In the Company of Vampires do-9 Read online

  “I’ve had those sessions in the privy,” Isleif said, obviously settling back to indulge in a few scatological anecdotes.

  Before he could do so, I raised a hand. “Stop. The moving of bowels is also on the list of things we don’t talk about.”

  He stared at me for a moment in utter bewilderment, and was clearly going to ask why, when Finnvid said, “My fourth wife forbid me to talk about shite. Perhaps the virgin goddess is like her.”

  I closed my eyes. To my left, I heard the noise of chairs scraping and people leaving hurriedly. I prayed the café owner was not watching.

  “I knew a woman like that, as well,” Eirik said, sitting next to me. “She liked me to write her name in the snow, though.”

  “What weapons did you buy?” I said, giving great deliberation to the words.

  Eirik shot a glare at Finnvid.

  “Why do you look such at me?” Finnvid answered the look, pulling his bags a little closer. “It could have been Isleif who told her about the Walther P38s.”

  “Walthers?” I searched my memory. I wasn’t too hip on weapons, but those sounded familiar. “Aren’t those guns? You bought guns?”

  “We needed them. We saw Nori.”

  “You saw Nori. We did not,” Isleif said, pouring about half the ale down his throat. He belched so loud I swear my hair fluttered.

  The people behind him left. Quickly.

  “You think I would mistake Nori? I am not so foolish.” Eirik turned from the Vikings to reassure me. “It was Nori.”

  “Who’s Nori? And why do you need a gun just because he’s here? I thought we agreed knives would be perfectly fine.”

  “You agreed,” Eirik said. “You forbade us to pillage swords or axes, so we got crossbows instead.”

  “You got crossbows and Walther P38s?” I took a deep breath in order to better lecture them, but before I could, Isleif interrupted.

  “The Walthers are crossbows,” he said kindly, as if explaining something to an idiot.

  “They are?”

  “Aye.” All three Vikings nodded, and smacked their lips loudly as they downed their beer. “The man at the ninja shop told us they were very effective in stopping attackers. We will find a bowyer later to get the bolts for them.”

  “You need not worry, virgin goddess,” Eirik added, patting my hand. “We will protect you from Loki’s son.”

  “Nori?” I asked, relief swamping me when I realized they didn’t understand about the ammunition needed by modern guns.

  “Aye. He is tricky like his father. I saw him leaving the train station a few hours ago. If Nori is here, he is up to no good.”

  I frowned at the table as I mulled over a new thought. Could it be Loki’s son who swept my mother off her feet to some love nest, goddess only knew where? Or was it a coincidence that Nori was in town? I explained to the Vikings what Absinthe had seen in her vision.

  “I don’t know what to think. It’s all so confusing.” I rubbed my forehead. “Maybe we should talk to Nori, just to be on the safe side.”

  “We will search for him tonight,” Eirik said, putting on his white-framed sunglasses even though it was dark enough that streetlamps were starting to flicker on. “You will go back to the Faire?”

  “Yes, I have to go back to the Faire.” I would not think about Ben. I would not allow the misery that was now my life to spread to others. “If you get tired and want somewhere to sleep, you can use the chairs and my bed in my mom’s trailer. I’ll sleep in her bed.”

  They agreed to this plan, and since my appetite had gone at the memories I would not allow, I stood up to leave.

  “You forgot to give her the offering,” Isleif said, pointing to a bag at Finnvid’s feet.

  “Aye, give the virgin goddess the offering we have brought for her,” Eirik said.

  Finnvid dug through the bags until he held in his hands a shiny gold metal helm, crowned on either side with curved plastic horns. I stared at it for a moment before turning my gaze on the three delighted faces that beamed at me. “You got me a horned helmet?”

  “Is it not splendid? ” Finnvid asked, admiring it. “The man at the shop said that it is a Viking helm, although we have never seen one like it before, so it must be a ninja Viking helm. We thought you would like it, since you are our virgin goddess.”

  With reverence, he placed the helm on my head. I bit my lower lip, not wanting to hurt their feelings when they were so very pleased with their present. I started to take it off, saying, “I will treasure it always.”

