Tall, Dark & Dead

by Tate Hallaway

  Hey, I liked sex. And it’s my body.

  Lilith let that comment pass without anything other than a disparaging whatever lift of my eyebrows.

  Anyway, aren’t you, er, we the thief, taking his book and all that?

  “Blood is a metaphor for life,” the Goddess said with my cheery alto voice. “He dares to consume my very essence.”

  It’s my blood, I insisted.

  “I have been with you since the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”

  Stop quoting the “Charge of the Goddess” and stick with the program.

  Lilith had no reply. Apparently, being disembodied, I was easy to ignore.

  We opened the door to the sight of Sebastian shoving my bicycle into the trunk of his car. Seeing me, he waved.

  “It’s the least I can do,” he said. “It’s a long way back into town, and, well, you haven’t been all that steady on your feet.” The grin he gave was one of pure sheepish guilt.

  Lilith barred my teeth in a snarl. Sebastian had said the wrong thing, reminding Her of the damage his bite had done to my/our body. I had to run interference, or She’d strike him down for his insolence.

  Is it worth losing the grimoire? I asked simply.

  “If I kill him I could have everything. Even revenge,” She whispered.

  Yeah, but what kind of revenge? I asked, hoping to play to a Goddess’s sense of drama and ritual. Would it really be tit for tat to rip his throat out here and now?

  A tiny tug, and I was back behind my own eyes.

  Sebastian drove one of those mafia cars from the late thirties. Big, black, and shiny, it reminded me of a June bug on wheels. Wedging my mountain bike into the skinny trunk was a bit of a challenge, but Sebastian clearly had a system involving lots of brightly colored bungee cords and a rope.

  The interior smelled like axle grease, but the crushed red velvet upholstery was unstained and unfaded. His car was even more fastidiously maintained than his house. There were no empty pop cans on the floorboards. When I sat down, the wide-open feel of the bench seat and the complete lack of seat belt disconcerted me. Apparently noticing my discomfort, Sebastian dug into the seat and produced a clunky-looking buckle like those popular in the seventies. It looked like an airplane seat belt, only fatter.

  “The strap is somewhere in there. I had to add them to make it street legal,” he said.

  I found the other part in question and buckled up, feeling strangely naked without the standard shoulder strap. I held the grocery bag on my lap, self-conscious about its contents. I should give the book back to him, I thought.

  Lilith growled.

  Sebastian looked at me. “Still hungry?”

  “Uh.” What did I say here? No, that was just my inner Goddess letting me know I shouldn’t narc on Her. I glanced guiltily at the grocery bag. “Well, actually, I…”

  Pain shot through my stomach.

  “Uhm,” I managed to say, “Yeah, I guess. Or maybe I’m just digesting. Good sandwiches, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Say, that reminds me, do you eat fish?” he asked casually.

  “What?”

  “Fish. I was thinking about dinner tonight. Are you vegetarian or vegan or what?”

  “I could eat fish,” I said absently, watching in rapt fascination as Sebastian went through some strange rituals to start the car, part of which included pressing a button on the dashboard. The engine, when it sprang to life, surprised me by being relatively quiet. I’d expected the car to sound like a jalopy, since it was old. Of course, I should have realized Sebastian would keep all the parts in perfect working order.

  “Did you buy this when it was new?” I asked. As I watched him expertly work the column-mounted stick shift, I tried to imagine Sebastian in the gangster era dressed in a zoot suit, fedora, and fangs.

  “Good God, no,” he said. “I didn’t even know this car existed when it was new. I was in Senegal. I got this off eBay.”

  There were so many questions that his response produced in my brain that I opted not to ask any of them. Besides, I was busy trying to revise my image of Sebastian to include a working familiarity with eBay, while simultaneously trying to remember in which continent Senegal belonged. Africa? Asia? Cripes, my high school social studies teacher would be so disappointed in me (again).

