In the Company of Vampires

Chapter 21

“Ow. I think . . . Ow!” Ben stood with the shredded remains of my jeans in his hands, his eyebrows raised when I reached behind me. “My butt hurts. I must have sat on something.”

“Goddess Fran!” The voice that bellowed was sufficiently loud to stop the nearby hum of conversation for a good thirty seconds.

“Oh, for the love of the moon and stars . . .” I stuck my head out of the torn side of the booth. “I’m right here, Eirik. And no, you can’t come in. Go to my mother’s trailer. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” I pulled my head back in, and glared at Ben, who stood laughing. “What is so funny?”

“Turn around, Francesca,” he said, making a twirling motion with his finger.

“Why? What did I sit on?” I turned my back to him, trying to peer over my shoulder at my own butt. “Whatever it is, it stings like the dickens.”

I felt the soft brush of Ben’s fingers, then a painful pinch.

“Hey!”

“It says ‘rstandi,’ whatever that is.” He held out a small piece of curved glass with a hand-printed paper label.

“Oh, goddess! I sat on one of the bottles of understanding. Ow! Ben!”

He chuckled again as he picked out the remaining bits of glass. “You aren’t injured badly, Beloved. Besides, there are benefits to having wounded yourself in such a manner.”

“Benefits? Are you nuts? You try sitting on glass and then we’ll talk about the bene—jumping Jeremiah!” His mouth was hot on my poor, abused flesh. “Ben! That’s my butt! You’re licking my butt cheeks!”

“I’m healing you,” he murmured against the swell of one cheek. “I would take my time over the job, but duty is pressing, so I will make this quick.”

I was torn between the pleasure of his mouth on flesh that was surprised to receive such attentions and shock that he wouldn’t mind at all healing me in such a fashion, but didn’t have time to dwell on such considerations. It took him only a minute to fetch a pair of pants for me, and by the time I returned with him to my mother’s trailer, the Vikings were lounging around telling stories about how many women they had on the train ride down.

“You are the lustiest ghosts I’ve ever met,” I said as I eyed the couch. A little smile hovered around Ben’s lips when I gingerly eased myself onto the cushions.

“We have had nothing but ale wenches since you sent us to Valhalla,” Finnvid pointed out. “Having mortal women who do not smell of hops is a pleasant change.”

“Change-of-subject time,” I said, relaxing when I realized my butt didn’t hurt at all.

As if I would let you go out with a sore ass.

“I’m at a loss as to what we should do to find my mother. You didn’t answer me before, Ben, because we were . . . er . . . distracted, but the watch said something about there being other resources—do you know what those are?”

“Yes. A professional diviner like Absinthe’s mentor would probably help, but diviners are dangerous, and I would not wish for you to consult one.”

“I consulted Absinthe,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but she is just an apprentice.”

“Still, I’m having a hard time seeing diviners as people to fear.”

He made a little half shrug. “Nonetheless, you should be wary. They demand too much in payment. There is another resource closer to you, however, and one that will think kindly about helping you.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tallulah. Or rather, her mate, Sir Edward.”

“Hmm.” I thought about that. Tallulah was a renowned medium, although mostly people consulted her in order to talk to their deceased relatives. Despite the constant, nagging worry that seemed to grow daily, I refused to consider the idea that my mother might be in that class. “My mother isn’t dead, though.”

Ben noted my stubbornly raised chin, but simply said, “Sir Edward’s abilities, and those of Tallulah, are not limited to conversation with the dead. We will consult them as soon as possible.”

“You go with the Dark One, goddess,” Eirik said, waving a hand containing the remote to my mother’s tiny portable TV. “We do not care for mediums.”

“You don’t? Why?”

“Archaeologists are always using them to contact us in Valhalla. They wish to know the location of our villages, and where we buried our dead. It is most annoying.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so after warning them to stay out of trouble, we went to see Tallulah and her ghostly boyfriend. She had only one person with her, so it only took ten minutes before we were shown into the small booth containing a table, her scrying bowl, a crystal ball, and three chairs.

“Fran!” She looked up in surprise as we took the chairs opposite hers. Ben placed some euros in the small stand to the side, where payment was made. “What are you doing here?”

“We wish to talk to you and Sir Edward.”

“You can do that any time,” she said, frowning toward the stand. “I do not require payment for that.”

“This is a professional consultation. We want you and Sir Edward to find my mom.”

Her eyebrows rose, her dark eyes speculative, first on me, then on Ben. “I am not a diviner. I do not have the power to locate your mother, Fran. If I had, I would have offered to do so when you told me she was missing.”

“Sir Edward—”

“He is limited in what he can see from the Akasha,” she said, shaking her head.

“But the two of you together . . .” Ben let the sentence trail off, his gaze just as speculative as hers had been. “You helped Fran once before, when her horse was stolen.”

