Companions (22 page)

"The what?"

"Lo, though I walk through valley of the shadow I will fear no evil, for I'm the meanest mother in
the valley,"
she quoted. "Haven't you ever heard that? Where were you in the sixties?"

"On tour, mostly, with the Dead. Where were you in the sixties?"

"I wasn't born yet. It's a saying on a poster my dad had in the basement. So, pretty little Valentia whomped you, did she? Wow."

"I was certainly impressed. Of course, I've always had a weakness for strong women. She could have taken my heart, but she patted me on the cheek instead and told me I was really a good boy, and she was sorry for what they'd done to me."

"Well, there's a radical new approach to monster slaying."

"You're mocking me, aren't you?"

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She settled back next to him, leaning in the crook of his arm. Clapton and B. B. King played on. "How can you tell?"

"I have superpowers. Though the night I met Valentia, I discovered that there was one stronger than I.

She claimed to be the mother of all hunters, but she was retired except for special occasions."

"Were you flattered?"

"I wanted to fight like a demon, but she was so — "

"Masterful?"

"Sweet." He shuddered as he said it.

Selena found it very hard to think of a vampire as
sweet,
and had a feeling it was even more difficult for evil ol' Istvan to embrace the concept, considering his opinion of his species as a whole. She also wondered if he'd embraced this sweet little Valentia, him being so fond of strong women and all, but told herself to can the jealousy routine.

"We didn't have sex."

"I
wasn't
going to ask."

"But you wanted to. And did I
want
to have sex with Valentia? No. It would have been… sacrilegious."

She could tell he didn't like that any more than he liked liking the old vampire who'd subdued him. He liked his opinion of vampires to remain low. "She was a goddess, was she?"

His response to that was an uncomfortable silence.

Selena ventured, "Was she the goddess they worship?"

"She said not," he answered grudgingly. "She called herself a servant of the goddess. Said she hadn't come to kill me or tame me, merely to talk some sense into me." He gave a faint, breathy laugh. "She gave me a lecture, all the while holding me down on the damp spring ground. To this day, I recall the feel of the cushion of pine needles under me and the smell of the earth waking from the cold. There were high clouds that night, driven across a half moon by a fast wind. I watched the shadows cross the light while she talked."

His memory was so vivid Selena was almost there. This time, though, she managed to avoid falling into him. She wasn't ready for another bout of shared consciousness after their flashing together on Rosho's rape, even if Steve's evening with Valentia sounded really interesting. "What did she say, this handmaiden of the goddess, to convince you to stop killing vampires?" He gave her a sardonic look, one that included a raised eyebrow. She'd always envied people who could manage that sneery single eyebrow tilt thing.

"She didn't try to change my habits, just to moderate them a bit. Her argument had nothing to do with the Laws, or duty to the Nighthawk line, or anything else I didn't give a damn about at the time. What she appealed to was self-interest on the most basic level. She pointed out that killing all the vampires in the world would seriously affect my own ability to survive."

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"How'd it do that?"

"Nothing to eat."

Selena's stomach lurched. "Right." Enforcers were cops who got paid in corpses. She bet this aspect of the job had led to some interesting corruption cases among the Nighthawk constabulary over the centuries.

"The legend about vampires being unable to commit suicide is no legend. Valentia told me that it was part of the curse put on strigoi by the goddess they offended. I already knew that I couldn't die by my own hand. I'd tried a few times. Or, I tried to try."

"That must have been frustrating."

"Very. Valentia added the bad news that even if I destroyed every vampire in the world, I wouldn't have starved to death," Steve went on. "Though I would certainly have starved. A very unpleasant way to spend eternity. She convinced me that I'd go mad and take out the endless craving to hunt on all of humanity. Countless mortals would die in terror, and I'd get no satisfaction. The picture she painted terrified me."

"For which the mortal world is grateful."

"Except that vampires continue to hunt and enslave mortals. I sometimes wonder if the trade-off was worth it. Either way, monsters remain loose in the world."

"You would have been lonely," Selena pointed out, for some reason defending the strigoi lifestyle. "If nothing else, you wouldn't have had anyone to hate but yourself anymore."

"Valentia used similar arguments. She also claimed I'd eventually give in and make more vampires just so I'd have something to hunt. The prospect she painted of me devouring my own children was quite horrific, even though I vowed I would never give in to the temptation. She was quite a missionary," he said and sighed. "She stayed with me for a long time. Eventually, she got me to respect and enforce the Laws. And, unfortunately," he added before she could ask, "Rosho is very good about living to the letter of the Laws of the Blood. Pity I didn't find him before Valentia found me."

"Bummer," she agreed.

They settled into a few minutes of companionable silence, letting guitar music be the only sound in the room. Selena absorbed everything Steve had told her and took a look at the information from her own perspective and experiences. True, there were a lot of things about strigoi history, society, customs, and culture of which she was ignorant. She'd only heard about Blessing Day from one of her on-line companion friends and about the lost vampire city and the origin of the nest coins from Steve. There was much about the strigoi of which she was unaware. But this Valentia, this mother of hunters, servant of the goddess chick…! There might be a lot of things Selena didn't know, but the child of an Irish Traveler clan of charlatans and scam artists knew a fellow scam artist when she heard of one. "And you call yourself a Roma boy," she murmured low in Steve's ear, and patted him on the thigh.

"What?" he asked, suddenly wary and suspicious.

Selena shifted on the couch so she could look him in the face. "Valentia pulled a
bujo
on you, my friend, a con. Damn good one, too." Selena shrugged. "Maybe she believed it herself."

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He did not look pleased at her disparaging his Enforcer mentor. "I don't know what you mean. I don't want to," he added warningly.

