Once we’d ordered drinks and they’d been set on the white linen tablecloth within easy reach, Sebastian smiled. “Better?”
I took a long pull of the wine I’d ordered. “Much.”
A waitress in a crisp white shirt and black tie appeared and asked if we were ready to order. We had to wave her away for the moment.
I glanced up at Sebastian. His eyes focused on something far away, and his jaw worked like he was thinking deeply about something. I wanted to ask him what it was that bothered him, but, in all honesty, I was afraid it might be disappointment about the disaster that was our honeymoon. Even though Dominguez confirmed that there was ice on the wings, I still felt kind of foolish for acting so quickly on my magical vision. Sebastian had been so looking forward to this trip, as had I.
Running my finger along the edge of the glass, I sighed. Sipping wine, I glanced through the menu. I peeped over the top of it at Sebastian, wondering if he was waiting for me to say something. He seemed engrossed making his own meal choice.
My eyes scanned over entrees, but my brain stumbled at the prices. Who pays sixty-eight dollars for anything, much less a hunk of steak?
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Just how sorry I am that we’re not in Vienna right now.”
“Please stop apologizing. We’ll work it out,” he said. “What is it you Minnesotans love to say? ‘Could be worse.’ ”
“True.” I laughed, imagining us sleeping in the airport waiting on a new plane or, worse, spattered on some highway.
The waitress came by again, so I absentmindedly ordered the walleye. Sebastian went for that sixty-some-dollar porterhouse. I gave him a little “Yikes!” glance as we returned the menus to the waiter. He seemed completely unfazed, however.
I was determined to try to turn this day around somehow, but my mind kept drawing blanks. The only safe subject that came into my mind was the weather, and I so did not want to be that married couple—you know the ones—staring at each other over dinner because they ran out of things to talk about twenty years ago. Yet we sat for a long time without a word. I started to fidget. Unrolling my linen napkin, I placed it in my lap expectantly. Then I moved my silverware around and thought about making a lame, joking reference to that scene in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts learns to eat at a fancy restaurant. I decided that was too strained, too desperate to make a funny.
Sebastian, meanwhile, continued to stare out the window, lost in thoughts all his own.
“William is Pictish this week,” I offered finally, referring to my dear friend and co-worker who was infamous among our set for changing the flavor of his religion like some people change clothes.
“Hmm,” Sebastian murmured, seemingly more interested in watching the snowfall. “I thought that was an ethnicity.”
Having gotten any kind of response, I pushed on valiantly. “It’s also a kind of Scottish, nature-focused witchcraft. When we get back, he’s off to some kind of retreat in the Boundary Waters.”
“Cold,” Sebastian said with a gruff smile.
“He’s going with an experienced cold-weather camper. That ambulance driver he . . . I don’t know . . . dates?” That was the other thing William wasn’t entirely sure of. He mostly liked girls, but he lately had been having a sort of fling with a very fine-looking EMT named Jorge.
Our conversation had to be postponed when the waitress interrupted with food. She placed a steaming plate of pan-seared walleye with broccoli and garlic mashed potatoes in front of me. It was supposed to be the house specialty, and it smelled delicious.
Sebastian shrugged as he cut into a very bloody looking steak. “Shit.”
“What?” I peered at his plate. Sebastian, unlike most vampires, could eat whatever and whenever he wanted with no ill effects. He’d been made by magic, not blood. The ultimate self-made man . . . well, vamp. Was there something wrong with his food?
But Sebastian was looking over my shoulder. “You see that guy over there by the window?”
I was almost afraid to look. Would it be Eriskegal or Loki? As casually as possible, I turned to glance in the direction Sebastian had indicated. The guy did look familiar, but not because he was leading some celestial double life. It was the man that I’d noticed leaving the plane the same time we had. He was an athletically trim white guy in his midforties with mouse brown hair, almost memorable for his unremarkableness. He sat alone, watching the snow drift from silver gray skies. “I think he got off the plane with us,” I said. “Who is he?”