“We did,” she admitted slowly, her gaze now on the table before her. Her fingers twitched as if she wished to touch the scrying bowl or the baseball-sized glass orb that sat in a mound of midnight blue velvet. “This is more difficult, however. Someone has gone to much trouble to hide Miranda’s whereabouts. If that person should discover that we sought to uncover his actions, it could be dangerous not just to me but to Sir Edward and Fran and you, as well. Are you willing to risk your Beloved’s safety for that?”

“Yes,” Ben said without hesitation, and I was comforted by the fact that despite his past differences with my mother, he would do everything possible to locate her. It didn’t escape me that he was also determined to move heaven and hell to keep me safe, but that was fine by me. I had the same plan with regards to his safety.

“Very well,” Tallulah said, rising from her chair. “Remain here. What you ask will take both Sir Edward and myself a little time to prepare.”

I didn’t have time to do more than envision three different types of grim deaths for Ben, my mother, and myself before she returned. I smiled my thanks when Tallulah returned, carrying, much to my surprise, Davide, my mother’s fat black-and-white cat. She plopped him in my lap before retaking her chair, hesitating between the glass ball and the scrying bowl, but eventually settling on the highly polished black metal bowl.

Davide looked at me with profound disdain.

“You smell like tuna fish, cat,” I told him. His whiskers twitched, and he dug his claws into my arm when I asked Tallulah, “Is he giving you trouble? If he is, I’ll put him in Mom’s trailer. Stop it, cat, or I’ll see to it you don’t have any claws.”

“I told you before that he is no trouble to me.”

“Er . . .” I looked back at the cat. He flattened his ears and hissed silently at me, but at least he stopped digging his claws into the flesh of my arm. “Then why did you bring him out here?”

She smoothed the cloth over the table and poured a little water into the scrying bowl. “He is your mother’s familiar. He will provide a bridge to her.”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale. Or more accurately, I guess, an old witches’ tale, because my mother never used a familiar, and if she did, she would have hardly chosen a fat, grumpy cat to be one.” Davide’s lips thinned, his whiskers held flush with his face, his eyes shooting lasers at me. Or they would have if he could have managed it.

“You are mistaken,” was all she said.

I looked back at Davide. He squinted back at me, and farted on my leg. “For the love of—”

“Silence.”

At Tallulah’s softly spoken command, I stopped glaring at Davide, shooting a quick glance at Ben out of the corner of my eye. He had adopted a mildly interested expression as Tallulah invoked a trance, but as I watched, one corner of his mouth tipped up.

You are entirely too sexy for your own good. How am I going to spend the rest of my life with you if all you have to do is quirk one side of your mouth to have me imagining the most lewd things?

You will enjoy yourself greatly, both in chastising me for my appearance, about which I can do little, and in being pleasured as only a Beloved can be pleasured. Yes, including more tongue swirls in that particular spot, although I object to you including in your fantasies that object, and I would like to know, since you’ve had no other men, how you learned about devices intended to prolong erections?

The Internet, baby, the Internet.

“Sir Edward is with us,” Tallulah said, interrupting my mental review of all the toys I thought might be fun to use on Ben. She sounded brisk and businesslike as usual, not at all adopting the dreamy tone my mother did whenever she communed with the goddess. “I have told him of your request, Fran, and he has agreed to help you, although he warns that he is limited in what he can see.”

I was expecting the session with Tallulah to take a long time, what with all the looking around Sir Edward had to do from the Akashic Plain, referred to by people in the Otherworld as Akasha, and by normal people as limbo. But to my surprise, it took Tallulah and Sir Edward only three minutes to tell us what we wanted to know.

“There is a man, swarthy and bull-chested,” Tallulah said, gazing intently into her scrying bowl. “I see him clearly. Sir Edward says he has much dark power, although he disguises it well. He was a servant, but has been freed. It is he who holds your mother, bound by love.”

“A swarthy man?” I glanced at Ben.

“De Marco,” he said.

“That’s what I was thinking. But why? Because he knew Mom in the past?”

“Perhaps the issues of their relationship were not resolved in the past.”

“Possibly. But that doesn’t sound like her.”

Ben admitted it didn’t.

“And is she really in love with de Marco, or did he magic her somehow?”

Ben asked Tallulah, “Is he nearby? Is Miranda with him?”

“Yes. And yes,” she said, her gaze still locked on the smooth surface of the water in the bowl. She was silent for a moment, then added, shaking her head, “He has too much power for Sir Edward to see more details. He says that this man is gathering forces to him, dark forces.”

The therions? His experiments, do you think?

It’s possible, but therions are not beings of dark power.

Tallulah suddenly took a big gasp of air, then sat back, her eyes once again on us. “That is all we could see. The man sensed Sir Edward’s interest, and would have attacked him had Sir Edward not retreated back to the Akasha.”

