"So, what does it feel like when you're drinking someone's blood?" Roxy asked.
Christian glanced in the rearview mirror and gave me such a woebegone look I couldn't help laughing. It was the first time I'd laughed all evening, and it felt a bit stiff and unsure in his presence, but I gave myself full marks for being able to laugh with a man who I'd just discovered had a lifespan that could be ticked off in centuries rather than decades.
"Do blood clots get stuck in your teeth? What if someone's anemic; are you hungry again an hour later? Has anyone ever bitten you? If you run out of blood, do you shrivel up like a really old orange?"
"Roxy!"
"OK, here's an easy one. How come you can eat and drink when other Dark Ones can't?"
"What makes you think I can?" Christian asked, his eyes on the dark road ahead.
"We saw you!"
He glanced at her.
"At the hotel," Roxy added. "You had dinner with us, remember? And you were in the bar earlier. We saw you drinking then... didn't we?"
His eyes met mine in the mirror.
"With your sleight-of-hand abilities, you ought to be the one giving the magic show, not Dominic," I said.
He smiled.
Roxy finally figured it out. "Well, that's just not fair! If I'd realized you were only putting on a show, I'd have known right away who you were. OK, on to the next question - "
"I have no idea if you can do any of those handy mind-control things that the heroes in your books do, Christian, but if you can, I'd appreciate it if you gave Roxy the mental command to shut up."
He laughed.
"Can I help it if I have a bunch of questions?" Roxy asked with an infuriated look back at me. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime situation here and I'm not going to waste it! Besides, you got to ask all the questions when we were seeing the castle; now it's my turn."
"Questions about the origin of the Conspirators' Gallery are not quite as offensive as asking someone what they pick out of their teeth. Stop being so rude."
"You don't mind me asking you personal questions, do you?" she asked him.
Christian gave her a look that said yes, he did mind, but she ignored it. "See? He doesn't mind. Now, about this eternal damnation you suffer - "
"Oh, for God's sake - Roxy, lay off him!" She turned around in the seat to level me another glare before turning back to pout out the window, but both glare and pout left me unfazed. I watched the back of Christian's head as we drove the few miles back to the hotel. It was difficult reconciling the friendly, amusing Christian I'd grown to like with the tormented immortal who viewed me as his only means to salvation.
And it left me feeling guiltier than ever.
I leaned back against the soft leather seat and closed my eyes, thinking back over all the times his mind had touched mine, trying to adjust my mental picture of him with the emotional one his mind had left me. It was him I felt approaching the bar the first night. It was his hunger that filled me when he bent to kiss my hand, not Raphael's as he stood watching us. It was his desperate need that scared me the night Raphael came to my room. And it was his wordless scream of anguish that ripped through the night when I gave myself to Raphael. Christian was wrong about me, I knew he was. But how was I supposed to make him understand that?
I let my body relax into the seat, trying to clear my mind of everything but what I wanted to do, following Miranda's rules regarding meditation. I stretched and reached with my mind.
Christian ?
Immediately he was there, his thoughts warm and reassuring. Or they would have been except that I felt anything but reassured with the ease he invaded my head. Beloved? You call to me?
Oh, no! What had I done? What if only his Beloved was supposed to be able to communicate with him mentally? My mind scurried around trying to remember what I had read from Christian's books about mental communication between a Beloved and her Dark One. What if only a Beloved was supposed to be able to communicate mentally with him? I thought I remembered reading he could talk to others that way, but what if I was wrong? My hash was really fried if that was so. I resisted the temptation to see if he was looking at me in the mirror, deciding that as of that moment, all mental communication with Christian was verboten.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you just then. I wanted you to know how bad I feel about how things have turned out. I know you don't believe me yet, but I'm going to prove to you somehow that I'm not the one who can save you. Better than that, I promise to help you find her. I don't want you to suffer anymore, Christian, I truly don't."
His eyes glittered blackly in the mirror. "It is, perhaps, a subject we can discuss more fully at another time."
I shook my head. "No, it isn't. You don't have to worry about Roxy, she won't repeat anything. I told her what happened in your dungeon. She understands."
He glanced at Roxy. She just smiled at him.
