Romancing the Dead

by Tate Hallaway

  His smile was toothy as he pulled a ring out of his pocket and jangled it in front of my face.

  I scratched my chin with the middle finger of my left hand. Yes, juvenile, but something about Mátyás brought out the worst in me. Besides, this way I had the opportunity to both give him the finger and flash the engagement ring.

  He stared at my ring finger with a look that I could only describe as stricken. “So it is true. Dear God. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  Mátyás opened his mouth, no doubt to shoot off another insult, when one of the gardening matrons cleared her throat, surprising us both.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Lacey?” the lady asked, peering at the name badge I’d been given when I first came in. “You’re Mr. Von Traum’s guest tonight, right?” I nodded. “Is there a problem?” she asked. “Is Mr. Von Traum expected to be late?”

  I reached for my cell phone only to remember that I’d smashed it when I tumbled over my bike. “I’m afraid I don’t know,” I told the lady. “The last time I talked to him, he was planning to be here.” In fact, he’d been the one to remind me not to be late. “Mátyás, do you have a phone? Mine’s broken.”

  Without a word, Mátyás pulled a cell out of his suit coat pocket and handed it to me. I dialed Sebastian’s number and got his voice mail. I left him a message reminding him that he was supposed to be here in—I checked the wall clock—three minutes. “This isn’t like him,” I told the gardening lady, as I handed Mátyás’s phone back. “Something must be really wrong.”

  “People have paid for their tickets. The food has been catered,” she said, her voice starting to sound a bit shrill. “There’s nearly a hundred and fifty people here. It’s the best attendance we’ve ever had.”

  My own nerves were starting to jangle. “Sebastian isn’t the sort to just blow this off. Something terrible must have happened. He must have been in a car accident, or . . .”

  “Or, he’s off playing blood sports with another woman,” Mátyás suggested casually.

  The gardening lady, who had continued to sputter about arrangements that would have to be undone, stopped and stared gape-mouthed at Mátyás.

  Mátyás locked eyes with me. “Or have you asked him to give all that up as part of your new life together? Say, how is that working out for you?”

  “This is not the time, Mátyás. I’m seriously worried about Sebastian.”

  “Should I cancel? Or do you really think he’s just held up?” The lady asked Mátyás, apparently hoping for a better answer from him than what she’d been getting from me.

  “My father is fairly indestructible,” Mátyás reminded me. “Very little keeps him from what he wants.”

  “Maybe you should try calling him again,” the club president helpfully suggested.

  When the door swung open, we all turned expectantly. The young woman who ducked in smiled apologetically when she noticed all the attention focused on her.

  Sebastian hated being late. He thought tardiness was a social affront. When we went places together, we were often the first to arrive. I remembered when he’d miscalculated the time it would take to negotiate the traffic to Hal’s house and we’d resolutely sat in the car so we wouldn’t be twenty minutes early for the holiday party.

  Even if Mátyás was right and Sebastian was with a ghoul, he’d still find a way to make it here on time. This wasn’t like him.

  Something was really wrong.

  “He’s not coming,” I said, and somehow I knew it was true.

  Despite my pronouncement, the club president fussed and fretted until almost thirty minutes past the hour before calling the engagement off. I stayed to help fold up chairs, still hopeful that Sebastian might show. Mátyás hung around to gloat, though I noticed him surreptitiously checking his cell a couple of times, so he might have been a bit worried himself.

  “She must be something else,” Mátyás said from where he leaned against the wall near the stack of folding chairs.

  “Who?”

  “The ghoul,” Mátyás said, sounding a bit disappointed that I missed the point of his clever barb.

  “Give me your phone,” I said.

  “I’ve already tried him. He’s still not answering.”

  I raised an eyebrow, surprised he confessed to being worried. “I want to call a taxi. I’m going home. Maybe . . .” I was going to say that maybe I’d see him later, but I didn’t like the implication that he might be gone for good. “He’d go there.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  I put my finger in my ear and wiggled it. I swore Mátyás just offered to take me home.

  He rolled his eyes. “Seriously. Come on. My Jaguar has got to be more comfortable than a cab.”