“De Marco can attack ghosts?” I asked, incredulous at the idea. I knew ghosts in corporeal form, such as the Vikings and those that had been grounded, could be interacted with physically, but Sir Edward had never, in the time I had known Tallulah, had a solid form.

“Yes. He is an Ilargi, a reaper of souls.” Her eyes held sympathy as she reached across the table and tapped Ben on his wrist. “You must guard well, Benedikt. He desires to add you to his forces.”

“Well, he can just desire all he wants, Ben is mine,” I snorted, immediately regretting the show of possession.

Why? I enjoyed it, Ben said with a smile.

Yes, and you’re going to be absolutely unbearable after a few years of that, and I have to spend . . . what, a thousand years with you?

Possibly. Possibly more.

All of which means I need to start deflating your ego now, before it’s too late.

Ben laughed in my head, and took my hand. We thanked Tallulah and Sir Edward for their time, after which I took Davide back to Tallulah’s trailer, making sure to pat the cat on his head since I knew he disliked it. Kindlier instincts prompted me to pull out a little bowl of chopped chicken that Tallulah said she was saving for him. He looked like he wanted to bite me as I gave it to him, but decided instead to adopt a righteously indignant expression meant to put me in my place.

“I don’t see the Vikings,” I said some twenty minutes later, as I arrived at where Ben sat on the corner of a portable picnic table in the common area. I waved the sausage roll I’d bought just before the food stall closed down, adding, “Normally I wouldn’t worry, but with the Faire closing down early for the big finale of the opera shindig in town, I suspect they’ve gone in to pick up women, and with them, that could be trouble. Did you get hold of David?”

“Yes.” Ben put his phone away in an inner pocket of his leather jacket and slipped on the latter. “He says he’ll meet us at de Marco’s house as soon as he can. Do you have your valknut?”

I touched my T-shirt. “I do, but the Vikingahärta is Loki’s valknut. Why do you think it will help us with de Marco?”

“It had its origins with Loki, but it’s yours now, and it’s you who is powering it. It protected you against Naomi’s attack earlier, so it’s my belief that it will do the same should de Marco try to harm you.”

“Aren’t we going to add Imogen to our posse? And shouldn’t we have the Vikings? I can call Eirik and find out where they are. I’m sure they’d be happy to help us make de Marco hand over my mother. They love a good fight.”

“I would like to avoid bringing a full-fledged attack force, since we simply intend to locate your mother. And I’d prefer Imogen to remain here. She’s vulnerable right now.”

“Vulnerable how?” I almost had to run to keep up with Ben as he hurried toward the parking lot, where he’d left his bike. There were a few stragglers left at the Faire, but most had left in the last hour, and the Faire employees were happily shutting up shop in order to watch the festivities. “Is Imogen okay? Is something wrong with her? And why are you running? I’m going to get a stitch in my side if you keep up this pace.”

“Nothing is wrong with Imogen, no. I’m hurrying because I just saw the time. It’s going to be a nightmare trying to get through the town to de Marco’s house.”

“Why? Oh, the parade.” The grand finale of the weeklong opera competition was a parade filled with floats, artists, and other performers.

“The sooner we get through the town, the better.”

I waited until he got on the bike, then slid on behind him, happily burying my face in the nape of his neck and wrapping my arms around him.

Not going to fondle my belly tonight? he asked as we bumped over the lumpy pasture ground and up onto the smooth asphalt of the road.

My hand moved downward in a bold gesture that surprised even me. How about I fondle you somewhere else, instead?

We almost crashed. By the time Ben righted us, brushed the gravel off his boots, and delivered to me a lecture about the follies of groping the driver of a motorcycle going fifty miles an hour on an unlit road, I was alternating between remorse and amusement.

You can’t tell me that you never had a woman grope you while you were riding a horse, I said.

What? He sounded confused.

If you remember, you told me it’s possible to have sex on horseback. I assume that meant you had practical experience in the matter.

A little blush of embarrassment touched his mind. Er . . . yes. And yes to your question, although I will point out that falling off a horse isn’t nearly as painful as falling off a moving motorcycle.

I said I was sorry. Are we going to do it?

Have sex on a horse?

Yes.

If you really want to, then someday, yes, I’ll show you how it’s done. Francesca . . .

Hmm?

I know you’re worried, but I will take care of you.

I hadn’t thought he could see into the hidden kernel of worry that poisoned my general sense of well-being. I know you will. It’s just . . . this is my mother we’re talking about, Ben. If de Marco is as powerful as Sir Edward says he is, how on earth are we going to convince him to de-thrall her, or reverse whatever it is that he’s done to her? We don’t even know why he’s done it in the first place.

We will find out. All will be well, Beloved.

I spent the rest of the ride into town silently contemplating Ben’s calm assurance, and my own worries that even he might meet his match in de Marco.