  “You are removing it?” Isleif asked, his expression a little hurt.

  “Well . . . it’s so very pretty, and shiny, and . . . horny. I wouldn’t want someone to steal it from me if I were to wear it out on the street. Maybe you could give me the bag and I could carry it back to the Faire in that.”

  “Ah,” Eirik said, nodding. “That is smart thinking. It is a most attractive ninja Viking helm. Many people will want it.”

  I didn’t point out that just about everyone was wearing them. “Exactly. So I’ll just tuck it away safe and sound in this bag, and that way no one will know I have it.”

  “Until you get to the Faire,” Eirik prompted me. “Then you will wear it. It will be safe at the Faire.”

  “Er . . . yes. I will be safe wearing it there.” I heaved a mental sigh, but pointed out to myself that as easily distracted as they were, I probably wouldn’t have to wear it more than once or twice before they forgot about it.

  They escorted me to a cab, promising to pass along word about Nori should they find him again. I returned to the Faire with a heart filled with anguish, an empty stomach, and a historically inaccurate horned Viking helm.

  Somehow, that just seemed to sum up my life.

  Chapter 7

  “The little kindness is five euros, the bigger one is ten, and the do-it-yourself love charm kit is twenty-five.”

  “Oh, love charm is good, yes? We will take it,” one of the two young women who stood before me said in a charming German accent.

  I handed over the box and took her money. “Forgive my ignorance, but who are you dressed as?”

  The woman smoothed a hand down her floor-length black dress and matching belted waist cincher, pulling down from the top of her head a silver metal mask. “I am a death eater!”

  “So you are. Er . . . isn’t that from Harry Potter? Not a Wagnerian opera?”

  “Yes,” she said, pushing the mask up before waving to her friend. “Sabeine is Hermione.”

  “And a very good Hermione you are,” I told her, handing over the change and admiring her Hogwarts robes. “Enjoy your love charms.”

  The two women left, excitedly discussing whether to visit the wizard’s sanctum first or the aura photography booth. I eyed the table in front of me, mentally adding up the stock on it and the boxes of extras I’d found earlier. I had assumed that the items would last several days, but Peter hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that the town’s opera competition was sending the Faire lots of customers—center aisle was a solid mass of bodies, and I had done a roaring trade in just the hour we’d been open. I’d kept so busy I hadn’t had time to do more than twitch whenever a man of Ben’s general build and color walked past.

  “Fran!” A petite woman with long, curly blond hair and brilliant blue eyes darted around a small clutch of people and ran toward me. “It is you! I am so pleased to see you, but there is something I must tell you about Benedikt before you see him—”

  “Too late.” I smiled when she froze just as she was about to hug me, the delicate lines of her face unmoving. “Hello, Imogen. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has,” she said absently, her gaze searching my face. “You have seen Benedikt?”

  “Yes.” I set down the bottles of kindness, idly checking the lid on the tester my mother kept to show people how the potion worked. “I’ve seen him. And Naomi. Ben seemed surprised to see me. You didn’t tell him that I was coming?”

  “No,
I thought the surprise of seeing you might do him some good. Sort of a shock therapy, you know. Oh, Fran.” Remorse filled her eyes as she hugged me, waves of sympathy rolling off her. “I am so sorry. Benedikt is . . . I do not know what has happened to him. I have tried to talk to him about his decision. I have tried, you must believe me. But he will not listen to me. He will not speak with me. He avoids me, he will not even let me feed him anymore. It is as if he is bewitched by that . . . that . . .” She spat out a word I didn’t recognize, but assumed it wasn’t something I’d ever be saying. “But it is very hard to bespell a Dark One, and Naomi does not have that sort of power, so it cannot be that. My dearest Fran, I do not know what to say to you. I have let you down. I fear Benedikt is lost to us.”

  She hugged me again, and I patted her back, smiling a little at the fact that she was the one who needed comforting. “It’s okay, Imogen. You don’t have to cry. If Ben is lost to us, it’s my fault, not yours.”