"Not that I have a lot left to say. I think I've pretty much said it all."
"I, however, have not said all," he replied mildly, and turned his eyes back to the road.
Glaring at his head helped a bit; so did a stringent round of mentally calling him every variation of the terms pigheaded and obstinate. For a while. By the time he dropped us off at the hotel, I was resigned to the fact that I would have to redouble my efforts to make him understand that I was not what he wanted me to be.
"Are we going to brave the crowds?" Roxy asked as we stood in the parking area of the hotel, looking at the meadow below.
"Do you have to ask?" I turned to smile at Christian. "You're welcome to join us if you've got nothing else to do. That is, if you don't mind being around a bunch of people. If we don't bother you, I mean. Having all the people... around... you... " My words trailed off under the knowing look he gave me, my cheeks heating up with embarrassment over what I couldn't put into words.
"She means if you've fed," Roxy chirped. "I don't suppose you'd let me watch - " He transferred his look to her. "No. You're right. It's a bad idea."
"If you will allow me, I believe I will join you later at the fair."
"Sure thing," I said brightly, trying not to acknowledge that he was off to prey on some unsuspecting victim. "Later. We'll be there. Somewhere."
"Bon app¨¦tit," Roxy said.
I grabbed her by the arm and hustled her down the grassy hill toward the fair. "For God's sake, Roxy, you don't tell a Dark One bon app¨¦tit!. That's utterly tactless!"
"Why?" she asked, stumbling over a clod of dirt. "I want him to have a good meal. What if he picked someone who was born in an off year? Or someone with a blood disease? You may not have any plans for him later, but I do, so I'd like him to be in a good mood. I want to hear all about the stuff he hasn't written yet, all the dirt on the Dark Ones. And he promised me it was my turn next with the thumbscrews in the dungeon room."
I looked back over my shoulder as we reached the bottom of the hill. Christian was silhouetted against the glow from the hotel, the wind setting his long coat flapping around his legs as he stood frozen, watching us.
"Raphael can't be done soon enough for me. I sure hope nothing goes wrong at the fair tonight," I muttered under my breath.
Roxy heard me. "What could go wrong tonight? You're not reading any rune stones tonight, so the world ought to be safe from any of the disasters, catastrophes, and general acts of God that follow when you do."
There are times when Roxy isn't particularly prescient.
I found Raphael by one of the two tents that served prepackaged food and hot beverages. Although the fair was not licensed to serve alcohol, many customers brought their own in. With the crowds gathering for the big festival a few days away, Raphael was particularly hard-pressed to weed out those who had overindulged and were making a nuisance of themselves. He was escorting two women and a tall, skinny young man off the fairgrounds, telling them they could come back later after they'd sobered up.
"From the way they're staggering - not to mention the bits of song interspersed in their condemnation of your actions - I'm betting they sleep it off rather than return later."
"That's the general idea." Raphael smiled as he turned to face me. There were lines of stress alongside his mouth, and his beautiful eyes looked troubled and distracted. I squelched my plans to tease him into a frenzy of lustful thoughts, and tried instead to smooth away the frown that creased his forehead.
"Not going well tonight?"
"No worse than what we expected." He caught my hand and pressed a warm kiss to my palm. "How did your evening with Dante go?"
I swallowed back the horrible memory of Christian's torment. "OK. I'll tell you about it later." Much later. Say, five or six years later.
A burst of static and unintelligible garble came from the radio clipped to his belt. He seemed to understand it, however, because he barked a command into the radio, and grabbed me as he started back toward the fair proper.
"Here. You take this." He pulled his trailer key out of his pocket and shoved it in my hand. "I'll be there as soon after closing as I can. Rico needs help with a fight near the main tent. Stay away from that area until we can clear it out."
"No problem. Don't worry about me. I'll go find Arielle and see how she's doing."
He started off at a trot toward the big tent, then changed his mind and pulled me into a quick, hard kiss. "Have I told you how wonderful you are today?" he growled into my mouth.
"No, but I'm willing to entertain your apologies later for so gross a negligence." I nipped his chin and felt a glow of happiness inside me at the heated look he sent before turning back toward the main tent.