“My own personal stalker.”
“Your own personal stalker? Since when? And how come I’ve never heard of him?” I asked through tight lips, trying to stay mindful of the echoing properties of a mostly empty restaurant.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Sebastian said with a grimace.
Actually, I did.
“How long has this guy been stalking us, er, you? Are we talking days? Months? Why have I never seen him? What does he want? Is he some kind of peeping tom/vampire groupie? What has he seen, you know, between us?” Putting my elbows rather indelicately on the table, I leaned in and whispered, “Anyway, haven’t you just, you know, eaten him?”
Sebastian laughed. “I haven’t, as you say, ‘eaten him,’ because—as you of all people know—bodies rarely stay buried.”
Unfortunately, I did have a bit of experience with skeletons in my closet resurfacing, as it were . . . uh, rather literally. Not terribly far from where we sat, in fact. In a lake inside a Minneapolis cemetery, Parrish and I had tried to hide the bodies of the Vatican assassins that Lilith killed in self-defense. A freak drought exposed them, and that was what had sent Special Agent Dominguez on my trail. I shivered at the memory.
This was really my first time back in the Cities since that night. I’d been so scared that I’d left in the middle of the night, abandoning everything but a few clothes and my cat. I wondered if that old apartment was still there and whatever happened to all my stuff.
With some effort, I shook my head to clear it. “Can we get back to talking about your stalker? What’s he after? Is he dangerous?”
Considering, Sebastian turned back to his plate and sawed off another hunk of meat. “His name is James . . . uh, something. He’s from the Illuminati Watchers; they follow me whenever I leave the country.”
I poked my potatoes with my fork skeptically. “Did you just say, ‘Illuminati’?”
2.
The Chariot
ASTROLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE:
Cancer
Sebastian nodded and took a bite of steamed cauliflower. He frowned at his food for a moment, and then said, “Yes, Illuminati.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t say anything. Was Sebastian trying to lighten the mood after bringing up the whole dead-resurfacing thing? He had to be joking, right?
“It’s not all that unreasonable, is it?” he asked, sounding somewhat hurt that I might not believe him. “I fit their profile. I have a ridiculous amount of money, a lot of overseas investments, property, gold, and, shall we say, a family history that extends over several centuries.”
Only, the “family” would be just his—oops, our—son, Mátyás, and himself. Yeah, okay, I could kind of see how he ended up on a conspiracy theorist’s list somewhere. “Can I be honest? I don’t really even know what the Illuminati is . . . or are, exactly. They have something to do with world domination, but after that . . . ?” I put my palms up and nearly flung a piece of winter squash on my fork across the room. “I thought they were . . . I don’t know, made up?”
“Well, these days the term Illuminati has gotten kind of muddled.” Sebastian returned his attention to cleaning up his plate. “Nowadays it can apply to any number of groups that people are convinced are attempting to control the political scene or establishing a certain world order. But it all started in Bavaria in the seventeen hundreds, the Age of Enlightenment.”
There was something in that faraway look in Sebastian’s e
ye that made me ask, “And you know this . . . because you read about it in a book?”
“No.” Sebastian sighed, setting his fork down. “I might have been a founding member,” he said almost so quickly I didn’t catch all of it. “Look, at the time, it was the Austro-Bulgarian Empire, okay? I had a vested interest.”
“Wait. Did you just say that the Illuminati started in Austria?”
“Really, it was Ingolstadt in Upper Bulgaria, but, for your purposes, yes, close enough.”
“And you wonder why they’ve been following you? They’ve probably been trailing you since seventeen whatever.” I couldn’t help but laugh a little. Then I wagged my finger at him with mock accusation. “And did you also say you started it?”
“Good God, no. I try not to do anything worthy of an entry in Wikipedia—makes it much easier to live forever without people noticing. No, it was Adam. I mean, Professor Weishaupt from the university.”
