Dominguez seemed to have found the place we were looking for and pulled into an empty space next to a hole-in-the-wall cafe.
“Is our plan to eat . . . eggs? Is that the sort of thing that’s going to flush out the bad guys?” I asked. As we walked through the door, a bell jangled. No one looked up when we came in, but, even so, I felt acutely aware of the skull and crossbones on my jacket and the dried blood on my sweater. I wore black for a reason. It hid those kinds of stains well.
“I should have changed,” I said to Dominguez.
“You’re fine.”
Most of the crowd fell into the average- working-class-Joe variety, though there were a couple of women in pastel hospital scrubs chatting over coffee in a booth. Dominguez looked a little overdressed in his suit coat, but he always carried with him that air of “cop” that made him fit nicely into places like this.
Me, I just looked like a freak.
We took a seat in a narrow, vinyl-covered booth. The tablecloth was plastic and a bit stickier than I usually preferred. A metal ring on a stem held single- sheet menus. From the handwritten notes on the wall it appeared breakfast was the big draw, though we’d missed the early- bird special by several hours. I didn’t even know that people ate biscuits and gravy this far north, much less at 6 A.M.
Dominguez displayed a grumpy look—it seemed to be his sort of stock expression so I didn’t take it personally. “At first I thought being visible in the right places might do it, but now I’m convinced you need to be”—he waved his hand in an abracadabra motion—“you know, magic.”
I looked around at the customers wearing ball caps. “Here?”
“Well, I thought we’d eat first. Then you can do your thing.”
“What about my thing is so attractive to these guys, anyway?”
“Heh,” he said, looking me up and down. “Don’t get me started.
A blush crept into my cheeks. “It’s not what I meant, and you know it,” I admonished, trying to hide my reaction. “I meant, if these guys are all anti-New World Order or whatever, why don’t they like magic? Larkin is a witch, or at least a pagan, or was when I knew him, anyway.”
Dominguez dropped his voice and, leaning on his elbows, said, “I suspect the Illuminati Watch stuff is just a cover. Like Smythe said, they’re vampire hunters.”
A strong odor of frying steak filled the tiny restaurant. I nearly choked on the smell. “But . . . but . . .” I sputtered. “Vampires aren’t supposed to be real.”
Okay, that sounded rich coming from me, but I spent much of my life worrying about whether the Vatican witch hunters would catch up to me again. It never occurred to me that there might be an organization of people bent on killing vampires. People just weren’t supposed to know.
“You heard Smythe. He thinks he’s some modern-day Van Helsing.”
“Smythe totally denied being part of a group.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
The grill sizzled. Condensation dripped in wide rivulets on the window. I fiddled with the menu ring, making it spring and wobble. “Well,” I said, “you’re the mind reader. I suppose you’d know.”
Dominguez grimaced. “I didn’t . . . I don’t make a habit . . . Look, I don’t want to talk about that. I’m just saying that it makes a certain kind of logical sense,” he accented the word logical with a meaningful frown in my direction, as though daring me to bring up his abilities again. When I didn’t, Dominguez continued. “Sebastian was the target all along. They kidnapped you to use as bait. I couldn’t be certain until Smythe went on his little rant about demons. Their organization uses Marxism and the Illuminati bull as a front to hide their real mission. I only started to suspect—”
“When you read his mind?”
“Before that,” Dominguez continued, for once letting one of my references to his psychic abilities slide. “I started to suspect their real focus when I noticed that their website was running a huge campaign to keep certain anti-occult laws on the books in Australia. Knowing what I do about you and your friends, it got me thinking.”
“See, all that secret stuff came in handy for once.”
He leaned his chin against his knuckles dejectedly. “Yeah, although the funny part is the conspiracy theory stuff plays better at headquarters.”
“Even with your partner, the faerie queen? Where is your partner, by the way?”
“My partner the what?”
“Stop acting like you can’t hear me. I asked where Francine, Queen of the Faerie Folk, is.”
“What? I know she’s a tough woman, but she’s not gay.”
I gave up trying to make him accept the truth.
