Necromancing Nim (14 page)

Colin nodded curtly. “Right. Only fair. Pieter’s a…special case. His bite has…side effects.”

A cold prickle of fear moved down my body. “What kind of side effects?”

“Putrefaction,” said Sebastian.

“What the hell is that?” Whatever it was, it didn’t sound good. I pressed the cold cloth harder against my neck, as if increasing the pain would help the wound heal. The sickening ache spread down into my chest.

“Rotting,” Sebastian clarified, still apologetic. I gave him a
what the fuck
look, and finally Colin told me what I wanted to know. Or, in this case, what I didn’t want to know.

“The bite rots you to death. And then you come back as a kind of a vampire zombie, whether or not he’s actually gone to the effort to turn you.”

“Oh, that’s just special. So he’s like the vampire version of a brown recluse?” The levity held off my panic for about half a second; then it crashed over me. “He turned Therese Wilkins, didn’t he? Is that what— So fix it. God, fix it. How do you fix it?”

“Take a breath, love,” said Sebastian. I had a sudden urge to brain him with my favorite cast-iron skillet. “The stone can fix it, point of fact.”

“You said we couldn’t have helped Therese. Did we kill her for no reason?” My voice was rising again, thinning out. “God, could we have saved her?”

“Shhhh.” Sebastian stroked my shoulder. “She was turned. You’re just bitten. It was too late for her, but it isn’t for you. We can take care of this.”

I nodded, grasping his words like shreds of a disintegrating lifeline. “The stone. Okay. Right. That’s good.” I shot to my feet, heading for the kitchen. “Let’s just go get the stone, then.”

I pulled open the kitchen cabinet. It was right there, in the bag of completely shitty coffee grounds, which was—

Missing.

I sat staring. The bag was nowhere to be seen.

“What’s wrong?” Sebastian asked.

I pulled out coffee cup after coffee cup, bags of beans, filters, searching everywhere in hopes of finding the bag where I’d stowed the stone. Questioning my own memory, as well as my sanity, I even started opening other bags, only to find nothing but coffee inside them.

I knew I’d left it here. Nobody had touched it since I’d poked it into the bag of coffee grounds. So where in the ever-loving fuck was it? “I can’t find it.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find it?” Colin’s voice was gruff. I pretended he only sounded like an asshole out of his deep concern for me. A weird, off-kilter part of my brain was starting to think that was actually the case.

“I can’t find it. It was here. Now it’s not. Shit.” I put my face in my hands, trying to steady my breathing. “Fuck!”

“Are you sure Pieter didn’t find it?” Sebastian asked, his voice far too calm for comfort.

My hands had started to shake. “He was about to cavity search me for it when Colin got here, so I’d say no.”

Sebastian nodded. “Right.” His voice and demeanor remained calm. “They did this on purpose.”

“What?”

Colin laid a hand on my shoulder again, steering me back toward the hallway. “He knew if he bit you, we’d need to produce the stone to cure you. So he bit you as a Plan B in case Plan A didn’t pan out. I’m thinking he’s planning to wait around until we get the cure underway, and then try again to steal it.”

“But…if they had found the stone, I would still have been here and bitten and have no way to get better.” The words came out fast, running all over each other.
That’s not what happened. Quit borrowing trouble. You’ve got enough as it is.

Sebastian gave a small nod. He still seemed far too calm. “Yes.”

“That’s just twisted.” My voice squeaked.

“Classic Pieter. He’s not really into worrying about other people. Especially human people.”

I sat on the couch again, thinking. Pieter and his cronies hadn’t found it, so the stone had to be somewhere. Maybe Gwen—

Jumping on the sudden thought, I dug my cell out of my pocket and dialed.

A strange howling rose from outside as the ringing started. Colin and Sebastian both sat up straight, hackles on the rise.

“It’s Rufus,” I said. “He wants in—he’s been out all night.” I pushed back to my feet and headed for the deck door.

