Honeymoon of the Dead (18 page)

Despite the question, I knew there was no avoiding answering, whether I wanted to or not.

“I guess I was kidnapped.” I thought about adding the part where I figured that the boys who had me were part of an organization that believed my husband masterminded the course of human history, but I’ve also learned that when dealing with the law, the smarter course of action was to say as little as possible.

“Kidnapped?” The cop repeated somewhat skeptically. Over the bridge of her small, pug nose, she observed me critically. “I thought this was a case of . . . didn’t the doctor say you had the Rohypnol in your system? Usually that involves someone you might have met at a bar or possibly someone you know?”

“Larkin,” I said. “Larkin”—oh, crap, what was his last name?—“Eshleman?”

I gave her a description then, too, a damn fine accurate one, because I was mad at Larkin for scaring me with this whole date-rape thing.

“Do you have any idea why someone would try to kidnap you?”

“Ransom. My husband has a lot of money,” I said, again sticking with the simple and leaving out the conspiracy theories and vampirism. “We’re from out of town. Here for our honeymoon.”

For the first time, the cop took a notebook from the pocket of her jacket. She wrote something down, nodding to herself. “What’s your husband’s name?”

“Sebastian Von Traum,” I said, and then spelled his last name at her request.

She looked at me a little disappointed, as though perhaps she’d been hoping I’d say a name she’d recognize as famous. I fought the urge to explain that there were a lot of people of influence she’d probably never heard of out there, and, anyway, that was no reason to get that dismissive look in her eyes.

“If this really is a kidnapping, it’s a matter for the FBI.” She tucked her notebook away, like she’d already solved the case.

“Oh, good,” I said mostly to myself, since she’d started to leave. “I’d feel better with Dominguez on things.”

She stopped midturn. “Are you referring to Special Agent Gabriel Dominguez? How do you know him? Are you friends?”

I couldn’t exactly say he was a friend and had no desire to tell her I’d been investigated before, but . . . “Yeah.”

She nodded and gave me a sincere smile. “He’s a good guy. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“Thank you,” I said and really meant it.

A curt nod and she was gone.

 

 

The rest of the night I spent intermittently snoozing
and staring at the frost-laced window and wondering exactly how one got rid of a Goddess that didn’t want to leave. And could I even do it? After Coyote tried to steal Lilith, She’d bonded to me in a new and powerful way. Would having another Goddess waiting in the wings be enough to break that bond?

After an hour or two, my roommate got wheeled out for tests and I had the place to myself. I briefly switched on the TV, but I found it more disturbing than restful. Between the drugs and not having owned a television for several years, I found myself much more sensitive to the jerky, fast motion of the whole experience. When I started to feel dizzy, I switched it off.

At some point I must have fallen asleep because I dreamed of the bogeyman.

 

 

 

 

 

It was spring; the birds chirped as I watered my collec
tion of potted herbs. I sat on the front porch of my old duplex. A darkness prowled just beyond my sight, in a deep, coniferous forest that suddenly sprung up in my front yard in that way of things in dreams. At first, I thought it was a wolf stalking me, but then I caught sight of a tattered black trench coat and a down-swept, wide-brimmed hat. A feral, sawtooth smile materialized, Cheshire cat-like, from the inky gloom.

“Oh, hi, Mátyás,” I said with a happy wave.

The bogeyman waved back. “Hey, Garnet.”

Sebastian’s son is not only a half-vampire, slowly aging teenager, but he’s also a dream-walker. His Romany relatives call him something in their language that translates roughly to “moon thief.” Anyway, since most people’s subconscious registers his presence as a threat, he appears as that guy you’re always running from in your dreams—the bogeyman.

Mátyás leaned on the porch railing. Closer, he was no less frightening. Considering he was sort of an average- looking kid in the real world, his dream persona was deeply disturbing. His teeth were like uneven blades and his eyes were dark, empty pits. Under the hat, his hair flowed wildly, as if constantly tangled by an unseen wind.

“It’s sweet of you to check up on me,” I teased. A glass of lemonade appeared in my hand and I offered it to him.

When he took it, the liquid changed black and viscous. He sniffed it and recoiled. “Childhood trauma involving poison, Dr. Freud?” he asked, setting the cup down on the nightstand of the hospital bed.

I lay in a coffin that was propped up against the wall. “Uh, sorry,” I said stepping out of it and brushing the spiderwebs from my shroud. “I must be more freaked about being in the hospital than I realized.”

“Hospital?”

“Yeah, after the kidnapping.”

Mátyás opened his mouth to say something more, but a shake of my shoulder fragmented his image, until it fell like shattered glass into wakefulness.

“Garnet?”

Sebastian had arrived with a huge bouquet of red roses. Blinking away the sleep, I accepted the flowers and a kiss gratefully.

“I just saw Mátyás,” I said between yawns.

He nodded but didn’t seem terribly surprised. Mátyás was especially drawn to haunt friends and family. “I would have brought some coffee but the doctors told me it might upset your stomach,” he said, pulling up a metal chair with a beige vinyl seat. Finding my hand, he took it. His thumb caressed my knuckles. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I’m so sorry we fought.”

“Me too.”

My roommate never returned, I noticed. She must have requested a room in the non-fugitive-from-justice wing. He glanced around the room with the look of someone who loathed spending time in hospitals. I couldn’t agree more. Maybe now that he was here, I could be discharged.

“I can’t believe you’re in the hospital. How did this happen? Where was Lilith?”

So now he wanted Her in my life?

I could sense real concern in his expression, like it suddenly occurred to him that he might have to worry about me a lot more if I somehow had lost Lilith. “Lilith isn’t everything, you know,” I said. I didn’t want to admit how much this whole thing with Larkin scared me too. “I could take care of myself.”

