It was nine o’clock in the morning. I wondered whose door she was going to pound on this early. With Mom in the mood she was in, I didn’t envy her lucky target, whoever it was. “Okay, have fun,” I said jokingly.
She just scowled at me and headed out the door.
I was glad to have the house to myself, frankly, so I could riffle through my mother’s things. Specifically, I was looking for a phone number. I could have asked Nik, but I didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily. I found Mom’s old address book in the desk drawer under a stack of bank statements. Most of her newer contacts would be in her phone or on her BlackBerry, but I was hopeful that what I was looking for would be in this old, forgotten flowered booklet.
At first I thought I’d struck out. Then I found Victor’s name under K, for Kirov. I only hoped the number listed was for the landline, because I really wanted Nik’s mom and she didn’t have a separate listing.
I dialed the numbers and waited. Nik’s family lived on a stipend from the coven, so neither of his parents had to work, but I knew Mr. Kirov slept during the day. When I heard Nik’s mom answer, I nearly breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s Ana,” I told her. “You owe me a favor.”
Then, without waiting for her reaction, I explained what I wanted her to do. I would continue to keep her secret safe from Mom, who, I was sure to remind her, was on a rampage this morning trying to root out traitors in the coven. In exchange, she would get me several pints of witch blood from the contacts I was sure she must have in the coven’s medical community. It had to be witch blood. I stressed this repeatedly.
“What is this for?” she asked.
“I’m going to stop the hunt,” I said. “Remember what we talked about last night?”
“Yes, the animus. You have a way to separate it from your body?”
“I think so,” I said.
“And you need the blood to feed them?”
“Think of it as a supplement,” I said.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “A few pints of blood will never be enough to satisfy them. They’ll tear you to pieces, and you will lose both your souls and your life.”
I hated the way her accent came out when she said things like that. It felt as if I were receiving a fortune. “Yeah, well, let me worry about that. Just get me the blood.”
“You will keep my secret?”
“Totally.”
“Meet me at the Hmongtown Marketplace at three o’clock.”
That was a totally strange place to pick, but I had to admire her quick thinking. It wasn’t as if we were likely to run into any coveners there. The Hmong in St. Paul had their own magic workers who rarely intersected with ours. “Deal.”
I killed time listening to my iPod and reading a book. At some point, Mom came back. We didn’t talk; she went directly upstairs for a shower. The humidity was pretty low today, and the cool breeze lulled me into a nap. I woke up to the sound of the doorbell.
Mom answered the door before I could rouse myself. I heard her giggle. Then she called out, “Ana, a young gentleman to see you.”
Okay, color me curious.
Thompson stood on the other side of the screen door with a bouquet of flowers. They were gorgeous and exactly the kind of artsy arrangement I loved to window-shop at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market: a riotous combination of bright zinnias, sunflowers, and lilies.
“Hey, Matt,” I said, remembering at the last minute not to call him Thompson.
He smiled.
Mom raised her eyebrows and cleared her throat.
I got the hint. “Uh, Mom, this is Matthew Thompson.”
Mom opened the door and held out a hand for him to shake. He gave it a good, solid pump. “Mrs. Parker,” he said.
I winced, but, for once in her life she didn’t correct “Mrs.” to “Dr.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mom said. “Won’t you come in?”
I could see Mom checking Thompson over. He was in his landscaping uniform: grass-stained jeans and a green T-shirt with Thompson’s Lawn Care embroidered in white thread over his heart. “I have only a few minutes,” he said to me as he handed me the bouquet. “I’m on my lunch break.”
“These are gorgeous,” I told him. It was such a sweet, mundane gesture that I felt tears prickle behind my eyes. I wanted to tell him about tonight, all my fears that it wouldn’t work or that something would go wrong; I wanted to cling to his strong neck and make him tell me everything was going to be okay.
But he wouldn’t understand.
