge of mascara and the freakish bed head thing my hair had going on marred the stately look of concentration on my face. Oh and Mátyás was right; the sweatpants/ass-kicking knee-high boots combination really did nothing for me.
My assessment of my current fashion choices came to an abrupt halt when a slow smile crept across my face. Lilith had found her quarry, I was certain. I watched helplessly as I crouched down and scattered a row of books from the bottom shelf onto the floor. Reaching deep into the case, I removed a leather-bound volume.
Stop, I tried to make my mouth say, but my disembodied self stayed rooted to the spot where I’d been booted from my own flesh. Talk about taking liberties. You get back here wit
h my body, I tried to shout, but I was too busy leafing through the grimoire to notice me.
Downstairs, I heard the door open.
She/I shut the book with a snap. I gave myself another thin, cold smile. If Lilith hadn’t been in possession of my spine, shivers would have crawled up and down it. As it was, I felt a tightening, as though in response to that evil gaze, my spirit tried to curl itself into a small ball. You’re not supposed to be able to cast me aside so easily, I’d have said with my mouth, if I’d had one. You’re breaking the rules.
“You’re the one who called me down, mortal. You begged me to make your body my vessel. We’re just getting more… comfortable, is all,” I whispered, standing up. I moved toward the threshold, and for a moment I thought I might leave myself floating in the doorway forever. Instead, I held out a hand, fingers open, like a net, and then I felt myself being pulled along just out of step with my body. “I have asked for little in return for all that I have done for you. If you will not willingly offer tithe, I shall take it.”
She/I wrapped Sebastian’s grimoire in my still damp mini and tucked it under my arm. I grabbed my spiderweb lace hose, flushed the toilet, and headed downstairs. It was weird not to have the physical sensations that corresponded with my movements. For instance, I knew that the mini would be wet where it pressed against my ribs, but instead I felt nothing. I was an impotent, disconnected observer of my own body. Let me back in, I demanded wordlessly. You have the grimoire now. If Sebastian sees you, he’ll know you’re not me.
She laughed. “I don’t trust you to follow our plan.”
Your plan.
“Very well,” Lilith conceded. “My plan.”
Stopping in the kitchen, She commandeered one of Sebastian’s empty grocery bags. She unwrapped the grimoire, put it inside the sack, and dumped my damp clothes on top.
Then, turning, Lilith/I headed for the front door. Aren’t we even going to say good-bye to him?
“He’s a thief, Garnet. I don’t share your sympathetic opinion of him. He beheld me, and despite my kindness in allowing him to live, he attempted to possess us sexually, and took our blood. Our blood, Garnet. The blood of a Goddess.” I saw myself puff up with righteous indignation. After a moment of consideration, Lilith added, “You couldn’t even take the active role during sex. I wouldn’t let the first man conquer me that way, and I’ll be damned if I let this thieving corpse do it.”
Tall, Dark & Dead Page 10