I scratched at the back of my neck. “Adam? I take it we were close?”
“You know my attraction to university and university types.” It was true. Sebastian seemed to have spent most of his natural and unnatural life haunting various colleges and institutes of higher learning. He even taught a few extension courses in horticulture at the University of Wisconsin. And then there was the cute little comparative religion studies major in our coven I didn’t even want to talk about he found alluring—intellectually, that is!
“Adam taught canon law,” Sebastian continued. “I was on the science faculty. We had opportunity to talk. I thought he was brilliant.”
My tone was all teasing: “Did you sleep with him?”
“No,” Sebastian said, a tiny bit more forcefully than necessary.
He hated it when I teased him about that sort of thing. It was a big burden, apparently, to be the only straight vampire in the history of his kind. And what could I say? I found it utterly hilarious.
“You know I don’t go that way without a lot of effort,” he continued. “Adam wasn’t that cute. It was more of an intellectual crush.”
“Sure,” I teased. “Your passions were inflamed by the desire to rule the world together. Oh! It was totally Anakin Skywalker at the end of that movie we both hated.”
“One of the Star Wars ones, was it? Ugh, tell me again why you insisted we go?”
I was secretly kind of a fan girl, but I confessed the real reason to him: “Ewan McGregor is hot.”
“Even in a bathrobe?”
I shrugged. “I like you in a bathrobe.”
“Hmm. Good point. I thought he looked scruffy.”
“I thought you didn’t notice boys.”
Sebastian flashed me a vaguely exasperated look and then rubbed his mouth with his hand. He let out a long breath before reaching for his wine. His eyes strayed to where his stalker sat sipping coffee. “I wish those conspiracy theory nuts would give up. It was several hundred years ago and, anyway, it’s over. The whole Illuminati thing with Adam was a fad, a flash. We disbanded in less than a decade. And, for the record, we called ourselves Perfectibilitists, not Illuminati.”
“It’s no surprise that first one didn’t stick. Illuminati is a lot easier to say.” I smiled, taking a bite of my cooling fish. “Anyway, you don’t have to convince me.” I jerked my head in the direction of Sebastian’s stalker. “This—is it James? He’s the guy you need to convince.”
“How likely is that?” Sebastian sighed, rubbing his forehead like he was developing a sudden headache.
“This guy, is he dangerous?” I asked, stealing another glance at the very forgettable man in the ho- hum clothes, who seemed completely absorbed admiring the slow, soft drift of flakes outside the window. As I watched, he picked up a book and started reading. I could almost read the title, something about the secret architecture in America’s capital.
“He could be,” Sebastian said. “Larry, my accountant, is very good at keeping people like James from connecting any dots. But it wouldn’t take much to blow my cover.”
“No one would believe you’re a vampire,” I reminded Sebastian. “No way.”
Most people didn’t know vampires were real. Or, more accurately, they were in denial.
You see, there was a kind of veil that existed between the general populace and the truth about things that go bump in the night. If pushed, you might get a “rational” person to admit to having had an experience with a ghost or something else supernatural, but most of the time people just close their eyes and plug their ears, singing “la, la, la,” to the things that make up the majority of my everyday experience.
It’s my opinion that’s why there is always a collective hunger for those cheesy, nonfiction exposés about haunted houses and reality shows featuring ghost hunters and psychics. It is because, on some level, everyone knows. They understand that this stuff is really out there just beyond their perceptions. All they really have to do is open their eyes.
I closed mine for a moment and pinched the bridge of my nose. “But what I want to know is this: This James guy,” I said, “he’s not going to jump out of the bushes with a knife or anything, right?”
“No,” Sebastian muttered glumly. “He’ll probably blog about me.”
“Horrors,” I snickered. “Maybe he’s Twittering right now!”
“Laugh it up, but it’s people like him that have kept me on the move my whole life and probably why the FBI put the screws to me.”
