Tall, Dark & Dead

by Tate Hallaway

  “The hunters,” I explained. “The Order of Eustace.”

  “Eustace?” he chuckled. “Am I supposed to be afraid of an organization with a name like Eustace?”

  My fists clenched. “They could be named the pansy-ass froufrou club for all I care. They’re killers, Sebastian. Stone cold.”

  “So am I.” Sebastian’s tone carried no arrogance or boasting, merely a statement of fact. His gaze held mine steadily for a moment longer, then shifted uneasily to the floor.

  “I’ll get those clothes for you,” he said.

  I nodded mutely. The rain had softened to a hushed, steady rhythm on the roof. The house was quiet except for the creak of floorboards as Sebastian made his way up the stairs. It wasn’t as if his admission should come as such a shock. I knew vampires killed people. I mean, they were predators. It was their nature.

  I learned from Parrish that vampires could, and most often did, survive on the small amount of blood that they took from consensual partners. The majority of vampires in Parrish’s circle courted a certain kind of groupie who enjoyed the thrill of the bite, which, I had to admit, had no small appeal. I let Parrish bite me once, out of curiosity, I suppose, or that before-mentioned self-destructiveness, and I instantly understood why Parrish never lacked for volunteers in that regard. The pain was addictive. My attraction to it must have scared me on some level, or I wasn’t nearly as suicidal as I feared, because somehow I managed to studiously avoid the role of ghoul with Parrish. We were lovers; he got his nourishment elsewhere.

  I guess that’s how I’d fooled myself.

  Parrish had been pretty up-front about the fact that he’d made his living as a “gentleman of the highway,” as he called it, and had a tendency toward murder even before the Change. Somehow he’d made his lifestyle—past and present—all seem so charming, so… harmless. I supposed it behooved him not to remind me that vampires regularly murdered people. That sort of thing was probably a turnoff for a potential partner.

  Sebastian had certainly changed the mood with his comment. I wasn’t precisely disgusted by him, but I certainly felt… sobered. I think what disturbed me the most was the comparison. When I thought about the Order, it was personal. Those bastards had taken the lives of my friends.

  Was there someone out there who hated Sebastian for the life—or lives—he’d taken the way I despised the Order?

  Of course, I was a fine one to talk. Lilith had killed through me. I was a murderer, too. Though I preferred to think of it as vengeance. If I thought of it at all.

  The squeak of the stairs alerted me to Sebastian’s return. He handed me a white T-shirt and navy sweatpants with UWs logo on the hip. “I thought you might find these comfortable.” He gathered up the cocoa mugs, avoiding my gaze. “I’ll freshen these up, shall I, while you change?”

  He was already through the kitchen door before I could acknowledge his kindness. I quickly pulled on the clothes. The shirt fell way past my hips, and I had to roll up the legs of the sweats before I could even see my feet, but he was right. The plush fabric of the pants felt really comfortable against my skin, although the softness made me hyperaware of the fact that my underwear was in Sebastian’s dryer.

  I thought about calling him back into the room to let him know I was decently dressed, but the sounds of broom and dustpan came from the kitchen. I took the opportunity to snoop.

  Despite claiming to be sun-loving, Sebastian had not turned on any lamps. The fire cast the majority of the light, accented by a couple of tall tapers on the built-in glass-fronted cabinet. Though clearly designed to display china, Sebastian had filled the shelves with books—tomes, really. The books Sebastian had looked nothing like any reading material I’d ever owned in my life. For one thing, none of them were published by the major New Age publishing house, Llewellyn Press, and anyway, these things were leather-bound and serious-looking. Most of them were not in English, or if they were, they were in some dialect so ancient it wasn’t recognizable to me as such.

  The books seemed very vampire, almost stereotypical fashion-by-Vlad. What surprised me were some of the curios among the books: a toy ‘65 Mustang with working doors and trunk, a jeweled frog with a compartment that held a rose quartz rosary, and—most curious of all—a framed photo of Sebastian with guy friends dressed in climbing gear on some mountainside.