He removed a fork and a knife from a pebbled plastic cupful of utensils. He lined them up neatly on the table, and he glanced at the grill hopefully. “I’m off the clock. A friend of mine on the force told me you’d been kidnapped, and I promised to always look after you.”
It was true, though he’d said so, I’d thought, under the influence of a love spell. Too bad Larkin didn’t feel similarly protective. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I’d managed to break the one with Dominguez, while Larkin’s had been festering on for years.
While thinking, I’d been arranging the little plastic containers of jam in their four-slot holder. I looked up to see Dominguez watching me with a thoughtful expression.
“I’d never hold you to a promise like that,” I said.
“I know,” he replied, but he was still looking at me like he’d take a bullet for me.
Looking into his puppy-dog eyes, I made a solemn vow that I’d never cast another love spell again. And I still had to make right one other mistake. “You know, I should probably tell you that I cast a spell on Larkin. A love spell . . .” I reorganized the jellies again, not willing to meet his eyes. “I think, you know, maybe more than the vampire thing or the Illuminati, maybe he’s motivated by a kind of romantic revenge.”
“Revenge?” Dominguez gave a little smile. “That’s not what I was feeling.”
I glanced up only long enough to see that he had a very wicked smile on his face.
“Yeah, well, I’m a better person now than I was with Larkin.” Better now since I had Lilith? Huh, that was an interesting thought. “Oh!” That reminded me. “I need to call William. I promised.”
Dominguez didn’t seem concerned one way or the other, so I took out my phone. William answered right away. After exchanging the usual hellos and pleasantries, I put my hand over the mouthpiece and asked, “Can they join us here?” At his deep, scowling frown, I quickly added, “They could help with the whole magic thing.”
“What magic?” William asked on the line.
“Fine,” Dominguez said with a tone that implied he actually thought little of the idea but couldn’t think of a good reason to deny me.
“Great!” I said cheerfully, and then explained to William that he and Mátyás could meet Dominguez and me at the cafe.
“No Sebastian?” William asked.
“Not yet,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “He’ll be okay. He’s got people coming.”
When I hung up, a waiter had finally appeared. He was college aged and sandy haired. Tall and athletic, he wore baggy pants and an unbuttoned lumberjack plaid shirt that opened to show off a clean, white undershirt. He smiled at me in a way that made me think he found me kind of cute. “What’s your order, hon?”
“Uh, eggs? Over easy and some toast.”
“Good choice,” he said, showing off deep dimples.
Was he flirting with me? I twiddled my ring finger a bit, hoping the gold band would catch his eye.
Dominguez sensed the flirting too. In fact, he sounded angry about his choice when he said, “I’m having the number six.”
I watched the waiter head off to turn in our order. “He’s sweet,” I told Dominguez.
Leaning in conspiratorially, Dominguez whispered, “And probably sympathetic to your kidnappers. There’s a reason we came here.”
Were all the vampire hunters/Illuminati/kidnappers vaguely sweet looking? I sighed. When I returned my attention to the table, Dominguez was holding back a smirk. “You don’t have to be so pleased about bursting my bubble, you know.”
“I do, actually,” he said. “It’s karma for the love potion.”
I blushed all over again, remembering Dominguez half naked in his car, desperate to have sex with me while under the spell. He even asked me to marry him. “Have I apologized for that?”
“Not nearly enough,” he said with a sly smile that one could interpret as flirtatious.
“Anything I can do to make up for it?” I said, batting my eyes in mock innocence.
He coughed a bit in discomfort and then said, “Catching the kidnappers would be a good start.”
I nodded in agreement. The hospital bracelet caught on the edge of my sleeve when I shifted my arm. As I tried to slip it over my hand, the plastic stretched tightly but refused to break. Dominguez cleared his throat. When I glanced up, he deposited a bright red Swiss Army knife on the table in front of me. It was the deluxe model with the toothpick.
