Summoning Sebastian (11 page)

Then the symbol Roland had drawn over my sternum began to burn, like someone was using a soldering iron to brand it on my skin, down deep, until the fire reached the bone. I clamped my teeth together. I didn't want to scream—I'd been through worse, and not that long ago—but a sound of protest wrenched from me, unladylike and kind of grunty. I should probably never have children. God knows what kind of noises I'd make.

“I see him.” This was Roland's voice, coming from just behind me, followed by “Don't touch her,” as Colin must have tried to intervene in some way. Or help. I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

“She's…on fire,” Colin protested. My stomach dropped. Was I? I felt like it. But I couldn't see any flames, didn't smell singeing flesh. And as much as it hurt, which is to say a lot, I was pretty sure I'd know if I were actually on fire.

“It's the spell,” Roland assured him. “The energy.”

“I'm okay,” I gritted out, figuring that would do more to placate Colin than Roland's explanations.

Then I saw Sebastian too, an amorphous version of him surrounded by blue light, like the aura at the bottom of a gas flame. It was, I reflected, almost the same color as his eyes.

“Sebastian,” I said, and his gaze met mine. His eyes looked glazed, unfocused, and I wondered if it was as hard for him to make out my details as it was for me to make out his.

“Nim.” I wasn't sure if I actually heard the word, or if I read it on his lips and supplied the sound. “Nim. I said not to.”

“When do I do what I'm told?” I answered, my voice shaking with both laughter and relief. “When do I ever listen to any of you?”

He smiled, the expression sad. “True. Nim, I don't want to hurt you.”

“You won't.”

“Let me go.”

“No,” I said, and Roland moved in, coming from behind my right shoulder.

I wasn't sure what she did—it was all as obscure as the marks on my body, uncertain as the nature of the power we called into being. But there was a low sound like a distant thunderclap, and suddenly the burning sensation in my body just…stopped. I staggered backward a step, unaware I'd held myself so tense against the pain.

The amulet fell to the sidewalk with a faint
tink
. Roland bent to pick it up and wrapped it around the neck of a delft-blue glass bottle. She'd already set its cork in place.

“That should hold him,” she said in a satisfied tone.

“It worked?”

“I do believe it did.”

Colin came up behind me and slipped an arm around my shoulders, drawing me to him. “How do we know he's in there?”

“It's thrumming,” Roland answered. Then, “Wait…”

She tipped her head toward the bottle as if listening, then held it out to me. “Can you hear that?”

With trepidation, I turned an ear toward the bottle. The “that” she referred to was a low hum, its timbre the same as the lower registers of Sebastian's voice. “Are you all right?” I asked automatically, not even considering the absurdity of talking to a bottle. And the answer came.

“I'm here. I'm okay.”

I took a step back in utter shock. Why I was surprised, I didn't know. I thought I'd passed my shock threshold a long time ago. But this was new. Sebastian was back—confined to a bottle for the moment but back among us. We could bring him back permanently.

I started to shake. I'd been through too much. My body ached from channeling the magic, and I could still feel the rune over my breastbone burning on my skin.

I turned to Colin, buried my face in his chest and burst into tears.

C
hapter Eleven

It's possible Linear V predates even Phoenician cuneiform. Or the texts could have been hammered out on a computer in the 1970s. It's simply not clear.
—C. Roland, Dean of Vampire Studies, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

L
ater, we all sat in Colin's study, working out our travel plans. Or Colin and Roland were working out travel plans while I leaned over the top of the table in the middle of the room and stared at the blue bottle.

It was a cerulean sort of blue, about the color of a bright fall sky. The glass itself wasn't clear—it was thick and filled with bubbles that distorted its contents. I couldn't see anything inside it, not really, other than a vague shadowy something that seemed to undulate beyond the thick, bubble-laden glass. Occasionally I heard a scratching sound, so quiet I could have been imagining it, like sand grating on the inside of the glass. I leaned on one elbow and just watched, mesmerized, as the amorphous gray shadow moved from side to side, up and down, all in a slow, lazy fashion that reminded me of an amoeba or a smoke cloud.

I hadn't had much time to take it all in. Somehow, we'd done it. Or we'd at least gotten this far. All the work, the translations, the all-nighters, the all-dayers, the headaches…all of it had paid off.

For a moment, I allowed myself to forget that we still had a long way to go. That Sebastian in a bottle wasn't yet Sebastian back among us, and we still weren't quite sure how to bridge that last gap. The point was, we had a theory and a plan, and so far the theories had worked. It was enough to allow me to hope, and hoping felt better than anything I'd felt in quite some time.

“Nim.” I jumped. I hadn't been expecting anyone to talk to me.

“What?”