So I turned away and headed to the kitchen to find a vase. Behind me, I heard Mom ask him to leave his shoes by the door. I hoped he didn’t take it personally. Mom made everyone do that. You’d think wood floors would be easy to keep clean, but any stray piece of dirt attracted dust bunnies like nobody’s business.
Thompson shuffled into the kitchen behind me. When I’d put the flowers in water, I saw that he had the same sort of expression I had at Bea’s house, as if he were afraid to sit in case he left some sort of grease spot.
I smiled at him to try to ease the awkwardness. Mom, however, her curiosity evident, didn’t help by hanging in the archway. “So, how do you know Ana?” Mom asked.
“You recognize Thompson, don’t you? He was Professor Higgins.”
“Oh!” Mom brightened. “I remember now. You had that smart suit coat and a beautiful singing voice.”
As heat flushed Thompson’s cheeks, I tried to catch Mom’s eye to give her the go-away-you’re-embarrassing-us glare.
When she stopped beaming at us, Mom seemed to get the hint. Though she had to say, “Well, I’ll leave you kids to it” in that dorky parental way. At least she hadn’t made me promise to behave.
“I tried to call ahead,” Thompson said.
I frowned and dug my phone out of its usual spot. It was dark, the battery completely dead. “I forgot to charge it. It’s been a crazy couple of days.”
“Oh? What have you been doing?”
“You know, just Festival tryouts and stuff. You were there.” Uh! Even I didn’t believe that lame lie. But what was I supposed to say? Reconciling with my insane vampire dad while hatching a plan to give up one of my dual souls? That sounded even crazier.
He just looked at me, and I knew he didn’t buy it either.
“Do you want a Coke or something?” I offered, hoping to deflect the conversation with hospitality.
“My lunch is in my truck,” Thompson said. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned against the kitchen counter. He stared at me for a long time, squinty-eyed, as if trying to see me clearly. “There’s something going on with you. Something to do with your life as a witch, right?”
I sighed in relief. He was more perceptive than I gave him credit for. “Yes, exactly.”
“I hate that you can’t talk to me about it.”
“Me too,” I agreed sincerely.
Impulsively, I ran over and wrapped my arms around his neck. He seemed surprised at my outburst, but he opened his arms and took me in. I laid my head against his chest. I could hear his heart beating underneath the cotton of his shirt.
He seemed to understand what I needed and rested his cheek against the top of my head. His grip tightened, and I felt held, protected.
Tears leaked from my eyes. In the safety of Thompson’s arms, I let myself weep.
Amazingly, he said nothing. He asked no questions, only softly stroking my hair.
After I’d pulled myself together with a very unprincesslike snuffle, he kissed my forehead and used his thumb to brush away the tear tracks on my face. “Can I take you out to dinner tonight?”
A real date? But tonight? I started to say no, that I had bigger plans, but stopped. Why shouldn’t I try to have a bit of normalcy too? “Yeah, as long as it’s before sunset.”
He grimaced, and I could almost see him biting his tongue. He shook his head with a light smile, and said, instead, “It’s not as romantic as midnight, but I can get Cinderella home before the sun sets.”
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“Thank you,” I said, and I meant for everything.
He seemed to understand. He let me go regretfully. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Okay,” I said, really wishing he didn’t have to go.
I was not at all disappointed when he leaned down to give me a long, lingering kiss. I responded enthusiastically. Nikolai was wrong about him. Thompson might be a mundane, but this could work.
Of course, if things went pearshaped tonight, this moment would be the sum total of our relationship. So I kissed a bit harder with all the passion I had.
Thompson made a happy sort of growling noise in the back of his throat. Breaking our kiss to give me a rakish smile, he said, “Are you trying to keep me here?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“It’s working,” he said, but then sighed. “But I’m already up shit creek with my dad. He’s totally pissed off about Ren Fest.”
“You got in?” I wondered if I’d missed a call thanks to my dead battery.
“No,” he said. “The jousters took me. So, I’ll see you out there?”