  “Anyway, like everybody else, I lost a lot of money during the crash,” he continued, as we rolled out onto the county highway I’d biked the night before. “Many world markets crashed, too, not just America’s.”

  “Huh,” I said with what I hoped was interested politeness. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious about Sebastian’s past, but I could feel the weight of his grimoire on my thighs. Looking at the bag, I swore I could see a distinctly square shape at the bottom. What would I say if he noticed it? Sorry about stealing your book, but my Goddess made me do it.

  “Luckily, I had expert advice from a London stockjobber in the late seventeen hundreds. Diversify, he told me, and never entirely trust paper money. He was well before his time, he was.”

  “So, you’re rich?” I hadn’t really meant to ask that, but all this talk of money and investments made me wonder. I mean, fiscal responsibility was such a foreign language to me that when people talk about IRAs, my first assumption is that they’re referring to gun-toting Irish nationalists.

  “When I realized I’d conquered the grave, I started thinking about long-term survival. Money is part of that.”

  “So, you’re rich?”

  He gave me a half grimace, half smile. “Yes.”

  “Like, I-can-live-comfortably rich, or I-have-so-many-Swiss-bank-accounts-I-have-to-hire-someone-to-keep-track-of-them-all astronomically rich?”

  Sebastian frowned at the road. We whizzed past a herd of cows standing in a pasture. The smell of their manure briefly overwhelmed the air.

  “That rich, huh?” I said when he didn’t respond. “Why are you living in Madison, then?”

  “What’s wrong with Madison?”

  “Nothing, it just doesn’t seem like a haven for billionaires.” Or vampires, for that matter.

  “I like my house. I like being able to live in the country, but also be within minutes of a decent, medium-sized city. I like the smell of alfalfa, and I like the people here.”

  “Why work? If you’ve got money, why not…”

  “Do nothing? Nothing is boring. You can only read so many books.”

  I almost said, Are you sure, because you have a ton of them, but stopped myself just in time. Sebastian didn’t know I’d been inside his private, locked study.

  I glanced over at Sebastian. He’d rolled his window down partway, and his hair swirled around him in the breeze. His face was pulled tightly into a frown. Though his eyes stayed darkly focused on the road in front of us, I could tell his mind was miles away. Brooding, clearly.

  I had to admit that discovering Sebastian had money bothered me much more than knowing he was a vampire. Vampires I could deal with. Rich? I didn’t know the first fucking thing.

  “Do you have a Learjet?”

  “No.”

  “Yacht?”

  “No.”

  “Mansion?” I asked, then added, gleefully, “Oh! A castle?”

  “No.”

  “A history at Yale that involves membership in Skull and Bones?”

  “No.”

  “You’re violating all my stereotypes about rich people,” I said in faux exasperation.

  “Good.” It was the first time since admitting to having money that Sebastian smiled at me. It was a warm look that made me grin back.

  “You do realize that from now on if we go Dutch, I’ll totally think you’re some kind of Scrooge McDuck.”

  Somehow the laughter that followed relieved all of the tension that had come up between us, and I forgot for the moment about the stolen book of shadows in the bag on my lap, Mátyás, and even the Vatican agents hunting us.

  * * * *

  We talked about nothing o
f any real consequence on the rest of the ride home: the weather, the strangeness of living in such a groovy-political town like Madison, and the appeal of manual over automatic transmissions.

  He’d released my bike from the bungee-cord death grip and leaned it against the streetlamp. “Right, well, then I’ll pick you up tonight at say, eight?”

  “Tonight?” I asked, clutching the grocery bag full of stolen goods to my chest.

  “Dinner.”

  Which is what he’d want to make of me when he discovered I had his grimoire. “Uh.”

  Sebastian misread my hesitation. He rested his hands lightly on my shoulders, turning me toward him gently. “You’re not going off me, are you?”

  I shook my head. What did I say at this juncture? Why don’t we just wait and see if you’re still interested in me in say, a half an hour or so when you’ve discovered I not only invaded your sanctum but also took your most personally valuable property? What I should do is confess, I told myself. Tell him now.