  Go into a car with him? After he and his cronies tried to kill me? When he had left me for dead? I looked at him, his hair falling in front of his eyes and his tailored suit covering his teenage lanky fram. He looked like a kid. “Are you sure you’re even legal to drive?”

  “A hundred and fifty years plus,” he said with a wry smile and a jingle of his keys.

  After the cool of the University Club, outside felt like a sauna. Despite the setting sun, heat waves shimmered on the asphalt as we walked to Mátyás’s brand-new, jet-black Jag. Despite having a boyfriend who was very into vehicles, I didn’t normally understand the appeal of all that steel and such. This car, however, looked cool. It was low and predatory and dangerously fast. He caught me admiring his car and let slip an I-can-tell-you-think-it’s-sexy grin. I grimaced in return, annoyed that he noticed me checking out his ride.

  Mátyás beeped the doors open. My butt clenched when I slid onto the painfully hot leather seat. The air conditioner brought the smell of new car. I jiggled my legs until I stopped sticking to the seat. Mátyás watched me out of the corner of his eye as his did all the usual preparations to drive.

  I said what I sensed he wanted to hear, but I gave it to him dry and uninterested. “Yeah, yeah. It’s a cool car.” It was true anyway. Even the dashboard looked spiffy and space-age. It must have cost a fortune. I wondered where Mátyás got the money for something this expensive. Then, the scrapes on my leg twitched and I remembered the Vatican agents. Had he gotten paid to betray his father? “Thirty silver pieces buys a lot these days, eh?”

  Our uneasy truce shattered. He shot me a bitter look and flipped on the CD player with his knuckle. The thrash of speed-metal guitar filled the interior, killing any attempt at conversation. Suited me fine. I only wished I had my cell phone so I could check to see if there were any messages from Sebastian.

  Where could he be?

  Goddess, I prayed that he was okay.

  I stared out the window, biting my fingernails to the quick with worry. At some point the sun set completely and the strobe of streetlights was replaced by long stretches of complete darkness. When the whiff of manure came in through the vents, I thought to ask, “Where are you taking me?”

  He turned down the music a notch, and said, with what appeared to be genuine confusion, “Home. Aren’t you living at the farm?”

  How was it that Mátyás always managed to stumble right into all the thorny issues in my life? “No,” I muttered.

  A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Oh. My bad.”

  I snorted. If only he really meant that. “We might as well check to see if Sebastian stopped there.”

  Mátyás hummed happily along with the music the rest of the way.

  I strained to see Sebastian’s car in the driveway as we approached the farmhouse. My heart pounded at the emptiness. “He’s not here,” I said.

  Mátyás’s smile widened as he pulled in to the dirt drive. “She must be one hell of a ghoul.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped. “I’m really starting to freak out. Aren’t you worried?”

  “He’s a thousand-year-old vampire, Garnet,” Mátyás said, switching the engine off. “He’s got mad survival skills.”

  “Maybe,” I
said, struggling out of my seat belt.

  “Where are you going? His car isn’t here.”

  “I know,” I said, opening the door. “But I still want to check things out. You know, see if there’s any sign of a struggle.”

  He laughed. “Who are you, Miss Marple now?”

  “Look, as you say, he’s a thousand years old. You don’t think he made any enemies in all that time?”

  Mátyás unsnapped his own seat belt with an incredulous shake of his head. “Okay, Inspector Clouseau, lead on.”

  There’s something inherently spooky about approaching a farmhouse at night. Sebastian’s was no exception, especially given the fact that he normally had the house warded to appear abandoned. Where the porch naturally sagged a little with time, the shadows and Sebastian’s spell made it seem in complete disrepair. The lights were off and the windows reflected only hollow blackness.

  I had to rub my eyes to banish Sebastian’s wards, but even then the place seemed dark and forbidding. The house was set quite a ways back from the highway, and my feet scrunched on the beige sandstone gravel of the drive. A highway light illuminated the country graveyard next door, with its lichen-stained, tilting headstones. The surrounding cornfields rustled with hushed whispers and bullfrogs bellowed lowly in the damp roadside ditches.