“Somehow I knew you’d have one of these.” I found the scissors and used my fingernail to pry it out. One snip and I was free of the plastic. My full name was printed on the band: Garnet Lynn Lacey. “They had to check to see if I’d been raped,” I said quietly, turning the plastic over and over in my hand. “It was really scary. How could someone you thought you knew be so different?”
“I’m not sure you can ever really know someone,” Dominguez said after a moment. “Everybody has a dark side. Some just keep theirs better hidden.”
My first impulse was to deny it, but not only had Larkin’s willingness to drug and abduct me gone against my desire to want to think the best of everyone, I’d also been made aware of all the skeletons in my own closet.
The big one, of course, was the Vatican witch hunters I’d had Lilith kill in self-defense. Just being in this town brought back that horrible night, and its ghosts lingered in every familiar landmark.
But in a strange way, I felt much, much worse about how I’d treated Larkin. I stole him from his longtime girlfriend, and then, when he didn’t turn out to be all I’d hoped for, I kicked him to the curb without so much as a backward glance.
Then I didn’t even remember to release him from the love spell. Or the name of my boyfriend at the time.
At least with the witch hunters, if I did enough mental gymnastics, I could see how my actions had been justified. It was kill or be killed. But Larkin? I had no excuse for that behavior.
And, at the time, it didn’t even faze me, you know? Until I saw him again, he probably wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.
“But just because we have demons, doesn’t mean we have to act like one, does it?” I asked, though in my mind the answer was clear.
“No,” Dominguez said as he folded the edges of his napkin. “We have to rise to our better angels.”
The question was, could I do that when I was merged with Lilith? Or had I made the wrong choice, after all?
The bell on the door clanged, and in walked William followed by Mátyás. Their presence instantly doubled the weird in the room; I no longer was the oddest person out.
A more unlikely pair you could hardly imagine. William’s short, spiky blond hair stuck up artfully, and round Radar O’Reilly glasses perched on the tip of his nose. William had trouble picking a pantheon in his various attempts to find the One True Path, and currently he was Pictish with a touch of the Fellowship of Isis. Under a lined leather jacket, I could see a silver chain with an ankh.
Standing next to him, looking a little baffled and a bit disgusted by the greasiness of the greasy spoon, was Mátyás. Thanks to an infusion of Sebastian’s blood, once Mátyás hit puberty he’d aged incredibly slowly. He’d been stuck as a kind of perpetual teenager, which didn’t make him particularly happy, so, as a bonus, he’d had more than a century to get that sullen thing down pat. He wore his black hair long and stylishly mussed. Ethnically, he was part Romany, and, possibly as a nod to that, he tended toward Euro-trash fashion. Slacks, shiny, snow-covered shoes, a heavy black knit sweater, and secondhand opera coat. It was a look that this place had never seen, I’d bet.
The waiter was eyeing them both suspiciously just as I waved them over. He exchanged a look with Dominguez that seemed to say, “Okay, but they’re your responsibility,” and then went back to reading the textbook he had laid out on the empty counter.
I stood up and accepted an enthusiastic hug from William and an awkward maybe-we-should-shake-hands-no-how-about-we-just-acknowledge-each-other-with-a-nod from Mátyás.
Dominguez then offered his hand to shake. “This is Special Agent Gabriel Dominguez of the FBI,” I said. William smiled and took his hand just as eagerly as he had hugged me.
Mátyás did so a bit more reluctantly and with a glance at me. “FBI?”
“Don’t you watch TV?” William asked Mátyás, scooting in next to a briefly flustered Dominguez, who quickly moved his coat to make room. “The Feds always handle kidnapping cases.”
Mátyás settled next to me somewhat gingerly, like he didn’t want to risk staining the opera coat. To me, he said, “Your love bite is showing, dear Stepmother.”
My hand flew to where Sebastian had nipped indelicately on me. I should really get a bandage. Every once in a while an edge of torn skin would catch on the tag of my sweater and sting.
William squinted, as if struggling to see between my fingers. “Did Sebastian do that?”
“He didn’t mean to,” I said, and then stopped, feeling a blush heat up my cheeks. Whenever I defended Sebastian’s occasional animal violence, I ended up sounding like some kind of battered wife. I hated that. So I diverted the conversation quickly. “He lost a lot of blood after he got staked in the heart.”
