Charming (30 page)

“Why do you care?” she asked.

“Because you’re still with Stanislav,” I said. “And the guy’s an asshat.”

Two bright red spots appeared on her cheekbones. “I am with Stanislav. And you need to respect that. Especially since you’re leaving anyway.”

“I’m coming back, Sig,” I said.

I think she’d been half expecting me to ask her to go with me. In any case, my words surprised her. She blinked.

“You were right,” I said. “This fugitive life is wearing me down. I’ve been getting more and more sloppy and self-destructive and bitter.”

“You’ve been running from more than just the knights, John,” she said quietly.

I nodded. “I know, or I would have admitted all this a long time ago. I have to square things with the knights somehow.”

“How?” she demanded.

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “But when this vampire thing is over, I’m going to find a way. And then I’m coming back here. If you and Stanislav are posing for Christmas cards and knitting pot holders when I do, I’ll deal with it. Hell, I know you don’t have to choose me even if you two do break up. But I’m coming back. I want to court you.”

She started to protest, then faltered as a number of incompatible emotions warred across her face. Anger. Pleasure. Confusion. Guilt. Amusement. “I… court me? How old are you, John?”

I ignored that question out of habit. “I know we just met, but I like you, Sig. I think you like me.”

“Look, I know you can smell…” She hesitated and blushed. “I know the female body produces… lubricants… when it’s aroused…”

“It sounds so romantic when you put it that way,” I said.

“I’m just saying, I admit I find you physically attractive,” she said angrily. “But you shouldn’t take that for more than what it is. You had a lot of pent-up feelings about Alison, and I helped you release some of them. It’s easy to get confused when you’ve had that kind of a powerful emotional experience after keeping feelings repressed for a long time.”

“I know what emotional displacement is,” I said. “I was attracted to you before I even knew about Alison. I was attracted to you in spite of her, not because of her. And you know it. That whole connection doesn’t turn me on… it freaks me out. And I’m attracted to you anyway.”

Sig shook her head. “I don’t like what’s going on with Stanislav and me, but I know I need to talk about it with him before I talk about it to anyone else. I owe him that much. And I’m not going to talk about it with him in the middle of a
vampire hunt. We all need to focus on surviving, not relationship drama.”

“I’m not trying to get you in a bathroom stall for a quickie,” I told her. “And I’m not asking you to make a decision about anything right now. I’m just telling you my intentions. I’m either going to get to a place where I can have a real life, or I’m going to get myself killed trying. But if I survive, I’m going to find you again and try to figure out if this thing I’m feeling is real.”

“You probably won’t survive,” Sig said under her breath.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, staring at her. She was beautiful, and I didn’t care if she saw me thinking it. “I’m not going to deal with the knights for you. You’re just the reason I realized that I need to do it.”

This just made her angrier for some reason. Female isn’t my native language; I’d probably messed something up in translation. “Do you want to know how Stanislav and I met?” she asked, looking at me squarely.

“No,” I said with complete truthfulness.

Sig ignored me. “A lot of supernaturals go a little crazy with extra-long lives. I think it must be hard, watching people you care about die generation after generation. A lot of them either have massive survivor’s guilt and start hating themselves, or they start to lose the ability to empathize with humans.”

“Or the desire,” I said. I had a little experience with that myself. I’d spent a lot of time living out of sheer stubbornness.

Sig nodded. “I don’t even know how long my mother lived, but I think it was hundreds and hundreds of years. She wasn’t handling it well by the time I came along. Having me was a form of suicide.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“In a lot of the old myths, Valkyries start aging if they
lose their virginity,” Sig explained. “But that’s not really how it works. Valkyries can only have one child, and it’s always a girl. Once the Valkryie has a child, she starts aging. It was the Aesir’s method of population control. They didn’t want their creation getting out of hand and outnumbering them one day. They wanted servants, not competition.”

“So all those stories about Valkyries getting cast out of Valhalla and losing their immortality and mating with men…” I began.

“They got the facts right but the cause and effect backwards,” Sig interrupted. “Valkyries didn’t mate because they’d lost their immortality. They lost their immortality because they mated.”

“Waitress,” I said.

Sig looked confused for a moment, then realized that the waitress was approaching from behind her. The woman set Sig’s chocolate orgy out in front of her and deposited my steak on the table.

“Y’all must work out,” the waitress observed a little sourly. She apparently did not.

“I’m going to throw this up later,” Sig said expressionlessly.

“I have a tapeworm,” I said cheerfully.

The waitress left, and I made a mental note not to order any more food. Sig didn’t touch her plate. “I’ve heard that people who try to commit suicide regret it at the last second. People who have had guns misfire when they tried to shoot themselves, or didn’t know the safety was on? They say that none of them just try again. They say that as soon as their fingers pulled the trigger, as soon as they thought it was too late, they changed their minds at the last second. The same with people who freakishly survive jumps from high places.”

“I don’t know if that’s true or not,” I said.

“Me either,” Sig acknowledged. “It’s kind of sad to think about, though. All those people jumping off buildings spending their last seconds wishing they could fly. All those people drowning themselves, trying to make it back up to the surface as soon as the water hits their lungs and finding they’ve gone too far down.”

“You’re saying your mom regretted having you,” I said.

“I think she regretted it two seconds after she found out she’d gotten pregnant,” Sig said.

“Did she resent you?” I asked.

Sig picked up a fork and began digging into her hot fudge cake. She ate mechanically and didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “My mom went through all kinds of bizarre stages. She tried to be the perfect housewife. She tried to become this ultraconservative Southern Baptist. She ran off and went on drunk binges. She tried to act like I was the most precious thing in her life. She acted like I was some kind of demon spawn. She didn’t have a center. She was totally self-involved and terrified and grasping for any kind of comfort the whole time I knew her, which wasn’t long.”

