Zen and the Art of Vampires (13 page)

“Sign the damned things so we can get out of here,” Kristoff growled, indicating the two copies of marriage forms he'd produced.

I had discovered he'd spoken the truth about the elderly clergyman. Not only was he deaf to all pleas to save me, he performed what I had a horrible feeling was a marriage ceremony while I tried to reason with the insane man next to me. “This is ridiculous. This is 2008. You can't force someone to get married. There are laws.”

“There are also bribes, and as I spent the night getting the correct documents and asking my old friend here to conduct the official ceremony, it will be completely legal and binding. As soon as you sign.”

“But we're in Iceland! I'm not a citizen. Surely it can't be legal for noncitizens to be married without a ton of paperwork. And don't I have to be present to get a license? Surely I have to have been present!”

“There are ways to make it possible,” he said grimly. “Sign the damned things.”

“No,” I said, folding my hands. “And you can't make me. Kill me if you want, but I'm not signing.”

Kristoff snarled something rude that I chose to ignore, yanking a small blue object from his pocket.

“Hey! Where did you get that?” I tried to grab my passport back from him, but he held it out of reach, flipping through the pages until he came to the one with my signature.

“Your precious Alec gave it to me last night, when you were asleep,” he said, snatching up the pen and thrusting it into my hand. Before I could throw it away he yanked me backward against his body, one hand clamping down on mine as he consulted the passport.

“Stop it!” I yelled, struggling as he forced my hand to write a scraggly version of my name. “This isn't legal! You can't do it!”

“It's done,” he snapped, forcing me to sign the second form before releasing me. I jumped away and rubbed my abused hand.

“You don't have witnesses, Mr. Smarty-Pants,” I pointed out. “You may have your buddy there falsely conduct the ceremony, and you may have a version of my signature, but there were no witnesses to the ceremony, and I'm sure that even in Iceland you have to have witnesses.”

Kristoff put two fingers to his mouth and blew a piercing whistle that seemed earsplitting in the confined space of the small church.

Two men emerged from what I assumed was a back room. They both eyed me as they came forward, speaking in a language that I didn't understand.

“Do either of you speak English?” I asked sweetly.

“The one on the left is my brother Andreas. The other is my cousin Rowan,” Kristoff said, almost smirking at my look of consternation. “They both speak a dozen languages, English included.”

My hand itched to slap that look off his face, but I hung on to my temper.

“I don't suppose it would do any good to tell you that your brother is insane?” I asked the man named Andreas. There wasn't a lot of family resemblance, although he, too, was the sort of man who made women stop and stare.

“No more so than any one of us,” Andreas answered, then signed the forms.

My heart sank as the second man did the same. The three of them spoke quietly for a few minutes while I contemplated my choices. I'd run for it, except Kristoff retained a hold on my arm, not to mention the fact that I wouldn't stand a chance of outrunning any one of the men present—other than the priest, and even he looked unusually spry for someone his age, laughing at something that the vampire named Rowan said.

That thought struck me oddly, somehow.

“Do you have . . . you know . . . fangs?” I asked Kristoff, making a little fangy gesture with my fingers. “Like Dracula fangs?”

The three men all stared at me as if I'd just turned into a giant ice-skating sloth.

“You don't, then? So the whole fang thing is a myth?”

The look of disbelief on Kristoff's face was almost worth the experience of being there.

Rowan burst into laughter. Andreas frowned, saying something in what sounded to me like Italian.

“You know, I'm normally a pretty circumspect person,” I told Andreas. “But since I woke up this morning, I've found a murdered woman in my bathroom, run away from the police, been kidnapped by a vampire, and been forced to participate in a pretend wedding, so what inhibitions I normally hold are pretty much gone. I'm sure you'll excuse me if I say that it's very rude to speak in a language that not everyone can understand.”

Rowan laughed even harder.

Andreas's frown darkened for a moment, then he suddenly smiled. Although his face wasn't nearly as hard as Kristoff's, his smile was just as chilling. “I told my brother that he should have simply killed you rather than wed you.”

“We're not married,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest in a show of what I hoped looked like bravado. Surrounded as I was by three tall, extremely handsome bloodsucking fiends, I certainly felt anything but brave, but it wouldn't do to let them know that. “It wasn't a legal ceremony.”

The two men looked inquiringly at Kristoff.

He gave me a bitter look. “It was entirely legal.”

“It was not! I didn't understand anything that priest said, let alone agree to it! He could have been performing the last rites for all I know!”

“No, but I can arrange for that, if you like,” Kristoff said with smooth menace.

I raised my chin. I may not be the bravest of women, but I hate being bullied. “You didn't even kiss me. Weddings always end in a kiss. So there!”

Silence filled the church for a moment before Kristoff made a low noise deep in his chest and yanked me toward him.

“Are you
growling
at me—?” I just had time to say before he kissed me.

My mind, never the most reliable of organs in times of stress, shut down and left me flailing in Kristoff's arms. This was not the same sort of kiss that Alec had pressed all over me the night before—this was a kiss of aggression, a punishment, an invasion. He didn't even wait for me to invite him in, his tongue was there, inside my mouth, sweeping around as if it owned the place. Not even Alec had kissed me so intimately!

I shoved hard on Kristoff's chest and jerked out of his grip, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “If you ever do that again, so help me god, I'll . . . I'll . . . I don't know what I'll do, but you can bet your butt it'll be horrible!”

“The marriage is legal,” Kristoff said, shoving one of the signed sheets into my hands. His eyes glowed from within, looking oddly lighter than I remembered them. “Complete with kiss. Tell that to your reaper friends.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that they weren't necessarily my friends, but he didn't wait around for me to answer. He just turned on his heel and marched out of the church. I stared in surprise for a few moments before I turned to the other two vamps. They watched me with eyes filled with malice and suspicion.