Colin seemed oblivious to the fact I'd been caught off guard. “I've got an email from your dad. Can you come look at it?”

I wondered briefly why he couldn't read it himself, then decided he was so intimidated by my father that he couldn't even bring himself to read Dad's missives. Smirking, I made my way to the desk, where he was peering at the computer.

Of course, he wasn't actually afraid to read the email—he just needed some additional information from me to figure out what we all needed to get into Russia. Dad's note indicated he'd have some of the paperwork expedited for us.

“We can leave in a couple of days,” I told Colin. “I'll see if Gwen can watch Rufus, or if she wants to come with us.”

“That could be a problem,” Roland put in.

I shrugged. “I'm pretty sure she won't want to. It just seems rude not to ask.”

Roland let it drop there, seemingly comfortable with my explanation.

Colin typed a response to my dad's email—
now
he looked intimidated, as he kept typing and then backspacing and then typing again—then went back to the table. I took Sebastian with me to the bedroom, where I woke Gwen up with my inappropriately timed phone call. If Bastian hadn't been inside the bottle, I'm sure he would have laughed.

Well. Maybe not. But I did.

I
t was a good thing we had a couple of days, because there was more to figure out than passports, visas and the official invitations that allowed us to step foot on the hallowed soil of Mother Russia.

It would be a complicated trip regardless of how we went about it, with Tunguska lying in the middle of the Siberian taiga and us stupid enough to try to make the trip in the winter. The occasional intrepid tourist, wanting to get a look at the mysterious remnants of whatever had happened in Tunguska, generally flew into Vanavara, a community of about four thousand or so people on the Tunguska River. From there, standard procedure was to hike in or take a helicopter to the actual meteor strike sight, or whatever the hell it had been. No one had ever found an actual crater where a meteor might have hit, or pieces of meteor, for that matter. Current theory focused on a comet or a meteor that had exploded in the atmosphere, since the 2012 Chelyabinsk incident had provided a good amount of evidence for scientists to sort through. Who knew the Russian obsession with dash cams could prove so useful?

But I digress. My point being that it was a complicated trip that required complicated arrangements, and said arrangements could only be sorted through after dark, because vampires. Being exclusively nocturnal is a lot more limiting than you might think.

On the other hand, when Colin was dead asleep the next morning, after pounding through the last few reservations we needed to complete our travel plans, and I was staring at the ceiling, I envied him a little.

After about an hour of listening to him not breathe next to me, I got out of bed and headed downstairs. I could go do things. Nobody would stop me. Maybe I could grab a new outfit for the trip. That seemed appropriate. I fetched my wallet, made sure I had at least two of Colin's credit cards and headed out.

There was a major problem with this plan, though. I hate to shop for clothes. Seriously, I'd rather spend the day watching one of the anti-vampire TV stations than try on jeans. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration. The anti-vamp channels are super annoying. But you get the point.

I meandered through Target and found a few things I liked, but the thought of trying them on made me think I might be much happier just wearing T-shirts and jeans to Russia. But I'd read up on some cultural things, and it sounded like I might need to dress a bit more girly-like to keep from getting weird looks. Although I didn't much care about weird looks. I was going to be with vampires. I didn't much give a shit if anybody thought I was a lesbian.

I was mulling the thought of buying a rainbow T-shirt and maybe some rainbow shoes, just to see if they could get me arrested in Moscow, when an odd movement caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I glanced in that direction. I didn't see anything unusual. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I never ignore that signal. Sometimes it's nothing, but on the occasions it's been not nothing, it's saved me from embarrassment at the least, uncomfortable death at the worst.

Maybe a nice blouse and some dress slacks, I thought, heading deeper into the women's clothing section. Did they have dress slacks for short people? I pretended to be interested, looking at size tags and price tags and giving the very occasional glance up toward where I thought the source of my neck-prickling was. Black slacks, petites. Those would probably fit. A nice, dove-gray blouse with simple tailoring and fabric that slid smoothly through my fingers. I liked the looks of that. It'd be easy to wear and relatively comfortable. Did I own any heels? I wasn't sure anymore.

Something moved again. I resisted the urge to look up immediately and instead shifted along the clothing rack. Slowly, I altered the direction of my gaze until I was looking toward the movement but still positioned so I would appear to be perusing the clothes.

There was someone there. Of course there was. My Spidey-sense didn't lie. He was dark and kind of blockily built, with dark, deep-set eyes and black hair that looked like it needed a comb. Something jumped in my chest—another warning signal.

He was a vampire.

He couldn't be a vampire. There was no possible way. It was broad daylight.