I showed him my dead phone again and shrugged. “I hope so.”
We said our good-byes with a few more brief kisses, and then I walked him to the door. We started to kiss, but Mom was sitting on the porch swing reading some Goddess textbook. Instead, we embraced quickly, and he waved good-bye as he trotted down the sidewalk to his truck.
I tried to get back into the house before Mom could comment, but she’d already set her book down. “Do I need to change the wards to keep out horny mundane boyfriends now?”
“Mom! Don’t be gross!”
“Are you dating him?”
“Yes, I told you that already. Remember, when Nik was over?” I asked, resigning myself to the interrogation.
She blinked, as if surprised she’d forgotten such an important detail. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday at Festival tryouts.”
“So it’s really recent then?”
“That’s what ‘yesterday’ means last time I checked,” I said. “Can I go? I need to plug in my phone.”
“We should talk about tonight.”
“He’s just taking me to dinner.”
“Oh? Well, I guess that’s all right.” Her eyes followed Thompson’s truck as he pulled out from the curb and drove down the street with the rattle of a loose muffler. She turned back to me. “I meant the hunt. I’ve been thinking about this, and I still think it’s too risky.”
Duh.
But I’d made up my mind about this. “We’ve been over this, Mom. There really isn’t another way. And I think it’s worth it.”
She nodded seriously to let me know she understood the gravity of the situation, but then she said, “I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Well, that makes two of us. You’re going to have to trust me. I’ve got this one, Mom.”
I could tell she didn’t like the idea of that at all. She continued to stare in the direction Thompson had gone. “Everything is going to change when you become a vampire.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m still going to be me. I can still go out in the sun. I …”
“You’re not going to be you,” Mom said, catching me in an intense gaze. “You don’t know anything about the vampire whose soul attached itself to you. You do know how vampires are made, don’t you? They destroy the person whose body they take over. Elias is not the man whose body he inhabits. None of them are.”
I shook my head, unwilling to believe what she was saying. I sputtered, “But—but it’s different with me, isn’t it? I’m not like them in this way. As you said, this extra soul has been with me since birth. It’s part of who I am.”
“Part,” she repeated, “but is it the part I love?”
Those last words were like a punch to the gut, and I could hardly formulate a coherent response. I couldn’t believe my mom could look me in the eye and say something so utterly heartless. Did she really mean to tell me there were parts of me she didn’t—wouldn’t love? “I guess we’re going to have to find out,” I said. Turning, I ran back into the house and up the stairs to my room.
I shut the door and hung out the Do Not Disturb sign that Bea and I had “liberated” from the hotel room we’d shared at Paganicon, the local pagan convention we attended last year.
I sat on my bed with my feet tucked up close and my arms around my knees. I was so angry and hurt by what Mom had said, but my mind kept returning to the same thoughts: What if she was right? What if the soul that I released tonight was the essence of who I was? What if, by letting it die, I allowed something else, something alien, to take me over?
Wasn’t that what happened when a vampire crossed over?
I wished more than ever that vampires had cell phones. I desperately wanted to talk to Luis. He was the only one who knew if there was any truth to what Mom suggested. I got up and went over to the alcove where I kept my computer. I looked out the window into the big pine tree Elias used to sit in when he courted me. Somewhere out there, very likely, an Igor lurked, watching the house and protecting me during daylight hours. Maybe I could send an Igor to Luis with my question.
First, though, speaking of cells, I had to plug mine in. I’d be completely cut off without it, and the Igor would be there all day.
I found the cord and plugged in my phone. As soon as it had power, it started beeping insistently. The cord stretched so that I could just rest my butt on the edge of the mattress. Perching like that, I scrolled through the messages. Bea had apparently spent much of last night composing a series of 140-character mini-rants. From skimming them, I gathered she was ready to call a coup on Mrs. Kirov—not that I blamed her entirely.