  “That, I do not believe,” she said, pulling a lace handkerchief from her sleeve. Imogen was the only person I knew who liked nothing more than to spend a night clubbing, but who still used handkerchiefs. She’d told me once that she had seen a lot of things come and go over the more than three hundred years she had lived, but handkerchiefs were a constant in her life. “You are his Beloved! How he can spurn you this way is beyond my understanding. There has never been a Dark One who has done so. No, I tell a lie. There was one, a Frenchman, but that is an entirely different situation. He has a woman he took as his Beloved in the other’s place.”

  “Just when you think your heart can’t break any more,” I said wryly, the pain that lanced through me at her words now a familiar sensation.

  “Oh, Fran, no! I did not mean that!” She took my hands, her fingers tight on me, tight enough that I winced at the glass tester bottle I still held as it dug into my palm. “That Naomi, she is not the one for Benedikt. He could not have replaced you with her in his affections. He could not!”

  It sounded like she was trying to convince herself of that more than me.

  “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” I said, and would have bared my soul to her, but at that moment, the tattered remains of my heart clumped together just in order to fling itself around inside my chest. Imogen turned and swore under her breath as she looked with me to where a couple was strolling past the booth. My fingernails dug through my gloves into my palms. Naomi, catching sight of us, pulled Ben to a stop, and with deliberately slow motions reached up to first brush back a bit of hair off his forehead, then stroked her hand down his chest, wiggling her hips into his as she gazed up at him. “Benedikt, would you like something from the little witch’s booth? You don’t need a love potion, but perhaps something else? She looks like she could use the money.”

  Ben’s eyes were black as midnight as he looked over the top of Naomi’s head to me. I forced my face to adopt a placid, unruffled expression that I prayed conveyed no interest whatsoever in the fact that Naomi practically had her hands down his pants right there in front of everyone. He shook his head.

  “What’s that?” Naomi cooed. “You don’t want anything you see? Nothing whatsoever?”

  “Oh!” Imogen said, outraged by the show Naomi was putting on. “Benedikt, I insist that you stop this! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  Ben’s jaw flexed. He shook his head again.

  Naomi laughed and tossed back her hair before she put both hands on his butt and licked his chin. “On the contrary, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Darling, you are sure there’s nothing the witch has to offer that you want?”

  “No,” he answered, the word piercing me like an arrow. “There’s nothing there I want.”

  “I thought not,” Naomi said with a smile at him as she stroked his chest.

  “That . . . that . . . oh! I’m not going to stand for this!” Imogen said, starting forward, her hands fisted.

  “Why bother?” I said loud enough that my voice carried over the drone of the people packed in the main aisle. I held Ben’s gaze, proud that I could speak without so much as a tremor in my voice. I was angry now, both at myself and at him. While I had been the one who had broken things off, I had never flaunted myself with another man in front of Ben. I’d never told him how much I was looking forward to dating other men. I’d never allowed another man to fondle me in front of him.

  No, Inner Fran said bluntly. You just let the man believe you didn’t want him.

  I closed my eyes for a moment against the guilt that swamped me, fighting it and the pain until I could speak. “Don’t bother, Imogen. People have the right to make their own choices. Ben has made his.”

  Imogen spun around to stare openmouthed at me. “You’re not going to tell Benedikt what you think of this?”

  “I believe I made myself quite clear the last time we spoke.” I kept my eyes on Ben despite the pain of it all. It was a suitable penance. “I hope he knows that I’m . . .” I couldn’t say the word. I just couldn’t. My fingernails dug even further into my palms. “. . . happy he’s found someone.”

  Naomi turned a self-satisfied smirk on me as she rubbed her butt against Ben’s hip. “How very sweet. Come, lover. You can help me with the piercings tonight.”

  By the stars that lit up the night, I was going to keep my expression from showing Ben just how devastated I was or I was going to die trying. As Naomi walked past, pulling Ben by his arm, my fingers tightened until the vial of happiness broke, sending hot little spikes of pain into my flesh.