"Be careful," I couldn't help but calling out.
He raised his hand in acknowledgment, and muscled his way through the thickening crowds.
Arielle was near the end of her rope.
"Joy!" she shouted as I wandered by her tent, pleased to see the huge line of people waiting to have their palms read. She stood up, excused herself to the startled client, and dashed after me, clutching my hands in hers when she reached me. "Oh, Joy, I am so happy to see you. I have sent Roxy to find you - please, you must help me. I am in a situation most desperate."
I smiled and gave her hands a little shake. "Of course I'll help you. What do you need?"
She started dragging me back toward her booth where the line of people - steadily growing with the increasing crowd - were beginning to look a bit disgruntled. "Tanya will not read. She came back earlier and refused Dominic's order to read the tarot cards."
I guessed where this was going. "I'm glad she's back safe and sound, although I'm sorry to hear she won't read, but I'm afraid I can't help you. I don't know the first thing about tarot cards - "
"No, no," she said, shaking her head vehemently as she continued dragging me past the line of people waiting. "It is all arranged. I shall read the tarot, and Renee - she is Bastian's wife, you know her? She is very much with child - she will read the palms, but you must read the runes, for Renee is a boh¨¦mienne, a gypsy, you see, and she does not feel the runes inside her. You will read the runes most successfully, and I shall be very thankful to you."
"But, but - "
"It is all arranged," Arielle repeated, shoving me into her chair. "I will go now to Tanya's booth and read the tarot. Renee is using the tea tent for the palm readings. You give a three-stone reading for 150 koruna or five euros. You may keep the tips, of course. Here are your stones - Roxy brought them from your room. Is that all you need? Yes? Excellent." Arielle clapped her hands and shouted out over the din that a great reader of runes had come halfway across the world to read for them. No one looked particularly impressed by either that news or my appearance in faded jeans and a Bavarian sweater, but no one cried foul either, so I picked up my bag of stones and gave the woman in the chair opposite me a smile.
"You must think of a question you'd like some insight on," I told her in German, praying everyone in line would get tired of waiting and go off to another booth.
Three hours and twenty-four minutes later I wished a young Czech couple good night as I tucked the last few coins into Arielle's cash box, dumped the money from her tip jar into a cloth bag I assumed she used for that purpose and stuck that into the cash box as well, then stood up to stretch my exhausted body. Besides the steady stream of people who wanted to have the runes read for their benefit, I had other visitors too. Dominic swept in dramatically, giving me one of his seductive smiles as he thanked me for helping. I accepted his thanks, ignored his leer, and told him in an undertone to take his act elsewhere unless he wanted me to get up and walk away right that moment. He took one look at the line of people waiting, wrestled my hand away from where I was clutching the table, and made a showy bow over it, kissing my wrist and making sure everyone saw him licking his fangs.
"Ham," I growled.
"Mon ange," he oozed.
Raphael was a much more welcome visitor, but although he stopped by three times, he looked distracted and did nothing more than to ask if everything was all right. Roxy and Christian waved twice as they passed while making the rounds, stopping the second time to drop off a bottle of cold water and a big pretzel.
Even Milos visited, once to express his appreciation for my helping - in a voice so low I almost couldn't hear it - and the second time to clear out the overflowing cash box. By the time I'd read the last rune for the last customer, I was sore and tired from the stress of reading runes for more than fifty people. I pulled out Raphael's key, intending to crash there, but the thought of a long, hot soak in the tub at the hotel sang a siren song to my aching body.
I creaked my way over to where Arielle was still reading tarot cards. "I finished with everyone, so I'm going to call it a night. Have you seen Roxy?"
She shook her head.
"Never mind. How about Raphael?"
"He was here a few minutes ago. He said he was checking on a problem someone had reported, but he would be back directly after that."
"Ah. Well, if you see him again, would you tell him I've gone to have a bath, but I'll be back?"
She nodded, her eyes warm with thanks. I left the cash box with her and did the salmon-spawning-upstream thing again through the crowds until I reached the edge of the fair. The noise from behind me indicated the first band was about to play, which accounted for most of the people heading in that direction. I stepped over the usual signs of people having fun - a puddle of vomit, empty wine bottles, discarded condom wrappers, and miscellaneous trash blowing across the crushed grass - and headed away from the noise and lights to the relative calmness of the outer fringes.