“Staked?” Mátyás was horrified.
“That doesn’t kill him,” William reminded everyone. “It just transfixes him.”
“I know what kills a vampire, William,” Mátyás sneered.
Dominguez raised his hands to stop the fight that clearly seemed to be brewing between the two boys. “Just so you know, everyone in this restaurant is listening right now. We should talk about something normal.”
“How about them Packers?” I offered. It was a standard joke among my Wisconsin friends to blurt out that phrase whenever things got strained or awkward.
But no one laughed nor really knew what to say next. Luckily, the waiter delivered some biscuits and gravy for Dominguez and eggs and toast for me. The boys declined to order until they’d had a chance to read the menu.
The silence stretched on until William finally broke it. “You know Mátyás and Izzy broke up.”
“What?” I was really shocked. Mátyás and my friend Izzy had been dating for months now. Last time I talked to Izzy everything was going great. She told me with far too much enthusiasm how much fun they had in bed together. Of course, all that had been before my wedding, and I hadn’t really checked in with her since. “What happened?”
Mátyás shot me a dark look. With an imploring glance at Dominguez, he asked, “Can we go back to vampires now?”
“No,” Dominguez said forcefully.
“They had a big fight just before we left,” William said. “He told me all about it on the drive up. I guess, you know, Izzy has some problems with . . . well, no offense, man, but you do sometimes look sixteen. Ow!” William rubbed his leg where Mátyás had kicked it under the table.
“Can I visit Papa in jail? Will they let me?” Mátyás asked Dominguez.
“I don’t see why not,” he said.
“I guess it had been brewing for a while,” William continued to me. “They get a lot of hassle in the clubs. He’s always getting carded, aren’t you, dude?”
“Is it physically impossible for you to keep a secret, William?” Mátyás asked. The booth echoed hollowly with another kick. William had apparently tucked
his feet up.
“She’s going to hear it from Izzy. Don’t you want to have a preemptive strike?”
“I don’t really want to deal with it at all, okay?” Mátyás admitted, and now I knew he was really crushed by the breakup because he wasn’t snotty or flippant at all. Even though it was weird for my now stepson to be dating my best friend, I did think they were a cute couple. I’d had no idea Mátyás got so hassled about his apparent age, but, when I thought about it, Izzy did look like she was dating jailbait sometimes.
“Oh, Mátyás,” I said sympathetically. Momentarily forgetting what might happen, I patted him on the back. He cringed; I flinched.
And then I saw that the bogeyman had a beautiful, if treacherous, soul.
His face blossomed into a thousand flowers, shoots growing and twisting until they became the soft features of a woman. Her lips were truly rosebuds, and her skin bright white lilies. A dark cascade of woodland violets and so-purple-they-were-almost-black pansies formed the curly locks that flowed past her shoulders. I remembered the story of Blodewedd, whom Irish druids formed out of flowers and magicked to life in order to wed her to a chieftain cursed to never be king because he couldn’t take a human wife. After their wedding, Blodewedd eventually betrayed the king with another man, Guinevere-style, and then successfully plotted to kill him.
That last part was maybe a little troubling given Mátyás’s penchant for taking sides against his father and me.
I wondered if I should warn Sebastian about this, or if I should follow my own advice. After all, I’d told Dominguez not two minutes ago that we didn’t have to be the demon we had inside.
When I blinked, Mátyás was himself again and everyone was staring at me. I cleared my throat. “So, uh, I’ve got something that will distract you from your heartache,” I said. “Dominguez needs me to do some magic, and I know just the thing.”
“Yeah,” said William. “I read up on Goddess banishing for you.”
“Oh, great!” I’d actually been thinking about reversing the love spell on Larkin, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the history of all that with William and Mátyás. I mean, I didn’t want them to necessarily know what a cad I’d been. William might think less of me and I couldn’t bear that. And, well, honestly, Mátyás would just use it against me next time we fought.
Honeymoon of the Dead Page 19