  Of course, that’s when he chose to kiss me.

  It wasn’t just a friendly peck on the cheek, either; it was full-body-contact passion. My lips tingled, and I felt myself swept up into it, until the grimoire poked me in the ribs. It was smashed into the space between our bodies. My heart pounded. Did Sebastian feel the sharp edge of the book? If he did, he never broke the kiss. Despite my nervousness, I delighted in the strength of his arms around my waist, the faint scent of cinnamon that always seemed to cling to him, and the way his hair tickled against my ear when the wind blew.

  When he released me and looked anxiously into my face for a response, I was sure he could see the heat on my cheeks. “It’s not you.” Jesus, that sounds lame, I thought, and watching his face crumble a little, I felt the need to continue, despite a nagging sense that less was more. “I mean, I want to, but…” But what, Garnet? What was the point of breaking his heart on top of stealing his stuff? Why not just end things happily before he came to hunt me down like a dog? “But, nothing,” I finished, letting out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “That would be great, Sebastian. I’m looking forward to it. Seriously.”

  “I know I’m rushing things,” he said. “And you’d think with the long life I’ve had I could be a bit more patient, but, to be truthful, the longer I exist, the more I’ve come to realize that there’s no point in not saying what you feel when you feel it. Seize the day, and all that. It’s true, you know. I want to see you. I don’t really want you to leave at all, but I understand that you have a lot to digest, what with Mátyás showing up like that, and—”

  I cut him off with a finger to his lips. “I’ll see you tonight,” I said. And, one way or another, that was probably true. “Let’s make it eight thirty. I need a nap.”

  He smiled at that. “Good. I’ll be here at eight thirty, then.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.” With trepidation, but, hey.

  “Great.”

  He gave me another kiss, this one quicker, though still passionate enough that the grimoire poked me again.

  After Sebastian carried my bike up the outside stairs, we said good-bye with a few more kisses. He was a good kisser. Part of me wanted to invite him upstairs for an afternoon of spooning on the couch. A corollary advantage to that would be to delay the whole discovery of my theft, but I was tired enough that a nap held a tiny bit of higher appeal. Besides, my apartment was a mess.

  “Okay,” I said, finally giving his chin a light push, “Enough now, you. You want me well-rested for this evening, don’t you?”

  Sebastian flashed me a wolfish grin. “I do.”

  “Then you’d better go,” I told him, making shooing motions with my hand. “Go on.”

  He blew me a final kiss as he slipped out, and I felt a pang of regret as I watched the door close. We could have had a nice relationship, I thought as I trudged up the stairs. Or at least a lot of hot sex.

  At the top of the stairs, I reached into the pocket of the sweatpants for the keys to my apartment and came up empty. Of course, these were Sebastian’s pants, and I just realized I’d left my emergency bag at Sebastian’s.

  I had to get it back.

  That bag had my emergency-money in it, two thousand dollars’ worth. It contained Jasmine’s prayer beads, the only memento I had left of the coven. My mouth went dry at the thought of having to abandon it, but what else could I do? Sebastian would never agree to anything short of an exchange of property, and though it was not my idea to steal the grimoire in the first place, I was certain it was worth more than two thousand dollars and personal effects to Lilith.

  I was wondering about the wisdom of a preemptive strike—maybe a quick taxi out to Sebastian’s farm, some even quicker talking—when I heard a delicate cat sneeze from the other side of the door. What would be causing Barney’s allergic reaction to magic inside my apartment?

  Another sneeze, this time closer to the door. A paw stretched through the gap between the door and the floor.

  Maybe, I considered, it was me that made Barney so miserable. Thanks to a pleasant chat with Sebastian, I’d successfully avoided thinking about the fact that Lilith now apparently rode so close to the surface that she could shove me out of the way whenever she wanted something.

  “I hope it’s not me, Puss,” I said. I hustled downstairs to grab the spare keys from where I kept them hidden behind a loose baseboard. I’d managed to lock myself out of my apartment enough times in the past to always keep a set on site.