Voices raised loud in song made me pause as I was about to take my usual path past the tent city. Eight or nine people were dancing in various stages of undress around a burn barrel, clearly members of the intoxicated group Raphael had ushered out earlier. Rather than risk attracting their notice, I cut sharply to the left, huffed and puffed my way up a steep hill made slippery with pine needles, and plunged into a small stand of fir trees at the far end of the hotel's property. It was a dark, close area that smelled heavenly, but gave me goose bumps with its isolated location. After the experience in Christian's dungeon, I wanted the security of lights and people around me.
As I rounded a large pine tree, I stopped. Ahead of me someone was hunkered over between two trees at the fringe of the stand. Probably just a solitary drunken Goth ralphing up too much cheap wine, I told myself. But as I quietly tried to edge my way around him, I could see that the person wasn't a Goth, wasn't ralphing up anything, and wasn't alone.
The figure silhouetted against the distant hotel was large, muscular, and extremely familiar to me. But what held my gaze, and what kept me from calling out in delight, was the person at his feet.
Even in the almost dark I recognized the crimson hair that spread like a stain from her head.
If Raphael had been attempting CPR, or trying to slap Tanya awake, or even talking to her, I'd have run forward to help him, but the silence he maintained, the economical but efficient movements as he searched Tanya, kept me frozen behind the tree that partially hid me from his view. Raphael plucked something from the ground near Tanya, examined it for a moment, then tucked it in his pocket and looked out into the night, his head turning slowly as he made a scan of the area. I ducked back behind the tree, my heart pounding madly, unsure why I was hiding from him, but doing it nonetheless. When I peeked out a moment later, he was gone.
Tanya wasn't, however.
"Please just let her be sleeping. Or unconscious. Or playing possum. Or in a drugged stupor. Please oh please oh please don't let her be... " I couldn't even say the word, which was stupid because I knew full well she was dead. Raphael's body language screamed it, Tanya's still form screamed it, and every hair on my head that stood on end as I'd watched him looking her over screamed it.
She was dead. She lay on her side, curled up into a ball, resting on a pine-needle mattress with her hair streaming out around her like a red halo. Her eyes were closed. I didn't see any sign that she was breathing, but figured I'd better check to make sure she wasn't gravely wounded instead of dead.
I leaned forward to look at Tanya, felt a warning tickle high up in my nose, and threw myself backward, pulling out a handful of tissues from my pocket as I did so. I sat back on my heels a moment later, praying there wasn't any bad karma to be had from sneezing on a possibly dead person. She sure looked dead. I swallowed back a lump of revulsion before I reached out with a hand that shook more than I was willing to acknowledge, pushing back the collar of her jacket and touching one fingertip to her chin. It felt warmish.
"Pulse, you idiot - you can't tell anything from a person's chin. Check fora pulse," I lectured myself. I scooted forward until I was leaning over her, moving her head gently to the side so I could find her pulse point.
My hand froze.
A scream tore through the heavy night air, startling the birds nesting in the trees around me. I ignored the screaming, unable to take my eyes from the horrible sight, unable to believe I was seeing what was in front of me. A distant part of my mind wished that whoever was screaming would shut up so I could think in peace, but the rest of my mind, the part that was staring at Tanya's neck, was too stunned to do any thinking at all.
A dark form swooped out of the blackness and grabbed me, slamming me up against a brick wall of warmth and comfort, mercifully silencing the screamer. "Hush, baby. You're all right, I'm here now."
I shuddered into the warmth that called to me, clinging desperately to Raphael, pressing against him in an attempt to block out the horror of the thing behind me. "It's Tanya," I shivered into his neck.
"I know, baby."
"She's dead."
"I know."
The horrible image of her neck torn open, the blood drained from her filled my mind. I tried to wedge myself in tighter to Raphael. "I know who killed her," I whispered.
His arms tightened around me as he pressed his lips against my temple. "So do I, baby. So do I."