  I looked at the photo for a long time. The sky was crystal-blue behind the men. Sebastian looked… tanned. Actually, it was a really good picture of him; it showed off his muscles, but that was just a distraction from how strange the whole thing was. A vampire who mountain climbed? With buddies? In the sun?

  I was still staring at the photo when Sebastian came back into the room. I suppose I should have replaced the picture guiltily, but I just couldn’t get over it. “You mountain climb?”

  He smiled fondly with the memory. “Oh, yeah, I got into it for a while there. That was taken in Alaska.” He came up beside me and pointed to one of his friends in the picture. “This is Smitty. He’s a crazy Australian. You’d like him, I think. He has a bit of a wicked side. This is Ron—”

  My expression must have halted his reminiscence.

  “What?” he asked; it was that incredulous yet I-could-be-guilty-if-I-knew-for-sure-what-you-were-thinking-of what.

  “You mountain climb?”

  “Rock climb, really,” he said, his eyes lingering on the photo in my hands. “Not anymore, though. Too dangerous.”

  I nodded. I was thinking that the danger of being exposed as a vampire had to increase exponentially when you were alone in the wilderness with a bunch of living men. The logistics of his expedition made me ask, “How much blood do you have to consume in order to go out in the daylight?”

  Sebastian let out an embarrassed laugh. “That’s a bit of an indelicate question, isn’t it? See how I’ve diplomatically avoided asking you how you came to be part killer Goddess?”

  I started to deny it, but stopped. I kept forgetting that Sebastian knew about Lilith—had seen her—and lived. “Tact has never been my strong suit,” I admitted.

  “I’ve noticed.” He smiled, handing me a refilled cup of cocoa. “Luckily, I find it dead charming.”

  In order to take the cup, I had to replace the photo on the shelf. All the shuffling made for a good excuse not to show Sebastian how pleased I was to hear his compliment.

  Sebastian must have noticed how flustered I was, because he changed the subject. “Tell me more about these Vatican agents of yours.”

  “Not mine,” I said abruptly, though I’d known full well what he’d meant.

  He raised his hands as though in surrender. “Sorry.”

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t mean to snap. I just have a history with the Order.”

  “So I’ve gathered.”

  Sebastian took my place on the couch, so I snuggled into one of the overstuffed chairs close to the fire.

  After taking a sip of chocolate, I asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “Why do you think they’re after me, for one?”

  I recounted the tale of the real estate agent for Sebastian. “It was pretty obvious.”

  He nodded. “It’s strange that they care more that I’m a Witch than a vampire. You’d think that being one of the walking dead would be a bigger sin.”

  “It’s biblical, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “Vampires aren’t mentioned in the Bible; Witches are.”

  “The whole suffer the Witch to live thing?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s just bad biblical scholarship. A much more accurate translation of the Hebrew would be something more like, ‘Thou shalt not support a Witch in her livelihood.’ Or, ‘Don’t give the fortune-teller your dime.’ ”

  I’d also heard that originally the word had been “poisoner” and had gotten changed over time. Anyway, it hardly mattered. “Be sure to explain that to the assassins when they come,” I said with a grimace. “I’m certain they’d love to engage you in a lit
tle semantic debate before they gut you.”

  “They? I thought you said there was only one.”

  I shrugged. “Where there’s one, there’s bound to be more.”

  Sebastian took a contemplative sip of his cocoa, then asked, “Why Eustace? The Vatican had a fairly efficient group of Witch hunters in the Order of the Inquisition.”

  I shrugged. “Eustace is the Inquisition, as far as I can tell. Officially, of course, it’s a different story, but when the Inquisition fell out of favor, the new order carried on its business covertly. I think the Inquisition was embarrassed because it never uncovered real magic. The Order of Eustace has.”

  Sebastian nodded. “So what’s their plan?” Sebastian asked, setting his cocoa cup down on the table between us. I watched the firelight play across the ripple of his muscles with a smile. “The Order, I mean. Total destruction of Witches? Containment? Control?”