I flipped ahead and saw that, at least, Bea’s mom seemed to be recovering from being drugged. She’d had a bad case of the munchies, which necessitated a drive to the convenience store for Doritos and Raisinets. That whole thing sounded kind of hilarious, honestly; though, judging from Bea’s sparse, irritated, and expletive-laden texts, Bea clearly failed to see the humor value.
Thompson had told me he was thinking of me a couple of times.
So did Nik.
I opened one of Nik’s. It read, “Remembering ur kiss. Can’t wait for the next.”
What was I going to do about him?
Thompson had been amazing a moment ago, and I really felt as if we’d been in sync on some deep level ever since that first kiss at tryouts yesterday. There was nothing I wanted more right now than someone like that—strong, dependable and … normal.
Nik had never taken me out to eat, at least, not without his whole band, the crew, and a few groupies in tow. Except the night we broke up. He’d taken me to a malt shop that night and basically told me he thought vampire Igors were freaks. Okay, we kind of agreed on that score, but talk about star-crossed. He was a vampire hunter, for Goddess’ sake!
There really shouldn’t have been any contest.
But, you know, brains and romance didn’t always agree. Despite my better judgment, my heart did a little flip-flop when I thought back to Nik’s kiss. Under the moonlight, it had felt special and just a touch illicit. He knew I was dating someone else, but he’d made his move anyway. That kind of arrogance should probably be a turnoff, but how could I not be flattered?
Plus, Nik could have his pick of any girl, but he’d doggedly pursued me. He wrote songs for me.
The phone beeped again. Thompson wrote, “Hope u r feeling better. See u at 6.”
My thumbs flicked over the keypad to tell him how much I was looking forward to it, and I felt a wave of guilt. I shouldn’t even be thinking about Nik that way.
After sending my reply, I went through and deleted everything from Nik—even messages I’d saved from last year when we were dating.
That made me feel momentarily more righteous, but my mind would not stay on Thompson, no matter how much more he might deserve it.
I set the phone on my bookshelf and lay back
on the bed. Staring up at the plaster ceiling, I counted the cracks.
One of the reasons Nikolai and I had broken up before was that he was always so quick to pull out his psychic knife. How many times last night had he been ready to use it on Elias?
A squirrel chattered on the pine branch right outside my window. It occupied the very spot Elias favored. I wondered where Elias was sleeping tonight. I suspected it wasn’t with the Southern prince’s troops, given the smack-down he’d given his erstwhile fiancée last night.
The squirrel scampered off, chasing away a couple of chickadees that had been hopping around in the needles.
I rubbed my face. None of this was going to matter much if I came back from tonight’s ceremony a different person.
My phone rang. I thought it was probably Bea, but I checked the caller ID. It was an unknown number. I didn’t get a lot of wrong numbers, but I let it go into voice mail anyway. I thought for sure the caller would hang up on hearing the wrong name, so I was surprised when, a minute later, the bell buzzed with a recorded message. Curious, I listened.
I let out a whoop—I’d gotten into Renaissance Festival! They’d hired me as a street performer.
That was the first bit of good news I’d had in a while.
Feeling buoyed by the news, I left my phone charging and snuck downstairs. Through the open screen door, I could see my mom still reading on the front porch swing. I grabbed a pair of flip-flops from the basement stairs and headed out the back. It was nice enough today that I wore a pair of cutoff jeans with the hems cuffed, and, ironically, my “Vampire Hunter D” T-shirt. What can I say? I related to a character who was half vampire, even if he did have a demon living in one hand.
I scouted through the alley for the Igor. I found a likely suspect at the bus stop on the other side of the block. Problem was, he was just kind of a greasy kid. Could I be sure he was an Igor? What if he just had unfortunate hygiene?
“Uh, excuse me,” I ventured.
The kid looked startled, which could be a sign either way. Igors were used to being mostly ignored by vampires and even kind of mistreated by royalty, but, then again, this was Minnesota, so he might just be shocked by my boldness. It was not as though people made a habit of talking to strangers here.
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