Charming (35 page)

I had mentioned this before. After every practice we sat together and went over in detail what we had learned, then talked about how we could improve our chances, and then started the whole process over again. But Andro and Andrej were still showing off, and Sig would hardly talk to me at all.

They didn’t seem to care that the actual raid wouldn’t be as easy. I thought about that as I reached for some beef jerky from my canvas belt. Then again, maybe Sig had the right idea. As much as getting the cold shoulder from her sucked, maybe it was less distracting than getting all hormonal and dewy-eyed and drama-prone. Maybe the last thing Sig and I should do was talk before the vampire thing was done.

28

I
t was the last evening before the actual raid. Molly started taking orders for takeout Chinese food, and I announced that I was going to go to the health food store to get some supplies of my own. It was roughly twelve hours until we climbed down into a nest of heat seekers, and I knew that Sig’s group wasn’t going to let me disappear on my own without a chaperone. I didn’t even resent this, not really. It was true that everyone else got to come and go to take care of their personal lives, but I didn’t have a personal life, and I was the unknown quantity in the group. Still, I was more than a little surprised when the person who volunteered to go along with me was Sig.

She was still not speaking to me when she opened the passenger door and silently climbed into my car.

“You know, you kind of give me mixed signals,” I said. My newfound peace with myself hadn’t exactly evaporated; I still felt more comfortable in my own skin than I’d felt in a long time. My conscience was clear, my eyes were bright, and I knew in my heart of hearts that Allah smiled upon me for mine was
the sword of righteousness. By the same token, I had opened up to a woman who had then spent the next few days acting like she never wanted to talk to me again, been threatened by her homicidal lover, and was probably going to die the next day.

“I know,” Sig said. “I just don’t like the idea of going down that hole tomorrow with this thing hanging over you and me like…” She stopped and struggled for a good simile.

“Like an open airplane storage locker?” I offered.

She smiled a tight smile. “I was trying to think of the name of that sword that used to hang over a king’s head. Was it the sword of Pericles?”

I just looked at her. Did she really want to talk about a sword?

“Come on, I know you know it,” she prodded. “I saw all those books when I was in your house the other day.”

“It was the sword of Damocles,” I said.

“Right,” she agreed. “Anyway, I like the ‘open airplane storage compartment’ thing better. It means there’s a journey with lots of baggage.”

“And things being balanced precariously,” I added.

“And a lack of closure,” she said.

“OK,” I admitted. “I could start bullshitting about frequent-flier miles or something, but I can’t really think of any more good ones.”

“So shut up and drive,” she told me.

I shut up and drove.

“Why are we going to a health food store anyway?” she asked me after a while. “Choo has plenty of verbena. He grows it in a patch of woods near his house.”

“I have a feeling that’s not the only plant he grows there,” I griped.

She waved that aside. “He won’t be smoked up tomorrow.”

I made a noncommittal noise.

“So why are we going to the health food store?” Sig repeated.

“To get my secret weapon,” I said. “Most people don’t know this, but vampires can’t stand tofu.”

“Why should they be any different?” Sig agreed. When I didn’t respond, she gave me a sideways look. “But seriously. Talk to me.”

“I tried that,” I pointed out.

“So what, you only dump a lot of emotional stuff on someone when they’re not ready for it? Stop being such a diva.” Sig’s tone was impatient. “I didn’t ask you to talk to me then. I’m asking now.”

OK, fine.

“I’m not used to spending this much time in a group,” I admitted. “I was kind of hoping to clear my head and get some high-protein energy bars for tomorrow. I’m probably going to need to heal a lot if I survive at all. I’m not sure why you’re going along.”

Sig took her time answering, which was all right with me. Right then I preferred silence to small talk. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” Sig finally said. “About how I’m not the reason you need to come to terms with the knights, but that I am the reason you realized that you have to.”

“That’s true,” I acknowledged.

Sig blew out a puff of breath. “I need to break up with Stanislav.”

I played it cool and continued to drive steadily even though internally I was stomping on the accelerator and running through red lights at intersections and pressing down hard on my horn. “Yes, you do,” I agreed.

“I feel like I’ve been cheating on him,” Sig said unhappily. “With you.”

I didn’t deny it. “Good.”

“Good?” she challenged. “It’s good that I’m a cheater?”

“You haven’t cheated,” I said. “But it’s good that you feel that way. It means I haven’t been imagining us having something.”

“Don’t go getting cocky,” she warned dourly. “I’m not in the mood.”

I smiled, but only slightly. “Look, Sig, it’s obvious you and Stanislav have had problems for a long time now.”

She bit her lip. “I want to wait until after the raid is over to tell him. We need Stanislav, and we need him holding it together. If any of us are going to die, I don’t want it to be because of this.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And I wasn’t going to tell you anything until I talked to him first,” Sig continued, not looking at me. “But I don’t want to wait until after the raid tomorrow to talk to you. In case we… you know. I don’t want one of us to die with you thinking I… hate you. So if I’m doing something wrong here, I’m doing the best I can.”

“I get that,” I said, and I did. When you’re half convinced it’s the last night of your life, bottled-up feelings have a way of getting out. If Sig had been Catholic, she’d have gone to confession.