Flipping on the outside lights, I opened the door to let the dog in. He made a soft “wuff” and trotted past me, giving his shaggy coat a seemingly unnecessary shake. I peered through the window into the yard, more than half expecting to see Pieter or one of his cohorts burst up out of the scrub to interrogate me again. But nothing happened. Rufus made his way to his water dish and began to lap messily. He showed no outward signs of being sick, in spite of Gwen’s earlier concern.

The phone rang. And rang. She was probably in the air, damn her, doing her job when I needed her to answer her phone five rings ago.

“Hello?” Gwen’s voice sounded reedy and distant.

My heart rate shot up again. Maybe I’d just drop dead from a coronary infarction and I wouldn’t have to worry about the vampire-zombie rotting disease at all. “Gwen?”

“Nim? What’s up?”

“Listen, Gwen.” I talked fast, maybe too fast for her to even follow, but the connection sounded shaky. “There was a rock in the cabinet, in a bag of coffee—did you do something with it?”

“That…why the…away.”

“Gwen!” I practically screamed it, frustrated beyond my ability to bear it with the situation, the bad connection—everything.

“Who keeps a rock in a bag of coffee grounds? I threw it out. And the coffee. That was good coffee too—”

Everything inside me stilled. I broke through her obviously idiotic assessment of the coffee in question. “In the garbage?”

“On the compost pile.”

“The compost pile? I don’t have a compost pile.”

Some staticky, incomprehensible words followed. Among them I heard, “gross nasty,” “compost,” and “dog is an idiot.” None of which was particularly helpful. Then her voice disintegrated into fuzzy white noise.

“Shit,” I said weakly, and hung up. Then, “Shit!” I exclaimed again, and flung the phone at Colin.

The primary spiritual obligation of a vampire is, above all else, to be a vampire.
—House of the Eternal website, excerpt from the church’s fundamental text,
The Obligation of the Vampire
.

Chapter Nine

Theoretically, it should have been easy after that. The trash bag in the kitchen had all of two napkins and an apple core in it. Gwen had taken out the trash. It didn’t get picked up until Wednesday, and the trashcan was right by the front door, so the stone, bag and coffee grounds should have been in one of the topmost garbage bags.

It wasn’t. Colin and Sebastian tore through everything in the can, Colin pissed that I wasn’t helping, Sebastian insisting that I sit quietly and rest and not even think about helping. They found every kind of trash there was to find, including the embarrassing stuff, but no stone.

I sat at the kitchen table drinking tea while they cleaned up, my hands trembling, too freaked out even to wonder if they were in the shower together soaping each other off. Okay, maybe I wondered a little bit. Rufus lay at my feet snoring while I absently rubbed his belly with my sock-clad feet.

I should have put it somewhere else, I thought. But I hadn’t known Gwen was even going to be around, much less have a sudden urge to straighten up my cabinets. Or that she had such horrible taste in coffee. Or that she thought I had a compost heap. Which meant…what? Where could she have put it that she thought was a compost heap? I racked my brain but could think of nothing.

I also hadn’t known the stone was as important as it was. I certainly hadn’t known I’d need it to keep from turning into a vampire zombie. I mean, how would anybody know that was on the menu for this week’s events?

I was starting to feel strange, as if I were coming down with the flu. The mark on my neck was itchy, achy and uncomfortable, but I didn’t know if I was really starting to feel the effects or if it was just my brain giving me psychosomatic symptoms based on Colin and Sebastian’s diagnosis. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it.

I was just starting to feel like I might be about to drift off when I jolted awake at the sound of the cabinet under the sink tapping open and shut several times in a quick tattoo. I sat bolt upright. “Rufus! Stop that right now, you stupid little shit.”

He came slinking back into the living room, ears drooping, as if I’d hit him. “You stay out of there,” I told him, still angry. The last thing I needed right now was to have to clean up after him again.