Then again, we were inside a store. Maybe he lived in the storage area and came out during the day just to check on things. It was possible. Vampires could be out and about in the daytime without danger of death if they stayed out of the sun. But it took a great deal of energy. I'd seen Colin do it, and it wore him out faster than most of our sexcapades would wear out a normal human male. It was a difficult proposition, and the side effects were unpleasant at best.

I looked back down at the blouse I had draped over my arm. Was he here by coincidence? Was he following me? Was he actually a vampire, or was I just paranoid? I'd been on tenterhooks for quite some time—ever since I'd met Sebastian, point of fact. It could be that my natural instincts were just running overtime.

But when I glanced up again, he was still there, and he was looking right back at me. And when my eyes met his, something black and cold and vaguely slimy ran down my back, making me shudder.

Whatever he was—whoever he was—I didn't care for him. Nor did I appreciate his attention.

He wasn't moving toward me, though. And when I shifted direction, heading toward the lingerie, he didn't follow. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw him still just standing there, staring, like it would be far too much effort to try to move even if it meant I would no longer be able to see him.

So weird.

I headed for the checkout. Time to get the hell out of Target.

I
wasn't done shopping, though. While I was forcing myself to expand my wardrobe and wondering what in the world could cause some creepster to stalk me at Target, I'd had another idea. Unlike most of my ideas, this one was logical and useful and even constructive. Go, me.

I headed down the road a bit to Barnes & Noble and parked close to the door. Something still tingled down my spine, making me wary. But I didn't see anyone following me as I got out of the car and headed into the big bookstore.

It took me a couple minutes to find the foreign language section—next to the reference section, who knew? Once I'd sidled into the right aisle, I perused the books until I found what I wanted.

We were going to Russia, so why not learn some Russian? Colin and Roland probably knew it—they knew lots of things, after all—but it couldn't hurt for me to give it a shot too. But there was another motive to the purchase.

I'd never really tried to learn a language before. Sure, I'd taken Spanish in high school, but that was school, so I hadn't tried very hard. I'd managed to squeak through with a B-minus, and that was good enough for me. I didn't need to be able to read freaking
Don Quixote
. I did need to know how to order midnight lunch at my favorite stand downtown, so these days about all I knew in Spanish was how to say three tacos with steak, easy on the hot sauce, toss a little lettuce on there, please.

But the experience with Linear V had made me doubt myself. Not in a bad way. It had made me doubt I was as intellectually challenged as I'd always assumed. After all, I'd picked up things pretty quickly once Roland had taken me in under her tutelage. I had to have some kind of skills, right? And it irked me to think the only reason I could wade through all those complex lines and hash-marks and weirdly constructed syntax was that I'd developed some kind of communion with that stupid stone. Maybe I really did have a knack for language learning and had just never been properly motivated.

So I picked up a Russian phrasebook and a basic book on the language, both of which came with CDs I could rip and transfer to my iPod for international travel. It was going to be a long trip—I'd have a lot of time to learn, especially on the daytime flights when I'd have nobody to talk to. If I could pick up a few useful phrases, I wouldn't be tied to nighttime hours when the vamps could translate for me. That would make things less stressful for me, I was sure.

I looked through a couple more books, finally settling on another set of CDs designed for travelers. With my small stack of bookstore booty, I headed for the front of the store.

And saw him again.

This time it caught me so thoroughly by surprise that I stopped in my tracks. Hard to pass that off as a casual reaction, but I spun on my heel and went back to the language aisle, hopefully managing to make my sudden freak-out look more like I was realizing I wanted another book. Hands shaking, I sorted out a Russian-English dictionary and added it to the pile to add authenticity.

Holy God, I thought. I hadn't thought he was necessarily following me when I'd seen him in Target, but there was no other explanation for this appearance. He had to have followed me from the other store. If so, why? And how? If he actually was a vampire, then how the hell?

I made my breathing slow down, but my heart still pounded high in my throat. Who the hell was this guy? Slowly, acting like I was absorbed in looking over my soon-to-be purchases, I headed back up the aisle.

He was still there. As far as I could tell, he was thumbing through a cookbook, but that weird, prickly, slimy feeling crawled down my back again. Whatever this guy was, he wasn't
right
.

He also wasn't looking at me. Could the whole thing have been my imagination? It wasn't like I was the only person in the world who might go to Target for clothes and then to Barnes & Noble for books. It wasn't exactly the most unusual shopping trip in the world.

But I couldn't accept that it was only a coincidence. Even when I boldly moved past him, heading up the aisle for the checkout, I couldn't get that assumption to make sense.

I took my place in line and looked back the way I'd come. He was still there, looking at a different cookbook now. His attention never wavered from it. I had absolutely no reason to think he was interested in me, or following me, or anything other than a slightly creepy dude who happened to like books about barbecue. But I couldn't shake the thought that there was something very, very wrong.