  I scrambled to the unlit porch and put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Honey, we’re home!” Mátyás shouted from behind, making me jump. Noticing my reaction, he smiled broadly. With a jerk of his chin in the direction of the cemetery, he said, “Home, creepy home, eh? Perhaps I can understand your cold feet. I mean, especially given the place really is haunted.”

  I pursed my lips in response. A ghost had come with Sebastian’s house. Sebastian always said that he figured that Benjamin was the reason he was able to get such a good deal on the mortgage, but I knew he enjoyed sharing his house with a poltergeist. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we weren’t pretty sure Benjamin had ax murdered his wife in the “guest” room upstairs. It was only a guest room in theory because no one had ever stayed there since the murder, and Benjamin wouldn’t let anyone change a thing about it either.

  Maybe I would take Sebastian up on that offer to move somewhere new. “Let’s see if he’s home, shall we?” I asked Mátyás, irritated that he’d somehow made me uncomfortable about a house I already spent more than half my time at.

  I tried the knob. I was strangely relieved to find the door locked, and not, say, hanging off its hinges. Today’s newspaper was tucked by the threshold. I grabbed it and the mail from his box. Using my key, I let myself in the front door. I flipped on the overhead light. The house was quiet, empty.

  Being a hundred-year-old farm house, Sebastian’s living room wasn’t grand or spacious. He filled the rectangular space with modern, comfy suede couches and leather chairs. Books lined glass-fronted, built-in cases. An expensive Persian rug accented polished maple floors. Abstract art hung on the ivory-gold painted walls. Central air kept the place cool. A book rested on the arm of Sebastian’s favorite high-back leather chair.

  I sighed. His place was much more grown-up and classy than mine. My stuff was so going to get sent back to the rummage sale it came from when we combined households.

  “So,” Mátyás said, flopping down on to the couch. “No signs of a break-in?” he asked from where he peeked in over my shoulder. “Are you sure the bedroom’s empty?”

  “Sebastian?” I walked over to the open staircase and called up in concession to Mátyás’s suggestion. “Hello? Anyone at home?”

  A wind ruffled the lace curtains on the landing upstairs, even though the window was closed. Cold kissed my cheek. “I mean besides you, Benjamin.”

  When Mátyás put his boots up on the glass coffee table, I almost heard Benjamin’s growl of dislike. With a sudden jerk, Mátyás’s feet were shoved off. Mátyás sat up straighter, looking around for the culprit. He gave me a glare like I’d put Benjamin up to it. I shrugged as innocently as I could muster. It wasn’t my fault Benjamin had good taste in people.

  I checked Sebastian’s answering machine to see if he’d called here thinking I might come back. There was a message from Jensen’s telling him details about the Mustang and another from the Horticultural Society lady expressing her extreme disappointment that Sebastian was a no-show at tonight’s event. I noticed she didn’t offer a date for rescheduling. Ouch. Automatically, I scribbled down notes detailing the calls on the pad near the phone as was our routine.

  Mátyás sat on the couch still glancing around a bit nervously, as though he expected Benjamin to make another move on him. I leaned against the railing of the open staircase and noted how Mátyás looked uncomfortable and out of place. The last time he’d been in this house, he’d secretly been allied with Vatican assassins that wanted his father’s alchemical formula for vampirism. We’d nearly died to protect it. Mátyás had let us live, but not for a lack of trying.

  “Have you and Sebastian reconciled?” I asked him as kindly as I could.

  He didn’t even turn to face me, he just chuckled darkly. “How likely is that?”

  Well, it didn’t seem impossible from where I stood. I knew that both men loved the other in their own way, despite all the twisted family history between them. I didn’t say anything, though, because I didn’t want to presume to comment on his relationship with his father.

  “Yeah,” he said to my silence. “Exactly.”

  “Then why are you here? Why come back?” I hoped my tone didn’t imply what I was really thinking, which was wondering if he’d come back with another agenda again. Maybe Sebastian’s disappearance wasn’t really such a surprise to him, after all. Perhaps he was back to finish the job he’d started.

  His eyes narrowed. “Oh, now I’m responsible for his disappearance?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, then just as quickly asked, “So are you?”