“He left,” I said, too surprised to care that I was stating the obvious.

“If you even think of using your powers against him, I guarantee that you will pay in ways you cannot imagine,” Andreas threatened before he, too, marched out.

Rowan said nothing, just gave me a long, hard look, shoved me aside, and left, as well.

“Good riddance!” I yelled after them, going to the door to watch as two cars backed out and sped off up the winding road. It was at that moment that I realized I was stranded, alone, without money, identification, or even a clear knowledge of the name of the town in which I'd been dumped. “Hey? Anyone? I don't have a car. Hello?”

I turned back to the clergyman, but he'd disappeared, as well, leaving me standing on a windy cliff, outside of a cold, dank little stone church, clutching a marriage certificate that I knew was false . . . but I had a horrible suspicion no one else would see it that way.

“Married to a vampire,” I said out loud, the words whipped away on the wind. “Oh, joy. Now what am I going to do?”

“I don't suppose you know the way to Ostri?”

I turned my head and stared with absolutely no surprise at the translucent figure that stood there. I raised an eyebrow at the spectral horse next to him, but I didn't say one word about the fact that yet another ghost had descended upon me. “I'm afraid I'm new around here. You're . . . er . . . dead?”

“As you can see.” The man, who was dressed in what looked to be Victorian wear, frowned. “You're the reaper and you don't know where Ostri is?”

“Afraid not, but since I'm evidently now the ghostly information office, I guess I'd better find out. What's your name?”

“Ulfur.”

“How do you do? I'm Pia, and yes, I'm the Zorya.” I held up my hand. The moonstone had once again converted itself into a small lantern. “But I'm afraid I'm new to the job, and don't know all the ins and outs of the whole thing yet. So you'll have to join the others while you wait for me to figure out what's what.”

“Others?” he asked.

“Three other ghosts. They're back in town. I don't suppose you have a magical way of transporting us there?”

He pursed his lips and eyed me curiously.

“No? I didn't think so. Well, I guess we'd better go see if there's a bus or something. You can come with me.”

“And the others?” Ulfur asked, falling into step with me as I started to pick my way down the rocky hillside to the fishing village below.

“I told you—they're back in town. I think. I didn't actually see them when I left them, but that could be because Anniki had the stone.”

“No, I meant the others here.” He waved toward the shore.

I cautiously moved over to the edge of the cliff and looked down. Along the craggy shoreline, a group of about twelve ghosts roamed aimlessly. They looked up as I stood staring down in increasing despair. More ghosts. Just what I needed to complicate things.

“This is the reaper,” Ulfur bellowed down to them.

They waved.

I lifted a wan hand and waved back.

“You're all ghosts?” I asked Ulfur.

He nodded and patted his horse's head. “Landslide. Wiped out half the village. I had been in college in Reykjavík but came home for my father's birthday.”

“Ouch. You speak English really well,” I said, curious about that fact.

Ulfur smiled. “There is not much to do with our time but watch and listen to people. A company runs tours from here to local fjords, so we get lots of tourists. It provides us all with an excellent means of learning other languages. English was the first we learned, and now that the Japanese tours have started, we're hoping to learn that language next.”

“I suppose it would provide for entertainment.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe you'd all better stay here until I can figure out how to get you to heaven. Er . . . Ostri. Whichever.”

“I don't know that we're safe staying here,” he said, his face becoming serious. “An Ilargi has been seen.”

“One of those bad-reaper, soul-eater guys?” A little shiver zipped down my back. “They don't sound good at all. Well, I guess you'll all have to come with me.”

He nodded and bellowed out orders to the folks below.

I looked out at the sea, bluey grey and wind tossed, and wondered what on earth I was going to do now. “Could my life get any stranger?”

The sound of the wind and the mournful cry of gulls wheeling overhead were the only answer to my question. I took one last look at the sea, then gestured to the waiting ghosts below and pointed to the village. A faint hurrahing cry met my ears as I jammed my hands in my pockets and started down the path into the village, Ulfur and his horse on my heels.

What on earth had I gotten myself into? And more importantly, how was I going to get out of it?

 

It took the better part of the day to get back to Dalkafjordhur. I didn't want to encounter the police, so I took the only bus that ran from the fishing village, praying the police wouldn't stop people going into town. There was a bit of a tussle when the driver found out I didn't have the fare, but I succeeded in returning to Dalkafjordhur by dint of clinging with desperate stubbornness to the railing on the back of one of the seats. Since none of the five passengers on the bus spoke English—or wanted to get involved—I don't quite know what threats the driver was using, but in the end he gave up trying to root me out, and let me ride without further harassment.

Ulfur, his horse, and the twelve other ghosts didn't raise a single complaint, but that's only because no one but me saw them. The ghosts were all polite, however, men, women, and children dressed in clothing from a hundred and fifty years before, all of them pathetically grateful I was taking them under my wing.

“I can't guarantee anything, but I suppose there's safety in numbers,” I told them after the bus driver, giving up on me, drove us up the track to the main road.

A woman who was seated near me gave me an odd look from the corner of her eye. I smiled at her but didn't have the energy to try to explain that there was, at that moment, a ghost sitting in her lap, while a horse nosed her bag on the ground beside her.

“You are the reaper,” an elderly male ghost said, nodding at Ulfur. “He says you will take us to Ostri.”

“That's the idea,” I said, gnawing on my lower lip.

The woman shot me another look, then got up and took a seat closer to the driver.

I mulled over my options on what ended up being an hour-long drive into town. I didn't have the faintest idea how to help the ghosts, but the Brotherhood people at the church must know something about it. Clearly, I'd have to go to them to get specifics. Maybe one of them could even take over and lead all the ghosts on to their reward.