  I sipped my cocoa and thought about for it for a moment. It wasn’t like the Order had a published mission statement anywhere, but the Witchcraft community talked and speculated and spun conspiracy theories. “There’s a lot of debate about that,” I said. “The general consensus is destruction, but to what degree, no one seems to know.”

  Sebastian sat forward in his chair. As the conversation intensified, so did his body language. “I thought you said they were being literal with the ‘Thou shall not suffer a Witch to live.’ That seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Not a lot of room for shades of gray.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s what I’d think, too, except the Vatican employs Witches.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s the rumor,” I said with a shrug. “Fight magic with magic, I guess.”

  “So,” he said with a wicked smile that showed off the points of his canines warming his tone. “Instead of excommunicating me, they should have recruited me.”

  The thought of Sebastian fighting for the other side sent a shiver though my body. He radiated magical power, even dead. “Goddess forbid,” I said.

  He laughed. “I’m not that scary,” he said.

  “Yeah, loads of people stare down Lilith and live,” I said, sarcasm oozing in my tone. “Please.”

  Sebastian caught my gaze and held it. The fire reflected the amber starburst that encircled his pupils. Intense. Intense and deeply, deeply sexy.

  We fell silent for a moment, both lost in thought. My thoughts mostly fell under the category of the things I wanted to do with Sebastian naked, with nothing between us but the heat of those eyes. I broke away first. “Do you think the Vatican knows you’re a vampire, Sebastian? With all this rock-climbing and having a day job, they might have come to the same conclusion I did.”

  “Oh? And what was that?”

  “Well, at first I thought you were some other kind of animated corpse.”

  He laughed. “Nice.”

  I gave him a hard glance. “You are an animated corpse, Sebastian.”

  “Reanimated, technically, but, well, I was hoping to make a better first impression.” His smile was warm and flirtatious. “What tipped you off?”

  “You have no aura,” I explained, smiling back. Damn that infectious grin of his. “I figured you had to be dead, but then I decided maybe you were just such a powerful magician that you’d learned to cloak it.”

  “To what end? Why would I not want to seem alive?”

  I blushed. I didn’t want to say what I’d been thinking, but he stared at me with such a curious expression that I finally relented. “I thought you were a necromancer. I thought you were trying to pass as dead. You know, to be cool.”

  Sebastian gave me a look that told me exactly how wrong I was about that idea. “Who the hell thinks it’s cool to be dead?”

  If I’d been wearing my ankh, I would have pointed to it. Instead, I twirled a piece of my dyed black hair with my blood red fingernails. “There’s a certain type.”

  And then he actually said, “Egad.”

  I hid my smile behind my cocoa mug. “More importantly, how do you think you came to the Vatican’s attention?”

  “It’s odd. I’ve always been very low profile.” He watched the flames dance on the logs. “It’s how I survive.”

  “As a vampire,” I offered. “What about as a Witch? Joined any covens lately?”

  “Dabble, remember? I’m no Witch,” he said, with, I noted, a slight tone of contempt. “I’m an alchemist.”

  “Same difference,” I said just to tease him. “Anyway, what self-respecting ‘scientist’ needs mandrake harvested by full moon? You’re a spell worker, Sebastian Von Traum, admit it.”

  He opened his mouth to protest but then stopped when he saw my smile. “I suppose I am, at that.”

  “Tell me the truth,” I said, pointing my finger at him with faux seriousness, “Mine isn’t the first shop you went to for your mandrake, was it?”

  “Hmmm, I suppose I shouldn’t have gone to all those co-ops and health food stores if I wanted to be secret about it, eh?”

  We grinned at each other, but neither of us could really work up to a full-fledged laugh. The situation was just too damned serious. I chewed on my fingernail, listening to the rain tapping against the window.

  Sebastian’s eyes roamed over my body thoughtfully, as though trying to understand something without having to ask. Finally, he said, “You never mentioned. What kind of Witch are you?”