  “No.” Mátyás said gruffly, though I thought I could sense a trace of hurt in his tone. “Disappointed?”

  Unconvinced, maybe, I thought. “Why are you here again?”

  “To torture you, of course.”

  With that, he stood up and walked to the kitchen door. I followed behind, turning on lights. It was freaky that he didn’t seem to need the light to find his way around; it was almost as if he could see in the dark. But I might have been imagining things. He probably just knew the place well. I was never really sure how extra-human Mátyás was, being a dhampyr and all.

  A dhampyr is what you get when you cross a vampire and a human. As far as I knew, Mátyás was the only one, ever. Traditional vampires like Parrish were dead. Their skin was cold, they didn’t need to eat or breathe, their hair didn’t grow much, and, well, let’s just say a sperm bank would be uninterested in their deposit. Sebastian was, for the most part, fully human. Thus Mátyás.

  Like I said, I never knew what, if any, superhuman powers Mátyás possessed. Other than his longevity and his awesome powers of annoyance.

  Sebastian’s kitchen smelled like roasted chili peppers and stewed tomatoes. There were bottles and jars of all sorts around. Sebastian had just canned tomatoes and made several batches of salsa, which sat upside down on towels on the counter beside the stove. A few remaining fruits ripened on the windowsill.

  Mátyás reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer. I watched him hunt through the drawers for a bottle cap opener.

  Our eyes met as he shut the drawer by my hip. I leaned against the counter, arms crossed in front of my chest. “I’m not here to kill him,” Mátyás said. “Or you.”

  “Really,” I drawled. I was still unconvinced. “How convenient that Sebastian is missing when you show up.”

  “Actually, it isn’t terribly convenient,” Mátyás said with a snarl. He levered the opener and gave it a forceful shove. The top came off with an audible pop and fizz. “I think he’s making a huge mistake and I was hoping to talk him out of it. Now I see it’s too late.” He tipped the bott
le in the direction of my ring before taking a swig. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I should have stayed in Rome.”

  “Italy? Still hanging out with the Order of Eustace then?” I tried to make it sound casual, but my voice sounded strained even to me.

  Mátyás glared at me from where he leaned against the kitchen counter, bottle poised at his lips. He took a long, defiant swallow. His eyes never left mine. Finally, he said, “Do you really want to broach that particular topic with me?”

  I sure as hell did if Sebastian was in danger.

  “Depends,” I said slowly. “Do you have any new tats you want to tell me about?”

  For a supposedly secret organization, the Vatican assassins liked to advertise their membership with a red-lettered tattoo of the numbers 22:18, a reference to the biblical chapter Exodus’s admonishment not to “suffer a witch to live.” If Mátyás had joined, he’d have gotten the tattoo. It was required, even of their sensitives—the magically abled turncoats that helped them hunt down and destroy Witches and their covens.

  The kitchen was so quiet that the ticktock of the wall clock measured the seconds before Mátyás answered. “No new ink,” he said finally.

  His answer was so cautious that I wondered what he’d left out. “What aren’t you telling me, Mátyás? Are you working for them in some other way? Or . . . Oh!” Suddenly I remembered that the Vatican had promised to try to resurrect his mother, Teréza who Sebastian accidentally left in a state of suspended reanimation when he tried to pass on his vampirism in the traditional way. “Do they have your mother hostage? Are they asking for a trade?”

  “Trade?” he repeated incredulously. “I already told you I’m not working for them.”

  “So sue me for being suspicious. It wouldn’t be the first time you’d sell out your father for your mother’s sake.”

  “That’s unfair,” he snapped.

  “Is it? You left us for dead.”

  “I did, did I?” Mátyás took a long pull on his beer. I could smell the yeast from across the room. “Is that how you remember it?”

  I had to break eye contact because I suddenly remembered how Mátyás had, in fact, not entirely betrayed us. Though my spell had fooled the Vatican agents on the other side of our magical circle, Mátyás had stepped through and knew that Sebastian and I were alive, and, even though the order wanted us eliminated, he’d walked away without letting on that there was a chance we had survived the ordeal. It had been mercy so much as Mátyás was capable of it. “Fine,” I said. “Are you planning on betraying us now?”