  “Son of a basket weaver,” I swore, opening my hand to find blood seeping through the gloves. Ben, almost beyond the booth, froze for a moment and glanced back at me, but Naomi jerked his arm, and with one last unreadable look, he followed.

  “Did you cut yourself?” Imogen exclaimed, hurrying over to pick tiny little fragments of glass from my hand.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. The oddest emotions were swirling around inside of me—fury and pain in a tight little core, all coated with happiness from the introduction of the potion into my bloodstream. “Yes, I did. Isn’t it glorious? Look! I’m bleeding all over the place! Ben has broken my heart, left me for another woman, and destroyed my entire life. It’s all so wonderful, I could dance!”

  And I did, severely hampering Imogen’s attempts to peel off my gloves in order to see how badly injured I was. It took a combination of her, Peter, and Kurt before they could get me to sit still long enough to clean up my hand. Three hours later I was still a bit giggly, although two pots of strong coffee and a measure of my own despair that would have dropped an elephant had helped work through most of the artificial happiness.

  “You’re sure you’ll be all right by yourself?” Imogen asked as she hesitated in the door of my mother’s trailer. “I worry about you being alone. Perhaps you could stay with me. Günter would not mind, I’m sure.”

  I had no doubt he’d mind very much, but I wasn’t about to say that. “I’ll be just fine here, thanks.”

  Imogen frowned. “Speaking of him, I wonder where he is? I haven’t seen him since this morning. I shall go look for him. You get some sleep, dear Fran. And about Benedikt . . .”

  Her expression said it all. I smiled wearily and waved her off before staggering to bed, where I lay tossing and turning for another couple of hours. I’d just fallen asleep when the weight of someone sitting on the edge of the bed had me grumbling, “Please, whichever one of you it is, not tonight. I’m really not up to randy Vikings.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that. How about a randy Dark One?”

  I rolled over and clicked on the light, my eyes already narrowed into a glare directed at the man who sat next to me, looking perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary, just as if he had a right to sit there and be so sexy, it made me want to rip off all his clothing and lick every inch of him. “You slimy, scummy strings of spit! How dare you come in here? How dare you sit there with your shirt open so I can see your chest? Get out! Go back to your precious Belo
ved.”

  “I am with my precious Beloved,” he said calmly, trying to take my hand.

  “Ow! Stop that, you’re hurting me,” I snapped, pulling my hand back. He shifted his grip to my wrist, slowly uncurling my fingers to reveal the bandages Imogen and Peter had applied.

  “You did cut yourself. I thought so.”

  “Take your hands off me, you slimy, scummy—”

  “Strings of spit, yes, I know. Nice alliteration, by the way. Stop fighting me, Francesca. I wish to see your injury. I won’t hurt you.”

  I stopped struggling with him at that, not because he had ordered me to do so, but because the sight of his head bent over my hand as he gently removed the bandages made a sob of misery catch painfully in my throat. “Why are you here?” I asked, my voice sounding thick with unshed tears.

  His fingertips softly caressed the lacerations on my palm and fingers, causing no pain but generating a heat that seemed to spread up my arm. “I had to come. I couldn’t stand the look in your eyes.”

  “Oh, you couldn’t? How thoughtful of you. I wonder that you didn’t think of that the second you jumped Naomi’s bones. How long was that after I broke things off, Ben? A month? A week? A couple of minutes?”

  He looked at me with an unreadable expression. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes. But only because . . .” My gaze dropped to where he was still holding my hand. A lump in my throat ached. “Only because I told you to go find someone else.”

  “I don’t recall you ever saying that.”

  “Not in so many words. But it’s usually what a breakup means.” Anguish caught on the lump in my throat, and I looked up at him, tears burning in my eyes. “I never so much as looked at another man.”

  “I know.”

  I stared at him in confusion as he brushed away one errant tear with his thumb. “How do you know?”

  He was silent for the count of five. “You are my Beloved, Francesca. No, do not get your hackles up. I’m not going to debate the wisdom of that, or the fact that you are bound to me without your consent. I am simply saying that you are my Beloved, and as such, I am responsible for your welfare. I know that you have seen no other men because I was told so.”