  Oh, the loaded question. This was that moment of vetting I always hated, when Witches tossed around lineage and degrees and dropped names copiously. Luckily, I had an answer that satisfied most people. “I’ve been kicking around the magical community for a decade or so. I was a fifth-degree Gardnerian when I got frustrated with hierarchies and all the politics of a structured order. The last coven I was in was Eclectic, which suited my temperament better. Now… now I’m solitary.”

  It was hard to say solitary. The word itself felt foreign and thick on my tongue. I loved being part of group magic, and I missed it so much I almost felt a physical pain in my chest. I tried not to let my hurt show, but Sebastian reached across the table and took my hand. I squeezed it, enjoying the comfort in his strength.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Yeah, me, too.” Impulsively, I moved to the couch.

  I nuzzled under his arm. He smelled good, musk-manly and something spicy, like cinnamon. It felt good to be held. His fingers stroked my hair.

  Oops. Suddenly I was all turned on. His presence, his smell, the rock-hard smoothness of his muscles had me thinking about kissing and grunting and sweating. Problem? He was being all brotherly comforting, and it would be wildly inappropriate to grab a handful of his silky black hair and plunge lips-first into a bruiser of a kiss.

  What to do now? How could I transform this moment of sympathy into hot, sweaty sex? I pushed myself closer under his arm, wiggled a bit, then felt foolish for even thinking about jumping Sebastian under these circumstances. I took in a deep breath and tried to be satisfied with the moment.

  Nope. Too hot and bothered.

  I straightened out of his embrace. “It’s late, isn’t it,” I said glancing around the room for a clock. “I should probably call a taxi if I’m going to get home at a decent hour.”

  “I’m afraid all the decent hours have already passed,” Sebastian said. “It’s quarter of midnight. Anyway, the guest room is already made up. You can stay here tonight.”

  I liked the sound of his proposition minus the guest bedroom part. Ah, well, I supposed he was being gentlemanly about it all and not presuming.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “That would be fine.”

  The room Sebastian showed me smelled of dust and lavender. Lace valances, white curtains, calico comforter, and doilies all seemed perfectly preserved from someone else’s life. Somehow, I couldn’t picture Sebastian collecting a wooden darning egg and displaying it so artfully next to a brass-bottomed kerosene lamp.

  “Whose room was this?” I asked.

>   “Vivian,” he said, glancing at the window as if looking for something.

  When he didn’t volunteer any more information, I prompted, “Vivian?”

  “The former lady of the house,” he said. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “But it’s perfectly safe now.”

  Safe? That sounded very bad. I got the sense that I didn’t want to know the answer, but I asked anyway. “She died in this room, didn’t she?”

  He nodded. “Kept the house off the market for years. Apparently, the whole murder-suicide thing was very spectacular.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “So, which one was Benjamin? The murder or the suicide?”

  “Suicide.”

  I should have figured. “And you kept the room the same?”

  “Not me. Benjamin.” Picking up an embroidered sachet of potpourri from the end table beside the bed, he tossed it on the bed. “That’ll drive him spare.”

  “Let me see…” I said, working this story out in my head, “Every time you try to change this room, Benjamin fixes it?”

  “The good thing is that his obsession makes him an excellent housekeeper. Sometimes I can get him to clean other parts of house by putting her things around.”

  “This is supposed to make me feel better?” I looked at the bed with its deceptively homey pile of throw pillows. “No way. I’m sleeping on the couch.”

  Sebastian tried to insist that Benjamin wouldn’t try to ax-murder me in my sleep, but I was able to convince him that there was no chance of me closing my eyes for one minute if I stayed in Vivian’s room. After helping Sebastian gather some pillows and blankets from the hall linen closet, I made myself a comfortable nest on the couch downstairs.

  The rain continued to fall softly on the window. “Are you sure you’d prefer to sleep here?” Sebastian asked for the seventh time since I had backed hastily out of Vivian’s room. “It’s only that Benjamin will probably rattle around all night, and… well, I’d prefer to have you closer.”

  Closer? I liked the sound of that, but I wasn’t sure how he meant it. “Oh?”