It wasn’t the ideal moment to have to deal with parallel parking, but suddenly we were at the health food store, and life doesn’t have any respect for dramatic pauses.

“I’m not doing this because of you, though,” Sig said while I began the back-and-forth process of wedging the car between a pickup truck and a jeep. Suddenly there were all kinds of sharp, pointy emotions in her tone. “You’re just the reason I realized that I need to do it.”

“I can live with that,” I said.

“And I want you to know I like you too.” Sig admitted this as if it were a character flaw.

I didn’t tell her that I could live with that. I wasn’t entirely certain that I could, literally. It probably also wasn’t the right time to tell her that I’d promised to kill Stanislav before I slept with her. “Good,” I said simply.

“Good?” she demanded.

“Look, I’m not great at relationship stuff, Sig.” I finally parked the car. “Do you want me to tell you how I feel so you can tell me to back off until you talk to Stanislav, or do you want me to give you space so you can keep your head on straight?”

She smiled faintly at that. “Yes.”

I snorted.

“It’s important to me to do the right thing,” Sig continued.

“Sure,” I said. “Because you grew up feeling blamed for things you had no control over, by people who were supposed to be taking care of you. You knew that there was some secret reason your protectors were keeping you at a distance, but you didn’t know what it was. Instead of giving you unconditional love, they gave you a code and a roof and just enough encouragement to keep you from becoming a complete asshole, but you wanted more. You wanted to prove to yourself that the world was wrong, that God was wrong, that whatever mysterious fucking power in the universe was making you feel guilty all the time was wrong, that you would be a good person given half a chance. And you worked hard for that chance, you’re still working for that chance, but you don’t really believe deep down that anyone else is ever really going to give you a fair shot.”

Sig absorbed that. “Wow. Repress much?”

I laughed a little shakily. “Shut up.”

Sig did not, in fact, shut up. “Is that why we seem to get each
other? We both grew up not human and not knowing it? Or is this some weird aftereffect of me seeing you through Alison’s eyes?”

“I was born in 1937, Sig,” I told her. “And I still don’t know why some people get each other and some people don’t.”

“I just know I can’t be the only thing Stanislav cares about anymore,” Sig said with a lack of inflection that seemed more exhausted than emotionless. “It’s too much work. His life is too sad.”

I just nodded.

“He’s too angry,” she added. “I can make it better, but I can’t make it good.”

“It’s not your job,” I said.

Sig looked away. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “I feel disloyal. We’ve survived so much and saved each other so many times. You’d think him aging would make it harder to stay with him. The truth is, it makes it harder to leave him because everyone thinks that’s the reason. It’s like wanting to break up with someone who just got diagnosed with cancer or crippled. I feel sorry for him.”

I didn’t. I had a feeling that Stanislav had been playing that card against her for a long time.

“I find myself thinking, why not just wait it out?” she continued. “Any of us might die at any time, and he only has a few decades left at best. I could have centuries. Isn’t that messed up?”

“He’s messed up, Sig,” I told her. “You just don’t want to admit how messed up.”

“John.” That was it, just my name. A warning, and one I ignored.

“He threatened to kill me slowly and painfully, Sig,” I informed her. “I’m talking really sick torture-porn kind of stuff
too. And he wasn’t kidding. He as much as admitted that he’s gotten rid of men who were hanging around you before.”

She didn’t want to hear it. “He was trying to frighten you. Stanislav is a hunter, John. You should understand that better than anyone.”

“Yeah, I hunt monsters,” I countered. “That’s why I know one when I see one.”

“Stanislav isn’t a monster,” Sig said tightly. “He’s just messed up like the rest of us.”

“You’re not afraid of hurting him,” I said. “You just don’t want to feel responsible for what he might do.”

She was getting angry now. “Stop telling me what I feel.”

I almost said, “I forgot; telling other people what they feel is your job.” But I stopped myself. Why was I doing this?

“OK,” I said instead.

That wasn’t what Sig had been expecting. After a moment she backed away from whatever emotional precipice she’d been about to jump off. “I said that I’m going to deal with him, and I will. I’m just not looking forward to telling him.”

I pictured Stanislav’s hand when he’d been in my house, the way it had opened, closed, opened, closed. “He already knows.”

Sig shook her head. “That just makes it harder.”

I knew what she meant. Sometimes there are conversations that have been going on for years, unspoken, full of repressed emotions that have built up like an explosive charge. All it takes to set them off is for someone to verbalize them.

“I’m going to tell him after the raid tomorrow,” she said.

My instinct was that she should find the son of a bitch right then and force the issue into the open, but my instinct was also to stab him immediately afterward, multiple times. I still had no idea how I was going to broach that topic with Sig. She didn’t drink wine, and even if she did, I didn’t know if red or
white was appropriate for telling a woman that you want to kill her former lover. Do they have greeting cards for that sort of thing?

“After you leave,” she added.

Something suddenly made sense. She thought she could handle Stanislav, but she was worried about me. Worried about what Stanislav might do to me, or what I might do to him.

“You’re trying to protect me,” I said stupidly.

She looked at me oddly. “Of course I am, you idiot.”

“I’m not used to that,” I confessed.

She reached out and squeezed my hand.