“You think?” I’d mostly finished my fish and started in on the last of the veggies.
“Those guys knew more about me than I would have liked.”
“Really? Like what?” My mind filled with visions of stake-wielding, garlic-waving G-men in matching suit coats and ties: Homeland Security of the Dead!
The waitress chose that moment to ask us if we found everything to our liking. We agreed that it was all lovely. She smiled pleasantly and after waiting another beat or two, finally moved to join a group of similarly dressed waiters loitering at the bar.
“So what did they ask you?” I kept my voice low, hyper-aware of the bored waitstaff and potential blogger/stalker who might be listening in.
“Well, they used the term wealthy businessman, which isn’t really the persona I use in this country. Nothing in my visa suggests it either. In fact, my main occupation is listed as adjunct university professor, not usually a profession people consider terribly wealthy.”
My brain sputtered at his use of the term persona. That made him sound very Bourne Identity. I wondered just how many personas he had. My mouth moved to ask, but the brain hadn’t quite recovered enough to let me form anything coherent.
Sebastian didn’t notice. His eyes had drifted to the condensation-steamed window. “It makes me wonder if I’m on their watch list as well. But why?” he asked mostly to himself. “That whole incident in Amsterdam is decades old. It was the 1970s, for God’s sake. I was just a student; everyone was into that whole scene, you know? Anyway, I was using a completely different name at the time. How could they have connected me?”
I had no idea. In fact, I wasn’t even born in the 1970s, had never been to Amsterdam, and was beginning to suspect I’d married a guy who’d been a part of every secret society since the dawn of time. “Did you bomb somebody or something?”
“No,” he said. “It was just a building. No one was in it.”
I choked on the wine I’d been swallowing.
Sebastian raised his hands, motioning me to relax. “It wasn’t nearly as outlandish as it sounds. Or at least it made sense to me at the time. Look, it was cool back then to be a radical, antiestablishment, antigovernment. Everyone was into it. It was easy to get swept up. I fell in with the wrong crowd.”
“What, again? Jeez, Sebastian, I never took you for such a joiner!”
“I’m social,” he said with a sniff.
“Why don’t you just join the Moose Lodge?”
“I have,” he said, quite seriously.
“You have?”
“Su
re, they have great dinners. I’ll take you some time.”
“Cripes, did you join the Illuminati for the food too?”
He laughed. “Come to think of it, they had some pretty excellent desserts!”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Honestly, you crack me up. But what I really want to know is who else you are when you’re not with me. Who are all these other personas of yours?”
“Well,” Sebastian said, a smile returning to his face. “I’m a real-estate magnate, but you knew that.”
I did. Sebastian owned several business properties in Madison. In fact, we once had run- in with the Goddess Hel in one of his office buildings, but that was another story.
“I’m a car mechanic, botanist, alchemist, mountain climber, and a father.”
“Tell me about someone I don’t know.”
“I raised goats in France.”
I smiled at the image. “What century was that?”
“The twentieth. It was actually right before the whole Amsterdam thing, in the sixties. My lover ran a commune near the Côte d’Azur. It was really gorgeous countryside, but, for your information, goats stink—both literally and figuratively. And I really never got a taste for their milk.”
“Was your lover a boy or a girl?” I asked precisely because I knew it would tweak him a little.
“Hmmm.” He smirked in a way that for a moment made me think he wasn’t going to tell me out of mischievous spite. “Free love, baby. Everyone at the commune was, uh, experimenting, but it was Estelle that brought me into it.”
“Estelle. She sounds pretty.” I couldn’t believe I was jealous of a woman that had to be dead by now.
“No one holds a candle to you, my love,” Sebastian said, reaching across the table to stroke my cheek. Despite the nearby fireplace, shivers ran down my spine.
“I want to continue this conversation upstairs,” I said, feeling the sudden, irrational desire to assert my wifehood all over him and his Estelle memories.
Honeymoon of the Dead Page 4