Selena wasn't likely to let a little thing like her lord and master's displeasure stop her. "Valentia's interest was in restoring the status quo and keeping things the way they'd always been. By bringing you into the fold, she used you to help reinforce the same old vampire class structure you were living with then and we're stuck with today." Selena took a deep breath. "Don't you see that?"

"No."

"Well…" She put her hands on her hips. "Why not?"

"I am
dhamphir. I
live outside vampire society."

She sprang to her feet. "You
were
a
dhamphir!
You were turned into a vampire. You
are
a vampire. Get over it!" she added, realized she was shouting, and added with less stridency, "If you accept that you're a vampire, you'll have to stop hating them and then you can start fixing what's wrong with the whole bloody mess!"

He rose slowly to his feet, eyes narrowed very dangerously. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't want to know. Even more importantly, I don't think you want to say another word."

"You could rule the vampires, you know."

"The Council rules."

"Only because
you
let them. You're not some ignorant peasant at the beck and call of the nobles anymore, you know."

"I'm aware of that."

"Are you? Deep down, don't you still see yourself that way? How many times do I have to tell you that you're in America now?"

"Land of the free?" he asked, with a very dangerous edge to his voice. His eyes looked like a pair of blue ice chips.

"Land of opportunity," she asserted. She knew preaching revolution at the Enforcer was a very dangerous thing, but if she could just get him thinking, the risk might pay off in the long run. "Land of possibilities. Oh, hell, Steve, never mind America. Everything is changing everywhere in the world."

"Not among the strigoi. Vampires do not change."

"Every society changes. Think about that, please. You pointed out a couple changes they've made to the Laws, yourself. Don't tell me there isn't room for change over time. You're the one to do it. You could even overthrow the Council if you wanted to."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Or does this Valentia rule the Council?"

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"She rejects the Council." His icy anger didn't hide his chagrin at revealing that tidbit to her.

"Can you do that?"

"Technically, no," he admitted. "But she is who she is."

"And you're the — "

"Meanest mother in the valley?" Pissed off as he was, he still smirked.

"Precisely."

"This conversation is over." He looked around the living room and sighed. Selena didn't like the sound of it. "It's all over." The lights in the room seemed to dim as though a chilling, dark fog swirled in from the night.

The phone rang before she could ask him what he meant by it. At first she glanced at the telephone on the end table as though it were an annoying bug she was ready to smash, but compulsion drove her to turn away from the Steve's sudden melancholy and pick up the handset on the second ring. "Aunt Catie, are you using magic?"

"It was the only way to get your attention. Are you all right? We've been trying to get hold of you all day.

Where have you been?"

"I've been home." Selena spoke through gritted teeth. This really was no time to get interrupted. "I've been busy."

"Are you sure you haven't been in trouble? Your cousin Paloma had an awful dream, and when I did a reading — "

"Aunt Catie… I have… company." Selena spoke slowly and distinctly.

There was a significant pause, and then she said, "Oh? Oh. Oh!" Followed swiftly by a brightly curious,

"Really?"

The only response Selena could make to this was to hang up. She was half frustrated and half amused when she turned back around. "So I have an overprotective family. Be glad you don't — "

But Steve was gone. Vanished. Disappeared, and she hadn't felt him go. She felt it now, as the emptiness of being without his presence welled up in her companion's loving soul. Not that she was going to let a little thing like complete emotional devastation get the better of her. "Coward!" she yelled to the empty room. "Chicken! Come back here and fight like a vampire!"

Somewhere out of her sight, he might hear her taunts, but she knew he wouldn't come back. He was on his way out of Chicago, out of her life. It might be another two years before she saw him. She knew he'd try to make it forever. Did he care about how rough that was going to be on both of them? Some men really had a fear of commitment. They'd shared a brief interlude of bonded bliss, but he'd fought his way out of the shared addiction, thrown it off, and thrown himself out into the night to pursue that damned lone-wolf-against-the-world lifestyle he was bound and determined to wallow in. Maybe tomorrow she'd be glad he'd found the strength to go away.

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"Fine," she grumbled and kicked the leg of the couch a few times. She wiped away the sudden flood of tears. She added, in a choked and sobbing whisper, "It's easier to run a revolution without you around, anyway. But I'll think about that tomorrow," she added and settled down for a good, long, heartbroken wail.

"Because sometimes a guitar is just a guitar."

"That's not funny."

"It's a joke."

"No, it isn't"

"I thought you liked rock and roll."

"What does that have to do with that not being a joke? "

The band started playing the "Hokey Pokey" while Selena and Uncle Gary continued to argue
over the nature of humor. The crowd shifted around them, and the scent of lilacs and gardenias
filled the air. Someone handed her a silver cup of red punch. The bride danced by, dressed all in
red, her arms around the shoulders of the Klingons dancing in the hokey pokey line on either side
of her.

Strange dream,
Selena thought, and took a sip of the blood. It was too cold. What idiot had put the
blood on ice?

"We certainly don't do it that way at home."

"Then you, sir, come from a civilized
— "

She turned around, and there was Rosho. Pale. Handsome. Fanged. Wearing a tuxedo.

"Typical," she muttered.

He held out a pale, long-fingered hand. She noted the blood under his nails. "Shall we dance?"

Selena had never been happier to hear the alarm clock go off. Only through the dissipating fog of the dream she couldn't remember why she'd set an alarm for two-thirty in the morning. Where was she supposed to be? Midnight shift? Stakeout? Her mind was weighed down with despair, and her body felt as inert as lead. What difference did it make if she was anywhere or not? Everything was equally lifeless in her so-called life.