  As I opened the door, I set the grocery bag on the floor and reached to pick Barney up. She purred contentedly in my arms, but her claws dug into the skin of my shoulder. I looked up with the intention of finding a surface to set her onto, when I saw a figure shrouded in shadow sitting in the middle of the room. I reached for the light.

  “Don’t,” came a voice from my past. “This place is already too bright.”

  It was Parrish. Daniel Parrish, my long-lost vampire lover.

  Fourth House

  KEYWORDS:

  Home, Concealment, Addiction

  Parrish had managed to make my living room surprisingly dark. The old Victorian had a number of windows, and since I was on the second floor, I never bothered with heavy curtains. The previous renters had abandoned lace ones, and Parrish had pulled those—for good measure, I guess, since blankets of all sizes and colors had been tacked to the window frames. Including, I noticed with some irritation, my grandmother’s hand-stitched quilt.

  He sat in my oversized beanbag, which he’d pulled into the middle of the room. Compared to Sebastian, Parrish hulked. His body dwarfed the chair, making him look a little bit ridiculous lounging as he did on the black vinyl lump. With his auburn heavy-metal curls, poet-shirt, and leather pants, Parrish exuded sexuality.

  “You’ve been out all night,” he observed dryly. “Should I be jealous?”

  The possessive tone in Parrish’s voice should have made me angry, but instead I found myself flushing with a frustrating combination of annoyance and excitement. Mostly, I was annoyed at myself for still finding Parrish so damned attractive. He was such an obvious bad boy, and he played the part to the hilt. I should know better than to be charmed, but… well, Parrish and I were very unresolved, honestly.

  My coven had never liked him. The group’s disapproval had caused a lot of friction in our relationship. The majority of them felt that vampires fell under the category of black magic. They managed to convince me.

  Of course, I ended up saddled with Lilith less than a day after I broke up with Parrish. The coven probably wouldn’t much like that development, either. It was strange to think that Lilith and Parrish had never officially met, in fact.

  Parrish had never been part of my coven, so he wasn’t there when I first called Lilith into me.

  “How many times do I have to tell you that women don’t find men who break into their apartments and lay in wait for them attractive?” I tried to sound serious, but I couldn’t quite hide a fond smile. />
  “How about ones that help them bury bodies?”

  I did phone him afterward to help me dispose of the agents’ remains.

  Parrish had proven himself a true friend in that regard. Dead bodies wrapped in landscaping cloth turned out to be heavier than I could lift on my own. Without Lilith, I hadn’t been up to chopping the corpses to bits. Of course, that was the first thing Parrish suggested when he answered my desperate phone call, but, in the end, he agreed to do things my way. He’d said something about the killer’s prerogative. Ugh. I’d forgotten that particular bit until just now.

  Seeing Parrish brought back all sorts of uncomfortable thoughts. Not the least of which was a desire to curl up beside him and stroke that gorgeous mane of hair. “What do you want?”

  “What I’ve always wanted, darling. You.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to sound sarcastic, despite the flutter in my stomach that his flattery evoked. “What do you really want? How did you find me, anyway?”

  He sat perfectly still, not moving a muscle. Meanwhile, I held my ground with my back to the partially open door. Barney, I noticed, had fled down the stairs. I could hear her plaintive mewing at the main entrance.

  “It wasn’t difficult. You’re still using your real name. You only moved three hundred miles from Minneapolis.”

  I hated to hear Parrish mock me. Starting over had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Okay, so maybe I didn’t excel as a criminal mastermind; that was never supposed to be my gig.

  Besides, despite what Parrish implied, I had been careful. The coven was dead. All the Vatican agents were dead. The covenstead had burned to the ground. None of us had ever used our real names, not even in the privacy of the magical circle. I doubted anyone other than Parrish could connect Goth-chick Garnet Lacey with blond, blue-eyed Meadow Spring.