Sig finished her cake and let out a long breath, as if she were deflating. “The thing I can’t forgive her for, though, is that my mom didn’t tell me what I was. She never told me she’d been a Valkyrie, or even what a Valkyrie was. She always acted like my gifts were some kind of demon curse and made a big deal about hiding them. I thought she hated me because I was a freak, but now I think she hated me because she envied me.”

“Is that why you’re so into the Norse thing now?” I asked.

“You mean am I overcompensating?” Sig laughed bitterly. “Probably. I had all kinds of crazy ideas growing up. I thought I was like Joan of Arc while Mom was going through
her Christian phase. Then when I was thirteen years old Dave Hagan showed me this comic book called
The X-Men
, and I thought I was a mutant. Then that whole missing-time craze came along, and I decided that I was a star child… that my mother had been abducted and impregnated by aliens or something. She’d been dead from alcohol poisoning and God knows what else for a couple of years by that time.”

I noticed that she wasn’t talking about her father at all, and whatever was between her and Stanislav, I had a feeling there had to be daddy issues involved. I didn’t press, though. The truth is, love is everyone’s inconsistency. It makes all of us stupid. The dumbest and weakest things I’ve ever done all involved trying to make my life fit around someone I wanted, or trying to make someone I wanted be someone they weren’t.

“Anyway, I was always trying to find some purpose for my life, you know?” Sig went on. “Some reason that I could see monsters and dead people and toss football players around like pillows. All adolescents want to do is belong, and I wasn’t even human.”

“You don’t have to be a human to be human,” I said, then winced. It sounded like an odd bumper sticker.

Fortunately Sig wasn’t really listening to me. “And I was angry. Really angry. I went through a phase where I just drifted around, listening to shitty music, partying too much, fighting too much, leaving burned bridges behind me everywhere I went while I was looking for any kind of money or trouble I could find. I wasn’t real mature, and I didn’t have the best role models growing up.”

“A phase,” I commented.

She smiled lopsidedly. “A decade. The nineties kind of went by in a blur.”

“And that’s why you don’t drink now?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long moment, some story she didn’t want to tell passing behind her eyes. “No.”

“OK,” I said.

“I did something I’m not proud of,” she sort of elaborated. “It doesn’t matter what. Use your imagination and you probably won’t be far off.”

“OK,” I said.

Sig’s tone had become a shade defiant, as if I were arguing with her. “I don’t know if I’m an addict or not, but I swore I’d never drink again, and I haven’t.”

“What’s all this got to do with Stanislav?” I asked quietly.

“He’s the one who told me what I was,” Sig said. “I thought he was a ghost the first time I saw him. I’m at this rave in a cellar in New York, right? This was before I quit drinking. And Stanislav shows up and starts talking to me, only no one else can see him. He’s telling me that this party I’m in the middle of is actually a vampire trap. That all the guests are like me, drifters and addicts and kids straight off the bus who won’t be missed. It’s how this particular vampire hive liked to party. I don’t know what they wanted with me. It’s not like they could drink my blood.”

“They’re territorial,” I speculated. “The stationary ones don’t like other supernaturals wandering onto their hunting ground. And you’re beautiful, and some of them like to polish off blood gorges with a bit of rape. But you know that.”

“I know that,” Sig agreed darkly. “So Stanislav tells me that the place is about to be raided by some very badass people… some of your knights as a matter of fact, but I didn’t know that then. He told me that I very much didn’t want to be around when these scary individuals showed up.”

“So Stanislav was doing that walking-outside-his-body
thing.” I know, that was obvious. I was just talking to keep her talking.

She agreed. “Stanislav’s spirit form led me down this passageway to a storage closet and told me to break through the west wall. It was thin, and there was a tunnel on the other side. The music at the rave was really loud—probably to cover up screams… but I could still hear explosions and gunfire starting behind me while I was leaving.”

“I’m surprised the knights didn’t track you down,” I observed. “If you were still half impaired.”

“This woman named Kasia came and found me in the tunnel,” Sig said. “She was Stanislav’s first partner.”

“You mentioned her in the van,” I said. “She was some kind of supernatural too, wasn’t she?”

“The bitch was inhuman all right,” Sig agreed tightly. “Kresniks aren’t like knights. They don’t mind working with other supernaturals.”

“They’re smaller in number,” I commented. “They have to be more flexible. What I don’t get is how Stanislav knew you were a Valkyrie.”

“He’d been tracking me and watching me for months trying to figure out what I was,” Sig admitted. “I never noticed.”

“And when he figured it out, he approached you and told you?” I asked.

Sig shook her head. “He didn’t just tell me, he took me to another Valkyrie he’d found.”

“The one who taught you that spell with the blood,” I noted.

Sig ignored this. “Stanislav trained me. He gave me a purpose. He gave me something I could hold on to.”

I kept silent, but my mind was busy filling in blanks. Sig obviously hadn’t liked this Kasia, and if she and Stanislav’s first partner had been rivals, it would have made Stanislav more
attractive. And the father Sig wouldn’t talk about was some kind of powerful emotional button. And Stanislav had been her mentor. And he could see dead people, the gift or curse that had been making Sig feel alone her entire life.

Sig stood up so abruptly that I almost jumped out of my own chair by reflex. “Would you mind riding with Molly? I have to go clear my head.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I would have said more, but she was already walking out of the truck stop. Was I right to give her the space she seemed to need right then? Should I have tried to follow her out? Grabbed her by the arm or tried to kiss her? Forced a fight? If so, I had been alone too many decades, become too used to guarding my own privacy, too used to not getting pulled into other people’s personal orbits. It’s not the kind of ingrained behavior pattern you change overnight, epiphanies or no epiphanies. I just watched her leave.

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