“What’s wrong?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. The two vampires were just there, as if they’d teleported out of the bathroom into the kitchen, both of them shirtless and with wet hair. I was just grateful they both had pants on. Or maybe disappointed was a more accurate assessment. The pair of wide shoulders seemed to fill the room, and they brought a just-showered, Ivory soap kind of smell with them. A trail of water ran down Colin’s chest, winding from the tips of his dark hair. I followed it as it headed for the waistband of his pants. For his part, Sebastian pushed a hand through his hair, creating a perfect flip across his forehead, its curled tip dangling in front of one blue eye.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, dragging my attention back to our current emergency. “Just the stupid dog getting into…the garbage…again…”

I could see the thought hit Colin and Sebastian at almost the same moment it hit me. Colin looked at Sebastian, Sebastian looked at Colin, I stared at both of them, and finally, all three of us swiveled toward Rufus, who was stretched out on the floor with his eyes closed.

“It’s in the dog,” Colin said. “Your fucking dog ate it.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. “Are you sure? It’s kind of too big for him to eat, isn’t it? Can Sebastian sense it in there or anything?”

Sebastian gave a harsh laugh. “Not really. Not right now.” I wondered what that meant, exactly.

My brain had come to a complete stop, numb and nonfunctional. “So what do we do?”

“Cut him open and see.”

That got the synapses synapsing again. I gaped at Colin, appalled. “You will do no such thing.”

“If that stone is inside that dog, and you want to live past, say, Tuesday, you have to get it back out.” Colin’s voice remained forceful.

“Fine. Then we’ll take him to the vet and get him x-rayed.”

“It’d be faster if I just grabbed a steak knife—” Colin actually took a step toward the kitchen.

“Shut the fuck up, Colin! You are not vivisecting my dog!” I wanted to club him in the head with something. How could he start being nice to me and then do a one-eighty into threatening canine murder?

He wheeled back toward me, and my fury abated marginally. He was worried—his eyebrows had formed a new and different kind of knot. “Fine,” he snipped. “When you’re shuffling, brainless undead, I’ll use the knife to cut your head off.”

“You use a damn cleaver for beheadings,” I informed him. “Don’t you know anything?” Rufus, awakened by the proceedings, thumped his tail and offered Colin a doggy smile.

Sebastian gave a tired sigh. “How soon does the vet open?”

I went to the fridge to scan the emergency numbers posted on the side. “The emergency vet is open twenty-four seven.” I had the number and the directions stuck to the fridge with a magnet, but I’d never had to use them.

It was Colin’s turn to be taken aback. “There’s an emergency vet?”

“Of course there is.” Why wouldn’t Colin know that? Then again, why would he? “For like if your dog gets hit by a car in the middle of the night. Or, you know, swallows ancient vampire artifacts.”

Sebastian was half out of his chair already. “Then let’s go.”

The vet at the emergency clinic didn’t seem happy to be bothered at five a.m. with a dog that didn’t seem to be under any particular stress. Of course, I couldn’t explain to her that we had to be done before sunrise or my two grim-faced friends would vaporize in the sunlight, nor could I use the whole
must get rock out of dog or I’ll turn into a vampire zombie
angle.

Colin, however, found the direct road to the cranky vet’s heart.

“You’re getting paid, right? So who cares if the dog is close to death or not? Put him under the damn X-ray machine.”

He slapped a fifty on the examining table to take the edge off, and the vet took Rufus off for X-rays.

Not long after, the three of us stood examining the developed films. Inside Rufus’s squiggly dog guts was—nothing remotely out of the ordinary.

“Your dog’s fine,” said the vet. She was slim, about forty, with a school-marm-by-day, dominatrix-by-night air. “Whatever he ate from the garbage, he’s either thrown it up, passed it already, or he didn’t eat anything in the first place.”

Cold terror washed through me, to the point where I thought for a moment that my knees were going to give out. “Are you sure there’s nothing in there? Maybe a rock, about so big, that doesn’t show on the X-ray?” I asked.

“Not even remotely likely,” the vet said. “Even if it didn’t show up on the X-ray, a rock of that size would cause distinct distortion in the intestinal outline.” Her wording had become even more precise, which made me think she was getting severely pissed off.