Sebastian snorted a little oh-sure-you-can laugh. “I’m just as glad you have a Goddess at your beck and call, what with all the trouble you seem to find or, perhaps more accurately,
make
.” His smile broadened. Before I could get defensive, he added, “Do you know what Courtney told me? She said you’re the reason people get lost in the Lake of the Isles neighborhood. It’s not drunken Irishmen—it’s the entire troop of faerie folk you accidentally loosed in a park one Imbolc.”

Oh, that.

“Haven’t they caught them all yet?”

“Apparently not,” Sebastian said with a note of deep amusement.

I rubbed my head, trying to hide my embarrassment. Look, I was a young witch. How was I supposed to know faerie magic wasn’t just happy pixies and such? “I didn’t have Lilith then,” I pointed out. “And I got along just fine.”

Now Sebastian laughed in earnest. “That’s one way of putting it.”

I frowned at the bouquet of roses in my hands, my shoulders slumping against the hard back of the hospital bed. “I’m not like that anymore.” I stopped myself when I caught Sebastian’s eye. He looked more than ready to make a list of all the various magical mishaps we’d had over the years, as though all the zombies and trolls and monkeys were my fault. I quickly added, “And anyway, I could change my ways. I could be, you know, more responsible.”

“Yes, and what would be the fun in that,” Sebastian said.

“Hello? Weren’t you the one complaining about what Lilith did to the room?”

“Oh, this is about Lilith. I thought we were talking about you. I mean if you’re trying to make a point about how well you can take care of yourself without Lilith, you should never have left me alone with Courtney. She had a lot of tales to tell about you—including the one about the genie.”

It was my turn to be the annoying know- it-all. “Singular is
djinn
, and that was not entirely my fault.”

I pouted for a moment and Sebastian just smiled at me. But after a moment his grin faded.

“I still don’t know how you ended up here,” he said. “What happened?”

“Didn’t the doctor tell you? Larkin slipped me that date-rape drug—what’s it called?”

The color drained from Sebastian’s already pale face. “Rohypnol.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Although the doctor said the toxicology test came back with a whole bunch of other stuff and he figured I nearly OD’d because I completely passed out, which isn’t supposed to happen quite like that or something, I don’t know.” I smiled in that grim sort of if-I-didn’t-laugh-I’d-have-to-cry way.

Sebastian stood up slowly, deliberately. His face looked hard as stone. “Did he . . . ?”

I put up a hand to reassure him. “Oh! Oh no, nothing like that. I guess they just wanted to kidnap me, you know, for a ransom.”

“Did the doctors do a test? I mean, do you know for sure?”

“Yes, they did. I’m okay.”

“Okay? Jesus Christ, Garnet,” Sebastian exploded. “Why didn’t you tell me this right away? Why didn’t the doctors tell me? Or the cops? Although that explains that ‘poor bastard’ look they were giving me. My God, all this time I had no idea. And who the hell is Larkin?”

I didn’t take much stock in Sebastian’s rant. I totally understood where it came from. I was scared too when I first heard. But in my experience guys don’t really like it when you point out that they’re afraid of something, so I said, “Larkin is the guy who invited us to the full- moon ritual today or, I mean, last night.” Hospitals always messed with my sense of time. “The guy I stole from his girlfriend. When I was dating someone else,” I added that last part quietly.

Sebastian either didn’t care or didn’t notice my confession. “That guy? He came to the hotel? Where was I?”

“Upstairs dealing with the room,” I explained. “I went down to swim, remember?”

As if all the air had been knocked out of him, Sebastian sat down in the chair. “So this is my fault.”

My hand went to his shoulder. “No, of course not, honey,” I said.

He looked up at my unusual term of endearment; it had slipped out, but it felt right.

“If anything had happened to you—” he started.

I put my finger on his lips to stop him. “But it didn’t,” I reminded him. “Anyway, if I hadn’t trashed the room—”

“Lilith trashed the room,” Sebastian interrupted. “And She never would have done if Homeland Security hadn’t taken me away, which I suspect is all the fault of James Something and his goddamn Illuminati Watchers.”

“Because someone had to tip off Homeland Security, right?”

“Right. My cover is airtight. Austria makes certain of that. Only the conspiracy freaks think differently. I think James lied to you about his affiliations. He’s no knight, except in his mind.”

“Do you think Larkin is working with them? If the plan was to kidnap me, could it be part of whatever they want to do to discredit you?”

“I don’t know,” Sebastian said grimly, but I got the sense he was well motivated to find out.

“Just don’t . . . you know. I used to like Larkin.”

Sebastian’s mouth opened, and he had a kind of horrified look on his face. “You can’t be serious. That bastard could have raped you.”

“I put a love spell on him to get him into bed. I’m fairly certain I never undid it before I left town. Maybe he’s still under the spell.”

“That is no excuse,” Sebastian said firmly.

“But he didn’t do anything, and we don’t know that he was ever intending anything like that. All I heard from those guys was ransom this and their master that.”

“Guys?”

Oops. Had I neglected to tell Sebastian there had been more than one of them?

“Well, I thought they might be the same ones that tried to jump me in the parking lot.”

“I thought this happened at the pool.”

“The bar, actually, but, um—”

That’s when a nurse came in to check on me. Sebastian introduced himself as my husband and quizzed her on all sorts of technical bits that had the nurse asking him if he was a doctor. He mumbled something about having studied medicine in Europe, but if she could just check on such and such. She promised to do all that and told me that I should be able to leave once the medicine had a chance to work.